Epidemics like Zika reflect enduring inequalities between and within countries, along with creating international and national discrimination against people from affected regions (Jones, 2007). Colonial practices and discourses get recycled, involving the reperformance of long-standing hierarchies, especially those that are ethnic, racial, and gender-based. In the case of the Zika emergency, these discourses travelled worldwide. In this paper, I explore the performativity of such circulation, by singling out two modes of discourse transit. The first one, termed ‘biomedical authority model’ by Briggs and Hallin (2016), conceives of health texts as mediatized expandable objects that move as unified static structures, as if they were solid blocks. The second mode, contrastively, displays flowing intensity and potential for change. Inspired by Massumi (2002), I term it ‘affective mode’. Upon investigating their performative effects, I delve into the friction between an insidious colonialist-modernist episteme and intensified transformational possibilities. The former projects specific groups as responsible for the spread of Zika. It does so by exploring the intersectionality of gender, race, ethnicity, social class, and nationality. In a rather distinct movement, the latter approaches intersubjectivity as being always intersectionally enacted, thus escaping any kind of causal determinism.