Rachel Shabi, The New York Review of Books, Wed 8 Jul 2020.
Walter posted a reference to this article in the Lifeboat for me, back when he could still post there, and I couldn’t. It seems worth revisiting, now that we’re, er, in the same boat, and have a place of our own.
It all seemed so simple then, just two short months ago. (Frightening, but simple.) There was a plague (possibly caused by irresponsibly dangerous experiments in insufficiently safe laboratories, or possibly not). The governments of China and various other countries, having already had experience of such things, had taken it seriously from the start, but here in the UK, Johnson’s hopelessly incompetent and corrupt right-wing government had let us all down, first by not taking the outbreak seriously enough, then by putting everything in the hands of crony profiteering subcontractors with no public health knowledge or experience, while people with relevant expertise were champing at the bit, wanting to help but being ignored by the chumps, spivs and ignorant fanatics in power.
Something like that, anyway. I’ll have to re-read the article, just to remember some of what I thought was happening. Like everyone else, I suppose, I’ve been reading a large number of articles about the whole thing for eight months now, and until quite recently it all seemed to make sense, but now I’m so confused that nothing makes sense.
One thing the article doesn’t deal with is the fact - it is a fact, isn’t it? - that public health experts had been warning for years that a coronavirus pandemic was the number one “security” threat facing Britain, but they were ignored then, too.
I’ll have to go digging to find whatever article(s) I read that in. I urgently need to shore up my fast-failing memory. I’ll make some sense of this virus if it kills me … aargh, thump.