THE PANDEMIC REPEATS ITSELF
When Mark Honigsbaum’s The Pandemic Century released in 2019, the book was lauded for its research and insight, but it’s taken a full-blown pandemic to make prescient its urgent warnings: “It’s not a question of if, but when.” While in its first avatar, The Pandemic Century described the cause and effects of nine disease outbreaks—starting with the Spanish flu and ending with Zika—its recent reissue sees Honigsbaum add some 20 pages about Covid-19, rounding off the number of chapters to 10 and giving the book a point of culmination the author will perhaps call unfortunate but not unseen.
Having trained as a medical historian, Honigsbaum deconstructs jargon effectively, explaining, for instance, how coronaviruses ravage the human body, but The Pandemic Century fortuitously also forages in places other than science. Being a journalist, Honigsbaum knows political structures impact our lives just as much as our cellular makeup does. Suggesting that curbs on dissent in Xi Jinping’s China helped the rapid spread of Covid-19, the author then points out that in 2018, Donald Trump had disbanded the pandemic unit in his National Security Council, impacting the US’s preparedness. There is no simple answer to the pithy question The Pandemic Century poses: “How did it come to this?”
Though it is human custom to look at our present suffering as unprecedented, medicine would suggest otherwise. In the early 2000s, when the roots of SARS were traced to animal markets that had cropped up in China’s Guangdong province, coronaviruses were considered the “Cinderellas” of the virus world, “beautiful to look at after work but too insignificant to take up the microbiologists’ daylight hours”. SARS forced some scientists to revise their dismissal, but even while some experts implored people to not hunt and eat bats, the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan was allowed to flourish. For Honigsbaum, ‘complacency’ would be an insufficient explanation. To understand the spread of disease, he says, we must take a hard look at how our ecology now transforms alongside us.
In his chapter on the Great Parrot Fever pandemic of 1929, Honigsbaum writes about how widows and housewives in US cities like Baltimore would often buy parrots and parakeets for entertainment. In order to meet this demand, sellers would pack these birds into overcrowded crates, creating the ideal conditions for the spread of the deadly psittacosis. Honigsbaum returns to these parakeets in his epilogue: ‘Herded into airline waiting rooms, then crammed into economy row seats, we resemble nothing more than [those] captive Amazonian parakeets.’ Not just has globalisation disrupted ecology, its perks—air travel, especially—have given pathogens the ability to cross borders.
Despite its urgency, The Pandemic Century hardly ever feels polemical. Even though Honigsbaum is deeply interested in what scientists and health experts got wrong, he never discounts what they get right. Their breakthroughs are detailed, but so is their hubris. Not immune to pettiness and myopia, we see that the stalwarts of medicine are fallible, too. While Anthony Fauci’s opposition to Trump’s recklessness might be considered heroic today, Honigsbaum reminds us that in 1983, Fauci was head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and had misinformed millions of Americans. He had then claimed AIDS could spread through “routine close contact, as within a family household”.
Reading this latest edition of The Pandemic Century can admittedly feel a little jarring. Honigsbaum, one thinks from time to time, might have written the book differently if he’d witnessed in 2019 what he has seen now. This is a minor quibble. His later chapters on SARS, Ebola and Zika make evident the fact that he could sense something worse was in store for us all. By now, we have all seen pictures of bodies stacked in hospital corridors and mass graves dug for victims of Covid-19, but Honigsbaum speaks with greater authority when he writes “they should have no place in the twenty-first century”. ■
To understand the spread of disease, Honigsbaum urges us to take a look at how our ecology now transforms alongside us