Fixing Epidemic Risk, Fixing Epidemic Spacetime? How Emerging Disease Science Writes Wild Stories About Pandemic Origins

ABSTRACT Using the US Agency for International Development (USAID) PREDICT program as a case study, I argue that mainstream emerging disease science (re)produces Orientalist imaginaries of pandemic risk through narratives about wildlife infections as inherently “backwards” in epidemic time relative to human and domestic animal infections. This temporal imaginary leverages a broad distinction between wild and domestic animals to naturalize Western geographies as low‐risk and human spaces and populations in the Global South as the global origin for pandemic threats. To examine these narratives, I draw on nearly 50 scientific publications produced by PREDICT, one of the largest global viral discovery and pandemic risk assessment programs to date. In doing so, I illustrate how ideas about epidemic time help (re)produce Orientalist spatial imaginaries as well as how wildness not only marks animals as belonging to a different place than (certain) humans, but also to a different time.