Afterword: Disease Reservoirs and Spatial Imaginaries in the Time of COVID-19.

Abstract

Disease reservoirs, as the contributions to this multidisciplinary special issue show, form heterogeneous epistemic objects related to disease maintenance, which have attracted an array of epidemiological concerns, biopolitical interventions, and metaphorical investments over the past 150 years. The latter, as Richard McKay’s article in this special issue shows, was far from an idle trope, with both medical experts and law enforcement apparatuses mobilizing reservoir metaphors in order to frame and blame vulnerable communities and individuals. Thinking with reservoirs thus requires both historians and anthropologists to take ethnographically and historically seriously specific epistemic, semantic, and biopolitical iterations of the disease reservoir. And, at the same time, it requires a degree of epistemological reflexivity. Whether we analyze, for example, Guarani approaches to understandings of rats as reservoirs of leptospirosis by the Brazilian state in the 2020s (Silva Santos, this issue) or Charles Elton’s rodent bait station as an “ecological” means of rat control (Kelty, this issue), we need to reflect seriously on the fact that we are doing this from within the context of a global pandemic that is creating its own epistemological and biopolitical affordances around configurations of humans and nonhumans as disease reservoirs. The challenge is paramount, as it is now clear that whatever the original animal reservoir of SARSCoV-2 (COVID’s causative pathogen) may have been, the virus has come to spread – or “spillback” – from humans back to nonhuman animals. It was already noted in early 2020 that humans were infecting other animals with COVID-19, most worryingly large numbers of farmed mink in Denmark and the Netherlands (ECDC 2021). But it was the discovery that large numbers of white-tail deer in Utah are infected with the disease (Kuchipudi et al. 2022) that really set off the alarm that COVID-19 spillback may be creating vast reservoirs of the disease among nonhuman animals across the globe, which may lead to the emergence of new variants of the disease and threaten humans with recurring pandemics. What is even more worrying is that very few countries have the capacity to investigate the spread of SARS-CoV-2 to non-domesticated animal populations, and those that have that capacity are neither interested in doing it themselves nor in facilitating others to do it, thus creating an epidemiological blind spot of global proportions. Yet what is striking is the lack of media attention or indeed public opinion interest in these disease reservoirs and their consequences for global health. This may be contrasted to the heated interest and debate over the “origins” of COVID-19, which is dominated by two master narratives at opposite spectrums of the science/anti-science spectrum: the lab-leak conspiracy theory, which assumes SARSCoV-2 to have been manufactured/modified at and escaped/leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s maximum-security (BSL-4) laboratory, and the scientifically backed zoonotic hypothesis, which assumes SARS-CoV-2 to be a naturally emerging virus that spilled over from nonhuman animals to humans in the context of Wuhan’s Huanan Seafood and Wholesale Market. Why is it that so much media and public attention is attracted to an emergence event that took place in the past and not about an ongoing process of viral emergence? On one level, it is precisely the originary nature of the COVID-19 debate that drives its impact on social imaginaries. For the question of origins is not simply one that distributes epidemic blame in a time past, but also one that has the power to determine the very being of the virus – what I have elsewhere called the “imperative ontology” of COVID-19, or what COVID must be (Lynteris 2020). On the basis of this ontology, determining COVID-19’s origins is imagined to hold the key to the “secret” of the pandemic, and to thus have not simply anticipatory but indeed predictive capacities, consistent with the much broader field of enunciation that Caduff (2014) has termed “pandemic prophecy.” The idea that a remote event MEDICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 2023, VOL. 42, NO. 4, 432–436 https://doi.org/10.1080/01459740.2023.2196721