Within days of discovering SARS-CoV-2, laboratory scientists and epidemiologists were speculating on whether the virus might take fecal passage, and thereby spread through contamination with bodily waste. But the fecal-oral route of transmission quickly proved a dead end, an etiological cul-de-sac. The pressure to inquire into shit, however, is always difficult to resist. Before long, experts in wastewater …
Series: Dispatches from the pandemic
The Social Potential of Continuing to Wear Masks

We are often told that anti-epidemic masks should not be politicised. Though often well intentioned, this admonition falls short of taking masks seriously as social and historical objects. For, in assuming these to be inherently neutral prophylactic devices whose politicisation is simply an epiphenomenon, this narrative fails to understand and acknowledge that the historical institution of anti-epidemic masks has been …
Long Covid, chronic fatigue syndrome and women: the shadow of hysteria
Is long Covid disseminated by newspapers?
On April 14th, 2021, the British journalist and writer George Monbiot published an article entitled “Apparently just by talking about it, I’m super-spreading long Covid.” (Monbiot, 2021). Monbiot had learned that during a recent public presentation Michael Sharpe, professor of psychology at Oxford University and founder of a clinic specialized in the …
Caring for home: The failures of vaccine nationalism, or, Why the pandemic will not be over soon
Para español aquí.
It was one of those early spring evenings where the sun was warm and the air fresh. My friends and I were at the park, in what has become a pandemic ritual. Seeing people of all ages running, reading, talking, walking their pets, and enjoying themselves while we also traded the confines of our small apartments for …
Tackling the pandemic: examining the role of social movements and organizations in Argentina
Introduction
Mónica, a 44-year-old woman, wakes up every morning thinking about the challenges ahead. Today, like every other day, she will prepare soup with noodles and rice for more than140 neighbors who attend her soup kitchen in an economically marginalized neighborhood in the outskirts of the city of Resistencia in Argentina. Three years ago, when this neighborhood flooded and many …
Visions of Black Futurity Amidst the Double Pandemic of COVID-19 and Police Brutality
When I ask Willow, an Afro-Puerto Rican young woman in her 20s, if quarantine has helped reduce the stigma of mental illness, she responds:
…I think it will because now we have something to compare it to. When we’re talking about having a hard time or feelings of not being able to escape ourselves, we can say, “Well, how was