How to Live in The Pandemicene

Bird flu, it's in the news again.

I've been following H5N1 and other diseases for several years now, and a certain pattern has emerged. Bottom line, we live in a different world than we did a few years ago. Now, diseases are making comebacks. If it's not one, it's another. Flu. Covid. Measles. Mpox. Tuberculosis. Pneumonia. Health experts are almost always predicting another pandemic at some point in the near future, and mainstream news is always telling us the threat remains low. This year, early coverage of bird flu insisted that the virus would have zero impact on our lives, and now we hear that the U.S. turkey flock has "shrunk to its smallest size in 40 years, and a fall rebound in avian flu cases is adding fresh strain ahead of Thanksgiving." Well, of course it is. Are you surprised?

I'm not.

The climate crisis was always going to raise prices on meat, a resource intensive thing to produce, even without diseases in the mix.

Of course, a turkey shortage doesn't mean much to those of us who live mainly on oats, beans, pasta, and dried veggies. Moving to a nearly vegan diet makes the most sense to anyone who's actually been paying attention for the last several years. Meat? Eggs? Dairy? For a person who's collapse aware, these products are only going to pose more and more problems as the years go on.

Every now and then, someone tells me they're not that interested in public health because they care more about climate change or collapse in general. Well, the collapse of public health is very much part of the climate crisis, and it's very much part of the more general collapse. In my view, we're far more likely to get mowed down by a disease before we face anything like a global famine. The science backs this up.

Just look around...

We're still in the middle of the second longest government shutdown in modern history, and I've got bad news. MAGA Republicans want this. The Trump administration wants this. They're using the shutdown to conduct another round of government purges. As I recently wrote, they've already axed core leadership at the CDC. Obviously, they're going to rehire some of these people, but not most of them.

That's the point.

Disease will shape the future. Whatever protest you go to, whatever genocides happen next, wherever you go, airborne threats will be waiting. As climate disasters upend our neighborhoods and cities, diseases will be there to attack us when we're at our most vulnerable. Some of these diseases, like Covid, disrupt people's ability to think and reason in the long term. They compound every other problem.

A few years ago, Ed Yong told us about the pandemicene. More climate research has only reinforced these points. The climate crisis is going to unleash a chain of pandemic events in our lifetimes. The last administration gave up on its public health promises, and this regime walks them back further. Forget clean air in public buildings, these flunkies won't even guarantee vaccines. The media offers the worst coverage possible. Either by design or just sheer incompetence, they're not on the ball.

So, how do we live going forward? We can't spend the rest of our lives getting whiplashed by shoddy coverage of every potential viral threat on our lives. And we can't rely on a dysfunctional government. In fact, you could even plausibly say that we don't have a government anymore.

Here's what I do: