Critical Response: The New York Times: ‘The Biggest Monster’ Is Spreading, And It’s Not the Coronavirus

The New York Times article: “‘The Biggest Monster’ Is Spreading, And It’s Not the Coronavirus” written by Apoorva Mandavilli, places a much-needed spotlight onto Covid-19’s indirect health effects in certain parts of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Narratives such as these can be helpful in the contemporary world of health, in which it seems the universal response is oriented around first world countries. However, in the process Mandavilli substantiates said globalist response, and its singular narrative. It is a reduction of the individual practically applicable etiology to monopolize the ethos of western biomedicine. What this reduction achieves is the manipulation of the hegemony of etiology within multifactorial issues to best serve foreign interests. Using arguments made in Roberts’ “Grappling with Exposure in Mexico City”, Farmer’s “Anthropology of Structural Violence”, Mkhwanazi’s “The Trouble with a Single Story”, and Doyal’s “Political Economy of Health”, Mandavilli’s narrative conveyed in her article will be critically deconstructed to its tectonics which convey both its own biomedical etiology and the maladaptive insinuations that facilitate the manipulation of ethnographic visibility for western paradigms.  

Mandavilli starts strong with objective statistics and substrative etiologies on how the pandemic has brought about substantial change in how other diseases are being handled. However, the fundamental multicausal issue has been reduced and redefined to an singular endogenic microcosmic framing, while at the same time substantiating outdated models of thought. While Mandavilli does briefly touch upon how the exogenous neo-liberal capitalist conditions may react in a way that would further worsen the situation, this is done purely in a way that blames the endogenic factors and the reliance on outside nations.  

“There is also a real risk that Indian companies will turn to more profitable medicines, or will not be able to meet the global demand - If you had more locally developed drug depots or drug manufacturers, it would be closer to the point of need,”(Mandavilli, 2020, 8). 

Here it is mentioned that this currently exogenous problem may be solved with endogenous solutions, however, the argument completely dodges how said factors created both the endogenous and exogenous conditions in the first place. This reduces the relationship between the exogenous and endogenous, while also reducing the myriad of etiologies into a singular monocausal endogenous oriented narrative. It would be like trying to find the reason as to why a fly got stuck in a spider’s web and only studying the singular silk strand the fly got stuck in, while actively ignoring the totalic web the string is a part of, the spider that spun the web, the trajectory of the fly, and the totalic evolutionary conditions in which all variables are oriented within.

Mkhwanazi argues that the case of a biomedical failure in the kingdom of Swaziland is placed on endogenous cultural impediments almost ubiquitously in every single story told. 

“The danger of this theme is that in trying to show local cultural logics, there is a risk of othering those central to the story. The heavy reliance on telling this singular story means that other stories are not told: stories that are not about the state’s inadequacy in health provision, suspicion, and distrust, or thwarted local agency, are rare in medical anthropological studies of Africa,”(Mkhwanazi, 2015, 199).

In a world where careerists dare not acknowledge the other issues that lead to the biomedical failure in Swaziland, Mkhwanazi argues that there is only a single narrative being told ubiquitously over every story, something that is dangerous and reductive, and brings about only more maladaptive modes of thinking. Mandavilli’s narrative on the re-emerging health crisis is an exemplar of the detournement of blame upon the other strands that make up the plural etiology of the issue. While the Coronavirus certainly was the spark that lit the flame, the narrative fails to account for the reason as to why these places were already flooded with oil-soaked kindling. Corroborating with Mkhwanazi’s argument, an explanation or even an acknowledgement of the historic factors that lead to the presence of HIV, TB, and Malaria is completely disregarded in Mandavilli’s narrative. It simply accepts the condition of these places as natural, something fated to be and synonymous with said places, rather than these conditions being symptoms of multicausal historical factors, one being the narrative substantiated by this very article. 

The theorist Paul Farmer in his “An Anthropology of Structural Violence” argues that the erasure of history in cases such as these are one of the many perpetrators of structural violence, and its reduction of blame within the narrative. 

“Erasing history is perhaps the most common explanatory sleight-of-hand relied upon by the architects of structural violence. Erasure or distortion of history is part of the process of desocialization necessary for the emergence of hegemonic accounts of what happened and why”(Farmer, 2004, 308)

This argument further substantiates what Farmer outlines as the manipulation of ethnographic visibility to serve the perpetuation of the structural violence imposed upon these peoples. The manipulation of ethnographic visibility is outlined in this very article, as regions highlighted and picked at seemingly random and removed from their context. India is relevant as an exogenic producer of healing, and it certainly has had its own re-emergence of third world diseases, however it is positioned as a mono-causal actor for unknown regions. For these random villages and even entire nations taken out of context, names dropped almost at random, we can only treat them as microcosmic exemplars of the conditions of the totalic African continent. 

Both Farmer and Mkhwanazi argue that the reduction of the other narratives and multi-causal factors has led to a sort of hegemony of etiology and its reactions, however this is not to say that there is not a hegemony. While it may seem too subjective to create a hierarchy of causes, and may even be antithetical to the arguments of said theorists, as long as there is a hierarchy of needs there will be a hierarchy of causes. As long as it can be agreed that the wellbeing of an individual cosm is locally more important than the agenda of an imposing nation, then there will be a strict hegemony. 

In Roberts’ “Grappling with Exposure in Mexico City”(2024), she outlines how the environmental health study “Early Life Exposures in Mexico to Environmental Toxicants”(ELEMENT), imposes the monocausal narrative upon the contemporary health issues of Mexico City. 

“Beatriz’s family’s sarcasm about ELEMENT’s focus on lead-glazed dishes, rather than on pesticides or air pollution, demonstrating their sense of impossibility of enclosed exposure”(Roberts, 2024, 21). 

ELEMENT imposes the narrative that the single cause of illness has stemmed from the lead glazed dishes, and not the imposition of ELEMENT’s pesticides into the great swirl. ELEMENT refuses to acknowledge the plurality of exposure. Similarly, the article sets a narrative that covid is the mono-causal ‘monster’, an enclosed exposure. Roberts argues that the rise of health issues in Mexico City is derived both from the lead-glazed dishes and the pesticides and air pollution imposed by foreign interests. What narratives such as the one substantiated in Mandavilli’s article seek to do is not to establish a new hegemony from tabula rasa, but to establish a paradigm in which the hegemony is flipped and manipulated to best serve neo-colonial interests. 

In Mexico City’s case, the lead-glazed dishes were not a health problem whatsoever, until foreign variables were introduced. The combination of lead and foreign pesticides and air pollution caused cancer, the imposition of foreign powers redefined the people’s culture as toxic. Certainly, pesticides exist for a reason, but when neo-colonial powers such as ELEMENT position culture to be the main vector of illness rather than the second vector, it only highlights their personal established hegemony; that the exported resources enabled by western imposition is more important than local culture. And the people have no say in choosing between any possible economic benefit brought by increased exportation and their own culture. ELEMENT acts as an exemplar of all neo-colonial impositions that thrust paradigms which already make the decision for the people that culture is at the bottom of the hegemony, to the point where culture will be deemed as the monocausal factor, and western-aligned factors as natural necessities. 

In conclusion, Mandavilli’s article substantiates a singular self-consummating narrative that reduces all other narratives in order to manipulate the hegemony of contemporary causes present in multifactorial problems. Quite plainly, Mandavilli defines what is the tabula rasa of this incident.

“The starting point in this ruinous chain of events is a failure to diagnose” (Mandavilli, 2020, 3)

The narrative that this failure was predicated on the disconnect of the endogenic local system to the exogenic biomedical health places the singular root etiology on the blameless zemblanity of the Covid-19 pandemic. Mkhwanazi shows how singular narratives imposed upon biomedical failures redirect blame away from problems caused by western reductionism, elucidating Mandavilli’s role in shaping the narrative of this contemporary problem. Farmer argues that this is effectively an erasure of history and historical factors, to reduce them to natural conditions. This reduces ethnographic visibility which in turn allows for the guileful clandestine substantiation of structural violence. Roberts’ theory ties up how globally western forces impose paradigms upon ‘othered’ regions that utilize the biomedically aligned tools outlined by Farmer and Mkhwanazi, to further western interests. These three theorists all tie in together to contextualize the macrocosmic role that Mandavilli’s article serves in the metaphysical etiological web that is the conditions of health in neo-colonial regions, which is to shift the singular narrative into one benefitting biomedicine and its benefactors.

Sources

Apoorva Mandavilli (2020) ‘The Biggest Monster’ is Spreading. And It’s Not the Coronavirus, The New York Times

Nolwazi Mkhwanazi (2016) Medical Anthropology in Africa: The Trouble with a Single Story, Medical Anthropology, 35:2, 193-202 

Paul Farmer (2004) An Anthropology of Structural Violence, Current Anthropology, 45:3, 305-325

Elizabeth F.S. Roberts (2024) Grappling with Exposure in Mexico City, Current Anthropology