Why militarized responses don’t address root causes of COVID-19

As the U.S. reported an all-time high of 75,600 new COVID cases Thursday, science journalist Sonia Shah argues we need to shift the language we use to talk about the novel coronavirus in order to beat the disease. “If we think of it as a foreign incursion, then we want to do things like close the borders or control people’s movements … and we want to create these weapons — vaccines and drugs,” Shah says, pointing out that these measures have failed to prevent massive loss of life in the first wave. “We should have been spending way more time and resources prioritizing collective actions.” Shah also notes that militarized responses do nothing to address the root cause of zoonotic diseases like COVID-19: environmental degradation. “We are creating these bridges between wild — between the bodies of wild animals and our own bodies, because we’re destroying so much of the habitat where they live in,” she says. “We are cutting down the forests and paving over the wetlands … and instead they’re coming and living in our farms and gardens and backyards.”

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