Dipping a Toe Back into the topic of Covid-19 - A Question of Origins

On 31st of December most of us were pleasantly ignorant to the fact that the World Health Organisation (WHO, 2021) had become aware of a cluster of pneumonia cases in Wuhan and that this marked the harbinger of what would become a year of alienated, unfamiliar and invariably tough existence brought forth by the now infamous COVID-19. It seems as though enough time has passed to return to the dreaded pandemic as a topic from which we might now learn from. In fact, academics interested on pandemics, epidemics or any other emic based study of disease, would argue that there are plenty of examples throughout history capable of teaching us the very same lessons we were taught in 2019.

The lesson I’m interested in here revolves around a question of origins. The specific question I’m asking is what are the political and social implications of tracking epidemics to a “source” or origin? This tracking exercise formed an integral part of public news, politics and debate. However, my argument here is that tracking epidemics to an origin is futile in its suggestion that a single biological source exists for what is a complex entanglement of socio-political histories, practices and dispositions. The logic that underpins the notion of disease origins diverts attention away from the systemic causes of poor infrastructure, precarity and inequality.

Attempts to identify epidemics’ origins represent a quest for knowability and controllability; a logic that was ingrained in imperial endeavours. Similarly, Controlling an epidemic, an ‘active entanglement between bodies, spaces, and devices’ (Lynteris and Poleykett, 2018, pg. 435), involves controlling persons and is explicitly socio-political. I argue that through constituting different actors, states and institutions as blameworthy, tracking epidemics’ origins is deeply concerned with power. Paul Farmer’s (1992, 2011) work during the HIV and cholera epidemic in Haiti highlights how efforts to pinpoint epidemics’ origin constituted a ‘geography of blame’. During the HIV epidemic this played out between Haitians and Americans. Farmer’s (1992, pg. 223) demonstrates the significance of history in understanding epidemics through his etiology. He discusses how US domination led to Haiti’s precarity which fed into the emergence of a sexual tourism industry (ibid, pg. 148). Sexual services were predominantly utilised by North American male visitors. Thus there was no one origin. The epidemic was a culmination of socio-political conditions, hidden by the passing of blame. Similarly, Farmer’s (2011) explores how efforts to understand the later cholera outbreak led to accusations between UN peacekeepers who had carried the disease from Nepal, the Nepalese and Haitian government, and the Haitian community. Farmer shows how the search for origins constitutes political deflection from firstly, providing remedial care, and secondly, accounting for the fact that ‘Haiti was an ideal host for cholera’ (Farmer, 2011, pg. 294), due to the state of precarity and inadequate infrastructures.

Sarah Berry (2020) stresses on the role of western media and world leaders’ in defining Covid-19’s origin as Chinese. She critiques President Trump’s terminology of the ‘Chinese virus’ and the media’s obsession with the Chinese ‘wet markets’ as the original point of human interaction with the virus. It follows that Western narratives conflated the origin of the virus and thus, the blame, with the Chinese government, but also the very nature of being Chinese. Sanda Hyde’s interview with McDevitt (2020) also highlighted social media’s role providing a ‘breeding ground for hate speech and discrimination.’ Social networking sites like Reddit featured numerous racist memes such as figure 1, seen by 23,000 people, that pathologized Chinese culinary customs unfamiliar to Western culture. In Haiti, Farmer (2011, pg. 195) describes the blaming of Haitian culture for disease epidemics with a ‘default logic [that] relies on the erasure of history’. We must be attentive to history in constructing an understanding of epidemics as socio-political, rather than naturalising them as a-political.

For instance, the media and public officials’ discourse drew on entrenched, racist associations of the Chinese with sickness, contamination and unsanitariness. Nayan Shah (2001) shows how this tracks back to 1876 when Chinatown residents for the smallpox epidemic in San Francisco. Quoting Shah, (ibid, pg. 2) health officials ‘depicted Chinese immigrants as a filthy and diseased “race” who incubated such incurable afflictions as smallpox, syphilis, bubonic plague and infected white Americans.’ Firstly, this segment speaks to Berry’s (2020) conclusions that cleanliness has historically been an emblem of social and racial privilege. Secondly, a form of othering is clear in this narrative, where the ‘white American’ is juxtaposed against the ‘filthy and diseased “race”’. Thus tracking Covid-19 back to an origin in China fed into racist discourse that further widened the fault lines of inequality in western society where Asian communities are already marginalised through their minority status.

Throughout the epidemic right wing UK politicians and alongside media outlets repeatedly perpetuated the notion that the threat was external; either by overemphasising the wet markets in China or stressing the potential ‘risks’ associated with the South African variant (Roberts, 2021) and Brazil variant, said to be ‘twice as transmissible as the original’ (BBC, 2021b). The emphasis on the external threat allows for the political construction of a space in need of state protection. This focus ignores problems within the UK including the Kent variant, government corruption, market orientated polices and structures of inequality, by blaming others. The socio-political practice of othering and pathologizing those out with national frontiers promotes a xenophobic politic and justifies the state’s security apparatus, or as Michele Foucault would argue a ‘technique of power’ (2004, pg. 107).

Referring to Sznedy’s (2020) questioning in relation to COVID-19 of ‘What kind of society hosts it? And what nosologico-political paradigm would it belong to?” I argue that the answer lies in the neoliberal logics which value the wellbeing and care of the market and of wealthy, private actors over that of individuals enduring a global health crisis. The notion of origins in itself feeds into a biopolitical logic in that it demands knowledge from which state control can be reified, seemingly in aid of enhancing the population’s security from the external threat of Covid-19. This creates a climate in which, with one biological origin, a vaccine is the silver bullet to solve all the issues we currently face. This is not to critique the efficacy of vaccination programmes, but to argue that such a response only addresses what we would think of as one half of the syndemic. The government is all too willing to employ militarised metaphors, depicting their eagerness to wage war against the threat of disease-causing organisms, and even against those depicted as disease-causing people. The battle they are unwilling to fight is against the historic structures of inequality which have repeatedly shown themselves to be decidedly violent, relentless and socio-political.

The hunt for a single origin is bound up in a misrecognition, arguably a strategic one, of epidemics. They do not emerge in a vacuum, nor do they solely emerge in the wet markets of Wuhan. Epidemics are wedded to socio-political conditions, histories and processes and thus understanding how they originate involves being attentive to each of these areas. The cycles of blame and othering perpetuated by origin narratives, to which China fell foul through racist ideologies, gave rise to xenophobia, anti-Asian discrimination and the further marginalisation of an already vulnerable community in Western contexts. Meanwhile the systemic conditions of poverty, inequality and governmental corruption that demand reform are obscured from public consciousness. We must recognise the quest for origins as a red herring, obscuring more than it reveals. That which demands careful tracking is the neoliberal logics which put profit making above care and justice, foster biopolitical forms of control, and drive environmental destruction that complicates our entanglement with the non-human world, laying the foundations for the emergence of an epidemic and the systemic conditions that allow it to flourish.