What pandemic has taught us about global inequality
By People Reporter, March 19, 2020Edna Bonhomme
After Haiti’s 2010 earthquake, which killed more than 250,000 people and left over one million homeless, I moved to Port-au-Prince to help with relief efforts.
As a recent graduate of a public health master’s degree programme, I thought my expertise could be of use to survivors.
Amid endemic poverty, political instability and almost no remaining infrastructure, the people of Haiti were struggling to rebuild their lives.
But it got significantly worse a few months later, when a silent killer emerged on the scene: cholera.
The cholera epidemic, which broke out near a base housing United Nations peacekeepers, killed over 10,000 people and affected more than 800,000 others.
The 2010 outbreak, which was the first large-scale cholera outbreak in the 21st century, brought death and disruption on an unprecedented scale. But it did not shock many in the Global North.
After all, what happened in Haiti was in line with their understanding of epidemics—deadly outbreaks of ancient diseases that affect foreign people faraway and poor lands.
Most did not see the outbreak as a wake-up call to review the readiness of their own countries for a similar epidemic or pandemic.
Fast forward 10 years, and we are in the midst of a pandemic that is devastating not only the Global South, but also countries in Europe, North America and Australia, countries that had come to believe that, for them, epidemics are a thing of history.
Of course, these countries faced a deadly HIV pandemic as recently as the 1990s, but most of their citizens viewed the disease as something that overwhelmingly affects “others”, namely homosexual and people from developing countries.
Since being identified in China as a new and dangerous member of the coronavirus family in early January, Covid-19 has spread to more than 100 countries worldwide, including Italy, the US, the UK, Germany and in Africa.
As a highly infectious respiratory disease, it poses a threat to everyone in every society.
The Global North is now facing an epidemic that is affecting not only its internal and external “others”, but all of its own citizens indiscriminately.
The pandemic’s death toll has already reached 8,000, and it has inflicted a massive blow to the global economy.
The countries that are used to watching epidemics from afar are now scrambling to contain the virus before it causes more devastation to their citizens.
Sadly, the Global North’s response to the pandemic was in many ways similar to Europe’s xenophobic responses to the plagues of distant history.
It not only rushed to close itself up to foreigners in an effort to keep the disease out, but many in these countries responded to the crisis with irrational panic, xenophobia and racism.
From the US to the UK, people of Asian descent faced racist and xenophobic attacks, as people irrationally held them responsible for the outbreak.
Overall, the countries in the Global North failed to see the global nature of the crisis we are currently facing.
As they rushed to protect their own, they once again succumbed to old tropes about epidemics being caused by “dirty and strange others”.
Furthermore, they failed to recognise the need for a global public health strategy to contain Covid-19 and similar disease outbreaks that can come in the future. Instead, they focused on themselves and themselves only.
Washington, for example, has reportedly offered German scientists working on a coronavirus vaccine a lot of money to give the US exclusive access to their work.
Pandemics do not materialise in isolation. They are part and parcel of capitalism and colonisation.
The countries that struggled to contain and control major epidemics in the recent past, from Haiti to Sierra Leone, had deficient public health systems prior to these crises, partially as a result of their colonial histories.
In the world that we live in, where capitalism and the remnants of colonialism fuel wars, unprecedented migration waves, public health crises and an increasing dependency on international and intercontinental travel, epidemics are inevitable.
And, as the Covid-19 outbreak makes crystal clear, no countries are immune to these outbreaks.
The global community, however, can successfully counter these epidemics if it employs a holistic health policy.
The world powers need to learn to act as one. Such a move towards solidarity can even reinvigorate the demands for a truly universal healthcare system, where access to healthcare is an indisputable human right for everyone, everywhere. —The article first appeared on www.aljazeera.com