Greedy coronavirus spivs are making money from the misery of others
PERHAPS we are at risk of catching something more deadly than a respiratory infection as Covid-19 multiplies and spreads. In Glasgow this week a friend encountered a much more lethal contagion. On a visit to the supermarket she witnessed a man exiting with a trolley containing “enough infant formula to feed triplets for the first year of life and much more”.
Later, she learned of a customer bulkbuying anti-bacterial soap for the purposes of making a quick buck on ebay. Presumably, in households such as these families will hunker down before the night-time news bulletin to await the latest increase in coronavirus infections. “Ya beauty, it’s now reached Glasgow. Let’s lift the price to £20 a bottle.”
As the Coronavirus advances, it’s being tailed by an erosion of human decency; a poisoning of the soul. Thus, human empathy flees and is replaced by something dismal: the urge to view other people as competitors who must be eliminated in the struggle for survival. This is what happens when civilisations collapse in on themselves.
Last week it was reported Roberto Giuliani, the director of Rome’s Santa Cecilia Conservatory, one of the world’s oldest music institutes, told students from China, Japan and South Korea they were forbidden to attend until they were certifiably free of the virus. Ignorance never lags far behind callousness.
In Canada, Germany and the UK coronavirus-related racism directed at Asians has increased sharply. In France, the social media hashtag #Jenesuispasunvirus is being used by Chinese people in response to the racism they are beginning to encounter. The Guardian reported one woman who took to Twitter to say: “Not all Asians are Chinese. Not all Chinese were born in China and not all have been there. An Asian who coughs doesn’t have the coronavirus. Insulting an Asian because of the virus is like insulting a Muslim because of the bombings.”
On Facebook this week the awardwinning journalist Audrey Gillan, a former colleague, offered a rebuke to the greed and ignorance wrought by the coronavirus. Ms Gillan’s reporting assignments have taken her to some of the world’s most crisis-torn areas and she knows more than most how the quality of mercy can prevail. “If you’re on your own in London and you have to self-isolate because of the coronavirus please do shout,” she wrote.
“There are a number of us who are in the same boat. We’re not panicking. But we are cooking things and freezing them, just in case. I had a debilitating virus that floored me for eight days in January so I have a little bit of experience of how tricky that is when you are on your own and I know that cooked food, some fresh vegetables and fruit, and whatever little things you might need will be welcome. We only promise to leave it outside your door so nae hugs. Okay pals?” Ms Gillan hails from Glasgow’s east end.
In the way we are inclined to react when a pathogen is on the loose there are parallels to be found in our attitudes towards those whom we perceive as a threat to our way of life. Immigrant communities and those fleeing terror from brutal regimes are already accustomed to being regarded as virulent. We round them up; isolate and detain them and then pack them off to their country of origin using some minor refraction real or imagined.
Those we give leave to remain must first be doused in the healing waters of a UK history exam which omits to mention any of those gnarly deeds of empire which caused them ultimately to seek peace here. We haven’t yet got round to forcing them to wear bells around their necks and shout “Unclean! Unclean!” but the Tories’ Windrush project was a close approximation.
We ascribe to them, in the manner of a pandemic, all sorts of anti-social behaviours and deploy our Conservativeleaning newspapers to dehumanise them and portray them as a danger to the British way of life.
Only after we consider them safe and have absorbed them into the UK bloodstream do we permit a limited number – at a distance – to share in this nation’s bounty, much of which is built on what we looted from their countries in the first place.
The instinct towards the survival of the fittest, which lies at the heart of Tory doctrine, comes to the fore when a global pandemic rattles. In 2017, the prestigious US think-tank Brookings studied how poor countries and disadvantaged communities suffer disproportionately when pandemics roar. “Regardless of where a pandemic starts, the poor tend to bear the brunt. Low and middle-income countries have weaker health systems and limited capacity to handle surges in cases.”
The essay went on: “We can curtail pandemics if we quickly develop vaccines and make them widely accessible. However, without vigorous efforts to secure equitable access, vaccine distribution will follow the logic of the market. During the 2009 swine flu pandemic, wealthy countries secured large advance orders for vaccines, but, despite the efforts of the World Health Organisation to negotiate donations, poor countries were crowded out – receiving vaccines more slowly than rich countries and unable to cover as many of their citizens.”
At its most primitive level this tendency is evident in bulk-buying at supermarkets or filling up at petrol stations during an energy shortage. Those with economic muscle use it to hoard rather than to share; those without must endure as best they can. It’s a distillation of all Conservative philosophy. Global capitalism works by identifying or creating shortages and then exploiting them and keeping them out of the reach of the majority.
No mercy can ever be found here and anything that speaks of weakness; infirmity or poverty is deemed to be selfinflicted. When it can’t be explained away that simply it’s regarded as acceptable collateral damage.
We may not yet have seen the worst effects of Covid-19 before it blows itself out on its journey across the world. Already, though, we are witnessing its corrosive effects on the human spirit which are much more wretched than the physical toll. The only antidote is basic human compassion: the instinct to reach out and not to recoil; to share and not to accumulate.
The instinct towards the survival of the fittest, which lies at the heart of Tory doctrine, comes to the fore when a pandemic rattles