[D66] Health Crimes - 'Biosecurity'

[R.O.]

http://www.tlaxcala-int.org/article.asp?reference=29417


  Health Crimes

<http://www.tlaxcala-int.org/biographie.asp?ref_aut=7364&lg_pp=en> 	
	
Spyros Manouselis Σπύρος Μανουσέλης 
<http://www.tlaxcala-int.org/biographie.asp?ref_aut=7364&lg_pp=en>

Translated by *Eve Harguindey 
<http://www.tlaxcala-int.org/biographie.asp?ref_aut=2277&lg_pp=en> *

All health practices against the pandemic to date, this set of 
biomedical measures and practices designed to protect human societies 
against the new infectious agent, were not based on rigorous knowledge 
and research, but on widespread propaganda about a "war" against an 
invisible enemy, summed up in terrorist slogans broadcast daily by the 
media, such as "Stay home" during the first phase of the pandemic and 
"Stay safe" during the second phase.

During the current pandemic (but probably afterwards) it has become 
clear that citizens no longer have the natural right to health that they 
enjoyed until yesterday, and that they are therefore legally obliged to 
ensure public health by all means and thus to contribute to global 
"biosecurity", i.e. to respect a series of measures and new biomedical 
practices that are supposed to ensure the protection of human societies 
against any biological threat.

In reality, as we shall see, biosafety was invented to give an illusion 
of security through artificial health protection, which only results in 
gradually depriving human beings of their social life, relying 
exclusively on the biomedical guarantee of their survival. Do the most 
recent public and individual health protection practices adopted to 
combat the new coronavirus justify the prospect of universal "biosafety"?

When "health" is imposed on us as a biopolitical imperative

 From the beginning of April to the end of May, more than half of the 
world's population was placed under house arrest to limit the spread of 
the new coronavirus. Of course, this is neither the first nor the last 
time in human history that certain populations have been forced to 
confine themselves to protect themselves from a deadly epidemic.

What is most astounding about the current Covid-19 pandemic is the speed 
at which it has spread across the globe, and the fact that about 3.9 
billion people were quarantined almost simultaneously. This 
automatically makes this pandemic an unprecedented psychological and 
anthropological experience.

It is indeed a completely new historical event, whose consequences, both 
psychological at the individual level and social at the collective 
level, have not yet been studied, although they have affected and still 
affect almost everyone. The upheaval in the daily social life of so many 
people, without being able to predict the end, is most certainly 
creating fear, anxiety, depressive syndromes, and other traumas not yet 
visible.

In more recent history, similar but localized phenomena of social 
containment due to a viral epidemic have been studied in the case of 
SARS in China and Canada, and the Ebola epidemic in some African 
countries. Similarly, the psychological consequences of the lockdown of 
human beings under extreme conditions have been studied in cosmonauts 
orbiting the Earth.

However, the case of cosmonauts, although extreme, is nonetheless the 
result of a conscious decision taken freely. It is a carefully prepared 
lockdown experiment, with consequences and end date known in advance, 
which nevertheless remains traumatic for the cosmonauts.

What is the attitude of people terrified of the new coronavirus, faced 
with the "health" need to radically disrupt their daily activities and 
postpone the satisfaction of some of their basic biological and social 
needs indefinitely? Some are eager to return to their normal pre-viral 
lives, while most approach their return to their former lives with a 
mixture of fear, anxiety or even panic as long as the coronavirus 
circulates freely.

However, avoiding social and physical contact with our friends and loved 
ones, never shaking hands and kissing them is contrary to our propensity 
as social animals, while prolonged deprivation of physical contact and 
intimate relationships with others is considered a major cause of 
psychosomatic disorders and depression in most people.

Lockdown for reasons of... health

Indeed, numerous psychological studies - both before and during the 
pandemic - confirm that prolonged confinement and forced loneliness are 
the most common problems of modern humans, manifesting themselves in 
permanent feelings of anxiety, intense discomfort and depression that 
affect their physical and mental health.

  If to these pre-existing psychological problems, which are widespread 
in modern societies, one adds, on the one hand, the constant and 
ubiquitous threat of infection by the new coronavirus and, on the other 
hand, the economic effects of prolonged quarantine, then feelings of 
intense anxiety and persistent insecurity intensify and have a 
devastating effect on the health and life expectancy of people, 
especially those belonging to the most vulnerable groups (the elderly, 
the sick).

It is an unbearable state of chronic anxiety which, despite the decrease 
in the number of cases and mortality due to the pandemic, creates in 
hypochondriac individuals a paranoid reaction of permanent repression of 
their desire to leave home, return to work and meet friends, who are 
automatically classified as threatening "carriers" responsible for the 
transmission of the coronavirus.

In this way, however, interpersonal relationships are shaped and 
regulated by a culture of "universal suspicion". This, as we know, by 
the suffocating and therefore unnatural rules it imposes, creates only 
inhuman and dehumanizing relationships.

A typical example of this are the new dematerialized - i.e. exclusively 
virtual - contacts and relationships on the Internet which, during the 
last pandemic, doubled because they offered a safe substitute for real 
but potentially infectious relationships between people confined to 
their homes.

This may be a temporary "solution" to our inherent need for 
communication and social contact, but in the long term it may lead to 
many problems - particularly for young Internet users - such as 
confusing the real with the virtual, and gradually diminishing their 
vital need for face-to-face physical relations and communication. Thus, 
in the aftermath of the pandemic, there is a serious risk that many 
people will "choose" to remain isolated at home, "living" exclusively in 
the reassuring but virtual reality offered by the Internet.

*“Healthy living” as terrorism *

It is enough to be attentive to the daily declarations of governments, 
the forecasts of terrorist attacks and the plans of international 
financial organisations for the years to come, to realise that what is 
at stake today is not the salvation of people from the coronavirus, but 
the panoptic and totalitarian management, through recurrent health 
crises, not only of the physical health but also of the socio-economic 
and psychological life of a plethoric human population.

This is a new planetary hygiene that is creating social, economic and 
humanitarian problems that are already visibly very acute, and of which 
no one can guarantee that it will be less destructive to human life than 
the current coronavirus pandemic. For it should now be clear that the 
disaster now affecting us is not purely viral in nature, but is, to a 
very large extent ... caused by man.

Thus, during the period of the pandemic, but also afterwards, citizens 
no longer automatically have the full right to health safety but are 
also obliged by law to take care of public health and biosecurity. The 
term biosecurity describes a range of new biomedical measures and 
practices designed to protect societies from any infectious agent and 
biological threat.

A typical example of these mass "biosecurity" terrorist strategies is 
the recent global quarantine, which has turned the right to health of 
every individual into an obligation to protect themselves and others 
from the threat of infection.

Needless to say, the extreme health practices that have been practised 
to date in the name of biosecurity are not based on rigorous scientific 
knowledge and research, but on the widespread propaganda of "war" 
against an invisible enemy (the new virus), which is most effectively 
summed up in the terrorist slogans "Stay home" of the first phase and 
"Stay safe" of the second phase of the pandemic, which are broadcast 
daily in the media.

To the new biopolitical practices of bl”aming individuals and, at the 
same time, of massive marginalization of the most "at risk" human 
groups, practices that have been widely accepted as supposed to 
guarantee the security and protection of people, we must oppose our 
active solidarity with the victims of Covid-19 and resist by all means 
this manifest attempt to dehumanize our lives in the name of an 
unrealistic biosecurity.

“Biosecurity” scenarios in a zombie society

According to the dominant political discourse, most people have shown 
great restraint and discipline in the face of the new pandemic and have 
behaved with a "high sense of responsibility" to society. For those who, 
like the author of this article, are not convinced by this "flattering" 
assessment, the widespread acceptance and unanimous application of very 
unusual health safety rules against coronavirus is a very serious problem.

This problem is not essentially scientific but above all biopolitical, 
in the sense that it concretely affects the forms of social management 
of the health and life of the entire present population.

The impressive readiness and speed with which most people have been 
willing to sacrifice their personal social needs and their deepest 
biological predispositions to protect their health should rather be 
attributed to the global misinformation and health terror generated 
around the immediate mortal danger and perhaps the uncontrolled spread 
of the new epidemic to themselves and their loved ones.

In this sense, the dominant problem for those who decide to confront and 
manage this pandemic is to achieve the greatest possible "biosecurity".

*“Biosecurity” as health terrorism*

The first explicit formulation of the concept of "biosafety" as a 
central policy option to manage citizens' health in order to arbitrarily 
guarantee immunity against certain dangerous infectious diseases can be 
found in French historian Patrick Zylberman's book ‘Tempêtes 
microbiennes’ (Microbial Storms) (Gallimard, 2013)l

  In this important book, unfortunately not translated into Greek, 
Zylberman, following the method of the archaeology of concepts of his 
professor Michel Foucault, reconstructs in detail and in a very 
convincing way the most recent version, historically, of the concept of 
“health safety” as a dominant tool, which is elaborated and exercised, 
according to the historical circumstances, through two alternative but 
complementary scenarios: the best possible scenario and the worst 
possible scenario for the implementation and management of a health crisis.

As everything shows, in the current pandemic is applied exactly what 
Patrick Zylberman described seven years ago: it is the worst possible 
scenario that applies to the global health crisis.

If the most inhumane and dehumanizing biosafety scenario is indeed 
implemented to manage the current viral crisis, then we are entitled to 
doubt the near future of human relations. After all, by definition, 
incorporeal and impersonal biosafety is only suitable for zombie 
societies. But we'll say more about this in our next article.

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