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New Pandemics, Old Politics. Alex de WaalЧитать онлайн книгу.

New Pandemics, Old Politics - Alex de Waal


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      This book began life as a compilation of reflections provisionally entitled ‘Critical Thinking in a Pandemic’, which became an essay in the 3 April 2020 online issue of Boston Review, entitled ‘New Pathogen, Old Politics’ (http://bostonreview.net/science-nature/alex-de-waal-new-patho-gen-old-politics). The Boston Review editors, Deb Chasman and Matt Lord, were indulgent, encouraging, and usefully critical. I have drawn on comments and critique from colleagues, students, and former students, including Lisa Avery, Bridget Conley, Sarah Detzner, Ella Duncan, Sulmaan Khan, Jared Miller, Aditya Sarkar, and Ben Spatz, as well as Louise Knight and Inès Boxman at Polity Press and anonymous reviewers.

      A pandemic pathogen is scary and strange. It is new to medical science and society and it is everywhere. At the critical early moment of a pandemic, much of the advice of doctors and epidemiologists will be vague and some will be wrong. Those who know their subject best will have the deepest uncertainties. No expert can say when and how the pandemic will end. There isn’t even an agreed definition of ‘pandemic’ – an arcane but revealing absence.

      Public leaders pay homage to ‘following the science’ but they actually follow a script. It’s a storyline with a reassuring ending. It goes something like this:

       We are at war against an invisible enemy. While our doctors and nurses combat the disease at the frontline in hospitals, while our scientists seek the cures and vaccines in their laboratories, the population must make sacrifices on the home front. We should trust our government while we forgo liberties and livelihoods. The pandemic will end with a medical magic bullet that vanquishes the pathogen. Then we will return to our way of life and be safe.

      This book is about this gargantuan and harmful error. It is about how and why the ‘war on disease’ script was written and how it guides our thinking and shapes our institutions in ways that we may not realize. When we most need a narrative to make sense of a devastating pandemic, the ‘war on disease’ not only fails, but also stops us recognizing our failures. This book is also about some very different visions. Scientists, social activists, and public health experts have other analyses and narratives – rigorous, practical, democratic, holistic – that we should pursue. The Covid-19 pandemic and crisis is showing us that the ‘war on disease’ is at best humdrum and at worst dangerous, and that these alternatives are urgent.

      The ‘war on disease’ script is like the sheaf of documents in a desk drawer seldom opened. It consists of a handful of different scripts, pictures, and reminders. Some are Chinese, most are European or American. Also in the drawer are other images for disease outbreaks: a journey, an imbalance in the cosmos, a crime investigation, a storm, and a forest fire.1

      For doctors, microbiologists, and epidemiologists, what matters in the storm isn’t so much the wind but the darkness: we can’t see our way. There’s a trope among crisis epidemiologists: if you’ve seen one pandemic, you’ve seen just one pandemic.5 The health metrics expert Chris Murray described constructing his model for Covid-19 as ‘forecasting the weather while trying to build the forecasting tools’.6 Perhaps we should adapt the storm metaphor to capture the fact that each pandemic isn’t just a hurricane, it’s a new kind of weather condition. Margaret Chan, Director General of the WHO in 2009, observed ‘the virus writes the rules’.7 Those rules govern how the disease is transmitted, which people are symptomatic and which are contagious and when, and what the microbe does to the human body and brain. It can take years to figure them out. In the case of the novel coronavirus, science has moved with unprecedented speed, but it is still lagging behind the epidemic curve. What we do during that lag is what’s most important.


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