The Politicization of Disease

The Politicization of Disease

Michael Dryzer

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Last week, as I was clicking around the Internet one morning (in that time-frame of “pseudo-work” where one checks emails while their brain is still waking up), I stumbled across this article: “A Costco sample-stand worker turned away a kid wearing a face mask because she thought he was from China and could give her the coronavirus.

The article itself was a tedious read—the gist is that Asian Americans are being unfairly targeted and stereotyped in Washington (the location of the first US case) as a result of the novel coronavirus outbreak (nCoV) in Wuhan, China. I don’t use the word “tedious” to downplay the valid concern about stereotyping present in the article—it is a very real issue that affected our view of African migrants in the 2014 Ebola Pandemic and of Mexican migrants in the 2009 Swine Flu Pandemic before that. Instead, I was anxious as to whether the article I was reading was the first in a long line of similar stories to politicize and polarize the nCoV Crisis.

You might recall the last time something of this nature occurred in the United States and, indeed, around the global community. The 2014 Ebola Pandemic was heavily politicized and, here in the United States, played directly into the Red versus Blue politics we all know and love. This blog post by Scott Alexander discusses the topic more fully than we will here, and is an excellent read, so I suggest that you check it out if you have a few spare minutes. But, the bottom line of is this: A lot of issues, including disease control and prevention, get caught up in the right/left (lack of a) dialogue and become wedge topics that drive “different” groups of people apart, even though these issues affect all groups involved and require communication and compromise to be solved.

Speaking further on the role of this during the Ebola Crisis, the US response was sluggish and disorganized, and it’s fair to say that our national politics was a primary cause of this. On one side, Republicans like Texas Senator Ted Cruz, a 2016 presidential candidate at the time, were lambasting the Obama Administration for not taking Ebola seriously and shutting down our borders. On the other side, Democrats argued that Republican-led budget cuts to the NIH and CDC were to blame. Whether either side was right isn’t the problem here; what is the problem is that too many people were pointing too many fingers for anyone to come together and hash out a plan. The same thing happened during the Swine Flu Pandemic and every other disease in the last 200 years.

Were we always this way? The answer to that question is no. At one point, we were actually worse. Politicization of disease has existed for at least 200 years back before we even knew what viruses were. One early example is the European yellow fever outbreak of 1845. While sailing down the African coast, sailors of the British vessel HMS Eclair contracted yellow fever and briefly made port at the Portuguese settlement of Boa Vista in Cape Verde. When the Eclair eventually left the island and returned to England where it was quarantined, yellow fever had infected to the island’s inhabitants and rapidly began to spread.

The quarantine itself angered the British as people immediately partitioned into two groups and entered a gridlock as to how to deal with the situation. (Sound familiar?) Meanwhile, on the island of Boa Vista a third of the population died as a result of yellow fever—a fact the Portuguese government was not particularly fond of. (Keep in mind that this part of history was egregiously competitive, with all industrialized countries does whatever they could to mess with everyone else’s economies. So, while this event could have been an honest mistake by the British, it could’ve also been used to undermine Portuguese efforts on Boa Vista.) Consequently, international relations deteriorated.

To be fair, it’s difficult to resolve a public health crisis when you don’t know what viruses are, which is why we should be better about such things in today’s world, right? In many ways, this is absolutely correct. We have a variety of different tools at our disposal to monitor, contain, and end the nCoV crisis. The New York Times published an article that offers a primer on the outbreak and answers all the major questions you might have, such as its infection rate, its mortality rate, its symptoms, you name it. Our very own university has created an interactive dashboard that tracks the outbreak in real-time. Finally, in the case of scientific literacy, there are many doing what they can to fight misinformation concerning the virus.

So, it’s not all bad. We have the tools to fight the disease and protect ourselves against its spread and the spread of the lies surrounding it. And honestly, I haven’t seen too many articles like the Costco one at the time of writing this.

But we can’t grow complacent.

We’re still at the very beginning of this outbreak. The virus is still spreading, people are still dying, and politics is still the same as it’s ever been. Just last week the Trump Administration imposed travel restrictions on people who “pose a risk of transmitting the disease” and has begun quarantining returning American citizens. Like I’ve said several times before, I’m not here to argue whether or not this is the correct course of action.

I’m more worried about a case of inaction resulting from political gridlock, and if there is anything that could spark that, it’s something like the incident at Costco or these travel restrictions. By the end of the Ebola Crisis, there were 28,600 cases and 11,325 deaths. Those numbers could’ve been much lower if we the world had acted sooner and more decisively. Let’s not let this happen again. Let’s approach the nCoV Crisis with coordinated, clear-eyed, and evidence-based thinking and save lives.

PHOTO CREDIT: PXFUEL