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  • Monthly Review Essays

About Rob Wallace

Rob Wallace is an evolutionary biologist and public health phylogeographer presently visiting the Institute for Global Studies at the University of Minnesota. He is author of Big Farms Make Big Flu and the soon to be published Revolution Space, both with Monthly Review Press. He is co-author of Neoliberal Ebola: Modeling Disease Emergence from Finance to Forest and Farm, and Clear-Cutting Disease Control: Capital-Led Deforestation, Public Health Austerity, and Vector-Borne Infection. He has consulted for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
  • A medical worker tends to a patient suffering from the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), inside the ICU ward at a hospital in New Delhi, India, April 29, 2021

    Rob Wallace on the political economy of pandemics

    Originally published: Frontline on July 02, 2021 (more by Frontline)

    Jair Bolsonaro, Donald Trump, Boris Johnson and such leaders across the world are malicious miscreants, convening necropolitical death cults. But the alternatives, also tied to capitalist sociopathy, are only a little bit better. Our “progressives” worship at the altar of the circuits of capital.

  • Whose Agriculture Drives Disease?

    Whose agriculture drives disease?

    Originally published: ARERC (Agroecology and Rural Economics Research Corps) along with Ivette Perfecto on October 5, 2020 (more by ARERC (Agroecology and Rural Economics Research Corps) along with Ivette Perfecto)

    We concur that linking land-use change science, ecology, and epidemiology is a critical step towards developing a more robust understanding of zoonotic diseases. Yet we are wary of the way the authors omit the historical specificities, political economy, and agroecological dynamics of land-use change, and their implications for disease ecologies.

  • COVID-19 - A Socialist Response

    COVID-19 – A socialist response

    Originally published: The Left Berlin along with Gizem Fesli and Vitor Guimarães on April 8, 2021 (more by The Left Berlin along with Gizem Fesli and Vitor Guimarães) (Posted Apr 13, 2021)

    COVID-19 – A socialist response

  • Industrializing pathogens? Cattle pictured in a feedlot in South Africa. MARTIN HARVEY/GETTY IMAGES

    Food Justice files PLANET FARM

    Originally published: New Internationalist on January 8, 2021 (more by New Internationalist)

    As industrial agriculture encroaches into the last wild places of the Earth, it’s unleashing dangerous pathogens. Time to heal the metabolic rift between ecology and economy, suggests Rob Wallace.

  • Trump, Obama and Biden

    Bidenfreude: COVID-19 in post-Trump U.S.

    Originally published: Climate & Capitalism on January 16, 2021 (more by Climate & Capitalism)

    A jokester once characterized Yale University as a hedge fund with a campus attached to it. One might say something similar of the country in which Yale is based.

  • From Agribusiness to Agroecology: Escaping the Market of Dr. Moreau

    From agribusiness to agroecology: Escaping the market of Dr. Moreau

    Originally published: Rob Wallace Youtube Channel on November 11, 2019 (more by Rob Wallace Youtube Channel)

    Presentation by Rob Wallace, author of ‘Big Farms Make Big Flu’ and co-author of ”Neoliberal Ebola’ and ‘Clear-Cutting Disease Control’, Historical Materialism conference, 10 November 2019.

  • SARS-CoV-2, COVID-19

    COVID-19 and Circuits of Capital

    Alex Liebman and Rob Wallace and Luis Fernando Chaves and Rodrick Wallace

    COVID-19, the illness caused by coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, the second severe acute respiratory syndrome virus since 2002, is now officially a pandemic. As of late March, whole cities are sheltered in place and, one by one, hospitals are lighting up in medical gridlock brought about by surges in patients.

  • Pig Pen. Photo credit: Kim Bartlett/Animal People, Inc.

    How global agriculture grew a pandemic

    Originally published: Smarty Pants Podcast on March 13, 2020 by Stephanie Bastek (more by Smarty Pants Podcast)

    What are the underlying structural reasons for the coronavirus outbreak? According to Monthly Review Press author Rob Wallace, you have to look at global agriculture if you really want to understand the nature of global outbreaks.

  • An illustration of the ecology of vector-borne diseases like the 2019 ebolavirus and 2020 coronavirus (Covid-19) by the artist Olaf Hajek. 

    “Capitalism is a disease hotspot”

    Originally published: Marx21 on March 11, 2020 (more by Marx21)

    The real danger of each new outbreak is the failure or—better put—the expedient refusal to grasp that each new Covid-19 is no isolated incident. The increased occurrence of viruses is closely linked to the proliferation of capitalist food production and distribution.

  • Coronavirus outbreak

    Notes on a novel coronavirus

    Rob Wallace

    The virus’s final penetrance worldwide will depend on the difference between the rate of infection and the rate of removing infections—by recovery or death. If the infection rate far exceeds removal, then the penetrance may approach the whole of humanity, although there will likely accrue large geographic differences.

Also By Rob Wallace in Monthly Review Magazine

  • COVID-19 and Circuits of Capital May 01, 2020
  • Revolutionary Biology November 01, 2016

Books By Rob Wallace

  • Dead Epidemiologists: On the Origins of COVID-19 October 07, 2020
  • Big Farms Make Big Flu: Dispatches on Infectious Disease, Agribusiness, and the Nature of Science June 14, 2016

Monthly Review Essays

  • The Obama Line, Samantha Power, and U.S. Intervention in West Africa During the Ebola Epidemic
    Jean-Philippe Stone © UN Photo/Martine Perret | CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

    December 2013 marked the beginning of the worst Ebola outbreak in history. Ebola, a severe hemorrhagic virus which causes muscle and joint pain, diarrhea, vomiting, and bleeding, spread from Guinean forests to the capitals of Liberia and Sierra Leone by the summer of 2014.

Lost & Found

  • Russia and the Ukraine crisis: The Eurasian Project in conflict with the triad imperialist policies
    Samir Amin State flag of Ukraine behind a wall of anonymous protesters in Kyiv, Ukraine

    We wanted to draw readers attention to this piece by Samir Amin, which was written at the time of the Maidan Coup in 2014. —Eds. 1. The current global stage is dominated by the attempt of historical centers of imperialism (the U.S., Western and Central Europe, Japan—hereafter called “the Triad”) to maintain their exclusive control […]

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