A bad flu or the eve of destruction?
In Mary Shelley’s novel “The Last Man” (1826), a pandemic, originating in Istanbul in the late 21st century, annihilates the human race. In the ensuing centuries, Niall Ferguson reminds us, the plague genre “has exerted a ghoulish appeal.” Presented as histories of the future, dystopian stories “echo present fears.”
In “Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe,” Ferguson, the author of “Colossus,” “Empire” and “The Great Degeneration,” provides an informative and engaging history of catastrophes, from the earliest known societies to the COVID-19 pandemic. All disasters, he argues, are human-made, even if they are brought by new pathogens. And they have substantial economic, cultural and political consequences.
In treating highly contagious diseases, Ferguson demonstrates, the more thingschange, the more they stay the same. Although they did not understand the epidemiology of the bubonic plague that swept through the Mediterranean world in the sixth, seventh and eighth centuries, officials restricted travel, isolated infected individuals, and enforced social distancing by prohibiting festivals, ballad singing and tippling in taverns.
In 1383, authorities (inspired by the number of years Israelites wandered in the desert and the number of days Christians observe Lent) sought to fend off the Black Death by detaining new arrivals to Marseilles for 40 days, giving the quarantine its name. Since the 1700s, proponents of vaccinations against smallpox encountered stiff opposition, despite reduced fatality rates. In the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century, violators of quarantine laws were “tried with military haste.” During the 1918 pandemic, San Francisco made mask wearing mandatory — and civil libertarians, Christian scientists and businessmen formed an Anti-MaskLeague.
Drawing on the work of economist Amartya Sen, Ferguson indicates that famines are caused by increases in food prices beyond the capacity of poor people to pay for them. Nor do famines occur in functioning democracies. During the droughts of the 1930s, by contrast, Joseph Stalin accelerated farm collectivization, blamed counterrevolutionary kulaks for bad harvests and ramped up exports of grain. About 5 million Soviet citizens died.
Middle managers are often responsible for “accidental catastrophes,” including the Titanic, Hindenburg, Challenger, Chernobyl and Three Mile Island — because they attempt to restrict knowledge of problems to the smallest possible circle. When failure occurs, Ferguson claims, societies often draw unwarranted inferences about risk (concluding, for example, that nuclear power is chronically unsafe).
Before concluding with a warning that China poses a greater danger to the free world than COVID-19, Ferguson analyzes the pandemic. Completed at the end of the summer of 2020, some of his judgments, he acknowledges, may already have been provento be wrong.
Ferguson’s claim that as a public health crisis COVID19 looks “much more” like the 1957-58 “Asian flu” than the 1918-19 pandemic is now unconvincing. The infection fatality rate of the “Spanish flu” in the U.S. was, almost certainly, far greater than the 1957-58 or 2020-21 outbreaks. But Ferguson did not know how deadly the 2020-21 surges would be. Or how many American lives that mitigation saved. And Ferguson doesn’t provide evidence to support his claim that the competence of the federal government diminished between1957 and 2020.
That said, Ferguson supplies a perceptive account of the social networks spreading pandemic disinformation. He makes a provocative case that “lockdowns” were far less successful in limiting contagion than “social distancing in all its forms” including school closings and bans on large public gatherings, widespread and rapid testing, and contact tracing.
He acknowledges, however, that the United States’ strategy amounted to “whack-a-mole with a blindfold on.” Nothing “was easier to predict than that this would lead to second waves ….”
And a race between vaccinations and virus variants, including delta and omicron.