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BIOLEGALITIES

The Viral Politics

of COVID-19
Nature, Home, and Planetary Health
Edited by Vanessa Lemm · Miguel Vatter
 Biolegalities

Series Editors
Marc de Leeuw
Law, University of New South Wales Sydney
Sydney, NSW, Australia

Sonja van Wichelen

Sociology and Social Policy
University of Sydney
Sydney, NSW, Australia
This interdisciplinary series on Biolegalities engages with contemporary
challenges and implications of new biotechnologies and biological knowl-
edges in the field of law. Our series aims to open up a much broader
understanding of biolegality that includes a range of biotechnologies and
biological knowledge, expanding into areas of immigration law, trade law,
labor law, environmental law, patent law, family law, human rights law, and
international law. While the growing scholarship on biopolitics has studied
the ways in which such practices are entangled with certain modes of gov-
ernance and neoliberal economies, their translations, deployments, and
reconfigurations in the realm of law or legal practice has been relatively
understudied. The main objective of this book series is to provide a venue
for the study of the complex and often contested ways in which biotech-
nologies or biological knowledges are reworked by, with, and against legal
knowledge.
Vanessa Lemm • Miguel Vatter
Editors

The Viral Politics

of Covid-19
Nature, Home, and Planetary Health
Editors
Vanessa Lemm Miguel Vatter
Faculty of Philosophy Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship
Complutense University of Madrid and Globalisation
Madrid, Spain Deakin University
Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Biolegalities
ISBN 978-981-19-3941-9    ISBN 978-981-19-3942-6 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-3942-6

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2022

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to
the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
­institutional affiliations.

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Singapore Pte Ltd.
The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-­01/04 Gateway East, Singapore
189721, Singapore
 Foreword

Books in the Biolegalities Series are concerned with how technologies of

life impinge upon social sensibilities of law, justice, and rights. Since
Foucault’s theorizing on the concept, the growing scholarship on biopoli-
tics explores a politics of life across time, geographies, and multiple situa-
tions. This interdisciplinary series on Biolegalities engages with the ways
these life politics become entangled in new questions around legality,
legitimacy, and legal knowledge.
The main objective of this series is to provide a venue for the study of
the complex and often contested ways in which life’s technologies or
knowledges are reworked by, with, and against law and legality. Books in
the series may include analysis of technology, including biotechnology,
reproductive technologies, forensic technologies, bioinformation, and
Artificial Intelligence, and how they reconfigure the organization of law in
society. They may include analysis of knowledge, particularly those from
the life sciences such as genetics, (post)genomics, neuroscience, immunol-
ogy, microbiomics, and how these scientific understandings rearrange our
knowledge of life and law. And finally, books may include an analysis of
crisis, including pandemics, bioterrorism, biocolonialism, eugenics, eco-
cide, and how communities, institutions, and states respond to the varie-
gated forms of harm and abuse on human and more-than-human life,
including those from disease, disaster, and violence.
In The Viral Politics of Covid-19: Nature, Home, and Planetary Health,
Miguel Vatter and Vanessa Lemm chart the crisis-event that is the global
pandemic of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. Cognizant the event is charac-
terized by many scholars as biopolitical par excellence, they have brought

v
vi FOREWORD

together a group of established and emerging scholars, who analyze with

great knowledge, care, and nuance the many edges and layers of this
quintessential biopolitical and biolegal moment in history.
Following the initial outbreak in Wuhan at the end of 2019, the world
shut down and nation-states worked at a colossal attempt to contain the
SARS-CoV-2 virus. We are amid the third pandemic year as we write this
foreword, and the Covid-19 global pandemic continues to be an event of
unparalleled character. As of 18 April 2022, 504,432,083 cases of
Covid-19, and 6,197,851 Covid-19 deaths have been formally reported
according to the Coronavirus Resource Center at the John Hopkins
University. Actual numbers are thought to be much higher. As the book
attests to, this production of numbers, while forging the ultimate biopo-
litical justification, does little to convey the enormity and nefariousness of
lives impacted, not by the virus itself but by the measures implemented to
contain it.
The book is not a collection of chapters that merely succumb to a
straightforward biopolitical critique of the state, but it is a well-rehearsed
exercise from the very start of the pandemic. While the editors and con-
tributors are not avoiding the analysis of negative biopolitics (character-
ized by the multiplication and normalization of hyper-surveillance and
neoliberal governance during the course of the pandemic), they wish to
emphasize instead how an affirmative biopolitics can illuminate a different
politics of life and a post-pandemic future that encompasses the health of
all on earth, not only those pertaining to humanity. Rather than approach
the global pandemic as a natural disaster, and its failure to contain it as a
failure of global health, the book starts from the premise that the crisis
that is Covid-19 must be understood as a planetary crisis-event. Its future
plight therefore rests on planetary health. This starting point allows the
scholarship to move in several novel and stimulating directions.
There is the privilege of time to reflect more profoundly on the last few
years. While the editors and authors aptly draw on the pandemic literature
that appeared in the initial phases of the crisis, they are able to move
beyond ad hoc observations and build more durable arguments by placing
their objects in a broader—planetary—context and a longer historical
framework. The result is not only a rich commentary that ranges from the
themes of biosecurity, biosociality, pandemic neoliberalism, and planetary
habitability, but also a programmatic intervention: the planetary turn in
the study of biopolitics and biolegality.
 FOREWORD vii

As editors of the Biolegalities Book Series it befits us to signpost the

biolegality of planetary health, seen from the vantage point of a global
society in pandemic turmoil. Vatter explains how Covid-19 exemplifies
new biolegal articulations of home that should be placed within the larger
context of planetary habitability. The biolegality of home in the crisis-­
event of the global pandemic seems to produce a particular kind of knowl-
edge, a knowledge based on the spherical milieu as the new configuration
of political space. Here, bodies are turned into border-making entities as
they can only cross certain spaces when tested and vaccinated, evidenced
by the right kind of (digitized forms of) documentation. The juridification
of movement, described in many of the chapters, comprised disciplining
measures on the one hand (through for instance biometrical devices) and
neoliberal governmentality on the other (for instance by the changing
habitats of social distancing). Moving away from a thanatopolitical analy-
sis, however, the chapters emphasize the importance of imagining plane-
tary habitability within this very same space. This presupposes a reworking
of biolegality and a reckoning with foundational binaries informing mod-
ern life, most acutely that of nature and society/law. It also means losing
narratives of conquest and war, working instead toward more biosocial
and symbiont forms of cooperation. After all, as Muecke so eloquently
formulates at the end of this collection, “[N]ature is full of surprises: per-
ceiving so-called natural things means being surprised by their attributes.”
Let us be distracted by these chapters, and sharpen our theoretical tools
and methods so as to create a space where we are able to conceptualize an
emerging architecture of planetary health, cooperation, and habituality.

University of Sydney Sonja van Wichelen

Camperdown, NSW, Australia
University of New South Wales Marc de Leeuw
Sydney, NSW, Australia
 Acknowledgments

We would like to acknowledge Flinders University, DVCR Prof Rob Saint,

for having granted us a COVID-19 research grant in 2020 to study “One
Health and One Home: Zoonotic Diseases and the Biopolitics of
COVID-19”. Stephen Muecke was a lead investigator of this grant in
addition to the two editors and we acknowledge his contribution to the
early stages of this project. We are also grateful to Dr. Camille Roulière
without whose help in collecting research materials, contacting, and man-
aging communications with our fellow contributors, as well as formatting
the manuscript, this volume would not have seen the light in such timely
fashion. Many of the chapters in this volume were presented at the sympo-
sium “The Viral Politics of Covid-19”, co-organized with Eben Kirksey
and supported by the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and
Globalisation, Deakin University, on August 27, 2021. We would also like
to thank Sonja van Wichelen and Marc de Leeuw for inviting us to make
a contribution to their prestigious Biolegalities series.

ix
 Contents

Part I Biosecurity and Planetary Health   1


Cryopolitics of SARS-CoV-2: Biosecurity in Laboratories
and Wet Markets  3
Frédéric Keck


From Global to Planetary Health: Two Morphologies of
Pandemic Preparedness 15
Lyle Fearnley


COVID-19 and the Contradictions of Planetary Health:
Envisioning New Paradigms 33
Susan Craddock

Part II Bio-social Dimensions of Public Health  51

A Foucauldian Moment or the Longue Durée? COVID-19

in Context 53
Maurizio Meloni

xi
xii Contents


Zoonoses and Medicine as Social Science: Implications of
Rudolf Virchow’s Work for Understanding Global Pandemics 73
Abigail Nieves Delgado and Azita Chellappoo


Living in Peace with Coronaviruses 93
Eben Kirksey

Part III Social Distancing and Community 111


The Micropolitics of Social Distancing: Habit, Contagion
and the Suggestive Realm113
Gay Hawkins


Visceral Publics and Social Power: Crowd Politics in the
Time of a Pandemic129
Yasmeen Arif


Ideologies of Contagion and Communities of Life145
Vanessa Lemm

Part IV Pandemic Neoliberalism 161


Contradictions of the Bailout State163
Martijn Konings

The Neoliberal Virus181

Federico Luisetti

Part V Pandemic Habitats 201


Biometric Re-bordering: Environmental Control During
Pandemic Times203
Mark Andrejevic and Zala Volcic
 Contents  xiii


Planetary Health and the Biopolitics of Home221
Miguel Vatter


Creative Responses to COVID-19247
Stephen Muecke

Index261
 List of Contributors

Mark Andrejevic Monash University, Clayton, VIC, Australia

Yasmeen Arif Shiv Nadar University, Noida, India
Azita Chellappoo Department of Philosophy, The Open University,
Milton Keynes, UK
Susan Craddock The University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA
Abigail Nieves Delgado Freudenthal Institute, Utrecht University,
Utrecht, Netherlands
Lyle Fearnley Singapore University of Technology and Design, Singapore,
Singapore
Gay Hawkins Western Sydney University, Sydney, NSW, Australia
Frédéric Keck Laboratory of Social Anthropology, CNRS, Paris, France
Eben Kirksey School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University
of Oxford, Oxford, UK
Martijn Konings The University of Sydney, Camperdown, NSW, Australia
Vanessa Lemm Faculty of Philosophy, Complutense University of
Madrid, Madrid, Spain
Federico Luisetti University of St. Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland

xv
xvi List of Contributors

Maurizio Meloni Deakin University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Stephen Muecke The University of Notre Dame, Fremantle, WA, Australia
Miguel Vatter Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation,
Deakin University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia
Zala Volcic Monash University, Clayton, VIC, Australia
 Introduction

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, probably no event in recent world history
has mobilised so much specialised scientific and academic discourse within
the public sphere, both seeking to guide governance responses and incit-
ing fierce exchange of opinions among the citizenry, as the COVID-19
pandemic. But whereas the former event, a good decade before the term
‘Anthropocene’ was first coined, may serve to date the apogee of the pro-
cess of globalisation, the current pandemic may in the future serve to date
a turn in the Zeitgeist towards awareness of the ‘planetary’ dimension of
human existence on Earth. From such a ‘planetary’ perspective, the
dynamics and processes of natural history, measured in geological epochs,
no longer function as the silent and static backdrop against which human-
ity unfolds its self-referential drama. Rather, the natural ‘scenery’ appears
as continuously shifting and ‘intruding’ into the play, proving to be no less
determinant to human-­centred history than the old theatrical deus ex
machina. Conversely, the human species unleashes planetary dynamics and
processes of its own, whose feedback character is destroying the living
conditions for much life on the planet. After the pandemic, few will seri-
ously doubt that society and politics consider, and perhaps have never
ceased to consider, that the capacity of human beings to choose their ways
of life and forms of self-organisation requires taking into account that
humankind is a biological species living with, among, and through other
living kingdoms and species on this planet and its various systems. The
chapters in this volume offer inter- and multi-disciplinary perspectives on
the pandemic that thematise the overlap and tension between global and
planetary dimensions of analysis of our shared bio-social, bio-political, and

xvii
xviii Introduction

bio-legal condition. They seek to understand the imbrications between

technosphere and biosphere at social, economic, and political levels, and
open up new vistas on the challenges posed by the prospect that how to
inhabit this planet can no longer be assumed as a self-evident fact.
The COVID-19 pandemic and the global governmental responses to it
have drawn attention to planetary health models, such as One World One
Health, that are based on the premise that most Emergent Infectious
Diseases (EIDs) are caused by zoonotic viral pathogens, so-called because
their ‘reservoirs’ are found in animal hosts. Planetary health posits a basic
link between the health of the environment and human health. The One
Health model registers the increased frequency of human interactions
with other living species crossing the wild/domestic boundary, and thus
the heightened risk posed by viruses ‘jumping’ between species due to
changes affecting the plant-animal-human-fungal-microbial interfaces and
caused by human-made environmental destruction. A basic principle of
planetary health is that safeguarding environmental health and the integ-
rity of ecological systems is the best way to prevent future pandemics. The
chapters in this volume present a critical yet affirmative engagement with
the model of planetary health and with attempts to extend its principles to
understanding the challenges for contemporary global governance posed
by the ongoing environmental catastrophe. The chapters address the call
from the public health community for transdisciplinary approaches to the
study of the interconnectedness of all life-forms on earth and planetary
health as an issue of the health of humans, animals, plants, and ecological
systems.
Part I, ‘Biosecurity and Planetary Health,’ contains three chapters that
introduce the planetary perspective into the analysis of the bio-political
and bio-legal measures that governments have adopted in order to combat
the spread of the virus. From the very beginning of One Health, with the
formulation of the ‘12 Manhattan Principles of One Health’ in 2004, the
model attracted the attention of specialists in international politics and
securitisation studies within the framework of global health biosecurity.
The geopolitical dimensions of biosecurity became apparent at the start of
the COVID-19 pandemic, when the discussion on the presumed origins
of the virus in the wet markets of Wuhan was quickly weaponised both by
Trump’s infamous tweets about the ‘Chinese virus’ and by the Chinese
authorities, whose draconian lockdown measures were and continue to be
indicated as evidence of their superior ‘social model’ when dealing with
such public health crises, or alternatively rejected by libertarian critics of
 Introduction  xix

pandemic governance as an indication of a presumed ‘totalitarian’ slide

inherent to global health policies.
Chapter 1, ‘Cryopolitics of SARS-CoV-2: Biosecurity in Laboratories
and Wet Markets,’ by Frédéric Keck offers a sophisticated analysis of what
might lie behind the contrasting narratives as to the presumed origins of
SARS-CoV-2. Discussing the hypothesis that Asian ‘wet’ markets—where
animals are slaughtered ‘fresh’ and the meat is sold ‘warm’—represent an
illustration of the vanishing frontier between wild and domestic animals,
and thus a particularly favourable site for transmission of zoonosis, Keck
follows an alternative origin-­story that focuses on the so-called cold chain
of food production and distribution, based on frozen goods, which is also
shared by virus cultivation in laboratories. This ‘colder’ path to tracking
the origins of zoonotic viruses takes us from the cultivation of mink for
their fur (and thus protection from the cold) to ferrets, their domesticated
relatives, which are often used in laboratories to study the effect of respira-
tory viruses because they replicate human symptoms such as sneezing.
Keck’s chapter suggests that such temperature differentials in the origin-
stories of zoonotic viruses indicate an underlying ‘crypolitics’ to the tradi-
tional Foucauldian account of biopolitics and pandemic management
which adds a planetary dimension to biosecurity and the present challenge
to manage global warming.
In Chap. 2, ‘From Global to Planetary Health: Two Morphologies of
Pandemic Preparedness,’ Lyle Fearnley takes us to the heart of the tension
between global and planetary perspectives on public health. The chapter
offers a brief history of the shift from an international to a global approach
to health and pandemic viral outbreaks. Whereas the former approach was
state-driven and operated with national strategies of containment, the
SARS outbreaks at the start of the twenty-­first century led to the establish-
ment of decentred global surveillance mechanisms that tracked zoonoses
back to their ‘hot spots’ and provided ‘early warning’ of outbreaks.
Fearnley argues that in the case of COVID-19, the world was not caught
‘unprepared’ because governments quickly implemented policies based on
models of global health security. However, he suggests the problem now
lies precisely with the narrow scope of global virome analysis that has not
yet integrated a planetary approach focussed on ecology of viruses and
habitat suitability.
Chapter 3, ‘COVID-19 and the Contradictions of Planetary Health:
Envisioning New Paradigms,’ by Susan Craddock focuses on how the pro-
tective measures put in place to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 have
xx Introduction

auto-immunitary consequences by accelerating the destruction of ecosys-

tems. Her examples are the vertiginous increase of single-use plastics in
packaging and personal protections equipment (PPEs) leading to a ‘plastic
pandemic,’ and the impact of the pandemic on industrial chains of food
production that increased food insecurity, but also are themselves sites for
potential pandemic outbreaks. Both are expressions of a ‘turbo-charged’
capitalism that places the social and ecological dimensions of pandemic
response at odds with each other. Craddock discusses the One Health
paradigm as holding the promise of a more holistic approach to planetary
health, but only if it is willing to relinquish its ‘western-­centric assump-
tions’ about health and its tendency to police the frontiers between human
and non-human life rather than in exploring their interconnections. To do
so, Craddock argues, planetary health needs to integrate indigenous
knowledges and practices on health because, arguably, they are based on
principles of gift-economy and multispecies justice that foster a living-
with, rather than against, the non-human.
Part II, ‘Bio-social Dimensions of Public Health,’ provides a series of
historical frameworks within which to think critically about the relation
between humans and microbes that is determinant for human and non-
human health. In the public discussions and polemics that have erupted
worldwide in the wake of pandemic governance, the opposed fronts with
regard to preventative measures often seem to share a basic postulate,
namely, that the relation between humans and viruses is one of war, and in
war, unlike in societal relations, ‘laws are silent’ as Hobbes said. Hence,
those who argue that ‘society must be protected’ from the onslaught of
the virus even if this requires the (perhaps only momentary) suspension of
legal rights, just as much as those who argue that pandemic governance
reduces human life to mere ‘biological’ life (‘bare’ life in the terminology
of Giorgio Agamben), hold on to a schematic separation of the social from
the biological that ultimately equates biopolitics with thanatopolitics. The
chapters in this section, in contraposition to the above view, work with the
hypothesis that disease and health are bio-social from the start: they are
outcomes of the complex interplay between social and biological, human
and non-human factors. In so doing, they offer new perspectives from
which to think about an affirmative viral politics, one that places at the
forefront social inequalities linked with racism, poverty, and sexual dis-
crimination in the analysis of the differential damage caused by pandemics
and future policies to redress this situation.
 Introduction  xxi

In Chap. 4, ‘A Foucauldian Moment or the Longue Durée? COVID-19 in

Context,’ Maurizio Meloni critically discusses the claim that the
COVID-19 pandemic verifies the paradigms of biopolitics worked out by
Foucault and Agamben. Meloni argues that it is important to question the
assumption that biopolitics is a modern artefact in order to articulate a
discourse on biopolitics that is not saddled with modernist assumptions,
above all the separation of nature from culture. These assumptions rein-
force an asocial picture of biological life and stand in the way of a more
holistic approach to human health as part and parcel of planetary health.
In this chapter, Meloni centres his attention on examples of pre-modern
‘politics of life’ in which the civic life both within cities and in the coun-
tryside was always already embedded in an ecologically minded ‘healths-
cape.’ In so doing, Meloni seeks to disrupt the assumption of an internal
link between biopolitics and logics of exception and exceptionality that
have contributed to polarising the public discussion during the pandemic
and have distracted attention from a more bio-social approach to pan-
demic governance.
In Chap. 5, ‘Zoonoses and Medicine as Social Science: Implications of
Rudolf Virchow’s Work for Understanding Global Pandemics,’ Abigail
Nieves Delgado and Azita Chellappoo offer a careful discussion of the
thought of Rudolf Virchow (1821–1905). Virchow was the first to theo-
rise the phenomenon of zoonosis and to identify environmental factors of
disease that anticipate on several fronts the turn to planetary health. As
Nieves Delgado and Chellappoo show, Virchow’s innovation consisted in
viewing disease as a bio-social phenomenon, thereby linking the medical
approach to epidemics with the need to provide solutions to social inequal-
ities. Their discussion of racial and ethnic disparities in the burden of
COVID-19, and evidence that socially constructed categories of race carry
with them epigenetic effects, highlights the sense in which one should
understand Virchow’s belief that ‘politics [is] nothing but medicine on a
grand scale.’ Directly related to this belief is Virchow’s advocacy for physi-
cians as social and political actors, a role that has been highlighted in the
current pandemic, where epidemiologists have been standing side by side
with elected officials. However, Nieves Delgado and Chellappoo point out
that with the assumption of increased policy-­ making power, Virchow
insisted that physicians had a heightened responsibility not only to main-
tain their independence from governmental dictates but also to alert
whether and how governments were tracking social and economic inequal-
ities. Likewise, his understanding of complex organisms as a ‘state of cells’
xxii Introduction

makes him a fundamental figure in the discourse on biopolitics because of

the pioneering insight that organisms are symbiotic assemblages of distinct
cellular components that show a level of self-organisation that can be
understood as ‘political’ in opposition to the neo-Darwinian image of
organisms being the result of egoistic genes engaged in a continuous war
of all against all.
The starting point of Eben Kirksey’s chapter (Chap. 6), ‘Living in
Peace with Coronaviruses,’ is precisely to deconstruct a viral politics that
is based on metaphors of war, in which the virus is presented as an eternal
‘enemy’ of humankind. The chapter profiles the work and thought of
Alexander Gorbalenya, the virologist who first described the coronavirus
genome and identified the virus causing COVID-19 as belonging to the
SARS species. Kirksey shows how virology entered its current phase as a
highly securitised discourse, where protection from infection has become
the highest priority, in direct contrast with the research conducted by
Gorbalenya and others that tends to show viruses as symbiotic partners of
most forms of life, such that no living organism on the planet is free from
viral infection of some kind, and indeed viral infections seem to account
for half of the human genome and viruses keep shaping our genome, for
good and bad outcomes. These considerations on symbiogenesis lead
Kirksey to pivot on the difference between the coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2)
and the disease (COVID-19) that it may cause in certain hosts, with mor-
tal outcomes in about 2% of the infected human population, in order to
argue for a shift from seeing viruses as pathogens to seeing them as symbi-
onts, while keeping focused on the bio-social conditions that dispropor-
tionately expose minorities and less-privileged groups to the risk of death.
Part III, ‘Social Distancing and Community,’ transitions the discussion
of COVID-19 from its biological, viral basis to a more sociological analysis
of governmental, bio-political responses that seek to control the spread of
the virus and of the viral politics that it incites. The initial shock caused by
projections of very high mortality rates should the infection be allowed to
take its ‘natural’ course, infect most of the population, and lead to ‘herd
immunity’ and endemic status was compounded by the shock of draconic
measures taken by governments worldwide to prevent infections in the
population, including long-lasting home lockdowns, closure of interna-
tional borders and creation of new internal borders, quarantine measures,
introduction of social distancing parameters, later followed by vaccine
mandates and new surveillance mechanisms such as vaccine passes. The
chapters in this part thematise the implications of the new practice of
 Introduction  xxiii

‘social distancing’ and question whether society is possible purely as a

function of protection from contagion. These chapters take stock of what
this panoply of controls mean for our understanding of social interactions,
the possibility of a politics developing alongside and against bio-political
measures, and the future of community within the new imperative to ‘live
with the virus.’
In Chap. 7, ‘The Micropolitics of Social Distancing: Habit, Contagion
and the Suggestive Realm,’ Gay Hawkins argues that social distancing
should be understood as a form of de-securitising the ‘war’ against the
virus because it is a form of engagement with the virus that relies on social
cooperation, at the same time as it is employed by governments to steer
individual behaviour or conduct in the pursuit of public health policy.
Employing the ideas of French sociologist Gabriel Tarde on social interac-
tions as the result of ‘action at a distance’ exerted through dynamics of
imitation and suggestion, Hawkins highlights the process whereby indi-
viduals form new habits in the attainment of collective goals in and through
the modification of their environment or milieu. For Hawkins, the societal
response to COVID-19 also demonstrates the pertinence of Tarde’s con-
troversial claim that society is a ‘suggestive realm’ in which individuals are
affected and affect others as a function of a ‘contagious communication.’
The chapter considers that individuals are always already ‘contaminated’
by each other prior to the advent of any viral infection, and it is this very
capacity to be contaminated that allows for a bio-social accommodation of
human and virus in the mode of cooperation rather than one characterised
by fear, panic, and war metaphors.
Chapter 8, ‘Visceral Publics and Social Power: Crowd Politics in the
Time of a Pandemic,’ by Yasmeen Arif explores the converse of social dis-
tancing, namely, the role of the crowd and the mass in pandemics and its
viral politics. Arif reflects on an interesting global phenomenon during the
pandemic: the continued assembling of individuals in political protests
despite the fear of contagion from the virus. Arif discusses the massive
social protests that took place in India on the occasion of new ‘Farm Bills’
at the height of the pandemic and while lockdown and social distancing
measures were also in place. Her chapter reflects on this seeming contra-
diction between a biopolitics predicated on immunity from (biological)
contagion and a need to seek out (social) contagion and lose the fear of
being touched by others in the experience of the crowd. Arif postulates
that while bodies can be separated and distanced, the social cannot, for it
agglomerates individuals around sites of conflict. While bio-political
xxiv Introduction

governmentality employs biology to embody and individuate difference,

for Arif, the social deals with difference through groups and collectives,
and politics is a function of collectives seeking to immunise themselves
against other groups. The social resists the bio-political wish to attain an
immunity from community, but it also leaves open the question of the
singular, the biological individual who is abandoned by the state unless
they manage to collectivise themselves.
One of the most striking phenomena of the viral politics of COVID-19
was the simultaneous mobilisation of the global ‘republic of letters’ at the
onset of the pandemic. In Chap. 9, ‘Ideologies of Contagion and
Communities of Life,’ Vanessa Lemm gives an analysis of this case of ‘spir-
itual’ suggestion and ‘ideological’ contagion. Against the background of
home lockdowns and social distancing, and the sudden grinding halt of
globalised exchanges and chains of production, there arose calls for a
deeper human community, global moral imperatives, and even commu-
nism in the face of the viral onslaught. For Lemm, these reactions were
symptomatic of a resurgence of humanism and a religious approach to
history that are at odds with the need to form communities of life with
non-human beings and in awareness of humankind being part of a natural
and cosmic history that bears no trace of divine providence or guidance.
With Part IV, ‘Pandemic Neoliberalism,’ this volume shifts to consider
COVID-19 from the point of view of a new planetary approach to the
conception of home. The home acquired a new significance in the light of
the global policy of lockdowns and quarantines, which along with signify-
ing that state protection of its citizens ultimately rested on the preserva-
tion of the bourgeois, domestic interior, highlighted dramatically the
plight of those who did not have access to such protective bubbles and
those whose confinement in such bubbles led to damage to their mental
health, increased spousal and child domestic abuse, and serious educa-
tional deficits due to ‘home learning,’ to name only some of the conse-
quences of this policy. Likewise, the concept of ‘home’ or ‘household’ is
central in economics, from its root in the Greek terms oikos (household)
and nomos (legal order). For some time now, the development of late capi-
talism termed ‘neoliberalism’ has been known to rely on mechanisms of
‘privatisation’ that seek to separate and oppose the state to the market and
disband social welfarist conceptions of market capitalism. More recently,
neoliberalism has also been viewed as a regime of appropriation, produc-
tion, and reproduction centred on home ownership and ‘family values’
 Introduction  xxv

that uphold racist and sexist normative hegemonies tributary of a long

history of colonialism and imperialism.
In Chap. 10, ‘Contradictions of the Bailout State,’ Martijn Konings
tackles one of the most discussed features of the governmental response to
the pandemic, namely, the apparent abandoning of the analogy between
household deficits and public deficits that underpinned neoliberal dis-
course with regards to fiscal issues, coupled with the new phenomenon of
undoing the distinction between workplace and home. Konings explains
that the ‘bailout’ mechanism employed to finance the COVID-19 response
is not alien to the discourse of neoliberalism but one of its principal sys-
tematic features adopted in order to deal with internal and external ‘crises’
of capitalist development well in advance of the pandemic. Konings traces
the origins of the bailout mechanism prior to neoliberalism in the
Keynesian welfare state and its ideal ‘middle-class politics,’ but unlike
many critics of neoliberalism who tend to associate it with an ideology of
the elites, Konings points out that neoliberalism enters the scene as a way
to ‘realise’ the same middle-class politics based on speculation over asset
values as a way to transition out of working-class, wage-owning status,
among which speculation on the value of the home plays a crucial role.
Federico Luisetti’s chapter (Chap. 11), ‘The Neoliberal Virus,’ also
situates the COVID-19 pandemic within the logic of neoliberal globalisa-
tion as it encounters and negotiates the rock of planetary conditions. For
Luisetti, the planetary discourse of One Health is more a symptom than a
solution to the problems caused by the ‘ecological order of neoliberalism’
that leads to EIDs through zoonosis, where such viral jumps between
animal and human species would not have been possible had it not been
for the ecological disruptions occasioned by turbo capitalism and its ‘glo-
balisation’ of nature. Luisetti considers how COVID-19 has become a
‘neoliberal virus,’ that is, it has been ‘socialised’ into neoliberal forms of
governance that understands the ‘state of nature’ to be one characterised
by socio-natural evolutionary forces such as natural selection, competi-
tion, and adaptation that give rise to spontaneous normative orders like
free markets and characteristics like resilience. Luisetti worries that through
the pandemic governance, neoliberalism is in the process of colonialising
not only the global dimension but also the planetary one, employing as its
Trojan horse narratives about the Anthropocene which, in the language of
Earth systems, mimic the same neoliberal economic requirements to adapt
to bio-social mechanisms that social actors are powerless to change.
xxvi Introduction

The chapters in Part V, ‘Pandemic Habitats,’ thematise the concept of

home as central to ecological considerations of planetary health through
the idea of ‘habitat,’ the ‘interface’ between ‘wild’ and ‘domestic’ forms of
life, as well as new borderings intended to constitute homelands. One of
the best-known expressions of the shift from the global to the planetary is
formulated in terms of the Gaia hypothesis, where the Earth systems are
considered, within a certain range, to form a self-regulating and self-main-
taining whole. When considered from a planetary dimension, the ecologi-
cal conception of habitat becomes something that living beings create for
themselves through complex loops of interaction and feedback, giving rise
to analogies with the control of the environmental conditions within the
interior of homes. However, from a planetary perspective, where the sur-
vival and adaptation of the human species is no longer considered as the
final aim of natural history, what is threatening exterior and welcoming
interior are no longer drawn along humanist lines. The chapters in this last
part all pursue reflections from a posthumanist perspective on what gov-
erning through habitat or milieu entails post-COVID-19.
In Chap. 12, ‘Biometric Re-bordering: Environmental Control During
Pandemic Times,’ Mark Andrejevic and Zala Volcic address the changes in
our understanding of habitat brought about by the pluralisation of bor-
ders, established and policed through the use of digital technology in
response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Their analysis considers how the
planetary concern with ‘safe operating spaces’ for life-forms is translated
by the ‘first global pandemic of the smartphone era’ into strategies for
securing human mobility. The chapter pays special attention to the way in
which the ‘digital enclosure’ of bodies through biometric monitoring and
surveillance undermines claim to equality of rights by modulating in a dif-
ferential way the environment in which individuals move.
In Chap. 13, ‘Planetary Health and the Biopolitics of Home,’ Miguel
Vatter examines the discourse of planetary health as a function of a new
bio-political and bio-legal articulation of the idea of the planet as a ‘home’
for life. The chapter discusses the idea of planetary habitability in the light
of a holistic conception of biology whose central principle is the unity
between organism and environment. Vatter analyses the bio-legal implica-
tions of planetary habitability in relation to the societal conflicts around
rights to ‘health’ and to ‘free movement’ that have emerged during the
governance of the pandemic. The chapter concludes with a reflection on
 Introduction  xxvii

the problems posed by environmental devices such as vaccine passes from

the perspective of a posthumanist phenomenology of embodiment
and rights.
The volume concludes with Chap. 14, ‘Creative Responses to
COVID-19,’ by Stephen Muecke, where an imaginary overlap of domes-
tic and wild habitats brings to bear a multispecies perspective on conta-
gion, infection, death, and cure. The first part approaches the question of
non-human planetary agencies through an engagement with Michael
Taussig’s calling into question the nature/art divide as well as with Bruno
Latour’s and Isabelle Stengers’ reformulations of the Gaia hypothesis. In
the second part, reflecting on the ‘new normal’ of post-COVID life and its
‘resetting’ trope, Muecke’s text engages the tensions between Marxist and
Green approaches to the imbricated deployments of the ‘Economy’ and
‘Nature,’ proposing ways in which aesthetics and myth can help us live on
in the Earth’s ‘Critical Zone.’
The inter- and multi-disciplinary perspectives on the pandemic reflected
in the chapters in this volume thematise the tension between global and
planetary dimensions of analysis of our shared bio-social, bio-political, and
bio-legal conditions, highlighting the complexities, challenges, and oppor-
tunities the entanglement of human and planetary health present for
humanity. We hope that this collection of chapters opens up new ways for
us to address these challenges and opportunities collectively.

Vanessa Lemm
Miguel Vatter
 PART I

Biosecurity and Planetary Health

 Cryopolitics of SARS-CoV-2: Biosecurity
in Laboratories and Wet Markets

Frédéric Keck

The debate on the origins of COVID-19 raises important questions on

biosecurity: how should the circulation of living materials be controlled in
such a way that it does not cause the emergence of new infectious agents?
This question mobilized a range of experts who assessed the risks of emer-
gence in the different spaces where living material circulates (Lakoff and
Collier 2008). COVID-19 has been described as an emerging infectious
disease of probable animal origin, which distinguishes it from zoonoses
naturally transmitted across vertebrate species (Haider et al. 2020). The
World Health Organization published a report in February 2021 investi-
gating the different scenarios for the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 (WHO
2021). From an anthropological perspective, these different scenarios of
the past can be considered as imaginaries of the future in spaces where
regulations will be imposed. If rules of biosecurity aim to prepare contem-
porary societies for zoonotic viruses, how do these rules express changing
relations between humans and non-human animals in these societies?
How do experts on biosecurity imagine material exchanges between

F. Keck (*)
Laboratory of Social Anthropology, CNRS, Paris, France

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 3

Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022
V. Lemm, M. Vatter (eds.), The Viral Politics of Covid-19,
Biolegalities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-3942-6_1
4 F. KECK

humans and animals in spaces of biological accumulation such as laborato-

ries, farms and markets? In this chapter, I will argue that this imaginary
mobilizes the cold chain as a technique of conservation of living material
which casts anew the question of domestication.

The Hypothesis of Imported Frozen Products

In June 2020, Chinese health authorities discovered traces of the SARS-­
CoV-­2 virus on cutting boards used for imported salmon in the Xinfadi
market in Beijing. They then carried out systematic tests on imported
frozen products: American pork, shrimp from Saudi Arabia, and Brazilian
or New Zealand beef. The discovery of the active virus on frozen food
imported into Qingdao justified the screening of 11 million people in this
port city. In the eyes of Chinese experts, the hypothesis that the virus was
imported via frozen foreign products ruled out the possibility of a viral
emergence in the Huanan seafood wet market in Wuhan. The detection of
a cluster of COVID-19 among workers and customers in this market was
very similar to the scenario of the SARS crisis in 2003 (Chan et al. 2020).
What retrospectively came to be called SARS-CoV-1 had been detected
among workers in wet markets in the Guangdong province, raising the
hypothesis that the new virus had been transmitted from horsheshoe bats
to civet cats sold in these markets (Woo et al. 2006). This led to oriental-
izing descriptions of wet markets as unsanitary places where humans are in
contact with wild animals (Zhan 2005). But in the eyes of Chinese experts,
the discovery of SARS-CoV-2-like viruses in human samples in Italy and
France as early as fall 2019 suggested overseas circulation before the first
cluster in Wuhan was identified in December 2019.
According to other virologists, however, it was ‘highly unlikely’ that
SARS-CoV-2 was actively preserved in frozen products and more likely
that the contamination in markets selling frozen products was accidental.
Frozen foods may provide surfaces where the virus survives, but they are
not environments where it can replicate. The hypothesis of a contamina-
tion from abroad would request to trace back the entire import chain to
be proven. Why was this baroque hypothesis proposed in an interna-
tional report?
In the language of virologists, the hypothesis of viral transmission
through frozen foods could be a ‘red herring’: a logical fallacy designed to
divert attention from the real target. Indeed, the term ‘red herring’ refers
to the use of smoked herring as a lure for hunting dogs. The term was
 CRYOPOLITICS OF SARS-COV-2: BIOSECURITY IN LABORATORIES AND WET… 5

used in the ‘mutant H5N1’ controversy in 2013, when Dutch and

Japanese virologists engineered a ferret-transmissible bird flu virus in the
laboratory in anticipation of its natural emergence in animal markets in
China (Porter 2016; Keck 2020). They were then accused by the biosecu-
rity authorities of the United States to design a dangerous virus that could
be released outside of the laboratory or used as biological weapons. The
term ‘red herring’ suggested that it was safer to analyze viruses circulating
in the wild rather than simulate them in the space of the laboratory. When
they call themselves ‘virus hunters,’ virologists design traps to capture the
information of viruses and send warning signals of the emergence of a
dangerous pathogen, but some of the information may be a lure that leads
to the wrong track and misses the prey.
The three scenarios assessed by the WHO mission report mobilized, in
different ways, the cold chain to trace the origins of SARS-CoV-2. The
Chinese authorities used the hypothesis of the importation of the virus in
frozen products because it implied technologies underlying the other
hypotheses, as if they were bringing to the forefront a technique that
remained invisible in the other scenarios. How do ‘virus hunters’ use this
technology for the conservation of living materials? How does the cold
chain orient the different scenarios of preparation for future pandemics?
And what does the cold chain tell us about the role of virologists in the
construction of planetary health?

The Wet Market Hypothesis

The hypothesis of an emergence of SARS-CoV-2 in the Wuhan animal
market was initially retained precisely because these markets are not in the
cold chain. Chinese consumers go to these markets because they provide
them with ‘fresh’ meat whose taste and pharmaceutical qualities are better
guaranteed than those of ‘frozen’ meat in supermarkets. The term ‘wet
market’ was first used in Singapore in the 1960s when hawker centers were
bought by the State to impose rules of hygiene such as the daily use of
water to clean the stalls (Mele et al. 2015). The development of private
markets in mainland China in the last two decades has led authorities to
regain control over retailers by imposing regulation on the sale of live
animals (Zhang and Pan 2013). Poultry farmers were selling on these
markets their small-scale production while selling to supermarkets their
large-scale production, a distinction which passed within farms themselves
in their exposure to zoonotic risks (Fearnley 2020). Between 30% and 50%
6 F. KECK

of the meat consumed in China is bought in these markets, but this pro-
portion has decreased due to the regulation of these markets by the
Chinese authorities after the SARS crisis (Maruyama et al. 2016).
While these markets are often presented as archaic places where exotic
animals are bought for traditional medicine, they are also valued by a
young clientele who is attached to local products and wary of the conser-
vation of chilled meat in supermarkets. Most of the animals sold in these
markets are fish, seafood and poultry, presented live so that customers can
check their ‘freshness’ (Zhong et al. 2020). The Chinese term for ‘fresh’
(xinxian) does not mean cold but rather new and savory (Sabban 1993;
Farquahr 2002). To avoid refrigeration in their home, customers in Hong
Kong go to shop in these markets between two and three times a week
(Liu 2008). Paradoxically, wet markets are considered as ‘fresh’ precisely
because they lack the cold chain of supermarkets: the production of fresh-
ness is delegated to human actors rather than to a standardized machine.
In an atmosphere of conviviality often described as warm (renao), wet
markets are sites where the construction of value involves a range of actors
in the presentation of commodities as savory and desirable (Tsing 2008).
Investigations are necessary to understand how the introduction of freez-
ers in these markets, under new regulations of biosecurity, has changed
customers’ perception of the animals they buy for consumption at these
markets.
The notion of freshness orients experts beyond the gastronomic mean-
ing of ‘savoury’ toward the medicinal meaning of ‘protection against the
cold.’ Indeed, the value of live animals bought in Chinese wet markets
comes from their consumption as food as well as medicine. Pangolin scales
have been used in Chinese Traditional Medicine along with other animal
products involved in the process of industrialization of this market by
Chinese authorities (Chee 2021). When a virus 90% similar to SARS-­
CoV-­2 was detected in Malaysian pangolins in early 2020, it was an oppor-
tunity for Chinese authorities to reinforce regulations on the trade of
wildlife. A ban on the consumption of Asian pangolins had been declared
in 2000, as well as a provisory ban on the consumption of palmed civets
and snakes in 2003; this ban was lifted after protests from workers involved
in the farming of wild animal, which, according to the Chinese Academy
of Engineering (2017), involves 15 million people. Here again, pangolins
may be ‘red herrings’ for animals sold in less-regulated conditions in
Chinese markets. A recent study has showed that raccoon dogs, bamboo
 CRYOPOLITICS OF SARS-COV-2: BIOSECURITY IN LABORATORIES AND WET… 7

rats, hedgehogs and badgers were sold in the Huanan seafood market, but
no pangolins (Xiao et al. 2021).
Raccoon dogs are sold in China not so much for their pharmaceutical
virtues, as palmed civets, but for the quality of their fur. Their trade has
grown in parallel to the trade of mink and is increasingly suspected by
virologists to be a major cause of transmission of zoonoses. This track
has led ‘virus hunters’ to other hypotheses on the origins of SARS-
CoV-2. While civets are hunted and bred in the south of China, mink are
industrially exploited in the north of China for the fur market. It is esti-
mated that the Shandong province produced 15 million mink in 2018
and that this number declined to 7 million in 2019 for reasons that
remain mysterious (Faure and Sciama 2021). When the government of
Denmark announced in November 2020 that it would slaughter its pop-
ulation of 17 million mink because some farms had been contaminated
by SARS-CoV-2, and when the Danish fur companies announced that
they would close this major industrial activity, as Denmark produces a
third of the mink fur globally, it may have been a warning signal to
launch investigations into the mink industry in China. The consumption
of mink fur has increased in China in the last decades and it is estimated
that more than 3000 industrial farms breed mink for fur. While mink
farming was developed in North America and Scandinavia at the end of
the nineteenth century as a way to control the production of fur without
relying on reluctant native hunters, as it was the case in Russia (Etkind
2011), the displacement of the fur industry to China may be another
step in the history of the domestication of mink.
The massive killing of mink as a precautionary measure in 2020 is remi-
niscent of the mass slaughter of poultry or civets against avian flu or SARS
twenty years ago. In all these cases, animals are killed to avoid the forma-
tion of an animal reservoir for a dangerous pathogen emerging among
humans. However, the relations between humans and these various animal
species are different. Civets and poultry were involved in a ‘hot chain,’ as
they were consumed for the contrast between freshness and freezing, or as
a remedy for inflammation. Raccoon dogs and mink are caught in a ‘cold
chain’: their furs protect during the winter and the animals must be kept
at a temperature below 10 °C. Because of the intensification of the pro-
duction of mink, they may have become a reservoir for the amplification
of coronaviruses emerging from bats. Studies of outbreaks of SARS-­
CoV-­2 in mink farms in the Netherlands, Greece and Utah show that their
mortality reaches, respectively, 2.5%, 8% and 30% (Fenollar et al. 2021).
8 F. KECK

An interesting contrast can be made between the status of mink as a poten-

tial reservoir for COVID-19 and the status of deer. This mammal species
has recently been showed to host the SARS-CoV-2 virus in the North of
the United States, with a prevalence reaching up to 50%, and has remained
so far asymptomatic (Kuchipudi et al. 2021). While the potential transmis-
sion of COVID-19 by deer is a risk to hunters, deer do not enter the cold
chain as mink do because they are not industrially bred—hence their role
as an experiment on how COVID-19 spreads ‘in the wild’ without any
prophylactic intervention such as culling, vaccination or lockdown.

The Hypothesis of the Laboratory Accident

The potential transmission of SARS-CoV-2 by mink brings an interesting
comparison between farms and laboratories, which is the starting point of
my reflection on biosecurity. Mink belong to the same family of mammals
as ferrets, who have been used as experimental models for the transmission
of influenza because they replicate the human symptoms for respiratory
viruses, such as sneezing. While mink were farmed to produce fur, ferrets
have long been bred to hunt other animal species such as rabbits; hence
their role in laboratories where they can be lured by ‘red herrings.’ The
2013 controversy on the mutant H5N1 focused on the conditions in
which a dangerous pathogen had been cultivated among ferrets situated in
adjacent cages. There was a risk that the mutant H5N1 turned contagious
by these manipulations would escape from the laboratories or that the
genetic information of this virus would be used as a biological weapon.
After being produced in laboratory conditions, the mutant H5N1 should
be conserved in highly secured fridges and its genetic sequence down-
loaded on data banks to which only influenza experts should have access.
Epidemiologists then criticized these experiments on potentially pandemic
pathogens by assessing the risks of their escape from the laboratories in
which they were cultivated (Lipsitch and Galvani 2014).
The hypothesis of a laboratory accident was also assessed in the WHO
report on the origins of SARS-CoV-2, in a way that mobilized the cold
chain as a technique of biological cultivation. There are a dozen laborato-
ries in Wuhan working on coronaviruses. The most famous is a biosafety
level 4 (or P4) laboratory, where highly pathogenic viruses such as Ebola
or SARS are cultivated. Inaugurated in 2018, it is directed by a Chinese
virologist trained in France, Shi Zhengli. Since the SARS crisis in 2003,
researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology have been collecting
 CRYOPOLITICS OF SARS-COV-2: BIOSECURITY IN LABORATORIES AND WET… 9

coronaviruses from caves where bats live and storing them in freezers.
Phylogenetic analysis of these coronaviruses traces them back to a virus
very similar to SARS-CoV-2, indicating a possible bat-to-human transmis-
sion event. Questions are currently focused on a paper published by Shi
Zhengli and her colleagues in Virologica Sinica in 2016 describing a coro-
navirus that infected miners working in a cave in Mojiang, Yunnan, and
hospitalized in Kunming, the capital of that province (Ge et al. 2016).
This article suggests bat-to-human contamination via guano and possible
transmission between miners. It also attests ‘gain-of-function’ research to
analyze the sequence of the virus that explains its high contagiousness
between humans. The laboratory as a site of storage for viruses trapped in
the wild would thus also be a site of amplification of emerging viruses.
This hypothesis of an escape from the laboratory is ‘extremely unlikely’
in view of the biosafety rules that govern such manipulations of patho-
genic viruses in a laboratory. Indeed, the SARS-CoV-2 virus on which the
Wuhan virologists were working was not a live virus but a backbone virus
(Holmes et al. 2021). However, other virologists have supported this
hypothesis by reading the traces of SARS-CoV-2 in ‘phylogenetic trees.’
The random mutations of viruses are indeed represented by virologists
following branches that derive from common ancestors, according to a
‘molecular clock’ that allows virologists to date their divergences. Since
mutations occur at a regular rate, these branches form a more or less con-
tinuous tree. In contrast, a genetic break (drift rather than shift, in viro-
logical vocabulary) makes it possible to identify a crossing of the species
barrier, when an important mutation leads a virus to evolve in a new eco-
logical niche. The continuous and discontinuous divergences of the phy-
logenetic trees thus display a natural history of the viruses which leaves
room for human intervention: it is thus possible to identify the effect of
vaccination—which restricts the possibilities of evolution of the virus—or
of industrial breeding—which increases them. However, a laboratory acci-
dent can appear on these trees as a particularly long branch because the
evolution of the virus is ‘frozen’ when it is kept in the cold and resumes
when it escapes into the environment. It has thus been possible to trace on
phylogenetic trees the emergence of an H1N1 influenza virus in 1977,
which had escaped from a Soviet laboratory, or the re-emergence of a
bluetongue virus in 2015, which had been eradicated in Europe in 2010
and only stored in laboratories (Pascall et al. 2020).
In this third hypothesis, the cold chain is no longer the infrastructure
that contributes to the emergence of the virus but the tool that allows
10 F. KECK

virologists to trace its history when it is hidden. We can thus hypothesize

that the Chinese authorities have drawn the attention of ‘virus hunters’ to
frozen products imported from abroad in order to divert it from this other
cold chain which makes the natural mutations of viruses visible through
their conservation in the laboratory. The hypothesis of the transmission of
the virus on an animal market is part of a modernizing narrative according
to which the cold chain makes it possible to control the distances over
which goods are transported. In this narrative, Wuhan’s position in China
is comparable to the position of Chicago in the industrialization of food in
the United States by the use of refrigerated trucks (Cronon 1991). The
contrast between the globalized industries developed in Wuhan for the last
decades and the tradition of wet markets makes it necessary for public
health authorities to regulate the cold chain in the city. But the first and
third hypotheses mobilize a more archaic imagination in which ‘virus
hunters’ reconstruct the past from traces preserved in the cold.
The COVID-19 pandemic seems to confirm the diagnosis proposed by
Michel Foucault of a biopolitics by which experts control populations
through statistics to ‘make them live and let them die.’ But the work of the
‘virus hunters’ is rather similar to a ‘cryopolitics’ whose goal is to ‘make
latent life and defer death’ by conserving materials in fridges where they
are suspended between life and death (Radin and Kowal 2017). Cold stor-
age is a technology that has been used by hunters to conserve their food,
anticipate future shortages and institute the first inequalities (Testart
1982). As a technique of domestication which makes a distinction between
species that can be bred and conserved, it is used by contemporary virus
hunters to distinguish ‘reservoir species’ in which viral mutations are
intensified and accelerated, as well as to build laboratories where these
mutations are simulated and slowed down. The storage of viruses in the
cold chain is a technique to better anticipate future pandemics as well as
the stockpiling of vaccines.
These analyses of the uses of the cold chain in the search for the origins
of SARS-CoV-2 lead us to conclusive remarks on the transformations of
planetary health. If the main challenge today is to connect global health
crises such as COVID-19 with other warnings on ecological transforma-
tions such as global warming, the uses of the cold chain may be an indica-
tor connecting the health of humans in different sites where they interact
with animals under conditions of zoonotic risks. Farms, markets and labo-
ratories are regulated by biosecurity rules because they slow down or
accelerate the temperature of living beings through their transformations
 CRYOPOLITICS OF SARS-COV-2: BIOSECURITY IN LABORATORIES AND WET… 11

into desirable commodities or valuable information. If planetary health

forces us to think how we share a ‘home’ with other living beings in the
planet we inhabit and transform by our activities, it must be reminded that
‘home’ is separated from ‘outside’ by temperature conditions (it is warmed
up or cooled down) and that domestication is a technique to bring animals
into the human ‘home.’ The cold chain as an infrastructure revealed by
controversies on biosecurity captures the domestication of animals as a
source of zoonotic viruses. It thus raises the question at which tempera-
ture we are ready to live with other animal species in a planet where life
under sustainable conditions is possible.

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 From Global to Planetary Health: Two
Morphologies of Pandemic Preparedness

Lyle Fearnley

By now, we are accustomed to identifying the COVID-19 pandemic as a

failure of pandemic preparedness—it has become a commonplace to say
that we were ‘unprepared.’ And yet, in this chapter, I will argue that the
public health response to the emerging SARS-CoV-2 virus was in fact a
largely successful demonstration of a particular paradigm of pandemic pre-
paredness, one that I will call, following anthropologist Andrew Lakoff
(2010), ‘global health security.’
Seeking analytic precision, Lakoff divided the vast domain of global
health into two different regimes: humanitarian biomedicine and global
health security (ibid.). Humanitarian biomedicine refers to global health
programs on the model of organizations like UNICEF or Doctors Without
Borders that provide necessary medications and healthcare to poor coun-
tries. Global health security, by contrast, reflects a very different strategy
of health governance: global health security, Lakoff writes,

L. Fearnley (*)
Singapore University of Technology and Design, Singapore, Singapore
e-mail: lyle_fearnley@sutd.edu.sg

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 15

Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022
V. Lemm, M. Vatter (eds.), The Viral Politics of Covid-19,
Biolegalities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-3942-6_2
16 L. FEARNLEY

focuses on ‘emerging infectious diseases’ which are seen to threaten wealthy

countries, and which typically (though not always) emanate from Asia, sub-­
Saharan Africa, or Latin America. It is oriented toward outbreaks that have
not yet occurred—and may never occur. It seeks to implement systems of
preparedness for events whose likelihood is incalculable but whose political,
economic, and health consequences could be catastrophic. Its ambitious
sociotechnical agenda is to create a real-time, global disease surveillance sys-
tem that can provide ‘early warning’ of potential outbreaks in developing
countries and link such early warning to immediate systems of response that
will protect against their spread to the rest of the world. (2010, 59, origi-
nal emphasis)

In this chapter, I first explain why, contrary to most expert and public
opinion, we should consider the response to the COVID-19 pandemic a
successful demonstration of the global health security paradigm. But I also
argue that this success should concern us. If the COVID-19 disaster hap-
pened despite the existence of global health security programs that suc-
cessfully anticipated, rapidly identified, and globally shared data about the
novel coronavirus, the failure to contain the emerging virus before it
spread around the world exposes a critical weakness in the vision of global
health security.
I then draw from my research on avian and pandemic influenza pre-
paredness interventions in China to draw a contrast with another possible
approach to pandemics that I will call ‘planetary health.’ My use of global
and planetary health may not systematically match some of the official or
branded definitions provided for these terms.1 Instead, what I want to
emphasize is a conceptual difference between the global and the planetary
as two distinct spatial forms or morphologies of preparedness.

International to Global Health

After the Second World War, the establishment of the World Health
Organization (WHO) as an agency within the United Nations invoked a
new vision of ‘world health.’ By seeking to cover a ‘worldwide’ scope and
based on ideals of world citizenship, the WHO differed in important
respects from previous international health initiatives such as the
International Sanitary Conferences or the League of Nations Health

1
On global health, see Brown et al. (2006); for an historical review of planetary health, see
Dunk et al. (2019).
 FROM GLOBAL TO PLANETARY HEALTH: TWO MORPHOLOGIES… 17

Organization (Wu 2021; Staples 2006). In its structure, however, the

WHO remained bound to an international pattern of governance, includ-
ing a hierarchical mode of governmental authority and what David Fidler
calls a ‘Westphalian’ or territorial, state-based pattern of sovereignty (2003).
The WHO’s World Influenza Programme (WIP) was one of the first
agency initiatives that put the vision of world health into practice. Public
health and virology experts, concerned about the impact of flu pandemics
and aware of the variation of influenza viruses, suggested that a worldwide
monitoring system able to identify new variants of the virus could help to
contain or mitigate the next pandemic. At the center of this vision was the
technology of immunization: the recent development of flu vaccines held
out the promise of prevention, while the recognition that flu vaccines
needed to be tailored to the wide antigenic variation of influenza viruses
posed a crucial challenge. As British virologist C.H. Andrewes explained,

One might perhaps hope to isolate a strain from the beginning of an epi-
demic, adapt it to growth in fertile eggs and produce a vaccine in time to be
of use before the epidemic is over. In practice, there is not nearly enough
time to do this within one country. But if it could be shown that a new—and
especially lethal—strain was spreading from country to country, the vaccine
might be produced in time to protect countries yet unattacked. The above
arguments seem to show that many problems concerning influenza can only
be solved by international collaboration, such as could be fostered by the
World Health Organization. (WHO 1947, 194; see also Payne 1953)

At the same time, the worldwide coverage of the WIP was structured
by an international form. In London, the World Influenza Center stood at
the apex of a network of fifty-four virology laboratories in forty-two coun-
tries. Each country’s ‘national’ laboratory was equipped with the tools and
reagents to identify an influenza virus, and then prepare and ship samples
to the central laboratory in London. The WIP network adopted a hierar-
chical hub-and-spoke structure in which samples isolated in individual
nations were sent to the central laboratory for expert analysis. At the cen-
tral laboratory, more advanced studies of antigenic variation could be con-
ducted and the results then communicated back to the national laboratories.
In some cases, vaccine seed strains created in London were also shipped to
the national laboratories for local vaccine manufacturing.
The significance of the international structure of the WIP’s worldwide
surveillance became particularly clear during the 1957 pandemic. In early
18 L. FEARNLEY

May, an outbreak of influenza was detected in Singapore—at that time a

British colony where an ‘epidemic intelligence’ station was established—
and quickly reported to the London World Influenza Centre. The London
laboratory identified a novel variant of the influenza virus, significantly
different from previous strains, and predicted a pandemic. The WHO then
monitored the spread of influenza across the globe but was unable to
develop vaccines rapidly enough to contain or mitigate the disease.
Meanwhile, researchers in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) had
identified the novel influenza virus more than two months earlier than the
cases discovered in Singapore—and also recognized that the flu was caused
by a novel variant. However, at the time, the PRC was not a member of
the WIP and the researchers never reported the findings to the
WHO. During this period, the China seat at the United Nations was held
by the Taiwan-based Republic of China and the PRC was excluded from
the UN and all its agencies, such as the WHO. As WHO epidemiologist
Payne noted in retrospect,

The 1957 pandemic of influenza is the first that it has been possible to study
using modern virological techniques in an almost world-wide network of
laboratories which had been organized by the World Health Organization
with just such an eventuality in mind. It was almost ironical therefore that
the epidemic should originate in an area not covered by the programme.
(1958, 29)

Despite the pretensions to ‘worldwide’ coverage, the WIP operated

within the structural form of international relations—a particular way of
carving up the world, shaped and limited by geopolitical conditions such
as the Cold War. In 1972, when the PRC was admitted to the United
Nations, ongoing WHO programs in Taiwan were canceled. Taiwan
remains to this day excluded from WHO collaborations. Though the
geography of world influenza surveillance had shifted, its international
form remained the same.
During the 2003 SARS outbreak, the international form of WHO’s
pandemic disease surveillance programs once again became a matter of
concern. As is now well known, the earliest cases of an ‘atypical’ pneumo-
nia began appearing in China’s southern Guangdong province in
November 2002. However, China did not officially report the existence of
an outbreak until 11 February 2003. By that time, the outbreak was
already beginning to spread across China’s borders into Hong Kong,
 FROM GLOBAL TO PLANETARY HEALTH: TWO MORPHOLOGIES… 19

Vietnam, Singapore, and other countries (Abraham 2004; Kleinman and

Watson 2005).
However, the WHO had already received several reports about the out-
break from novel ‘global’ sources of information. In late November 2002,
the Global Public Health Information Network (GPHIN), a secure
internet-­based ‘early warning’ system that gathers preliminary reports of
public health significance on a ‘real time’ basis by monitoring internet
news forums (developed by Canada’s Public Health Agency; see Mawudeku
and Blench 2005; Heymann and Rodier 2004), identified an article
reporting an unusual ‘flu’ outbreak in Guangdong province. After for-
warding the article to the WHO, the WHO responded by activating the
WIP (by then renamed as the Global Influenza Surveillance Network
[GISN]) and requesting updates on influenza activity in China. Operating
within the remit of the GISN, China provided a detailed report on influ-
enza cases suggesting that the number of cases was consistent with sea-
sonal patterns—but without mentioning any unusual outbreak. In essence,
the WHO’s influenza surveillance system functioned as it was designed to,
but it had no capacity to identify outbreaks of unknown cause.
Global surveillance networks built and managed outside of the WHO’s
international health regime played a more important role. On 10 February
2003, a post was made on the Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases
(ProMED-mail) suggesting that a severe and deadly outbreak was taking
place in Guangzhou, Guangdong province. Founded in 1994, ProMED-­
mail was ‘envisioned as a means of exploiting the Internet in the service of
detecting emerging infectious or toxin-mediated diseases, either natural or
intentionally caused, that threatened human beings’ and designed ‘to dis-
seminate this information rapidly to a wide audience and allow for
informed discussion in real time’ (Yu and Madoff 2004). When the WHO
asked China for clarification, China for the first time acknowledged an
outbreak of an unknown disease, reporting 305 cases of pneumonia of
unknown cause, but also incorrectly claimed that the outbreak had peaked
and was under control. Commentators noted in the aftermath that
‘national surveillance failed to identify and respond to an emerging out-
break of SARS early enough to prevent its toll of sickness, death, and
international spread’ (Heymann and Rodier 2004).
In the aftermath of the SARS outbreak, a transformation in health gov-
ernance took place that has been described as a transition from interna-
tional to global health (Brown et al. 2006; Fidler 2003, 2004). David
Fidler, a legal scholar, highlights the unprecedented use of mechanisms of
20 L. FEARNLEY

non-state surveillance (like GPHIN or ProMED) as the beginnings of a

‘post-Westphalian’ health system—that is, one that transcends the limita-
tions of the nation-state form and the structure of international diplo-
macy (2003).
The morphological difference between international and global health
also played out in conflicts over the sharing of influenza viruses and infor-
mation. After the re-emergence of the highly pathogenic avian influenza
(HPAI) strain H5N1 in 2004 in China and Southeast Asia, several coun-
tries—notably China and Indonesia—refused to send physical samples of
the viruses to the WHO or other international laboratories. (Since these
were animal, not human influenzas, they were not technically included
under existing Global Influenza Surveillance Network agreements.) The
sample-sharing dispute was ultimately resolved through benefit-sharing
agreements that enshrined the principle of ‘viral sovereignty,’ essentially
remaining within the morphology of international health. Meanwhile, the
United States’ Los Alamos National Laboratory built a database for host-
ing influenza virus genome sequences but made the database private and
limited access to invited members. Soon some uninvited virology labs
complained and publicly called for the Los Alamos influenza data to be
set ‘free’. This sequence-sharing dispute, by contrast with the dispute over
samples, was resolved in a way that went beyond the structure of interna-
tional health. Instead, the controversy led to the formation of an alternate
open-access database known as the Global Initiative for Sharing All
Influenza Data (GISAID), which granted unlimited access to influenza
genomes’ sequences for any user who registered with the platform but
required that registered users agreed to cite and collaborate with the labo-
ratories that posted the sequences. Whereas the WHO’s WIP was struc-
tured by the international form of UN diplomacy—a hub-and-spoke
structure linking nation-states to a central WHO laboratory—the GISAID
system adopted a ‘global form’ based on many-to-many transfers much
like the networks of the internet (Fearnley 2020a).

The Global Virome

Since both SARS and several highly pathogenic avian influenza viruses
emerged in China during the early 2000s, it is unsurprising that China
became the primary object of many pandemic preparedness programs.
However, preparedness programs devoted to coronaviruses and influenza
 FROM GLOBAL TO PLANETARY HEALTH: TWO MORPHOLOGIES… 21

viruses adopted distinct forms—a distinction that I will argue reflects the
difference between a global and a planetary morphology of health.
An essay published in 2012 in The Lancet, authored by many of the
leading researchers on viral emerging diseases, captures the strategy that
dominated preparedness for coronaviruses (Morse et al. 2012). Even
though ‘no pathogens have been predicted before their first appearance,’
the authors argue that ‘patterns’ in the origin of novel pathogens, com-
bined with advances in virological analysis, communications, and compu-
tational tools, now ‘promise the possibility’ of pandemic prediction (ibid.,
1956). By focusing surveillance on high-risk ‘hot spots’ (primarily zones
with intensive human-animal interactions) and by deploying new forms of
pathogen surveillance (such as metagenomics), the authors heralded a
new era of viral discovery. They confidently titled their paper ‘Prediction
and Prevention of the Next Pandemic Zoonosis’ (ibid.).
Programs that followed this strategy included the USAID’s Emerging
Pandemic Threats, the non-profit Metabiota (started by virologist Nathan
Wolfe; see Wolfe 2013), the EcoHealth Alliance (Peter Daszak), and cul-
minated in Dennis Carroll’s organization of an umbrella organization
known as the Global Virome Project (GVP). Like similar projects to
sequence the human microbiome, Carroll and his collaborators aimed to
produce a complete archive of all viruses on Earth—to construct a ‘global
virome.’ To do so, the GVP funded initiatives to sample viruses from wild-
life, sequence them using advanced metagenomics techniques, and facili-
tate open-access information sharing across political borders and between
scientific laboratories. By building an archive of viruses in wildlife before
they spilled over into humans, the GVP promised to enable rapid response
to emerging outbreaks, including the possibility of developing counter-
measures before any human was infected.
Like GISAID, the GVP adopts a particular morphology in which the
global takes the form of a network, a device for translating local sites and
specific pieces of data into objects of data that can move across contexts—
what STS scholars have called ‘immutable mobiles’ (Latour 1987; Collier
and Ong 2005; Law 1987). The global virome is global in the same sense
as others have described the emergence of a ‘global biology’ in stem-cell
research, HIV vaccine development, and the Human Genome Project
(Franklin et al. 2000; Rees 2014; Stevens 2018; Fischer 2013). On the
one hand, geographic locations and animal reservoirs are defined as local
sources where viruses are sampled and extracted; on the other hand, stan-
dard protocols for laboratory analysis and data sharing are used to exchange
22 L. FEARNLEY

and research virus samples across a transnational domain. Once viruses are
assembled into a collection (the virome), machine learning and bioinfor-
matics approaches will predict risk based on virus genotype, enabling the
development of countermeasures before any outbreak occurs. Viruses
become global to the extent that infrastructures of sampling and sharing
enable their ‘decontextualization and recontextualization, abstractability
and movement, across diverse social and cultural situations’ (Collier
2006, 400).
In practice, the scale of the entire virome is extremely large (estimated
in the trillions), so the GVP narrowed its purview by selecting high-risk
animals and geographical ‘hotpots’ for sequencing work. In other words,
particular local sites were identified as globally significant, demanding the
introduction of a range of infrastructure to isolate and extract viruses from
these hot spots, then circulate them to laboratories around the world. In
this selection process, China was deemed one of the most important hot
spots and became a key testing ground for ‘global virome’ research—par-
ticularly research on the zoonotic reservoirs and spillover potential of
coronaviruses.
Immediately after the SARS outbreak in 2003, international research
teams collaborated with Chinese researchers to identify the reservoir host
of the emerging SARS virus. Initially identifying the civet cat as a key
source of spillover, researchers eventually focused on bats as the true res-
ervoir hosts and found large numbers of SARS-like coronaviruses in bat
species across southern and central China. As Wang and Eaton explain in
a review,

The genetic diversity observed among bat-derived SL-CoVs together with

the high prevalence and wide distribution of seropositive bats, as revealed by
two independent groups, are consistent with bats being the wildlife reser-
voir host of SL-CoVs. (2007, 335)

Funding for studies of bat coronaviruses in China grew rapidly.

Hundreds of coronaviruses were identified in samples taken from bats,
although most samples only yielded genome sequences and not viable
viruses (Cyranowski 2017). An important example is the work done by
the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). The WIV laboratory was inten-
sively supported by both international and China’s own grant funding,
including the construction of China’s first biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) labo-
ratory in Wuhan. Between 2005 and 2019, the WIV sampled more than
Another random document with
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of La Città dell'Oro
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
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ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
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you are located before using this eBook.

Title: La Città dell'Oro

racconto

Author: Emilio Salgari

Release date: April 5, 2024 [eBook #73336]

Language: Italian

Original publication: Milano: Treves, 1898

Credits: Barbara Magni and the Online Distributed Proofreading

Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from
images made available by The Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LA CITTÀ

DELL'ORO ***
LA CITTÀ DELL’ORO.
 EMILIO SALGARI

LA
Città dell’Oro
RACCONTO
Con 41 disegni di Antonio Bonamore e Gino De Bini

MILANO
Fratelli Treves, Editori
1898.
PROPRIETÀ LETTERARIA ED ARTISTICA
Riservati tutti i diritti.
Tip. Fratelli Treves.
INDICE
 I.
Yaruri.

— Bada, Alonzo! Se ti piomba addosso, non so se il medico,

quell’ottimo Velasco, saprà accomodarti le ossa.
— Non temere, cugino, ho il polso fermo e l’occhio sicuro.
— Ma quei dannati giaguari spiccano tali salti da far invidia alle tigri
indiane. Anche la settimana scorsa mi hanno storpiato uno schiavo
presso la foce dell’Arauca, sebbene quel disgraziato fosse un abile
cacciatore.
— Ma non aveva fra le mani un buon fucile.
— Una freccia intinta nel velenoso curaro vale quanto una palla di
fucile.
— Non mi fido, cugino Raffaele, di quelle freccie.
— Hai torto. Volano via silenziose e non falliscono mai, quando sono
lanciate da un indiano dell’Orenoco. Ti dirò poi che....
— Zitto, cugino!
— Il giaguaro?
— Ho udito laggiù a rompersi un ramo.
— Fermati, Alonzo! Non vorrei festeggiare il tuo arrivo dalla Florida
con una disgrazia.
— Taci! Non ho paura.
I due cugini si erano arrestati col dito sul grilletto del fucile e gli occhi
fissi sugli ammassi di tronchi e di fogliame che si stendevano dinanzi
a loro.
Al di là della boscaglia si udiva gorgogliare la corrente dell’Orenoco,
di quel fiume gigante che coi suoi numerosi affluenti solca
contemporaneamente le due repubbliche di Columbia e di
Venezuela, allungandosi fin presso l’altro gigante che attraversa tutta
intera l’America del Sud centrale, il famoso fiume delle Amazzoni.
Alcuni mico, scimmiottini così piccoli che possono stare in una
scatola di sigari, graziosissimi, svelti, intelligenti, emettevano le loro
grida lamentevoli, dondolandosi all’estremità dei rami, mentre su di
un tronco una copia di canindè, bellicosi pappagalli grossi come le
cacatoe dell’Australia, colle ali turchine ed il petto giallo, cicalavano a
piena voce.
I due cacciatori stettero alcuni istanti in silenzio, indagando cogli
sguardi i cespugli, gli alberi e le foglie gigantesche che proiettavano
sul terreno una cupa ombra e tendendo accuratamente gli orecchi,
poi Alonzo disse:
— Mi sono ingannato. Non odo nulla di sospetto.
— Non fidiamoci, cugino mio. Il giaguaro ci avrà scorti e si sarà
rintanato. To’!... Non senti questo odore di selvatico? È passato di
qui, ne sono certo.
— Si mostri, dunque!
Aveva appena pronunciate queste parole, che si videro le larghe
foglie d’un bananeira aprirsi rapidamente ed apparire una grossa
testa colla pelle fulva picchiettata di nero, che ricordava quella d’una
tigre, con una larga bocca irta di lunghi ed acuti denti. Gli occhi di
quella fiera, contratti in forma d’un i come quelli dei gatti, si fissavano
sui due cacciatori, mandando certi lampi che avevano i riflessi
dell’acciaio.
— Eccolo!... — esclamò Raffaele. — Indietro!... È affar mio!...
Un soffio potente, che parve un sordo ruggito, uscì dalle mascelle
aperte della fiera. Era una minaccia tremenda; annunciava
l’imminenza dell’assalto.
— Gli pianterò una palla fra i due occhi, — disse Alonzo. —
Guardati, cugino.
Puntò rapidamente il fucile che teneva in mano e senza attendere
altro fece fuoco. Era ormai troppo tardi! La tigre americana aveva
preso lo slancio ed era partita con impeto irresistibile, descrivendo
una fulminea parabola.
Il fumo non si era ancora dileguato che l’imprudente cacciatore
giaceva a terra. Il giaguaro gli stava sopra, pronto a stritolargli il
cranio o ad aprirglielo con un formidabile colpo d’artiglio.
Raffaele aveva gettato un grido d’orrore. La scena era stata così
rapida che gli era mancato il tempo di prevenire o d’arrestare lo
slancio della belva.
A sua volta aveva puntata l’arma, ma la tema di sbagliare la mira e
di colpire invece il cugino, lo aveva trattenuto. Gettò un secondo
grido.
— Aiuto!...
D’improvviso vide aprirsi precipitosamente i cespugli, apparire un
indiano armato di una di quelle pesanti mazze di legno di ferro che
usano i rivieraschi dell’Orenoco e che chiamansi wanaya, armi
formidabili che con un solo colpo sfracellano il cranio più resistente.
Senza pronunciare una parola, senza nemmeno gettare uno
sguardo sul cugino d’Alonzo, con un coraggio temerario,
quell’indiano piombò addosso al giaguaro e con un tremendo colpo
della sua pesante arma lo fece stramazzare al suolo fulminato. La
terribile wanaya gli aveva fracassato il cranio.
Raffaele si era precipitato verso Alonzo, il quale, dopo aver respinto
il cadavere sanguinante della fiera, s’era alzato a sedere.
— Sei ferito, cugino mio? — gli chiese con voce tremula.
— No, — rispose Alonzo tergendosi il freddo sudore che inondavagli
il viso già pallido. — Ma se il soccorso tardava, ero spacciato.
— Nemmeno una graffiatura?
— Neanche le vesti lacerate. Il giaguaro ha avuto un istante di
esitazione ed è stata la mia salvezza. Ti giuro però, cugino mio, che
mi sento tutto scombussolato.
— Presto, ritorniamo alla piantagione. Una vecchia bottiglia di vino di
Spagna ti farà bene.
Alonzo si era alzato raccogliendo il fucile che lo aveva così male
servito in quel supremo istante. Stavano per ricacciarsi nella foresta,
quando entrambi si arrestarono, esclamando:
— E l’indiano?
Si volsero di comune accordo e scorsero il salvatore ritto accanto ad
una palma massimiliana, appoggiato alla sua formidabile mazza,
immobile come una statua di porfido.
Era un indiano di alta statura, colle membra assai sviluppate, il petto
ampio, coi lineamenti duri, angolosi e gli sguardi cupi che avevano
un non so che di triste ed i capelli lunghi e neri, adorni d’una penna
d’aracari, cioè d’un piccolo tucano molto comune sull’Orenoco.
Aveva il petto adorno di varie linee dipinte in rosso, il collo d’una fila
di perle azzurre, alle quali era sospesa una placca d’oro in forma di
mezzaluna e per unico vestito portava un sottanino di cotone
finissimo, intessuto con pagliuzze d’argento, il guayaro come lo
chiamano gl’indiani.
Vedendo i due cacciatori avvicinarglisi, l’indiano non si era mosso,
però i suoi cupi sguardi si erano accesi d’una viva fiamma.
— Chi sei? — chiese Raffaele.
— Yaruri, — rispose l’indiano che doveva comprendere
perfettamente lo spagnuolo.
— Sei schiavo in qualche piantagione?
— Sono uomo libero, — disse il Pellerossa con fierezza.
— Da dove vieni?
— Molto da lontano; dai paesi ove il sole tramonta.
— Hai disceso l’Orenoco per cacciare forse il manato? [1]
— Forse, — rispose l’indiano con un sorriso misterioso.
— Sei valente, te lo dico io.
— Lo so: nessuno eguaglia il braccio di Yaruri.
— Grazie del tuo soccorso, — disse Alonzo. — Ti serberò
riconoscenza e se vorrai seguirci alla piantagione, non avrai a
lagnarti di noi.
— Intanto prendi, amico valoroso, — disse suo cugino.
Estrasse un borsellino contenente parecchie pezze d’oro e lo porse
all’indiano; ma questi lo gettò a terra con supremo disprezzo,
dicendo con aria tetra:
— A me dell’oro?... Sono qui venuto per offrirne a te!...
I due cacciatori, stupiti di vedere quell’indiano respingere quell’oro,
tanto ardentemente desiderato dai suoi fratelli rossi per
abbandonarsi poi a delle tremende ebbrezze che durano delle
settimane intere, si erano guardati l’un l’altro per chiedersi se
quell’indiano era pazzo. Quando udirono quelle parole, la loro
meraviglia non ebbe più limiti.
— Tu ci offri dell’oro! — esclamarono.
— L’ho detto, — rispose l’indiano. — Se gli uomini bianchi mi
seguiranno nei lontani paesi ove il sole tramonta, li farò tanto ricchi
da non saperne cosa fare dell’oro.
— Ma da dove vieni tu? — chiese Raffaele.
— Dall’alto Orenoco.
— A quale tribù appartieni?
— A quella dei Cassipagotti. La conosci tu?
— Ne ho udito vagamente parlare qualche volta e con terrore.
— Se vorrai, io ti condurrò lassù.
— I tuoi compatriotti non sono antropofagi?
— È vero.
— E da cent’anni spaventano le vicine regioni.
— È vero, — disse l’indiano con orgoglio.
— E vuoi condurmi presso i tuoi?
— Sì, se mi seguirai.
— E tu mi assicuri che là vi è dell’oro?
— Fin che vorrai.
— Non ti credo, quantunque si sappia che l’alto Orenoco è ricco
d’oro.
Un sorriso contrasse le labbra dell’indiano.
— Tu adunque non hai mai udito parlare degli Eperomerii? —
chiese.
Udendo quel nome, il piantatore aveva emesso un grido di stupore.
— Hai parlato degli Eperomerii! — esclamò.
— E di Manoa, hai mai udito parlare? — continuò l’indiano.
— Di Manoa!... Potenza di Dio!... Tu parli di Manoa!...
Il piantatore che pareva in preda ad una viva eccitazione, guardava
l’indiano con due occhi che brillavano di cupidigia. Pareva che quella
parola di Manoa lo avesse completamente scombussolato.
— Cugino, — disse Alonzo, che non aveva compreso nulla o quasi
nulla di quanto aveva detto l’indiano e che non aveva mai udito
parlare nè degli Eperomerii, nè di Manoa; — mi sembri commosso.
— E vi è da commuovere l’uomo più impassibile della terra, —
rispose il piantatore con voce rotta. — Si tratta di conquistare
ricchezze incalcolabili, di monti d’oro, d’una città d’oro, mi
comprendi?
— D’una città d’oro!... — esclamò Alonzo. — Ma cosa narri tu?...
— L’antica leggenda sta per diventare realtà. Barreo ne ha parlato, il
cavalier Raleigh, Giovanni Martinez e Keymis non si sono sognati,
no, l’esistenza degli Eperomerii.... Ah! Alonzo, vedo milioni, vedo dei
miliardi!...
— Ma impazzisci?
— No, Alonzo, il mio cervello è a posto, ma che questo nome di
Manoa l’abbia un po’ sconvolto, non potrei dirti di no. Manoa!...
Manoa!... gli Eperomerii!... Quale inaudita fortuna!...
Poi volgendosi verso l’indiano che conservava la sua inalterabile
impassibilità, chiese:
— Ma è proprio vero che tu mi condurrai là?
— Te l’ho detto, — rispose Yaruri.
— Ma non ci tradirai, tu?
— A quale scopo?
— Che ne so io? Gli uomini della tua tribù sono antropofagi e
possono aver bisogno di qualche arrosto d’uomini bianchi per
qualche rito misterioso.
— Non sono nelle tue mani, io? Chi t’impedirà d’uccidermi al primo
sospetto?
— È vero, — disse Raffaele.
— Verrai?
— Una domanda prima.
— Parla.
— Vorrei sapere per quale motivo un indiano tradisce un segreto,
gelosamente custodito per più di tre secoli dagli uomini della tua
razza.
Negli sguardi tetri dell’indiano guizzò un lampo sanguigno.
— Una vendetta! — disse poi, con voce cupa.
— Non ti comprendo.
— A te l’oro, a me il supremo potere e la vita di Yopi.
— Chi è questo Yopi?
— Un uomo che odio e che bisogna che uccida, — rispose l’indiano
con accento feroce.
— Ma perchè l’odii?
— È un mio segreto. Vorrai aiutarmi? Io ti darò tanto oro da
riempirne venti canotti.
— È lontano il tuo paese?
— Una luna.
— Un mese di navigazione vuoi dire?
— Sì.
— E non c’ingannerai?
— Lo giuro su questo piaye [2], — disse Yaruri, toccando una pietra
azzurra che portava sospesa al sottanino.
— Ti credo. Alonzo, cugino mio, torniamo alla piantagione. Fra un
mese noi saremo tanto ricchi da acquistare dieci città.
— Ma non ho compreso bene di cosa si tratta, Raffaele.
— Ti spiegherà meglio il dottore. Vieni, Yaruri!...
 II.
La leggenda dell’Eldorado.

Don Raffaele de Camargua era un uomo di alta statura, bruno come

un meticcio, con membra poderose. Era un ufficiale spagnuolo
dell’antica guarnigione venezuelana. Scoppiata la rivolta che doveva
sottrarre alla Spagna quasi tutte le sue opulente colonie americane,
aveva abbandonato l’esercito dopo la proclamazione della nuova
repubblica.
Uomo audace ed intraprendente, aveva chiesto un tratto di terra al di
là delle regioni conosciute, nel cuore dell’Orenoco, quel fiume
gigante che attraversa quasi tutta intera l’estremità settentrionale
dell’America del Sud, presso la foce della Cauca, in quel tempo
affatto spopolata.
Con poche dozzine di schiavi negri ed indiani aveva dissodate le
terre, abbattute le secolari foreste ed aveva piantato parecchie
migliaia di canne di zucchero. A poco a poco la prosperità era
entrata nella sua piantagione e nuovi schiavi erano stati aggiunti ai
primi e nuove capanne erano state erette in quelle solitudini appena
visitate da radi indiani.
Nel 1846, epoca in cui comincia questa veridica istoria, la
piantagione di don Raffaele Camargua era una delle più belle di tutta
la grande vallata dell’Orenoco.
Duecento schiavi fra indiani e negri la lavoravano; un piccolo
villaggio, difeso da solide palizzate, una bella casa munita d’una
spaziosa terrazza dalla quale si dominava un vasto tratto del fiume
gigante ed abbellita da verande sulle quali il proprietario amava
schiacciare i suoi sonnellini in una comoda amaca di fabbricazione
indigena, e una grande distilleria si specchiavano nelle acque dei
due fiumi; un numero ragguardevole di canotti di ogni dimensione
sonnecchiavano sulle sponde, destinati a recare ad Angostura una
volta ogni due mesi i carichi di zucchero ed il cascaça [3] ricavato
dalla distilleria.
Giunto all’apice della fortuna, don Raffaele, che non aveva mai avuto
un parente presso di sè, aveva pensato di chiamare un suo cugino
che dimorava alla Florida, un giovanotto di diciott’anni, di
bell’aspetto, valente cacciatore, avido di viaggi e di avventure, ma
fino allora poco fortunato, poichè aveva veduto distruggere le sue
piantagioni da una rivolta d’indiani Seminoli. Ed appunto quel giorno
Alonzo, il cugino desiderato, era giunto e per festeggiare il suo arrivo
aveva organizzato quella caccia al giaguaro che sarebbe terminata
drammaticamente senza il provvidenziale intervento dell’indiano
Yaruri.
Quando i due cugini giunsero alla piantagione, cadeva la sera. Gli
schiavi stavano per ritirarsi nelle loro capanne per prepararsi la
cena; solamente la distilleria ancora fiammeggiava spandendo
all’ingiro, per un tratto immenso, i suoi effluvii alcoolici.
La comparsa di Yaruri parve però che destasse una agitazione fra
un gruppo d’indiani occupati a prepararsi il pasto serale all’aperto.
Furono veduti alzarsi rapidamente, additarselo l’un l’altro e
scambiarsi delle rapide parole.
Ma nè don Raffaele, nè Alonzo, nè Yaruri vi avevano fatto caso e si
diressero verso l’abitazione, sulla cui soglia un uomo di bassa
statura ma assai membruto, colla pelle oscura che aveva dei riflessi
ramigni, con due occhi vivaci ed intelligenti e giovane ancora, poichè
non poteva avere più di trent’anni, li attendeva.
Era l’intendente della piantagione, un bravo meticcio, o
mammalucco, come chiamano laggiù gli uomini derivanti da un
incrocio di negri e d’indiani, persone fedeli, coraggiose e sopratutto
intelligentissime.
— Buona sera, padrone, — diss’egli levandosi cortesemente il largo
cappello di paglia in forma di fungo. — Cominciavo ad inquietarmi e
stavo per radunare alcuni negri per venire in vostro soccorso.
— Abbiamo ucciso il giaguaro, Hara, — disse don Raffaele, — o
meglio è stato ucciso da quest’indiano con un buon colpo di wanaya.
— Non ho mai veduto quest’uomo, padrone.
— Lo credo, Hara. Viene molto da lontano. Dov’è Velasco?
— Sta visitando un negro che è gravemente ammalato.
— Cos’ha?
— Le febbri palustri, padrone.
— Velasco è un bravo medico e saprà guarirlo.
— Devo avvertirlo del vostro ritorno?
— E senza indugio. Ho da comunicargli delle cose importanti. È
pronta la cena?
— Sì, padrone. È servita sulla terrazza.
— Vieni, Alonzo.
Entrarono nell’abitazione e salirono sulla terrazza, sempre seguiti dal
taciturno indiano. L’intendente aveva già fatto allestire una
succolenta cena fredda e fatta accendere una lampada.
Una fresca brezza, profumata di mille aromi, veniva dal fiume,
facendo stormire le splendide e grandi foglie delle palme
massimiliane ed i rami di passiflore che si estendevano lungo il
parapetto.
Don Raffaele ed Alonzo si sedettero a tavola sturando una bottiglia
di vecchio vino di Spagna, trasportato fino alla piantagione con molti
pericoli e con molte fatiche.
— Hai fame? — chiese il piantatore, rivolgendosi all’indiano che si
manteneva ritto in un angolo della terrazza.
— L’indiano che pensa alla vendetta non prova nè gli stimoli della
fame, nè della sete, — rispose Yaruri.
— La vendetta verrà a suo tempo, amico. Puoi assaggiare queste
costolette di manato che sono più deliziose di quelle d’un vitello.
L’indiano alzò le spalle e non rispose.
— Che uomini! — esclamò Alonzo.
— E sono tutti così, cugino mio, questi figli delle selve. Fieri,
orgogliosi e sopratutto vendicativi.
— E traditori, — aggiunse una voce.
I due cugini si volsero esclamando:
— Voi, dottore!...
— E giungo in buon punto, a quanto sembra. L’aria dell’Orenoco
mette appetito.
— Ma la tavola è eccellente, dottore, — disse don Raffaele.
— Lo so, ed è per questo che vengo a trovarvi di frequente.
— Troppo di rado, o mio caro Velasco. Vorrei vedervi più sovente ed
avere più spesso un così amabile e sopratutto un così istruito
compagno. Accomodatevi e date un colpo di dente a questi fagiani di
fiume.
Il dottor Velasco non si fece pregare e si sedette fra i due cugini. Era
un uomo che aveva varcato la quarantina come don Raffaele, alto,
magro come un basco, ma tutto nervi. La sua pelle, cotta e ricotta
dal sole equatoriale, era diventata già bruna come quella d’un
meticcio, ed i suoi baffi avevano già cominciato a brizzolarsi.
Spagnuolo come don Raffaele, aveva emigrato da giovane in
America, soggiornando lunghi anni nel Brasile, poi spinto da una
potente passione per la storia naturale, aveva dato un addio alle città
ed era andato a stabilirsi ad Angostura, sull’Orenoco. Amante però
della natura selvaggia, intraprendeva delle lunghe peregrinazioni sul
fiume gigante, visitando le numerose piantagioni sparse sulle