Pandemic Co-pathogenesis: From the Vectors to the Variants of Neoliberal Disease

Abstract

The COVID pandemic represents something far more than the deadly global aggregation of experiences of infection in individual bodies. Instead, reconsidered in terms of social co-infection, disruption, and dysregulation, it presents a picture of political and economic pathologies that are examined in this chapter as a form of pandemic co-pathogenesis. What stands out most in this global pandemic picture are vulnerabilities created by neoliberal policies co-acting with a novel viral pathogen to inflict harm across the global body politic. The resulting vectors of COVID as a neoliberal disease are surveyed thus in the terms of: (i) neoliberal neocoloniality; (ii) neoliberal inequality; (iii) neoliberal austerity; and (iv) neoliberal legality. Considered in terms of co-pathogenesis, each of these vectors also evidences additional co-acting pathologies ranging from other systemic social forces such as racism to other infectious diseases such as AIDS. The resulting outcomes have in turn included not just the outgrowth of new viral variants of SARS-CoV-2, but also new variations in associated social, political, and economic pathologies, including not least of all in the evolution of the neoliberal policy regimes and political-economic structures that did so much to contribute to pandemic co-pathogenesis in the first place. Most striking among these neoliberal variants are new forms of reactionary and illiberal neoliberalism linked to the rise of authoritarian anti-globalists. Yet other emergent post-neoliberal possibilities connected to ‘building-back better’ call out for attention too. Examining COVID with a radically re-socialized concept of co-pathogenesis thereby provides a useful way for scholars of International Political Economy to come to terms with both (a) the central enabling role that neoliberal vectors played alongside other causes as enablers of the pandemic, and (b) with the subsequent variants of neoliberal norms and practices that have evolved out of the pandemic alongside new viral variants of SARS-CoV-2 itself.