To start with, when any given government is forced to confront an outbreak of any kind of disease, there are three and only three broad policy approaches to choose from:
- Ignore the epidemic. That is to say, adopt no special policies or additional public health measures to address this specific outbreak.
- Respond in force. This entails pouring massive resources into suppressing the infection, for example through quarantines, travel bans, mass emergency vaccinations, and mobilisation of additional medical professionals and resources.
- Respond on a limited basis. In this scenario, mitigation measures are implemented only if or when human toll from the epidemic reaches certain thresholds, and epidemic-related policy is calibrated so as not to spend, or do, “too much”.
In a way, all three of these options are the answer to a single question: what is the desired balance between epidemic-related costs, whether deaths, medical care expenses, or general economic disruption, and both direct and indirect costs of mitigation efforts – quarantined workers still need to be fed, but, unless their jobs can be performed remotely, are not producing goods, services, and corporate profits. Or, to put it bluntly, how many people have to die before we decide to do something about it.
On one end of the scale is the “Respond in force” option, which stems from the proposition that every life that can be saved ought to be saved, with society as a whole absorbing the necessary economic and fiscal burdens. To some extent, this may be termed a “collectivist” approach, in that every member of a given society must pull together to protect as many of their fellow citizens as is possible. Diametrically opposite is the “Ignore the epidemic” policy set, which can be termed radically “individualist” – every person is responsible for their own survival and well-being, whether they possess the requisite financial resources and knowledge to ensure this or not, while society as a whole carries absolutely no responsibility whatever for the outcome. To quote Margaret Thatcher circa 1987:
…who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves…1
Unsurprisingly, “collectivist” policies are typically favoured by the general public, or at least a large proportion thereof, as they benefit many if not most of the working people. By contrast, “individualism”, at least in the context of capitalist societies, tends to directly benefit the socio-economic elites and elite-adjacent strata, which stand to gain comparatively little from universal public policies, and are instead focussed on capturing the maximum share of a society’s economic output. Thus, the third approach listed above, that of responding to an epidemic on a “limited basis”, represents a government veering between the desire of the working people for safety, and the wishes of the elites not to curtail or impede extant economic processes so as not to jeopardise the associated profits. More often than not, this means doing the absolute least that is necessary to avoid popular unrest, while accepting the attendant casualty figures as the unavoidable cost of doing business.
Over the past three and change years, the COVID-19 pandemic showcased all three of these approaches, often within the same country thought at different times. As alluded to above, the instinct of capitalist elites has been, from the very beginning, to do nothing; to not even measure the progress of the epidemic; to implement no mitigation measures; to pretend that the disease is “mild” and nothing to worry about. Absolutely no reason to stop coming to work; absolutely no reason to cease spending money on restaurants, travel, and other forms of now potentially lethal entertainment; absolutely no reason to even wear a mask, which in any case does not even work2. Governments in most developed countries, however, even in the US, were initially afraid to let the disease simply run rampant, probably figuring that this would not be a vote-winning electoral strategy during the next election. Some nations, like South Korea or China, responded in earnest; others, like the US, generally flailed about, leaving most of the details up to state and local governments, only some of which were even interested in fighting the pandemic3. However, the broader point is that aside from a few outliers such as Sweden, most capitalist nations, and this designation most certainly includes China, did try to do something.
And then, the epidemic continued, and as it continued, the politicians and the socio-economic elites made three important discoveries:
- The public is too fractured to mount organised resistance. Most people, in most places, are far too atomised, far too focussed on their daily survival, to bother with mass protests or general strikes. There is not, at least in most Western countries, a robust labour movement; there are not any organised revolutionary parties with a high degree of reach. And what unrest does occur, for example during the Black Lives Matter protests that broke out in June of 2020, is small enough to be relatively swiftly managed or suppressed4.
- The public can be coaxed into complacency with propaganda. It would take an entire separate post to detail the sheer number of slogans and talking points marshalled to convince the public that COVID-19 is something that can be “lived” with, or that mitigation measures are an affront to “personal liberty”, or that the toll in death and prolonged illness is vastly exaggerated5. The point is that, ultimately, it worked, it all worked.
- Vaccines can lower the death toll to an acceptable level. While it is important to highlight the imperfections of extant COVID-19 vaccines – notably that they provide no “immunity” per se, but rather reduce one’s chances of hospitalisation or death – and while vaccination efforts in many countries, especially in the US, were far from efficiently managed, at the end of the day mass vaccination did occur, and the death rates did fall. Dramatically, in fact, compared with the initial months of the pandemic, though to be sure, COVID-19 remains a very much outsized cause of death relative to nearly all others throughout the developed world.
As these realisations hit home, one by one, every single developed world country began to drop its mitigation measures, sometimes, as in the US, under the individualist slogan of “personal responsibility”, at others, as recently in China, insisting that the disease is now “mild enough” not to warrant an aggressive public health response. Indeed, even as early as 2020 one could see that for all the COVID-induced misery in Sweden, with death rates multiple times greater than in neighbouring Norway, Denmark or Finland, there have been no meaningful political consequences. No massive public unrest; no “punishment” at the ballot box, aside from the typical ebb-and-flow between the eight or so political parties with parliamentary seats; nothing. The epidemic need not be fought, because the public can be managed if the casualties are not very high, and if the propaganda machine keeps firing on all cylinders. “Let her rip.”
Again, the underlying causes here are, at least to a significant degree, economic. Workers must get back to work; consumers must get back to spending. It is no accident that China’s official press, for example the Global Times newspaper, after reluctantly acknowledging at least 60 thousand additional COVID-19 deaths following the removal of most epidemic controls, swiftly turned to touting growth in tourism and air travel, a rising stock market, and other economic metrics. As well, in the context of a largely private health care system, as in the US, letting the epidemic continue unchecked is actually good for the medical business, especially pharmaceutical manufacturers – at least, to the extent “demand” for additional vaccine jabs and antiviral treatments can be “sustained”. The elites have more than ample resources and initiative to take care of themselves, as amply demonstrated at the World Economic Forum at Davos6. As for the rest of us…
…who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women…
All of which, beyond the subject of COVID-19, bodes rather more than ominously not just for future pandemics, but also for the future evolution, or, far more likely, devolution, of public health across the developed world.
- Margaret Thatcher Foundation, “Interview for Woman’s Own“, Thatcher Archive (THCR 5/2/262), September 23, 1987, retrieved February 3, 2023.[↩]
- Combining “there is no reason to wear a mask because COVID is like the flu” with “wearing a mask will not protect you from COVID” was a truly prodigious feat of propaganda. That, or we have collectively forgotten the very concept of logic.[↩]
- To be sure, the US also pledged trillions of dollars in support for corporations and the financial markets, lest these be impacted in any way by thousands of persons dropping dead every week.[↩]
- Notwithstanding the sometimes breathless media accounts of the BLM protests, in reality only a tiny fraction of America’s adult population ever turned out to march, not comparable even with those protests that preceded the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.[↩]
- See Williams, B., “Rethinking COVID Hegemony”, Croakey Health Media, February 1, 2023, retrieved February 3, 2023, for a highly informative overview of this sort of propaganda in Australia.[↩]
- See, for example, Lee, B., “World Economic Forum: Here Are All The Covid-19 Precautions At Davos 2023”, Forbes, January 20, 2023, retrieved February 3, 2023[↩]