After the Virus is a book about history and policy. Events such as revolutions and pandemics reveal – like an X-ray – what is going on beneath the surface in a particular society at a particular time. The huge stresses they cause suddenly make starkly visible the damaging effects of the power relationships and embedded inequalities that are already there but too often ignored. The introduction argues that we are now at such a moment of revelation, when people’s political imaginations can be engaged in new directions.

It explains why the reduced investment in our social fabric over the last forty years of a disempowering neoliberal state left us unable to respond effectively when COVID-19 arrived, arguing that the stresses created as a result produced a pandemic that was anything but levelling. Those most at risk were the poor, many with pre-existing health problems, frequently working in exposed front-line roles while others stayed safely inside. COVID-19 was a syndemic. It was not just an infectious disease to be controlled by cutting lines of transmission. It was a super-toxic coming together of a deadly respiratory illness, with latent, non-communicable health conditions (heart disease, diabetes and obesity) that interacted with embedded social inequality.