“Well Seasoned”: A History of North American Immunocapitalism

“Well Seasoned”: A History of North American Immunocapitalism

On May 20, 2024, the North Carolina government votes to pass HB237, also known as the “Unmasking Mobs and Criminals”  bill. This move, obviously a response to the Palestinian solidarity demonstrations occurring statewide, does just as the bills title suggests, and will not only criminalize the wearing of face coverings at protests, but also “Any person wearing a mask for the purpose of ensuring the physical health or safety of the wearer or others.”, allowing the police to decide what an appropriate use of masking is, presumably on a case-by-case basis. This callous and blatantly anti science decision comes after 4 years of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, which has left 30,000+ North Carolinians dead, and 1 in 6 with long COVID. Unfortunately, this brutalizing response to infectious disease outbreaks is nothing new in North America and follows a roughly 500 year pattern of European supremacy, defined by genocide and Immunocapitalism.

It is fitting that North Carolina is the first state in the U.S. to ban mask use, seeing as their Atlantic barrier islands were home to the first attempted English settlement, the disastrous Roanoke Colony (1585), which left no known survivors and sparked another wave of pan European disease rippling into the Indigenous Nations of the interior. In her 1973 PhD dissertation, “Indian Land Loss in Virginia: A Protype of US Federal Indian Policy” Dr. Helen Rountree explains that “European diseases often decimated Indian populations before the Europeans themselves ever appeared on the scene.” Indeed, for almost a century prior to English colonization efforts, Spanish conquistadors such as Lucas Vázquez de llón (1526), Hernando de Soto (1539), Juan Pardo (1566), and others, spread European disease such as bubonic plague, influenza, smallpox, measles, and typhoid to the Native population of “La Florida”. The fallout of this biological warfare are beyond comprehension, with modern archaeologists unearthing “several kinds of evidence for rapid depopulation in the territory.”

The Spaniards who invaded this section of North America never found the caches of mineral wealth that their compatriots had in Peru and Mexico and were woefully disappointed by the hammered copper and river pearls prized by southeastern Native groups. And only after the failed Jesuit Ajacan Mission (1570) in what is today Virginia, did the Spanish decided to leave Bahia de Santa Maria for good. This absence of Spanish military power in the Chesapeake region is the sole reason the joint stock company chartered by King James I, the Virginia Company of London, chose to settle in the marshy bottom land of Tsenacommacah. The sole intention of which was to force a profit out of any natural resource they could, and while doing so, hopefully find the gold and silver they so desired. In the end, all the colonists would find was Matchqueon, or fool’s gold as it is known colloquially to the English.

Jamestown, in these early days, was essentially a crude military outpost on the edge of Indian Country, plagued by sickness and mass death, starvation, and total desperation. The Englishmen refused to grow their own crops and instead bartered with the local Powhatan people for foodstuffs, leading to a near constant calorie deficit among the colonists. To make matters worse, the brackish water surrounding James Fort was their sole drinking water source, which was heavily contaminated with their own human waste and decaying organic material, leading to “regular bouts of dysentery, or bloody flux as it was known then, proving fatal on many occasions.” By January 1608 there were only 38 men left surviving at Jamestown fort out of the original 104 settlers who arrived a year prior. Edmund S. Morgans seminal text American Slavery - American Freedom expands on the carnage, saying, “It is well known that before 1624 Virginia was a death trap for most of those who went there. One reason why the king dissolved the Virginia Company was that it seemed to have sent so many men to their deaths without taking adequate measures to feed and shelter them.”

The driving mindset of these colonists was that the only way to thrive in this new world was to survive a “seasoning period”, which would allow someone to become acclimated to their new environment through exposure to the more humid environment and myriad of “distempers” and maladies. George Percy, one of the original colonists to sail to the Chesapeake region in 1607, described the reality of seasoning process during the summer of 1607. “The sixt of August there died John Asbie of the bloudie flixe. The ninth day died George Flowre of the swelling…The fifteenth day, their died Edward Browne and Stephen Galthorpe. The sixteenth day, their died Thomas Gower Gentleman. The seventeenth day, their died Thomas Mounslic...” Historian Thomas P. Hughs goes on to say that “Percy was of the opinion that the colonists at Jamestown suffered more during the summer and winter of 1607 than any other Englishmen have during a colonization venture.” John Rolfe, the early Virginia tobacco baron, was fortunate enough to survive the seasoning period and thus transform the colonial economy with tobacco, though his wife and daughter were not so lucky.

As their settlement grew, the investors of the Virginia Company realized that the only way to sustain their colonial enterprise was to send regular shipments of men, women, and children, along with necessary supplies, to replace those who perished during the starving times and epidemics. Staggering death tolls remained, and by 1624 the Crown revoked the company’s charter and took control of the colony. During this time a demographic shift began to take place, one towards enslaved Africans being the primary labor source in the colony, and as the 17-century continued, enslaved Africans were expected to survive their own seasoning periods, so that they might be healthy enough for work in the tobacco fields. The English and Africans who died from disease could be, and were, replaced by others from abroad. The Powhatan, however, “entered into an inexorable decline…[and] by 1669 only about 1,800 were left, compared to more than 20,000 when the English arrived.”

As western movement continued into frontier regions in the late 17^th and 18^th centuries, these areas too saw similar patterns of death and disease. The psychological and physical toll of living in such sustained proximity to death must have been immense and is hinted at several times in William Byrd II secret diary when he “pray[s] to God to remove the fatal sickness with which this country has been of late afflicted,” May 18, 1709. Enslaved Black populations were especially susceptible to outbreaks given the squalid conditions they were forced to live under, and it is illuminating to hear how the ruling class of the 18^th century spoke about these demographic disasters. Dr. Anne R. Davis highlights a May 11, 1727 letter from Robert “King” Carter in her Distempers And Physic: Virginia’s Health in the Eighteenth Century, regarding “’a grievous mortality’ that had ‘Swept away [an] abundance of my people’ so that he had been ‘forcd to buy a large parcell of new Negroes.’” The tone that pervades many of these diary entries and letters is one of annoyance rather than sorrow. Wallowing in the fact that they must purchase expensive new human beings like one would when replacing a worn-out agricultural implement.

The 19^th century sadly offers little variation on this theme. Cholera, Tuberculosis, and all manners of fever and ague continue to plague each new generation while the machinery of industrialization grinds on. If you were white, and wealthy enough, one might remove themselves from the malaria and “Yellow Jack” ridden summer season of the city to a “medicinal spring” or rural resort, where you might regain your humor, as well as having access to the most modern treatments and techniques of the day. If you were Black, you were likely enslaved, and if the disorder was not too severe, one might self-medicate with herbal remedies that were popular throughout communities located on plantations and urban centers. “Close contact in the confined space of the quarters, especially in winter, allowed respiratory disease to spread easily…Not surprisingly, under these conditions disease was a major factor in slave life” In the most extreme cases of illness, a master or overseer might call for a physician to come tend to their chattel. Edgar Allan Poe’s tormented perspective goes a long way to describe the general mood of the era, one defined by gross inequality, depraved violence, and death.

It was Yellow Fever, however, that brought the most drastic death tolls of the 19^th century. A virus that would solidify the scientistic idea of the “seasoning period” and further embed Immunocapitalism into the American Slavocracy and collective psyche. Spread by mosquitos, Yellow Fever took its victims one of two ways: either you survived your high fever, bleeding eyes, gums, and jaundiced condition, and became “acclimated” to the disease providing “lifelong immunity”, or you sunk further into the throes of the “yellow plague”, dying as you vomited up black blood “the consistency of coffee grounds”, and died shrieking in agony. In Kathyrn Olivarius’ excellent book Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom, she explains how “Taking advantage of the diseased reality around them, New Orleans elites differed from leaders of other major American port cities in spearheading policies that systematically heightened inequality, enriched themselves, enhanced white supremacy and wealth, undercut the majority, and etched epidemiological discrimination into law.” White elites of the time justified their enslaved people’s continual exposure to the virus by claiming they were “’naturally immune,’ [and] could safely cultivate ‘unhealthy’ areas outside the city—providing further incentive for the use of enslaved Black laborers.”

And while there were other significant outbreaks of infectious disease in the late 19^th century, such as the 1889-91 “Russian Flu” which killed an estimated one million worldwide, including Queen Victoria, nothing compares to the ferocity of the 1918-21 “Spanish Flu”. Caused by an avian-like H1N1 Influenza virus, the Spanish Flu is known as the “Deadliest Plauge in history”, killing between 50-100 million people worldwide. Like many of the disease events discussed earlier in this essay, the Spanish Flu was undersold to the public in order to maintain economic hegemony. “In 1918 the lies of officials and of the press never allowed the terror to condense into the concrete. The public could trust nothing so they knew nothing…And no national official ever publicly acknowledged the danger of influenza.” The White House shifted its focus instead to the World War effort and the economic boom it created, which ironically may have started the outbreak itself. National death rates soared, and by the time it waned, official death tolls in the U.S. from Spanish Flu ranged between 600,000 and 1.5 million. President Woodrow Wilson would eventually succumb to the disease, suffering a “major and debilitating stroke”, and remained in a compromised state for the rest of his presidency.

Like many other viral illnesses that spark chronic health conditions, the Spanish Flu did not stop taking victims when its initial spread had waned. Many suffered from chronic neurological symptoms, including encephalitis lethargica, the Long COVID of its day, “characterized by fever, sleepiness, ocular motility disturbances, and movement disorders.” It has also been proposed that “an early 20th-century expansion of a coronary heart disease…which contributed to most of the coronary heart disease cases and deaths during the 1960s—may have been a late result of the 1918 influenza.” Less than 60 years after the disastrous response to the 1918-21 H1N1 virus, Ronald Reagan, seemingly taking cues from the Wilson administration, stonewalled any meaningful action on the HIV/AIDS crisis, a virus that has claimed the lives of 40 million people since its discovery. The CDC only implemented “Universal precautions”, such as wearing gloves when exposed to blood and other bodily fluids, advocating for sexual education, treatments, and research, after a massive outcry from AIDS activist groups like ACT UP.

Perhaps no better example of modern Immunocapitalism exists other than the extremely controversial, and pro-business sentiment of the “Great Barrington Declaration”, one that assured an anxious and grieving public that “herd immunity” was only possible through repeat infections of SARS-CoV-2, protecting the “vulnerable” while the healthy members of society returned to “normal”. Gabrielle Bauer, a “public health” writer for the Brownstone Institute and early supporter of the GBD strategy, recently walked back her earlier claims in a February 15, 2023 article saying, “We now know that neither infection nor vaccination provides durable immunity against Covid, leaving people vulnerable to second (and fifth) infections. And for all their effect on disease severity, the vaccines don’t stop transmission, pushing herd immunity still further from reach.” It is also important to remember that is was not an infectious disease specialist who championed a reduced COVID-19 quarantine period from ten days to five (now just one day), but the CEO of Delta Airlines, Ed Bastian. Even as the CDC warns of another wave of disease at the hands of the highly pathogenic FLiRT variant, funding for testing, treatments, vaccines and hospital data collection related to the SARS-CoV-2 virus have been cut to financially support the genocidal actions of a foreign government. One that knows the power of unmitigated disease on a susceptible indigenous population, not unlike the earliest days of our own colonial experience.

Property and profits continue to take precedence over human life, just as they did in colonial Virginia, and Americans are once again asked to survive multiple “seasoning” periods as each new SARS variant embeds itself into its host. Testifying at the first Long COVID congressional hearing, physician and scientist Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly advocated that, “Long COVID represents a constellation of effects. It is a multisystem disorder that can affect nearly every organ system. It affects the brain, the heart, the endocrine system, the immune system, and the G.I. system.” Will it be the third, the fourth, or the fifth SARS infection that will lead to the “hybrid immunity” promised by our CDC and health pundits, or will it lead to the horrors of Long COVID, currently being experienced by at least “17.6 million Americans.” All the while, “Essential workers” continue to collect less than a living wage as many Americans fall deeper into poverty, housing insecurity, and disease of despair. Industry CEOs and their willing governmental partners continue to reap massive profits in the tens of billions as our failed public health campaign has left many Americans unclear on what is fact and what is fiction, how COVID spreads, and what long term complications might arise from this novel multisystem virus.

The North Carolina total mask ban comes at an especially risky moment, right as the avian influenza H5N1 tears its way through poultry houses and dairy herds, including in North Carolina. Our country caught somewhere between deep moral crisis, and all-encompassing allegiance to the US dollar, sends mixed messaging about the safety of our food supply, and urges, but does not require, farm workers to wear personal protective equipment such as eye protection, gloves, and high-quality masks, to try and prevent yet another catastrophic pandemic scenario. Not even the CDC, FDA, or USDA, has permission to test animals on farms without the blessing of the farm owner, leaving us in a perfect position to literally reenact some of the most painful events of our collective history. It is almost unbelievable that the state, which is responsible for the earliest English colonization efforts, which sparked new waves of pan European disease throughout North America resulting in mass death of indigenous populations, is the first to ban mask use during an ongoing pandemic, but this appears to be what we’re really made of. Regardless, whether it’s to protect your identity from police surveillance during protest, from a viral pathogen, or from wildfire smoke caused by manmade climate breakdown, masking is the future. Which side are you on?