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To Fight the Coronavirus, We Need a Massive Campaign of Disruption

Gregg Gonsalves on Covid-19, plus Meagan Day on the eviction crisis.

Start Making Sense and Jon Wiener

July 16, 2020

Ambulance in front of the US Capitol.(Alex Edelman / AFP via Getty Images)

The increasing number of cases of Covid-19, and of deaths, should be scary to everybody, Gregg Gonsalves says. A direct action campaign of disruption is necessary to bring the changes we need—something like the ACT UP movement of the eighties. Gregg is an assistant professor of epidemiology at Yale School of Public Health and the recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant, and he writes regularly for The Nation about the pandemic.

Also: We’re heading for an eviction crisis. On July 31 the direct cash payments of the CARES act expire and right now Republicans in Congress are not renewing it or anything like it. That means millions of people won’t be able to pay their rent on August 1. Meagan Day comments—she’s coauthor of Bigger than Bernie: How We Go from the Sanders Campaign to Democratic Socialism.

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Start Making SenseTwitterStart Making Sense is The Nation’s podcast, hosted by Jon Wiener and coproduced by the Los Angeles Review of Books. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts for new episodes each Thursday.  


Jon WienerTwitterJon Wiener is a contributing editor of The Nation and co-author (with Mike Davis) of Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties.


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