By this he means not that the pathogen SARS-COV-2 is not real, but that the existence of the pathogen does not account for its manifold social and political impacts. To make sense of these, we turn to René Girard's understanding of myth as a social technology that binds societies together in response to a common enemy. We consider how Covid-19 has come to perform this function, and why its limited efficacy in this regard only spurs more ritualized responses to it.
