The Covid-19 Vaccines: A Latent Function for the Capitalist Social System

It is very clear that the vaccines for Covid-19 are intended to function as a type of panacea for restoring confidence and reestablishing the social order. In this way, the Covid-19 vaccines will operate like therapeutics for cancer, diabetes, and other diseases because they do not address the social and environmental causes that increase susceptibility to these diseases, or in this case, the Covid-19 virus. The pervasive view that develops out of a highly fragmented bureaucratic social order is either unable or unwilling to connect medicine and healthcare with capitalist enterprise and the function they play in maintaining society. A holistic and critical perspective can situate the wellbeing of the individual in society. In this view, we would see how people are dehumanized by profit-generating industries that expose individuals to harmful conditions and chemicals on one side of the capitalist spectrum. To then, on another side, profit from providing therapeutics. To understand the system's logic, one needs to understand the manifest functions and the US capitalist social system's latent functions.