How the misuse of science compounded South Africa’s Covid crisis: Repeated claims that the country was “following the science” really meant it was following a particular science followed by some Western scientists
— which was greeted with horror elsewhere because it implied that many would have to die but was a consensus view in South Africa’s debate.
I argue in the book that Covid-19 is among the media’s most shameful moments – it treated scientists much as media in totalitarian countries treat government leaders. Internationally, the pandemic disturbed the view which divides the planet into first and third worlds, the first an island of competence and health in a sea of third world sickness and savagery. The countries which did least to protect people were in the first, not the third.
When the scientists said no country had avoided a severe epidemic, they meant no country they noticed – no first world country. When they said South Africa was doomed to suffer, they assumed that the third world majority would be too ignorant to protect themselves – and that only first world medicine would work but that the country did not have enough of it. The rest of the first world see South Africa in the same way.
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