No one is to blame for COVID-19. But everyone must be held responsible.
“We are all responsible and accountable for what we do or say even if those behaviours occur in stressful times.” Byron Pulsifer
Many people; many nations; many world leaders, since the outbreak of COVID-19 have tried to create grand narratives surrounding specific factors: China, Wet markets, Bats, globalisation and lack of medical guidance etc., for either how the coronavirus was created, or how it was accelerated. They have done so because by identifying and vilifying a scapegoat will not only anchor this global pandemic to one source of causation but will also excuse their own shortcomings in these anarchic times.
The reality however is no one, and yet everyone, is to blame. Everyone can be assigned blame if we dig deep enough. But it only leads to widespread disconnection, xenophobia, and hate. However, there are some factors that have to be held to account for either accelerating the coronavirus transmission, or by ignoring the signs when others were asking them to look. Some of these factors cannot be assigned blame as such, but they must be discussed. Because, when this is all over and world leaders try to re-align the fluctuating pieces of humanity, these factors must be closely examined and ruthlessly investigated.
1China.
China; more specifically, the wet markets of the Wuhan Province, is where COVID-19 originated, and so it is easy to assign all blame to this location and the people there. However, these wet markets have existed since the 1970s, when they were segregated from modern supermarkets, but wet markets have existed in China in various forms for hundreds, if not thousands of years. They are not a constant threat to global health.
Moreover, China is not the only source of wet markets; hundreds exist throughout South-East Asia and also in Africa. However, through the wet markets, many have begun to blame the Chinese people and Chinese culture for the pandemic, with mass xenophobia towards the Chinese on the rise. This xenophobia is completely unfounded. Blaming the Chinese people for COVID-19 is like blaming the Australian indigenous people for the mass fires that raged through their country, or blaming the Amazonian indigenous tribes for the Amazonian fires, both of which occurred last year (the Australian fires were exposed to far more media coverage than the Amazonian fires).
Admittedly, these wet markets are, from a western perspective, extremely brutal and distasteful. They sell various types of animals which are captured and kept in small metal cages, before being slaughtered, cooked, and sold. This has raised many concerns from animal rights groups, who have called for the removal of all wet and live animal markets. However, if wet markets are removed, then a part of Chinese culture is removed also.
Some accountability does need to be laid at China’s door. The government did attempt to hide the outbreak for weeks before they eventually realised it was impossible to do so. Moreover, these wet markets do need to be investigated and held to account by animal right groups, because they do undoubtedly violate animal rights. However, China is not exclusively responsible for COVID-19 and certainly should not be receiving the mass xenophobia that it currently is. One has to understand that China and South-East Asia was long a world disconnected from the West; a world the West will unfortunately never truly understand or accept. But just because you do not understand something, does not mean you should automatically resent it.
2Neo-liberalism.
Neo-liberalism came to the forefront of political and economic ideology in the 1980s with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, as they attempted to reverse the stagnation of the previous decade. Largely through economic reform, both the U.S.A and the UK were largely responsible for unleashing free-market capitalism, along with economist Milton Friedman. The economic policies of these governments would continue to dominate Western economic thought until the 2008 financial crisis.
Through Neo-liberalism, three huge changes shaped the modern world.
I. Free-market capitalism. Through Friedman’s work, the West was able to let go of the Keynesian economics that had dominated the mid-20th century, and began to adopt ‘laissez-faire’ economic policies, which essentially allowed the market to run itself with no government intervention. This caused a great surge in capital investment, which gave great powers to the financial institutions of the West, who began to infiltrate new markets in the Middle and Far-East.
II. Technological innovation. Technological giants such as Apple and Microsoft were both founded in the late 1970s, and throughout the late-20th century and early 2000s, became the technological behemoths they are today. This led to a world of mass-scale, superfast interconnectivity, which used free-market capitalism to its advantage.
III. Globalisation. People and ideas began to travel more around the globe. The largest banking corporations began to set up bases in the Far-East, as did the tech giants. The world fast became smaller as people were able to travel to far-away places more easily than ever before.
Neo-liberalism, whilst not a direct factor, undeniably changed the contour of the world. Borders were erased and people could move freely and at alarming speed. This at the time was a sign of ideological superiority. However, mass globalisation also meant that if a pandemic arose, it too would be able to travel freely and quickly around the world. Now, most countries have reverted back to having hard borders like those before WWII whilst they try to repel COVID-19. Whilst Neo-Liberalism allowed the world to advance itself technologically, it also made the threat of a global pandemic all the more real.
3Government inaction.
Whether it be the U.S.A and Donald Trump’s blasé attitude, or the UK and Boris Johnson’s inaction, the ways in which governments around the world have acted have varied. Some, like South Korea and Germany, have listened to the WHO and began mass-testing for COVID-19 quickly and clinically. Some, like the UK and U.S.A, failed to act quickly enough and therefore lost precious weeks of preparation.
The UK, perhaps too caught up in Brexit at the time, failed to realise the gravity and seriousness of the approaching pandemic. On the 31st January, when the first two cases of COVID-19 were confirmed in the UK, thousands of people lined the streets of London to celebrate ‘Brexit day’. It took a month for the UK government to finally announce a plan for combatting the coronavirus, announced on 3rd March which was, and arguably still is, extremely vague.
On the 15th March, Health Secretary Matt Hancock admitted that the UK does not have enough ventilators, and on the 16th, asked companies that if they can produce ventilators, they should contact the government. This plea for help was announced on, of all places, Twitter.
And finally, on March 23rd, nearly two months after the first two cases were confirmed in the UK, the government announces a ‘lockdown’. This came too late, as the coronavirus had already spread among large swathes of the population, the ramifications of which we have been experiencing ever since.
Government strategy is arguably the greatest factor to blame for the way COVID-19 has spread. What will come to separate the world will be that some governments acted, and some didn’t. Blame for the tens of thousands of deaths will lay most at the doors of the governments who ignored the signs.
Blaming people and governments, however it may make you feel, will not solve anything. The pandemic still rages across the world, ripping up the foundations of humanity. When it ends, the world will be broken, crushed by the power of nature. The world will need to work together to build society again, and to understand where and why governments failed. But blame must not be confused with accountability.
No one is to blame for COVID-19. But we all must hold ourselves, our governments, our ideologies, to account, to prevent history repeating itself.
