The COVID Emergency as Autoimmune Disease

Abstract

This article analyzes the United States biosecurity state’s orchestration of the COVID-19 phenomenon into a public health emergency, tracing the legal platforms that made this mobilization possible. Leaning on the longstanding reverberations between political and biological discourses around immunology, I argue that the polis entered into a state of autoimmune disease where its public/private biosecurity organisms attacked its own body politic. COVID-19 constitutes the culmination of a development that had been in the making for several decades. Besides parsing the central legislative inventions that form the basis of this operation, the article analyzes the most central medical countermeasure deployed as the ostensible remedy to the public health emergency. A novel technological platform (mRNA transfection) is introduced as the solution to the threat of infection (falsely promising immunity). This platform is equally built on autoimmune logic, not traditional immunity. Unlike previous vaccine technologies, synthetic mRNA transfections coerce the body’s cells to produce the antigen against which the immune reaction is mounted. The immune system will then attack those cells that express the antigen, the most publicly acknowledged example being myocarditis. The feedback loop between biological and political discourses on autoimmune disease has begun to restructure societies globally.