Niall Ferguson: The Next Global Disaster Is Already on Its Way – Bloomberg
Was democracy itself the problem? No. In China, the one-party state responded to the outbreak of the novel coronavirus in much the same way that its Soviet counterpart had responded to the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster: with lies. On Dec. 31, for example, Beijing told the World Health Organization that there was no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission. The next day, eight Wuhan doctors who had sought to sound the alarm were detained. President Xi Jinping s government prevented the spread of the virus beyond Hubei only by draconian restrictions on individual freedom.
Other authoritarian regimes fared worse, though we cannot be sure just how badly, as Russian and Iranian mortality statistics are not to be trusted. The true winners in their pandemic responses were Taiwan and South Korea, two East Asian democracies. The race to develop vaccines was won by biotech companies in the U.S. and Germany. The race to distribute them was won by Israel, the United Arab Emirates and the U.K.
We tend to draw a distinction between natural and man-made disasters. But a pandemic is made up of a new pathogen and the social networks that it attacks. We cannot understand the scale of the contagion by studying only the virus itself, because the virus will infect only as many people as social networks allow it to, and that in turn has a lot to do with politics.
The jury on whether Covid was a man-made or natural disaster is still out.