Mike Davis’ book, an updated version of The Monster at our Door, written in 2005, is about the threat of Avian Bird Flu, and the devastating effect that would have on society were it to turn into a pandemic. There is an introduction, written at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic last year, when the book was reissued. The most terrifying thing about the book isn’t what he gets right - the shortage of PPE, the governmental confusion, “Pandemic planners admitted that the bulk of the public… would simply have to cower in their homes” - but what hasn’t happened this time round. Because Davis, an analyst of slums, of mass production farming methods, of the way in which human demographics have become a time bomb, predicts that if the Bird Flu pandemic ends up being as bad as is feared, it won’t be millions dying, but billions. Presently, according to World of Meters, we stand at 3 million official Covid deaths, though that figure is sure to be higher and is still rising at an alarming rate, but we’re not yet in the territory that Davis predicts. For all the way in which society has felt threatened by terrorism, bio-terrorism, (Davis is very good on the way the war on terror allowed an emphasis on military spending, even in the realm of biological threats), the greatest danger to our way of lie, whatever that is, was always likely to come from a virus. Should we ever come out of this rolling Covid nightmare, one hopes that those who regulate budgets pay more heed to the Cassandras. Davis’ final observations on the way the pharmaceutical industry works only add to the sense that the free market is a long way from being the best socio-political mechanism for the future welfare of the human race.
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