Socialist Epidemiology and Pandemics

November 12, 4:30 PM ET. In person and online | With Rob Wallace and Salvatore Engel Di-Mauro.

Covid-19 triggered a public health crisis at an unprecedented scale. Almost three years later and after over 1 million deaths, the US, wealthiest country in the world, is still unable to find a solution. As we face the very likely possibility of another surge in covid-19 cases, we turn to Rob Wallace, evolutionary biologist and public health phylogeographer to help us understand how we have arrived at this reality, despite great advances in our understanding of disease, biology, and public health. What does epidemiology reveal about capitalism? How can we employ epidemiology to understand our conditions under capitalism as well as in the process of building towards a world organized around the needs and well being of the population; a socialist world?

Join us for this urgent conversation, and if you want deeper study and debate join our study cohort! We will meet on Wednesday, November 9 at 6:30 PM. You can find readings here and sign up at this link.  

Rob Wallace is trained as an evolutionary biologist and phylogeographer studying the evolution of infectious diseases. Author of the books Big Farms Make Big Flu: Dispatches on Infectious Disease, Agribusiness and the Nature of Science (Monthly Review, 2016), Neoliberal Ebola: Modeling Disease Emergence from Finance to Forest and Farm (Springer, 2016), and Farming Human Pathogens: Ecological Resilience and Evolutionary Process (Springer, 2009), he is also a public health activist, running start-up organizations such as PReP, Pandemic Research for the People, and a hugely resourceful, heady public online research blog called Farming Pathogens.