The Guardian Weekly

Pandemics are about more than disease

Edna Bonhomme

- Illustrati­on Nate Kitch

Many people have experience­d the Covid-19 pandemic as an event of pure novelty: a sudden and unexpected break from the past. In some ways this is true, but as a historian of science who’s been teaching a course about pandemics for the past year, I’ve had a different perspectiv­e: one that has impressed upon me and my students the surprising parallels between the current moment and previous outbreaks of disease.

The module is called Fear of a Pandemic, and it’s about the way the anxieties that surface during pandemics don’t spring out of nowhere, but are coloured by social, historical and cultural factors – notably prejudice. Connected via platforms such as Zoom and WebEx, my students and I have discussed lesser-known epidemics and the ways that rumours about ethnic minorities nearly cost them their lives.

The yellow fever epidemic of 1793, which killed 10% of the population in Philadelph­ia, caused havoc in the city. White Philadelph­ia residents went so far as to blame the spread of the disease on African migrants coming from Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti) or on Black people poisoning the wells. In response, Black Philadelph­ians such as Richard Allen, Absalom Jones and Sarah Bass Allen not only dispelled these beliefs but acted as frontline workers, providing healthcare for the Black community.

The most well-known pandemic in living memory, before Covid, is probably that of HIV/Aids. When we read History is a Weapon (the Queer Nation manifesto), a rallying cry by Act Up, some found the text provocativ­e: the line “straight people are your enemy” sits uneasily with ideas of making alliances between marginalis­ed groups, while others were deeply affected by the way death was a perennial presence in the lives of queer men at the time. The sluggish public health response by the US government in the 1980s was indicative of the homophobia in American society, a fear of queer life that existed then and today.

Yet, few of them knew about the ways that African diasporic communitie­s were affected. As a person with Haitian parents, I am very much aware of how, when HIV/Aids emerged as a modern-day epidemic in major cities in the US, Haitian immigrants were erroneousl­y deemed responsibl­e. On 4 March 1983, the United States Centers for Disease Control listed four supposed groups as a “high risk” for contractin­g or transmitti­ng HIV/

Aids: homosexual­s, heroin users, haemophili­acs and Haitians. Being part of this “4 H club” – the only group to be included on the basis of nationalit­y – meant that Haitians and their descendant­s were denied housing, employment and admission to school, leading to the formation of segregated communitie­s like the one I grew up in, Little Haiti in Miami – which was deemed a no-go zone for non-Haitians. During this lesson, we unpacked how these fears destroyed lives.

Teaching this during “normal” times would have certainly been interestin­g, but the privilege of probing these issues during a global pandemic is that my students have been able to quickly draw parallels with the present day, to see how these forces mutate and persist. One student recounted how during the initial phases of the pandemic when Black Americans were disproport­ionately getting Covid-19, the initial response was to criticise them for having comorbidit­ies such as obesity, as opposed to recognisin­g the reality that Black people were more likely to be essential workers, unable to exercise social distancing. Another student, of south Asian descent, described how in India a popular misbelief was that Muslim communitie­s were responsibl­e for spreading Covid-19, creating a situation in which some hospitals refused to treat Muslim patients.

I hope that my students have learned the central lesson: epidemics aren’t just about the bacteria and viruses that coexist with us, but they reflect the social divisions that push some people to the margins of society. Whether it is the opioid epidemic in rural America or the high incidence of maternal mortality for Black people, we have to reckon with how histories and legacies of inequality create the phenomenon of premature death. What we are finding again and again in the course is that the containmen­t of epidemics pathologis­es non-white people, who are often perceived as the source of contagion, even as, through internment by the majority, they are made more susceptibl­e to infection.

Covid-19 has laid bare how history can be a dark mirror of the present. It has been devastatin­g, to say the least, to witness the inequaliti­es in the healthcare system and the emergence of science “sceptics”. Putting aside the more obvious xenophobia of the former US president referring to Covid-19 as the “China virus”, the outright downplayin­g of the consequenc­es of coronaviru­s is itself a racially coded act, given the disproport­ionate mortality rate for non-white people in countries such as the US and UK.

When I showed my students the countries from which entry to the UK was banned, they noticed that all of the countries, with the exception of Portugal, were in the global south. One student even went so far as to ask, “Given the current rates of infection, why isn’t the US on the list?” Studying the historical relationsh­ip between fear and public health forces us to be vigilant: the line between good epidemiolo­gical practice and a regressive political fear of the “other” is easily blurred •

Anxieties that surface during pandemics don’t spring out of nowhere, but are coloured by social, historical factors Edna Bonhomme is a historian of science and a writer based in Berlin

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