CHAPTER 1

Epidemic Origins and Geographies of Blame in the Time of COVID-19

Jacob Steere-Williams, Christos Lynteris, and Monica H. Green

Introduction

Soon after news began spreading internationally in early 2020 of a new pneumonia-causing outbreak in China, the narrative of the emerging disease shifted, subtly but pervasively, in the Global North from an epidemiological claim about the clustering of early SARS-CoV-2 cases in the Wuhan Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market to broader cultural claims of the pandemic originating from Chinese food practices and pathways. In this chapter, two medical historians and one medical anthropologist ponder the question of what it means to pinpoint the origins of pandemics.

Too often in the past and the present, circumstantial evidence pointing to both the geography of epidemics and the causal circumstances of spillover events are reduced to narratives that blame groups along preexisting lines of social exclusion. Pinpointing origins is important for epidemiological and disease surveillance purposes. But it has only been with the maturation of the field of molecular genetics and the new ability to track strains of diseases that any meaningful ways of locating origins and epidemic paths has been possible. Meanwhile, blame for epidemics—often in the absence of any demonstrable evidence—continues to drive social and political responses to global epidemic phenomena. We begin with an exploration of the emergence of multiple and competing origin narratives of SARS-CoV-2 in the early months of 2020, particularly what have been colloquially known as the lab leak theory and the spillover theory. While divergently mapped onto political ecologies, each side agreed that Wuhan was the presumed geographical origin of the pandemic. In what ways do geographical understandings of origins imbricate scientific, antiscientific, human-animal formulations of disease events? Using the closely focused case study of early SARS-CoV-2 origin narratives, we locate the anthropological and epistemic role that origin myths serve in the ideological bounding of disease events. In the final section of the chapter, we turn our attention to the role that new scientific ways of knowing, particularly in evolutionary, genetics-based epidemiology, might have on reimagining what we call the geographies of epidemic blame. Moving beyond the diachronic pathways of disease, origin, and blame, we suggest new ways in which myth-making and epidemiological investigation might be understood. Entangled with complex disease events such as pandemics are multiple origin stories. And while stigma and xenophobia have been central in pandemic origin myths in the past and during the COVID-19 pandemic, they are not inevitable consequences of disease events.

Tracing the Origin Narratives of COVID-19

On December 31, 2019, the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission in the People’s Republic of China reported to the World Health Organization (WHO) a cluster of pneumonia-like cases of unknown etiology in the city of Wuhan, Hubei Province. A day earlier the health commission had internally circulated a notice to local hospitals about treatment and surveillance protocols for any pneumonia-like illnesses. These steps followed China’s Viral Pneumonia of Unknown Etiology mechanism that was established after the outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) from 2002 to 2004. However, the Viral Pneumonia of Unknown Etiology system failed to pick up on dozens of earlier cases in December. Wuhan health authorities acted, as Frédéric Keck argued, as “sentinels” but not “whistleblowers.”1 Of the earliest reported cases, twenty-seven of forty-one patients, or 66 percent, had some kind of link to the Wuhan Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, a sprawling twelve-acre, one thousand–tenant facility selling seafood and animals, the largest market in central China. The clustering of cases relating to the market, even though a sizable portion of cases had no epidemiological link to it, led Chinese health authorities to take viral samples, disinfect, and close the facility on January 1, 2020.2

Five days later, the WHO published on the new virus in its “Disease Outbreak News” section. Although the WHO reported that the disease had an “unknown cause,” its report hinted at an origin—and that cause and origin are phenomenologically and biologically distinct—noting that “some patients were dealers or vendors in the Huanan Seafood market.”3 Examining samples taken from the earliest patients, on January 7 researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, China’s first Level 4 biosecurity laboratory, identified a novel coronavirus with a genetic resemblance to strains previously found in bats. Authorities also found extensive surface contamination of the virus in the Huanan market. They shared with other world authorities the genetic sequence of the novel pathogen on January 12.

Within weeks, cases exploded in Hubei Province, surrounding regions of China, and across the globe into a devastating pandemic. But looming large in the first few months of the pandemic, amid debates over quarantine, lockdown, and social distancing and rising daily cases and deaths, was an origin story. Even as the market-as-origin story was critiqued, “all eyes have so far focused on a seafood market in Wuhan, China.”4

By March 2020, the market-origin hypothesis dominated the global landscape. Western media outlets, in particular, featured clips of animals in tight cages and daily discussions of abolishing Chinese wet markets, a stand-in xenophobic term that since the SARS pandemic of 2002-2004 has designated dangerous and unsanitary food practices.5 The narrative shifted, subtly but pervasively in the Global North, from an epidemiological claim about the clustering of early SARS-CoV-2 cases in the Huanan market to broader cultural claims of the pandemic originating from Chinese food practices and pathways. This shift, from a specific market as an epidemiological ground zero to a broader set of food practices under the deliberately confusing umbrella term “wet market” echoed, as Tamara Giles-Vernick argued, Western claims about the origin of Ebola in African “bushmeat” markets from 2013–2016.6

At stake in distinguishing between the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic in the epidemiological specificity of the Huanan market hypothesis and the claim that the disease originated from Chinese food practices was what the late Paul Farmer called “the geography of blame.”7 “Blame,” Farmer opined, is the “calling card of all transnational epidemics.”8 “The fear of the Other,” Sander Gilman and Zhou Xun recently argue, “has become a permanent feature of all epidemics.”9 Examining the AIDS epidemic in Haiti in the 1980s and early 1990s, Farmer showed how many Americans believed that the disease originated in Haiti and came to the United States. In other words, the origin story narrative fit a pattern of blame. The same was true of much of Western sentiment regarding SARS-CoV-2. On March 19, for example, a Washington Post reporter photographed notes for a speech by US president Donald Trump that had crossed out “corona” for “Chinese” to describe COVID-19. When asked about his repeated use of the derogatory terms “China virus” and “Chinese virus” and the rise in violent attacks on Asian Americans, Trump responded that “it’s not racist at all” because “it comes from China.”10 The market hypothesis, in other words, has been a successful narrative and origin story in the public sphere to a significant extent not only because by contrast to its main rival hypothesis it was based on sound epidemiological reasoning but also because it fit a current of prevailing political ideologies in the West. And while the dual nature of the market hypothesis, as Adia Benton observes, closely fit the conventional outbreak narrative, it was more poignantly part of a deeper political ontology in the West, which sees China as the source of all pandemics, past and present.11

By April 2020, however, an alternative and explosive origin story of the pandemic became popular in Western Europe and especially North America: that SARS-CoV-2 originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. US president Donald Trump repeatedly stoked the fire by claiming that a researcher at the institute was patient zero, but not revealing the source of the supposed secret information. At stake in the laboratory origin narrative was another set of embedded ideologies: that Chinese authorities had deliberately manufactured the virus through genetic modification, a form of biological warfare, or that laboratory workers had accidentally unleashed the virus through unsanitary or unscrupulous laboratory practices. US conservative media promulgated the lab leak hypothesis, going as far as to suggest that blaming the Huanan market was an attempt by the Chinese government to cover up the origin of the pandemic in the nearby Wuhan laboratory.12

What had become competing origin narratives were first investigated in May 2020 by an international team led by the WHO.13 The team convened a global study “to identify the zoonotic source of the virus and the route of introduction to the human population, including the possible role of intermediate hosts.”14 The joint WHO team considered four hypotheses: (1) direct zoonotic transmission to humans (spillover), (2) introduction through an intermediate host followed by spillover, (3) introduction through the food chain, and (4) introduction through a laboratory incident. Under particular scrutiny was the Huanan market hypothesis, but after examining the epidemiological, bioinformatic, and genomic data, the team resolved that “no firm conclusion . . . can currently be drawn” regarding the origin of SARS-CoV-2 at the Huanan market.15 Environmental sampling of the market following its closure revealed extensive SARS-CoV-2 contamination of surfaces, however, and the clustering of initial cases who worked at the market suggested to the team that the facility at least played a role in early transmission. Failing to find strong causal connections to the Huanan market as an origin, the team instead suggested that the most likely origin of SARS-CoV-2 was through an intermediate host, potentially mustelids and felids (Figure 1.1).

To scientists, the Huanan market hypothesis was important because it fit an epidemiological logic with early ideas that SARS-CoV-2 originated from an intermediate animal host. But ignored by the joint WHO report was the ideological significance of the market narrative, which focused less on the theory of intermediate hosts and more on a xenophobic blaming of Chinese wet markets and cultural food practices.

Because of the pervasiveness of the lab leak narrative building momentum in Western conservative circles and in the White House, the joint WHO team also investigated the evidence in favor of this hypothesis. Leading up to the first reports of SARS-CoV-2, dozens of laboratories around the world were studying coronaviruses in bats. Perhaps, they surmised, the pandemic could have originated in an accident with virus culture or animal inoculations. “Humans could become infected in laboratories with limited biosafety, poor laboratory management practice, or following negligence,” the report noted.16 However, this theory was dismissed by the team, who found no evidence for the laboratory incident origin. And yet, the lab leak theory continued to influence popular understandings of the origin of COVID-19 (Figure 1.2). Similar to the wet market hypothesis, the narrative of the lab leak had become both memetic and mythic.

Susan Sontag has shown how disease origin myths function both directly on the body of sufferers and on the broader geopolitical global body through modes of signification.17 Priscilla Wald has put this idea another way, suggesting that outbreak narratives articulate “community on a national scale,” with “ecological danger and epidemiological belonging,” entangling “analyses of disease emergence and changing social and political formations.”18 While competing origin stories over SARS-CoV-2 reveal today’s multiple geopolitical fractures, they also map onto broader patterns in the geography of blame. Richard McKay, for example, has shown that there were three central origin myths for HIV/AIDS: that the disease was transferred from animals to humans, that it was mutated from an older human disease, and that it was a synthetic virus created in a laboratory.19 The broader history of epidemiology shows such recycling of disease narratives, of the hunt for index cases and patient zeroes, and the way in which disease narratives play a critical role in bounding epidemic phenomena.20 Rumors and myths are almost harder to eradicate than the bacteria and viruses themselves.

A Constellation of Origins

Anthropology tells us that stories about origins are often mythic. This does not mean that such stories did not take place or only occurred in someone’s imagination. The term “myth” here is not used in the sense of something untrue or of a fabrication. Rather, in its proper anthropological meaning, “myth” refers to a story that unfolds in another place and time or indeed in a different spatial and temporal stratum of reality and is experienced as having an undeletable and profound impact on humans, the world, and the relation between them. Origin myths in particular are often composed of events that have given shape to the world. Yet origin myths are not always synonymous with cosmogonies. More often than not, myths also tell of the emergence of humans as distinct entities and of their relation to nonhumans. This does not mean that they work simply by explaining why, for example, humans keep dogs and cats in different ways. Origin myths are neither mere explanations of present phenomena through past events nor moral tales aimed at regulating normative action. Instead, generations of anthropologists have underlined the dialogic, performative, and productive nature of myths as transformative agents within human societies. At the same time, whether they operate on a grand cosmological scale or on smaller and more intimate scales, myths are rarely singular. Instead, taking the form of different, often opposing, variants within and between given communities is a foundational trait of the agency of myth. If Claude Lévi-Strauss was the first to identify this trait and to focus on the differential potential of myths as cognitive processes, more recent anthropological studies have focused on how the dialogue and tension between mythic variants is acted out and negotiated in everyday life and in ritual.21

Examining the mythic aspect of opposing hypotheses about the origins of COVID is to explore how these hypotheses make differential assertions not simply about the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 but also about the human condition. To illuminate this mythic operation, we need to examine how the two principal COVID origin hypotheses—the spillover hypothesis and the lab leak hypothesis—position themselves in terms of the ontological divide between Nature and Culture that forms one of the foundations of modern technoscientific societies.22 The wet market hypothesis places the ultimate origins of COVID with Nature in a probable natural reservoir (bats) and a probable intermediary host (most recently racoon dogs), with the spillover of the virus from animals to humans being catalyzed by Culture in the form of live animal market practices in China. By contrast, most versions of the lab leak hypothesis elide the discussion of any natural origin so as to put emphasis on the artificial engineering of SARS-CoV-2 before its supposed escape or release from the Wuhan lab. Whereas the wet market hypothesis attributes the (unintentional) origination of COVID in a pathogenic relation between Nature and Culture, the lab leak hypothesis rejects any idea of natural origin and places the emergence of COVID-19 solely within the realm of Culture.

The Nature-Culture dynamic of the wet market hypothesis, on the one hand, and the culture exceptionalism of the lab leak hypothesis on the other hand, reflect deeper differences in how the two hypotheses understand the emergence of COVID. For the proponents of the wet market hypothesis, COVID is a natural phenomenon resulting from Nature being mishandled by Culture, whereas for the proponents of the lab leak hypothesis, COVID is the unnatural result of human malice, that is, a cultural artifact with no relation to Nature. Hence, whereas the wet market hypothesis seeks to attribute falsifiable correlation and cause to a finite set of relations leading back to a natural reservoir of the disease, the lab leak hypothesis seeks to attribute absolute intent and blame to human individuals, groups, and institutions. This involves the advocates of the two hypotheses in very different processes of ethical self-formation. With the object of their investigation being a natural event of no intrinsic value in and of itself, proponents of the wet market hypothesis institute themselves primarily as scientific subjects through their pronounced adherence to objectivity. By contrast, with the object of their investigation being man-made evil, the proponents of the lab leak hypothesis institute themselves primarily as political subjects through their pronounced adherence to the truth.

At the same time, the two hypotheses entail radically opposite mythic operations as they tell different stories about what is posing a threat to humanity and what needs to be done to salvage it. By talking about origins, they, in other words, talk about endings and how to prevent them. On the one hand, the wet market hypothesis ultimately points to the broader pathologies of how our civilization (Culture) relates to the nonhuman world (Nature): climate change and environmental destruction. This hypothesis implicitly advocates rethinking and reforming Nature-Culture relations and in some cases even a critique of the foundational divide of our naturalist ontology. On the other hand, the lab leak hypothesis always already points to a universal dominion of evil, which, as in well-known historical manifestations of complotist ideologies (Nazism, Stalinism), takes the form of a conspiracy of politicians, bureaucrats, entrepreneurs, and medical scientists in cahoots with an “enemy race” (in this case the Chinese). This hypothesis explicitly frames any problematization of Nature-Culture relations as the cause of COVID as part of a conspiracy of evil aimed at concealing the supposedly true, nefarious workings of power. As a result, the two hypotheses also entail different calls to action. Whereas the wet market hypothesis highlights the need to enforce a pragmatic set of reforms on specific nodes of Nature-Culture interaction (e.g., conservation, animal market practices), the lab leak hypothesis has a far more ambitious and indeed eschatological agenda, as it is ultimately aimed at uncovering and overturning global conspiracy.

Understanding that the two COVID origin hypotheses operate on distinct ontological, ethical, and mythic registers is essential, as the general premise so far is that these are two epistemologically opposed hypotheses. In mainstream media and social media this conflict is usually presented to be an opposition equivalent, let’s say to the one between Robert Koch and Max von Pettenkofer on cholera causation.23 This is not the case, however, as their differential pivot is not epistemological (they both agree on SARS-CoV-2 being a coronavirus) or etiologic (they both agree, at least on basics, about how humans become infected with the virus). Instead, the difference may be said to be ontological, ethical, and, by extension, mythic, as the two hypotheses are premised on incommensurable views of the world and humanity’s relation to it. Paradoxically, this may be the reason why the two hypotheses work so well together in the public sphere, generating abundant spite and strife in spite of its otherwise “academic” nature.

History, Genetics, and an Ethical Epidemiology of Emerging Diseases

Pandemics are, by definition, global (or at least hemispheric in the premodern period). But they are also, by definition, microscopic, since they start at the level of individual microbes—viruses or bacteria or protists—that move from specific environmental or animal reservoirs into human bodies. Those are what we call “spillovers.” Spillovers, we are learning, have likely happened throughout history, even if the rate and type of spillovers has accelerated in the past half century because of human population growth, encroachment on new ecosystems, and climate change. Indeed, spillovers may be almost daily events, given the frequency with which humans and animal hosts interact.24 Spillovers, in short, are common; pandemics are not. A pandemic origin story—a story of why this time a potential danger became an actual one—has to account for multiple levels, or scales, of complexity.

Just as genomics—the study of life-forms at their molecular level—has played a defining role in the stories of SARS-CoV-2 since the beginning of the outbreak, it is also bringing new questions and new complications to how we study other infectious diseases. Not simply has palaeogenetics, or aDNA (ancient DNA), confirmed the role of particular organisms in disease events of the past, but it has also facilitated a wholesale shift in our ability to investigate infectious disease histories. We can now track diseases through space and time, identifying strains that have specific geographical profiles and then tie them to specific historical circumstances. This also means that in some cases we can tie these narratives to specific human circumstances. The time has come to squarely face the ethical ramifications of epidemiological history.

Plague, a bacterial disease that principally transmits through rodent populations, has been perhaps the most lethal acute disease in history; it is also now the best-researched disease in terms of its reconstructed historical narrative. As such, it is a prime example of why an evolutionary approach to disease history presents an alternative to the rhetoric of “blame” hitherto invoked in epidemiological histories. Any investigation of plague must take into account not simply the bacterium, Yersinia pestis, but also the fleas or other arthropods involved in the pathogen’s transmission, the rodent hosts in which the organism replicates, the mechanisms of transport that move bacterium/vector/animal host around, and then humans themselves. However, aside from humans and the events and circumstances they witnessed, until recently we had no historical record for any of these other agents in the phenomenon of plague.

In our new genomic age, the combined evidence of Y. pestis genomes from all over the world—and all across time, thanks to recovered aDNA dating back six thousand years—means that a global history of Y. pestis is now at hand, including a better understanding than we have ever had before of the origins of the Black Death. Where does blame fit into this origin story? Until a few years ago, the Black Death was almost always described solely from fourteenth-century sources from the western Islamicate world and Europe. These often said that it came from the East, but they offered no narrative of what Asian experiences with plague may have entailed. Evidence of the pathogen’s evolutionary development has indeed tied the pandemic closely to marmot-hosted plague reservoirs in Central Asia, which have likely existed for hundreds of years. But an evolutionary understanding of plague’s Asian history has also galvanized the retrieval of the experiences of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century people in Asia themselves, who had to cope with this reemerged disease.25 The working hypothesis is that increased hunting of marmots (for food, fur, and leather) moved Y. pestis out of its long-term niche in high-altitude regions and into populations of commensal rodents inhabiting sites of human agricultural production. Long-distance transport of grain then likely facilitated passage of the bacterium into new reservoirs. Once established in these new reservoirs, plague remained active throughout much of Eurasia and North Africa until the modern period. This “origin story” does not simply reject the mythic narrative (popular since the nineteenth century) that the Black Death was caused by an act of bioterrorism (the Siege of Caffa story) but also implicates rather mundane human activities of food acquisition in times of both war and famine.26

Comparison of epidemic knowledge production during the modern COVID-19 pandemic with any other prior pandemic—even AIDS, which came to light after the successful conquest of smallpox in the late 1970s—puts in stark relief how impoverished our historical epidemiological knowledge has been. Even in the age of bacteriology, outbreaks (of diphtheria, tuberculosis, syphilis, etc.) could only be tracked with crude species-level tests. With COVID-19, we have had the capability to do whole-genome sequencing of viral strains since the first weeks of the outbreak, well before it was even declared a pandemic. And when we talk at the level of strains, we are necessarily looking at geographical specificity.27 Whatever their other differences, the natural origin and lab leak theories agree on the geographic centrality of Wuhan in the COVID-19 narrative. The genomic evidence has been driving pandemic narratives since the beginning, even while human cultural patterns of blame influenced how the origins of the pandemic were perceived in popular culture. Just as the age of genomics gives us the power to think differently about zoonoses and pathogen evolution, so too an evolutionary understanding of pandemics allows us to think differently on an ethical level about humans’ roles in disease emergence.

Geographies of origin are harmful when they are incomplete and when they are ideologically driven or weaponized. When such investigations are conducted thoroughly and ethically and involve community-led approaches, they can yield evidence to aid current and future victims, prevent further spread, and prevent similar incidents from happening in the future. As noted above, the wet market and lab leak theories did not disagree on the geography of the origin of SARS-CoV-2. In this respect, Trump was not factually wrong to talk about the “China virus.” But he was both morally wrong and epistemologically wrong to focus on that level of the geography of origin. That is because an evolutionary understanding of pandemics—and indeed the foundation of an ethical epidemiology—must ask not simply where pathogens come from but also where they go to. By the time Trump made those comments, SARS-CoV-2 was already well established on US soil. It was now a pandemic, and it was his responsibility to do something about it. Knowledge of origins should have helped to understand the nature of the pathogen, its transmission mechanisms, and the likelihood of repeat spillovers—in short, the whole pandemic process. A narrative of blame, in contrast, serves no positive function.

Origins are relative. And they are necessarily multiple, as are the motives for investigating them. Determining the sites, circumstances, and causes of animal-to-human spillovers is a crucial part of infectious disease epidemiology. But how can this rethinking of disease origins interrupt the broader ideological patterns of blame and prejudice as epidemic responses? In a world of climate change, there will inevitably be new interactions between microbes, insects, wild animals, and humans as landscapes change and new cross-species interactions occur. Investigating origins at this level is vital, since multiple studies suggest that the odds of spillovers that might turn into regional outbreaks or pandemics increases dramatically when systemic alterations of environments occur.28 The seeding of new animal reservoirs is precisely what historians and anthropologists were concerned about when reports started coming in of SARS-CoV-2 being found in mink and deer populations halfway around the world from Wuhan.29

Conclusion

Origin narratives have been used historically to blame, to shun, and to exclude. Even in the 1980s, virological genetics was not advanced enough—in its deciphering skills or in the ubiquity of equipped laboratories—to contribute much to challenging the early accusations being laid on Haitians and other groups about the origins of AIDS. The fuller story of HIV’s origins and global transits would not be pieced together for four decades, when more sophisticated research methods (and faster computer processing speeds) could allow a more complete evolutionary story of HIV lineages to emerge.30 The potential of an evolutionary approach for thinking about pandemics is that it can ideally allow us to move beyond politically inspired accusations and instead make visible the ways that all human activity involves engagement with the microbial world. As with every other realm of investigation, free and probing ethical discussions must accompany this new era of epidemiology. In some cases (such as the fermentation of foods and beverages) we have developed a happy coexistence with microbes. With increased knowledge of these organisms and the processes they produce, we have cultivated relationships more knowingly.31 A more knowing relationship with potential pathogens is also possible now. What we do with that knowledge is up to us.

Notes

1. 1.  Frédéric Keck, “Sentinels and Whistleblowers: Lessons from Wuhan,” Somatosphere, March 6, 2020, https://somatosphere.com/forumpost/sentinels-and-whistleblowers/.
2. 2.  Chaolin Huang et al., “Clinical Features of Patients Infected with 2019 novel coronavirus in Wuhan, China,” The Lancet 395, no. 10223 (2020): 497–506, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(20)30183-5.
3. 3.  World Health Organization, “Pneumonia of Unknown Cause—China,” Disease Outbreak News, January 5, 2020, https://www.who.int/emergencies/disease-outbreak-news/item/2020-DON229.
4. 4.  Jon Cohen, “Wuhan Seafood Market May Not Be Source of Novel Virus Spreading Globally,” Science, January 26, 2020, https://www.science.org/content/article/wuhan-seafood-market-may-not-be-source-novel-virus-spreading-globally.
5. 5.  Mei Zhan, “Civet Cats, Fried Grasshoppers, and David Beckham’s Pajamas: Unruly Bodies After SARS,” American Anthropologist 107, no. 1 (2005): 31–42, https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.2005.107.1.031; Christos Lynteris, “The Prophetic Faculty of Epidemic Photography: Chinese Wet Markets and the Imagination of the Next Pandemic,” in “Medicine, Photography and Anthropology,” special issue, Visual Anthropology 29, no. 2 (2016): 118–32, https://doi.org/10.1080/08949468.2016.1131484; and Christos Lynteris and Lyle Fearnley, “Why Shutting Down Chinese ‘Wet Markets’ Could Be a Terrible Mistake,” The Conversation, January 31, 2020, https://theconversation.com/why-shutting-down-chinese-wet-markets-could-be-a-terrible-mistake-130625.
6. 6.  Tamara Giles-Vernick, “Should Wild Meat Markets Be Shut Down?,” Somatosphere, March 6, 2020, http://somatosphere.net/forumpost/wild-meat-markets/.
7. 7.  Paul Farmer, AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame (University of California Press).
8. 8.  Paul Farmer, Haiti After the Earthquake (PublicAffairs, 2012), 191. For a discussion of origin myths and blame of venereal disease in early modern Europe, see Kevin Siena, ed., Sins of the Flesh: Responding to Sexual Disease in Early Modern Europe (CRRS Publications, 2005). Susan Sontag, in AIDS and Its Metaphors, argues that a cultural imaginary geography of blame for AIDS was inscribed on the bodies of sufferers—who were invaded by a “foreign source”—and on the body politic, which saw the disease as coming from the outside. See Susan Sontag, AIDS and Its Metaphors (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989).
9. 9.  Zhou Xun and Sander L. Gilman, “I Know Who Caused COVID-19”: Pandemics and Xenophobia (Reaktion, 2021), 11.
10. 10.  Allan Smith, “Photo of Trump Remarks Show ‘Corona’ Crossed Out and Replaced with ‘Chinese’ Virus,” NBC News, March 19, 2020, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/photo-trump-remarks-shows-corona-crossed-out-replaced-chinese-virus-n1164111.
11. 11.  Adia Benton, “Border Promiscuity, Illicit Intimacies, and Origin Stories: Or what Contagion’s Bookends Tell Us About New Infectious Disease and a Racialized Geography of Blame,” Somatosphere, March 6, 2020, https://somatosphere.com/forumpost/border-promiscuity-racialized-blame/; and Christos Lynteris, “Yellow Peril Epidemics: The Political Ontology of Degeneration and Emergence,” in Yellow Perils: China Narratives in the Contemporary World, ed. Franck Billé and Sören Urbanksy (University of Hawaii Press, 2019), 35–59.
12. 12.  Bret Baier and Gregg Re, “Sources Believe Coronavirus Outbreak Originated in Wuhan Lab as Part of China’s Efforts to Compete with US,” Fox News, April 15, 2020, https://www.foxnews.com/politics/coronavirus-wuhan-lab-china-compete-us-sources.
13. 13.  Within China a host of origin narratives emerged for how and where the pandemic began. See Jon Cohen, “Anywhere but Here,” Science, August 18, 2022, https://www.science.org/content/article/pandemic-start-anywhere-but-here-argue-papers-chinese-scientists-echoing-party-line.
14. 14.  WHO-Convened Global Study of Origins of SARS-CoV-2: China Part, Joint WHO-China Study, January14–February 10, 6, https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/who-convened-global-study-of-origins-of-sars-cov-2-china-part.
15. 15.  WHO-Convened Global Study, 7.
16. 16.  WHO-Convened Global Study, 119.
17. 17.  Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978); and Sontag, AIDS and Its Metaphors.
18. 18.  Priscilla Wald, Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative (Duke University Press, 2008), 33.
19. 19.  Richard McKay, Patient Zero and the Making of the AIDS Epidemic (University of Chicago Press, 2017), 54.
20. 20.  Jon D. Lee, An Epidemic of Rumors: How Stories Shape Our Perception of Disease (Utah State University Press of University Press of Colorado, 2014); and Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb, Epidemic Empire: Colonialism, Contagion, and Terror, 1817–2020 (University of Chicago Press, 2021), 12.
21. 21.  Claude Lévi-Strauss, Le cru et le cuit (Paris: Plon, 1964); and Boris Wiseman, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Lévi-Strauss (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
22. 22.  Philippe Descola, “Beyond Nature and Culture,” Proceedings of the British Academy 139 (2006): 137–55.
23. 23.  Richard Evans, Death in Hamburg: Society and Politics in the Cholera Years, 1830–1910 (Oxford University Press, 1987).
24. 24.  Cecilia A. Sánchez et al., “A Strategy to Assess Spillover Risk of Bat SARS-related Coronaviruses in Southeast Asia,” Nature Communications 13, 4380 (2022), https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-31860-w.
25. 25.  Robert Hymes and Monica H. Green, New Evidence for the Dating and Impact of the Black Death in Asia (Arc Humanities Press, 2022).
26. 26.  Monica H. Green and André Filipe Oliveira da Silva, “Shifting Paradigms in Black Death Chronologies,” Religion and Urbanity: Reciprocal Formations (blog), May 22, 2023, https://urbrel.hypotheses.org/5550.
27. 27.  Emma Hodcroft, “Seeing the Epidemic Through the Trees—Why Is Sequencing Important for COVID-19?,” Video presentation, Coronavirus nanoTalks, Reatch!, recorded March 27, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dd1RSMETXfI.
28. 28.  Daniel J. Becker et al., “Ecological Conditions Predict the Intensity of Hendra Virus Excretion over Space and Time from Bat Reservoir Hosts,” Ecology Letters 26, no. 1 (2023): 23–36, https://doi.org/10.1111/ele.14007; and Peggy Eby et al., “Pathogen Spillover Driven by Rapid Changes in Bat Ecology,” Nature 613 (2023): 340–44, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-05506-2.
29. 29.  Leonardo C. Caserta et al., “White-tailed Deer (Odocoileus virginianus) May Serve as a Wildlife Reservoir for Nearly Extinct SARS-CoV-2 Variants of Concern,” PNAS 120, no. 6 (2023): e2215067120, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2215067120.
30. 30.  See, most recently, Francis Barin, “HIV/AIDS as a Model for Emerging Infectious Disease: Origin, Dating and Circumstances of an Emblematic Epidemiological Success,” La Presse Médicale 51, no. 3 (September 2022): 104128, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lpm.2022.104128; Michael Worobey et al., “1970s and ‘Patient 0’ HIV-1 Genomes Illuminate Early HIV/AIDS History in North America,” Nature 539, no. 7627 (2016): 98–101, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature19827; and Hannah Fuchs and Karl-Heinz Leven, “AIDS & Haiti—Discourses on Origin, Stigma, and Blame,” in “Epidemics and Pandemics: The Historical Perspective,” ed. Jörg Vögele, Luisa Rittershaus, and Katharina Schuler, supplement, Historical Social Research Supplement 33 (2021): 128–46, https://doi.org/10.12759/hsr.suppl.33.2021.128-146.
31. 31.  See, for example, Victoria Lee, The Arts of the Microbial World: Fermentation Science in Twentieth-Century Japan (University of Chicago Press, 2021).