Anti-Science Authoritarianism is a Deadly Virus
Three countries share half of all COVID-19 cases
As we mark 10 weeks to the day since the WHO announced the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic, Brazil has overtaken Spain as the country with the third most confirmed cases, nearing 300,000 individuals. Brazil joins Russia and the US in an ignominious top three, where a combined 2.2 million individuals have been infected with this deadly virus, nearly half the total number of worldwide infections. Though it has taken months for these countries to find their way to the top of the global rankings, I would argue it was nothing short of inevitable. With each country currently led by an anti-science authoritarian president, this pandemic was always going to play out like this eventually.
Pandemics are a grisly demonstration of the omnipresent complexity of our physical world. They cut through swathes of the population according to a complex interrelation of variables, including contagiousness of the virus, its mode of transmission, its average incubation period, and a number of environmental factors. Every virus outbreak is different, and few turn into pandemics, but the right combination of these variables, and presto: our highly interconnected modern world is brought to its knees.
As countries around the world came to grips with the varying speed and intensities of the COVID-19 outbreaks within their own borders, what now defines the relative severity of each outbreak 10 weeks into this pandemic, is each government’s response to it and whether it has been informed by science.
As I alluded to above, Spain was hit particularly hard in the early days of this virus, but consequently responded in dramatic fashion, taking heed of the advice of medical experts to implement widespread testing, strict lockdowns and social distancing policies to “flatten the curve” of infections. While this has had a catastrophic impact on Spain’s economy, the infection and death rates stemming from COVID-19 are mostly under control.
This is a familiar story across much of Western Europe, which for a while, was the epicentre of this pandemic. One by one, the governments of Italy, Germany, France, Belgium and others implemented similarly drastic, but ultimately effective strategies to deal with the reality of this pandemic. The contrast, however, with the responses of the largest and most powerful countries on three continents, the US, Brazil, and Russia, is stark.
In the US, Trump downplayed the virus and was slow to ramp up testing in the critical early days and weeks of the outbreak there, while simultaneously muzzling and neutering the CDC, the very organisation designed to respond to such a situation. He regularly contradicted and continues to contradict expert advice from his own coronavirus taskforce, and promoted unproven medical treatments including injecting disinfectant.
In Russia, the continual suppression of critical information relating to the outbreak harks back to the old soviet era of self-serving lies and secrecy. Reporters were forced to delete COVID-19 stories in March, as the outbreak began gaining steam, and as of now, three doctors treating COVID-19 critical of the government’s response in separate parts of the country have ‘mysteriously’ fallen out of hospital windows, two to their death. Another doctor who accused the government of underreporting infection numbers and who was highly critical of the government’s virus response, was detained.
However, the award for most diabolical pandemic response has surely been earned by Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro. With cases now soaring and daily infections surpassing 20,000, leading medical journal The Lancet recently labelled Bolsonaro “perhaps the biggest threat” to Brazil’s ability to successfully fight the COVID-19 outbreak. His reference to the coronavirus as the “little flu”, continued interactions with supporters without a mask, and encouragement of people to defy physical distancing measures put in place by state governors, has sowed widespread confusion. This as Bolsonaro fired his second health minister within a month, because neither would validate his deeply skewed worldview where COVID-19 does not pose a severe threat, leaving a monumental leadership vacuum.
It is no coincidence that these three countries are also at the top of the shitlist for their deplorable responses to the climate crisis. A total denial of the existence of climate change by Trump and Bolsonaro has been accompanied by relentless campaigns to roll back existing climate policies and environmental protections. Trump has gone so far as to be the only leader to pull his country out of the Paris Agreement, as Bolsonaro resumes industrial-scale clear-felling of the Amazon. Meanwhile Putin continues to cast doubt on the human links to climate change as he seeks to maximise his country’s output of oil, coal, and natural gas.
The common thread here is a rejection of science; a belief that experts are not to be trusted, and a narcissistic belief that their intuition and instinct are superior tools with which to understand and navigate the complex world around them. This is why it was always going to end up being the US, Russia, and Brazil at the top of the COVID-19 infections table.
Viruses don’t accommodate oversized egos that reject the advice of scientists, they just operate according to their acutely indifferent nature. No amount of bloviating, obfuscating, or grandstanding will alter the trajectory of a pandemic. Trump actually went on record saying that he had a “hunch” that the fatality rate of COVID-19 was far below 1%; a rate that would indeed, if accurate, put it in the league of a seasonal flu. A hunch.
This kind of deranged mentality is deadly. When a deluded worldview comes crashing into objective reality, the results can be catastrophic, and that is what we are witnessing in real-time with these countries’ COVID-19 responses. Deaths will continue to mount rapidly in these countries, because their leaders simply refuse to acknowledge the complex nature of the deadly situation they, and the countries they lead, now find themselves in.
This is compounded dramatically when you add an authoritarian element to the mix, where unamenable bureaucrats, ministers and administrators of oversight are fired at will. In a healthy democracy, there are levers that can be pulled to right such a listing ship; democratic institutions that are there to prevent the worst impulses of would-be dictators. The free press, the judiciary, and the legislative branch of government are all critically important examples, but these institutions are not infallible, something that has been proven time and again with the fall of democracies over history.
The current fledgling democracy of Brazil, with its constitution adopted only 32 years ago after two decades of a military dictatorship, is currently facing its greatest test yet. Bolsonaro has openly expressed his admiration of this military dictatorship, calling it a “very good” period for Brazil, and after abandoning his own political party, he has now filled his inner cabinet entirely with military personnel. A number of high profile firings of key government figures, including the federal police chief, have raised fears of a Bolsonaro dictatorship, or more likely, a military coup to oust him.
In the US, Trump has set about damaging or flat-out demolishing these democratic checks on his power. Continually railing against the “fake news” media, Trump has cowed senate Republicans into complicity, ordered officials not to testify in his impeachment hearings, and has fired numerous inspectors general; officials in the government tasked with investigating potential corruption and other wrongdoing.
The election of such authoritarian-leaning leaders like Trump and Bolsonaro, in part, reflects a desire for simple solutions to complex problems. 21st century problems like climate change, economic inequality, and hyper-globalisation are immensely complex, requiring deep reserves of expert knowledge and continual study to navigate, but this is a deeply unsatisfying realisation. When someone comes along promising, as Trump and Bolsonaro did, that they are the only ones that can fix the problems facing their nations, and offering simplistic diagnoses and prescriptions that ignore the inherent and ever-present complexities of these problems, many people choose to believe them because it feels good.
But we are witnessing firsthand how dangerous this can be, because when a crisis emerges, they are exposed for the vacuous, incompetent blowhards they have always been, at enormous societal cost. The irony here, is that strongman leaders are elected with a sentiment that they will protect their citizens. What we are witnessing under the anti-science authoritarian leadership of Trump, Bolsonaro and Putin, however, is completely avoidable carnage and death on a scale unrivalled across the world.
In this respect, the US election on November 3rd is a critically important milestone, as it represents the extent to which someone as intellectually and morally devoid as Trump can gaslight a democratic nation while systematically degrading its democratic institutions. If Trump wins in November, wannabe dictators the world over will take note, and the political zeitgeist will be altered immediately. The authoritarian virus that already spread to Brazil in 2018 will likely proliferate to new and unexpected corners of the world, with profound consequences.
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