Bowtell Bill - Unmasked: the Politics of Pandemics

In 2020, the butchers bill for decades of denying the science of climate change and the threat of viral pandemics came due.

Prevention is possible if we understand transmission, the core business of viruses. But prevention is the business of humans.

Nature creates viruses. Politics creates pandemics.

Nature creates viruses. But people and politics create pandemics. And pandemics create new politics. In the 1980s, the toxic politics of the response to HIV/AIDS turned a serious but manageable viral threat into a global pandemic that took the lives of thirty-two million people and brought illness and suffering to millions more. In 2020, COVID-19 emerged into a world where many governments had failed to pay attention to the past, and so they were unprepared and unable to stop its global spread. But some countries had learned the harsh lessons of HIV/AIDS, and had contained SARS1, Ebola, Zika and MERS. When coronavirus hit, they knew what to do to save their people from avoidable infections and deaths.

In Unmasked: The Politics of Pandemics, Bill Bowtell draws on his four decades of experience in the global and local politics of public health to examine why some countries got it right with coronavirus while others collapsed into misery and chaos. He looks closely at the critical weeks when poor planning brought Australia to the brink of disaster, until the Australian people forced their governments to put public health before politics. Unmasked reveals how and why our politicians failed us during the greatest public health crisis of this century to date.

BILL
BOWTELL

Unmasked: The Politics of Pandemics

Copyright 2021 Bill Bowtell

All rights reserved. Apart from any uses permitted by Australias Copyright Act 1968, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without prior written permission from the copyright owners. Inquiries should be directed to the publisher.

Monash University Publishing

Matheson Library Annexe

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Monash University

Clayton, Victoria 3800, Australia

https://publishing.monash.edu

Monash University Publishing brings to the world publications which advance the best traditions of humane and enlightened thought.

ISBN: 9781922464248 (paperback)

ISBN: 9781922464262 (ebook)

Series: In the National Interest

Editor: Louise Adler

Project manager & copyeditor: Paul Smitz

Designer: Peter Long

Typesetter: Cannon Typesetting

Proofreader: Gillian Armitage

Printed in Australia by Ligare Book Printers

A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia.

In this book, I draw on four decades experience at and around the intersection of politics and pandemics. This stretches from how Australia and the world responded to HIV/AIDS in the 1980s to the grim circus of coronavirus and COVID-19 in 2020.

I survived the mayhem and carnage of HIV/AIDS. I saw at close quarters how cynical politicians and poor decisions led directly to millions of deaths, severe and avoidable illnesses, and social upheaval. I did not think that this could happen again. But I was mistaken.

We must understand both what went so wrong and what was done well. We should learn from those who did better. And we must discard those structures and assumptions that served us poorly, replacing them with structures and policies that in the future will better anticipate, contain, manage and eliminate viral challenges with the least possible toll of injury, death, and economic and social disruption.

Above all, it is imperative that we strengthen our own public health infrastructure and the international public health architecture centred on the World Health Organization (WHO) and other agencies.

And we have to do this now. We can never know when the next viral threat will come along, only that it is inevitable and can happen anytime and anywhere.

I am Australian and my views are drawn predominantly though not exclusively from my career in Australian public life. The narrative here around the emergence of coronavirus is set in the context of how things developed in Australia over 2020.

Australia is a geographically large country with a relatively small population. It is governed by a complex federal edifice created in 1901 that melded together the models of Washington and Westminster. This might have been the height of enlightened nineteenth-century liberal political thinking, but, like its parents in the United Kingdom and the United States, Australias federation has far outlived its usefulness. It has become a dead weight around the neck of Australias democracy and people. Our ramshackle government structures are outmoded and cannot cope with the scope and gravity of the planetary emergencies that confront us.

We are a complex and sophisticated country now greatly hobbled by simplistic and unsophisticated politics and politicians. The ease with which a simple virus inflicted serious, lasting damage on the health, wealth and happiness of the Australian people is the clearest possible evidence that things have gone badly wrong. The levers of democratic power have moved from the people to a very few whose visions and instincts are no longer grounded in building common wealth, and who cannot be trusted to act in the national rather than sectional interest. The fractured response to coronavirus is just the latest in a long list of policy failures that have diminished the nations capacity to deal with the foreseeable problems and challenges hurtling towards us.

It appears that we are about at the end of the beginning of the pandemic, with much more to endure before better times return. So while it is still too early to write a comprehensive history of how and why things turned out so badly, we have been through enough for me to make a start.

In writing this book, I have done my best to base my conclusions and views on a fair assessment of the facts and evidence as disclosed on the public record. But I have been greatly hampered by the fact that all the documents, minutes, proceedings and even the memberships of the key advisory committees have been declared state secrets. Lacking access to these records, I have relied on public interviews, articles, and many informal and illuminating discussions with senior politicians, officials and front-line personnel at every level.

On 8 April 2020, the Australian Senate established the Select Committee on COVID-19, chaired by Senator Katy Gallagher. The committee is doing sterling work in attempting to hold Australian ministers and officials to account. I have also drawn on evidence given to the select committee and the various other committees established to investigate and report on the significant events and lapses in the administration of Australias pandemic experience.

Many opinions and views have been shared on social media. Assertions without evidence are just that and should always be discounted. But I have found there are many thoughtful and incisive interlocutors on social media who have timely, evidence-based insights. If journalism is the first draft of history, then Twitter has become, for better or worse, the first draft of journalism.