The novel H1N1 virus has been elected the “virus of the year.” According to the journal Science, the pandemic was a “near miss.” As the authors of the short piece argue, the “H1N1 virus was less virulent than feared, but the next pandemic could be worse.” Prepare for the next pandemic is the message.
What kind of work is the trope of the Next Pandemic doing? Might it not be worth investigating the current pandemic first, before we jump to the next? Before we orient ourselves towards the near future, it might be necessary to first inhabit the recent past in some meaningful way. What, in fact, has just happened? Apparently, it is easier for experts to take responsibility for the future than for the past.
Just to remind ourselves:
1. Most experts predicted the emergence of an H5 virus. It was an H1 virus.
2. Most experts predicted that the pandemic would start off in South-East Asia. It turned out to be closer to home.
3. Most experts predicted that it would be a devastating event. WHO now calls it a “moderate” pandemic.
4. Most experts predicted serious consequences for critical infrastructure.
Good luck with the next predictions! Trust your expert!
Carlo — Isn’t the implication of what you are saying that: (a) there may not be a way to “inhabit the past in some meaningful way”? (b) that accurate prognostication cannot and should not be the norm of legitimate expertise in this game?
… yes, that’s Luhmann’s argument. The failure of scientific prediction makes it not necessarily useless, on the contrary.
As to a): Inquiry as a way of engaging the recent past? The re-emerging rhetoric of the next pandemic is increasingly blocking such inquiry.
This is complementary to the previous discussion in interesting ways. Two modes of thinking employed by experts throughout the pandemic, and fundamental to public health as it operates today, are 1) prediction and 2) what an informant called “induction”. By induction, he meant the emphasis on basing public health action on more and better information. Thus, at the H1N1 conference in Beijing this summer, Margaret Chan from video-feed opened the proceedings by saying “What we need now is information”. The problem with this mode of thinking, as the informant argued to me, is that it can never guide action to an unexpected future event, which is precisely what is possible with an emerging disease. No matter how much information we have about the past experience with this virus, or previous flu viruses, it may not provide the proper guidance. Prediction is then a complementary mode that provides answers to questions about the future. But as we have argued before, preparedness is not prediction. Action in the present based on ‘preparedness’ relies on a metric distinct from both the accuracy of prognostication and the authority of information. What this metric is needs further specification.
The idea of “pandemic” is a creation, a claim, to which many experts play a role. By experts I mean epidemiologists, the WHO, and a lot of actors from the health sector, etc. Whatever pandemic may strike a region on earth next time, we can expect the same claims-making by experts. The problem with claim-making is that it changes, sometimes, on a day to day basis, which only creates and adds to the confusions of the day. The reliance on metrics (its prevalence, for example) is always reactive. Pandemics are “man-made” and therefore always difficult to predict, especially that behavior is so variable even on the village level. ‘Preemptive measures,” e.g. preparations, can accomplish only so much because pandemics are always due to new strains. Added to this is the “scare” effect that experts purvey, take H1N1 for example. The panic over it was in large measure due to the claims by experts, none of which was as “correct’ as they claimed them to be.