Critics have recently begun to compare the Covid-19 crisis either to 9/11 or to the 2008 financial meltdown. This is highly misleading, in my view. The Covid-19 crisis is impossible to fully control by political fiat or to overcome by injecting money into the system. The sovereign right over life and death has been usurped by a virus, which is neither dead nor alive. Political decrees won’t be enough to stop the virus from killing, although they can slow down its spread. Nor are bailouts sufficient to revive economies devastated by the very lockdowns mandated by political authorities, since production lines cannot be reactivated without risking contamination. Perhaps for the first time since the dismantlement of the welfare state (et encore, since that was but a palliative that curbed the radicalization of working class demands), lawmaking and moneymaking pull in opposite directions. Political and economic imperatives have ceased to coincide: it’s either pandemic control or the economy.