I

The wider public that Harris addressed was well aware of the roles that nonhumans played in the pandemic and global responses to it. Though its origins remain under debate, initial reports led many to believe that the virus moved from bats to another carrier animal—perhaps the pangolin, the world’s most trafficked mammal, or the raccoon dog—and then to humans. News stories typically blamed the animal carrier for transmitting the virus, not the destructive activities responsible for producing stressed, immunocompromised animals and bringing human populations into prolonged contact with them. As postcolonial literary scholar Rosemary Jolly observes, coverage of the pandemic emphasized narratives of zoonosis, or “diseases that transmit from nonhuman to human animals.”Footnote ³ In reality, however, pandemics such as COVID-19 are what she calls “reverse zoonoses,” or diseases that are “transmitted from colonial humans’ … actions and nonactions … to humans, nonhuman animals, and the environment alike.”Footnote ⁴ In an instance of what Mel Chen has called “racial mattering,” early reporting also emphasized viral transmission between animals sold in the Wuhan wet market and the Chinese bodies that captured, sold, and touched these beings.Footnote ⁵ Once the pandemic was well underway in the United States and Europe, however, most reporting stopped associating the virus with animals and animality. Instead, news stories and scientific studies focused on human-to-human transmissibility, especially the vulnerability of white bodies. While some raised the alarm of COVID infecting and killing free-living animals from primates to deer, along with companion animals like dogs and cats, most reporting depicted the pandemic as a human problem occurring in a human-dominated world.

With the start of vaccine development, nonhumans once again became central figures in COVID discourse. As virologists sought to learn more about the virus and whether a vaccine would be effective in saving lives and suppressing transmission, scientists in the United States, China, and parts of Europe turned to animal analogs. Primates—and animals such as transgenic mice, guinea pigs, hamsters, and ferrets—were deliberately infected with the virus in preparation for their role as vaccine test subjects. Because of their genetic and physiological similarities to humans, primates were the most desirable “animal models” for lab studies.Footnote ⁶ In widely publicized experiments, scientists at the University of Oxford and Sinovac Biotech Ltd. “dripped the coronavirus directly into the … noses or windpipes” of lab monkeys and observed the symptoms that developed.Footnote ⁷ A similar study by the Texas Biomedical Research Institute injected baboons, macaques, and marmosets with the live virus, then “scanned the primates’ lungs, took rectal swabs, measured oral fluids, and took tissue samples from the animals in order to study the virus’s effects.”Footnote ⁸ Researchers determined that rhesus macaques exhibited a similar progression of symptoms to humans and should, therefore, become the preferred test subjects in vaccine trials.Footnote ⁹ Based on these findings and on their exceptional immune systems that allow them to survive extreme injuries, captive rhesus macaques were enrolled in trials of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, the first COVID-19 vaccines approved for emergency use.Footnote ¹⁰ The particular chemical formula within each vaccine, together with the injection technique used to administer it, is derived from animal subjects. While this research was scrutinized in the months leading up to the release of the first vaccines, the US government and biotech companies never publicly advertised the vaccines as being bioengineered within the bodies of rhesus macaques and other animal analogs.

Outside the lab, endangered free-living primates assumed a very different relationship toward vaccines than their macaque relatives enrolled in vaccine development. On the same day the US declared a national emergency in response to the pandemic, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) sounded a warning about the vulnerability of free-living great apes to the novel coronavirus. The March 13, 2020 statement directed primatologists, animal behavior researchers, site managers, and tourism operators to minimize visitations of great apes, carefully monitor the health of essential staff, stay at least 7 m away from all primates, and follow globally recommended sanitation procedures.Footnote ¹¹ Three days later, the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund announced that the Karisoke Research Center in Rwanda would implement additional precautionary measures, tracking mountain gorillas from 100 m away and halting “all other ongoing research activities.”Footnote ¹² Similar distancing and sanitation practices were implemented among orangutan researchers in Sumatra the following week, and the Gombe Stream Research Centre soon followed with their own protective measures which included halting most research activities.Footnote ¹³ Understanding that the likelihood of transmission and infection was quite high, given the ease by which apes and other primates contract respiratory diseases from humans, international conservation programs sought to protect endangered gorillas, orangutans, and chimpanzees.

II

As these stories illustrate, COVID-19 and measures taken to defend certain species against it were experienced in vastly different ways. Animals with greater biocultural value, like endangered lowland gorillas, captive-living orangutans, and dogs and cats, were afforded protections, while animals like rhesus macaques were made to labor and die in laboratories. Acknowledging these differences among nonhuman groups complements and extends social analyses of how particular human communities were disproportionately impacted by the pandemic.Footnote ¹⁴ It also shows that the COVID-19 crisis marked a rare moment when concerns about public health visibly intersected with the health and well-being of other beings. As political theorists Danielle Celermajer and Philip McKibben explain, the pandemic brought “broad recognition of the link between the development of the disease in humans and humans’ deleterious impacts on the more-than-human world.”Footnote ¹⁵ The pandemic produced a resurgence of calls to participate in global frameworks like One Health and to frame the emergency as part of a worsening polycrisis.

Even more so, however, the strikingly visible role of animals in the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the structures of being that a significant portion of the global population used to orientate themselves to the wider world and the lives of others. The virus ruptured the fabric of modernity, exposing basic tenets of modern life such as individualism, separation, and control as fictions. It taught people that the human species is dependent upon and inextricably bound up with the lives of others, whether we like it or not. As a disease that moves across groups of nonhuman animals and humans, the coronavirus challenged beliefs in the impermeability of human bodies, the boundary fixity between species, and the separation of humans from the wider world. It was a potent reminder that humans are not, and have never been, separate from other beings and environments. As cultural anthropologist Genese Sodikoff observes, zoonoses “challenge the anthropocentric conception of the subject or the self,” exposing the human body as a trans-corporeal entity constantly intra-acting with others.Footnote ¹⁶ The virus and global responses to it destabilized liberal notions of selfhood and subjectivity to a degree that had not been seen before.

Embracing COVID’s destabilizing “microbiopolitics,” several cultural commentators have considered how the virus provided an opportunity to reorder life in less destructive ways.Footnote ¹⁷ Ruha Benjamin, for instance, asks what kinds of worlds might be possible if COVID-19 is framed not as a virus to be eliminated or dismissed, but rather as a transformative vector through which modern societies can be reorganized and rebuilt. In Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want, she argues that COVID-19 provided the opportunity to “acknowledge and foster a deep-rooted interdependence” as “a guiding ethos for regenerating life on this planet.”Footnote ¹⁸ Similarly, Jane Goodall, Thom van Dooren, and David Quammen have argued that the pandemic offered a chance to devise strategies for living well that could benefit human and nonhuman communities.Footnote ¹⁹

Government and public health officials responded not by embracing the ontological transformations prompted by the virus, but rather by patching up the ruptures and shoring up the liberal logics under threat. Some opted to defend their beliefs in the bounded and disconnected self, as Donald Trump’s claim to taking the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine, zinc supplements, and the antibiotic azithromycin to protect himself from the virus prominently demonstrated.Footnote ²⁰ Others erased or obscured the role of animal subjects in testing and vaccine development, essentially purifying the virus of its animal associations to make it consumable for bounded human subjects. Through such efforts, COVID-19 became a human virus, one that today holds only a trace of the nonhuman in its history and memory. The virus, however, is anything but human; it spans a spectrum of bodies and species, refusing containment.

This oscillation between the exposure of liberal logics as fiction followed by their tidy resolution has become a defining characteristic of modern crisis, from the COVID-19 pandemic to climate change. There is a growing awareness of human exposure to and vulnerability with nonhuman beings, coupled with an active and persistent denial of togetherness. In fact, the institutions of late modernity increasingly function and gain strength from managing ruptures in liberalist projects. To be a human subject in the twenty-first century increasingly requires acknowledging the interconnectedness that constitutes everyday life, while living in ways that openly reject this reality. As this collection of essays on “Literature and Science in the Public Sphere” demonstrates, analyzing narratives of science not only helps reveal how the figure of the human arises through different and sometimes competing sites, but it also shows that the human is produced—and, at times, troubled—through this multiplicity of sites and discourses.