Covid! It’s the Chinese! No! It’s the ‘others’ – Benton – – The Political Quarterly
‘I Know Who Caused Covid-19’: Pandemics and Xenophobia, by and . Reaktion Books. 2021. 254 pp. £16
This is probably the beginning of the gathering horde of books on the current coronavirus pandemic.
WHO recognised this new version of a coronavirus (also the cause of the common cold) in 2019, hence its name, Covid-19. Nobody today knows when it will lose its power to infect, damage and kill human beings. The single most obvious thing about this virus is how little most of us know about it. At the same time, many feel they know enough about it to take the right decisions, based on scientific evidence, rational thought and personal self-knowledge. This puts them/us in a highly privileged position. We accept the requests to wear masks, wash our hands thoroughly, resist the human desire to hug and kiss each other, stay away from crowds and keep the windows open wherever we are. Although older people are more at risk of dying from Covid-19 infection, they probably did enough hugging and kissing and marching and dancing in crowds to last their/our lifetime. This is perhaps why books on Covid-19 get so few reviews. We know enough already.
This book is not a study of the phenomena of coronaviruses. It is an exploration of the fear that attends them, of Covid-19 in particular. Ex-President Trump set the ball rolling with a tweet on Monday, 16 March 2020, referring to ‘the Chinese virus’. This prompted a wave of attacks on Chinese property and persons which the authors attribute to fear and xenophobia. Their references are very varied, from Anna Freud and psychoanalytic thinking backwards to Thucydides on the great plague of Athens in 430.
Like the deadly typhus that killed so many Jews in ghettos and camps under Nazi control, the mass deaths of Europe’s plagues were largely caused by lice which carried bacteria. More recent research has discovered that many plagues of humans were caused by a virus (discovered and named in the 1890s in Europe). Its best-known pandemics were the poxes, chicken pox and the far more deadly smallpox. Essentially, the armies of Spain and later the USA conquered South America not by military acumen but by smallpox. Incas and Aztecs ‘died in heaps, like bedbugs’, recorded a Franciscan priest in the 1520s.
Histories of pandemics are always necessary. People at the time of pandemic live on-edge, shut down by fear of getting the disease. When the threat recedes, there is a long period of ‘collective amnesia’. Here’s a personal instance: in my last undergraduate year I did a course on workers’ movements in Germany and Britain in World War I. I found it so interesting that I wanted to know what happened next and went to Sheffield University to do an MA. At the public library I read every issue of the local paper, expecting it to be full of news about those radical engineers. It was a shock to find that all the news was about the ‘flu epidemic’ which killed millions. Such amnesia followed this mass death that there had been no mention of it in my dissertation year.
The authors make frequent mention of public health officials, the unsung heroes of epidemics and pandemics who stalwartly bring together scientific knowledge with concern for the health of the population. They aim to replace the authority of some politicians (can they be injected with bleach/cured by prayer?) with the authority of scientists. This is exactly what ex-President Trump loathed. He heaped insult upon insult on his two advisers, Deborah Birx and Anthony Fauci. (In contrast, the British Medical Journal has been doing its best to extract from the UK government the names of the SAGE advisers and then a record of their business interests. The government refuses all freedom of information requests.)
Scientists of course do not speak with one voice. Scientists of all sorts can be harnessed to nefarious and harmful causes. And many do not trust them (who needs experts?). In the absence of their authority and distrust of experts, Covid-19 has energised the world of the irrational, the conspiracy ‘theorists’, victimologists, the paranoid. All of these assume the manmade disaster of Covid-19 was created with a destructive intention. Few want to consider that such pandemics occur when humans are rushing around the world, as in World War I and 1919’s Spanish flu. A century later people are hurtling through space for holidays, business deals, work.
The authors’ last section seemed very American: an account of the conflict between public health bodies and medical advisers on one side and a defence of individual rights, including, presumably, the right to die of Covid-19. This onslaught comes from the right, with its significant component of the religious, who cannot bear to see any accrual of power in public bodies concerned with human welfare. It’s not just the USA. There are protests in most European countries about the restrictions on movement. To justify their protests, people search out all the reasons why Covid-19 precautions are a con, a lie, a conspiracy. Somewhere in here is the politics of Covid. It’s not a good story.
Sarah Benton is a former the deputy editor of the New Statesman
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