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

New Pandemics, Old Politics - Alex de Waal


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these concerns to assail the whole edifice is to misunderstand the nature of scientific authority. To the religious dogmatist, authority is flat: all statements of scripture possess the same sacred quality, and to doubt one is to doubt all. To the scientific mind, theories are open to revision, technologies are not infallible, but facts are real.

      Pandemics move faster than politics. In the early acute phase, the number of cases of a disease can double every few days. It’s a frightening trajectory. A week is a long time for a pathogen, as it is in politics.

      Public leaders must act very quickly. Individuals who hold high office are, in general, attuned to their constituents’ anxieties and what those may mean for the political order and their own political standing. They’re not usually very literate in the science of infectious diseases and they don’t have time to learn anything new and complicated. At that moment of darkness and uncertainty as the pandemic storm breaks, ministers and presidents want reassurance – for themselves and so they can provide leadership in the hour of crisis. Their task is to control the narrative, to buy time and calm, so that public health and medicine can control the disease.

      Most scientists’ approach to public messaging has been that facts speak for themselves. This hasn’t worked. Towards the end of his book Spillover, the journalist David Quammen inadvertently shows how scientific thinking loses its compass as it crosses this divide. In 500 pages, he vividly describes the work of virologists who hunt down and analyse pathogens that have either made the zoonotic jump from animals to humans or have a fearsome potential do so. It’s fascinating. These scientists are, he says, ‘our sentries’ who will ‘raise the alarm’. Quammen continues: ‘What happens after that will depend upon science, politics, and social mores, public opinion, public will, and other forms of human behavior. It depends on how we citizens respond.’ Those ways of responding are ‘either calmly or hysterically, either intelligently or doltishly’.12 This is true but it also doesn’t get us far: social scientists and political analysts have useful things to say on these topics. They too have their hierarchy, with economists at the top table. But a pandemic is a rare occasion in which economists don’t have a model to hand,13 though they have much to say about what can be done to mitigate the crises of paying for health care, unemployment, and disruption to international trade. Macroeconomic models that take equilibrium as a premise don’t work when – as in a pandemic – there is by definition no equilibrium.

      Routinely, a political leader will talk to other politicians. The normal calculus of day-to-day politicking about loyalty, jobs, money, and the media doesn’t stop. We hope that in a national emergency, all those become secondary to the public good. One of the virtues of a pandemic-as-national-security drama is that it allows a leader to rise above party politics and set a truly national agenda, even a global one. Every politician also knows that they should never let a crisis go to waste. For some, the chance for partisan gain trumps the public good. There are benefits to pandemics: an opportunity to seize emergency powers and use them to other ends, spend public money with little oversight, and get on with other factional business while public attention is distracted. Some leaders are denialists. A few are devout denialists, who genuinely think the disease is a hoax or truly have faith that


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