In the world of epidemiology it’s sometimes said that pandemics are lived forwards and understood backwards.We encounter them head-on, chaotically, trying to fathom the disease in real time even while trying to mitigate its impact. Lessons generally come later as the evidence accumulates.What’s also true is public health, especially on a global scale, is rarely separable from politics. One of the complicating factors of the recently ended outbreak of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, was the country’s long history of conflict and the toxic relationship between central government in Kinshasa and the affected population in the country’s east, which led to deep and sometimes violent distrust.One of the most depressing subtexts of the coronavirus pandemic is how these kinds of conflicts are now being writ large as a range of actors, including western ones, have used the crisis to spread disinformation.The past months have been marked by dodgy dossiers leaked to the media and conspiracy theories, pushed by US officials engaged in a struggle for global influence with Beijing, suggesting that the virus was deliberately cooked up in a Chinese lab. More
