As people are stuck at home and glued to the latest little titbit of the coronavirus outbreak trying to make sense of the volcanic mountain of information that is suddenly spewing from everywhere; it is hard to distinguish the chaff from the corn. The arguments of scientists that are normally aired in papers that few of us see or bother to read, have now hit centre stage. The scientists running labs are having a field day and many as Stanford University’s Jay Bhattacharya has recently noted, find the attention a tad surprising. Simon Lincoln Reader advises readers that “listening – as opposed to forwarding opinion or data has the potential to build reason”. – Linda van Tilburg
SLR: A Tale of two Fergusons
By Simon Lincoln-Reader*
One of the more obvious features of commentary surrounding the pandemic is that the desire to be right has never been more desperate. This, almost entirely virtual spectacle occurs now hourly between families, friends, enemies, colleagues journalists, politicians and scientists – most of whom are convinced they know what has happened, what is going on and more importantly, what should be done.
Those who laid the foundations of the conviction are people unto whom we entrust our judgment. One way of looking at the pandemic is through the work of Professor Neil Ferguson – another is to see it through the historian Niall Ferguson.
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It was Professor Ferguson’s modelling that was responsible for the change in UK government strategy from mitigation to suppression – the thing that was supposed to flatten the curve, but now threatens to flatten the economy. In my experience, those who support Professor Ferguson’s work are more intolerant of criticism of the Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) or the World Health Organisation (WHO), and consider any suspicion that the virus did not originate from the Wuhan Seafood Market a “dangerous conspiracy theory”. There is emphasis upon graphs and other data in this argument, something made awkward by Professor Ferguson’s previous predictions.
In 2005, he went on record claiming that up to 200 million people could perish from bird flu. The number totally around 450. Three years previously he predicted 50,000 people would die of mad cow disease but in the end, only a couple of hundred died. Still, not a nice thing to have engraved into your headstone.
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The author of the acclaimed, “The Ascent of Money”, Niall Ferguson has also enjoyed support for his position, admittedly a less scientific one more concerned with the role the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) – something he has examined in some detail. Of the two, this approach is the more revealing as far as Africa is concerned, given the interests that the CCP has been building on the continent since the early 2000s – ones that it may become even more dependent on should one of the consequences be a revision of global manufacturing practises.
Niall Ferguson is regarded as something of a conservative amongst the academic community and therefore, more loathed. In my experience, those supportive of Niall Ferguson’s 6 questions for Xi Jinping are more sceptical of the lockdown, more fed up with the police and less willing to entertain niche interests that have appeared on the periphery – for example, London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s suggestion that we investigate the claim more people of colour have been affected.
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Compounding the problem of the desire to be right and its incorporated behaviours are the people we normally listen to and the things we read. Faced with a real crisis, handlers of the activist Greta Thunberg are running out of ways to stay prominent, so have charged her correspondence feeds with some nuanced class warfare. There is the Guardian, hitting the skids at present, which on the 10th of April featured a column entitled “Blaming China for coronavirus isn’t just dangerous. It misses the point”. Predictably there was no point – just some vague prescription, perhaps another expression of just how invested the CCP is in western media and in endlessly pandering organisations such as Amnesty International. Finally, there is Fox News, whose revised editorial policies have all but eliminated any suggestion of bats, and now propose that a faulty seal on a fridge in a laboratory is the likely culprit.
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No way of seeing the pandemic is “right”. Supporters of the views of Ferguson and their associations can be reduced to the natural default of the human condition: over compensation – the less we know, the more we think we do. There is no validated evidence yet that confirms the virus’ origin, no evidence to determine whether the lockdown strategy is better or worse than herd immunity. We are trapped in uncertainty, in the turbulence of science, in possibilities and unlikelys.
Fortunately the way to extract ourselves from this pointless scramble is also human. Listening – as opposed to forwarding opinion or data (that most of the time hasn’t even been read by the sender) – has the potential to build reason. Fundamentally compassionate and instinctive, reason now emerges through the hands of those quietly helping the less fortunate to secure their next meal. It explains why these people are generally happier than those who hope that the virus will bring harm to people with whom they have disagreement. At least of this we can be relatively assured.
- Simon Lincoln Reader works and lives in London. You can follow him on Medium.