We've been witnessing a coordinated ideological project unfold for the last five years, and the left appears to have ceded the field almost entirely.
Between 2020-2021, estimates for excess mortality (globally) range from 5 million to 14 million and beyond.
Pharmaceutical companies raked in hundreds of billions over the same period, some portion of which inevitably was subject to capital spillage -- and during the same time there was vaccine apartheid and a strict favoring of IP against life across the globe.
Wealth inequality became significantly more compounded over the period during and after the official recognition of the ongoing pandemic; and so on.
And what do we now see in this year 2025? An onslaught of books and articles from ostensibly liberal and left-liberal publishers that discuss how a tepid government response with halfhearted lockdowns was a 'overreaction based on bad models and evidence' where the costs outweighed the benefits. That mask mandates were in many cases probably too heavy handed. That the pandemic either was never very deadly in the first place, or quickly became flu-like in its virulence.
See 'An Abundance of Caution' published by MIT Press.
See 'In Covid's Wake', published by Princeton Press.
But based on Biden's term and the sociological production of the 'end of the pandemic', this liberal revisionism has been mounting for years. This rewriting of history comes as no surprise.
What I am surprised about, however, is the vacuum of useful literature on the left -- where is the Marxist analysis of this critical historical moment?
We had a real-time demonstration of:
- How capitalism prioritizes profit over public health
- The mechanics of disaster capitalism in action
- State power mobilized for capital while abandoning workers
- International solidarity crushed by IP regimes
- The manufacture of consent around "acceptable" death rates
But beyond Radhika Desai's Capitalism, Coronavirus and War and scattered podcast episodes, I've found virtually nothing.
Did I miss something? Does history move too quickly for us?
Try 70 years.
What do you mean by this? COVID and the surrounding ideological project have been around for 70 years?
The ideological project to take over the government and wreak absolute havoc has been around, since the counter-reconstruction, but after WWII, it took on new shape and form in the 50s, so we've been dealing with this for 70+ years. Covid is just another emergency in the long list of emergencies which they've taken advantage of.
Being able to periodize history into more granular chronologies (like OP's timeline of the COVID-denying ideological project) allows us to isolate particular chains of events that share a special relationship. OP is talking about a specific project to revise history and negate historical memory about the damage done by official pandemic denialism. It doesn't seem helpful to OP's criticism of this ongoing denialism to paint COVID as "just another emergency."
The lack of any real left-wing defense of historical memory of COVID, pushback against this liberal revisionism, or opposition to the culture of soft eugenics around the pandemic are serious problems. Wordplay is right, the left by and large has almost completely ceded this ground, and worse, has gone right along with this project to deny and minimalize COVID. We still have "leftists" who won't mask and really don't want to hear about it. That only helps entrench the systemic sociopathy around COVID.