Dangerous Discourses

The ‘survival of the fittest’ myth in the time of coronavirus

Photo by Jonathan Borba on Unsplash

One of the more unpalatable elements of the discourse surrounding the current COVID-19 crisis has been the resurgence of a language which evokes the notion of ‘survival of the fittest’. Strong, healthy, young people will ‘defeat’ the virus; the weak, the old, the sick will die. At the level of biology, this is true. Some people are more vulnerable than others. What…