THE RACIALISED DISCOURSE SURROUNDING CORONAVIRUS

In conversation with Abbie Fairclough and Charlotte Evans, Dr. Christos Lynteris discusses discourses of race, securitisation, and the notion of existential threat that the novel Coronavirus may pose.

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Dr Lynteris is a medical anthropologist, specialising in the social and historical dimensions of disease epidemics and zoonosis: animal to human infection. He completed his Undergraduate and Postgraduate study at the University of St. Andrews, with a PhD on the anthropology of public health and the epidemiological restructuring of China after the SARS outbreak in 2003. His focus then shifted to the bubonic plague, with Postdoctoral study at the University of Cambridge focusing on how people in Mongolia and South Siberia protected themselves from the plague and a European Research Council Starting Grant project on the visual representations of the third plague pandemic. He joined St Andrews’s Department of Social Anthropology in 2017, and his current 5-year project, funded by the Wellcome Trust, is on the global war against rats and the epistemic emergence of zoonosis. We meet Dr Lynteris at a time when zoonotic disease is a very topical issue - as COVID-19 sweeps the globe.

With the speed at which the COVID-19 outbreak is changing our social landscape, it is worth mentioning the temporal context of this interview and its write up. The interview was conducted on the 4th of March, when the outbreak of COVID-19 was very much in the public consciousness but had not yet reached pandemic proportions. This was also prior to lockdown measures being implemented in the UK. It was written up in the weeks following, up until its last revision on the 7th April.

Dr Lynteris began by explaining that his work focused on infectious zoonotic epidemics including research in China alongside the Centre for Disease Control (CDC), which emerged after the SARS outbreak. It is unsurprising that media such as the New York Times, have reached out to Dr Lynteris for his expertise during this present Coronavirus pandemic. Dr Lynteris’ present project on the “epistemological building blocks” for understanding zoonotic diseases, explores the ways in which a disease vector can become a ‘zoonotic villain’ in the public eye. His project takes the “global war against the rat” as the foundation on which epidemiological reasoning (the way we think about epidemics) developed. He referred to the rat as a “charismatic zoonotic villain which preoccupied the entire globe” in the first half of the 20th Century, showing how public perceptions of disease vectors can have societal, even global, implications. “The moment when they realised that rats spread plague and other diseases. Everyone became obsessed with rats. So across the globe there was the biggest campaign against any animal vector we’ve ever known. And that contributed to the basic understandings, the very language of zoonotic diseases we have today”.

When it comes to COVID-19 however, the ‘zoonotic villain’ is not so clear. As Dr Lynteris pointed out, although the genome of the disease suggests that it is a zoonotic disease, the main reservoir of COVID-19 is uncertain (though bats are the likely culprit). On top of this, the intermediary host is, as of yet, undetermined. This ongoing search for the animal vector responsible comes at an opportune, albeit unfortunate, time as Lynteris’ recently published book ‘Framing Animals as Epidemic Villains: Histories of Non-Human Disease Vectors’ covers this phenomenon in great detail [1].

Despite the fact that little has been scientifically proven about the origin of this disease, many popular media platforms have strongly implicated Wuhan’s ‘wet markets’ as the location in which the virus was contracted. We asked Dr Lynteris if the scientific community share this assumption. “Well this is no longer the assumption. The latest scientific data show that the outbreak started outside in a different place, not in the market,” he told us. “The fact that we have found the virus in the wet market doesn't mean that it emerged there...So the problem here is that we expect wet markets to be these incubators of disease emergence so that we immediately look at them to find it and that blinds us to all other possibilities.” The particular market referenced here is the Huanan Seafood and Wholesale market, which was initially implicated as the site of origin of the disease. It was later determined however that it was likely only a location in which the virus was spread between humans rather than being the original source [2].

So why have various media fixated on the idea that the COVID-19 outbreak originated in Wuhan’s wet markets? Dr Lynteris explained, “The media love wet markets because they can exoticise them, they can orientalise them...I mean ‘wet markets’ is in itself a very problematic term because it encompasses so many things that it’s actually meaningless. The term ‘wet market’ encompasses anything from a market where freshly butchered meat is sold...to markets of poached wild animals.”

Not only is the term ‘wet market’ homogenising to the point of being effectively meaningless, but the association of these markets with disease and uncleanliness is inaccurate. As Dr Lynteris clarified, “In my field work with the China CDC, we inspected wet markets all the time and these are perfectly legitimate and legal markets.” He went on to describe how markets are frequently inspected and sanitised with laws, regulations and sanitary officers monitoring the process. “It’s not marginal, illegal, shady...as it’s portrayed in the West. It’s THE market, it’s the normal market.” In fact, in cities such as Shanghai, he mentioned, lower and middle classes rely on these markets to provide up to 60% of their weekly groceries [3].

Lynteris continued on to say that it is of course true that illegal, or less well monitored activities may take place on the margins of these markets but that this is true of any country as vast as China. He also criticised certain journalists’ claims of “exotic animals being sold and eaten in China”. Using the example of frogs, he dryly joked, “well probably the same journalist goes to France and eats frog legs and pays a fortune for them but when it’s in China then it’s a problem.” This type of xenophobic trope, Dr Lynteris says, has been pervasive since the 19th century and is “one of the constitutive elements of xenophobia.” Xenophobia like this, he says, is incredibly normalised in the West.

Uncertainty is present not only in the search for the origin of the virus, but also in the process of developing appropriate responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. International border controls and securitisation have been high up on the priorities of many states in their attempts to quell the spread of the virus, but is this response an effective one? The usual method of border checks involves the use of thermal cameras to check passengers for fever symptoms. With many infected people showing little to no symptoms of fever, Dr Lynteris doubts the effectiveness of these checks which he called “notoriously inaccurate”. Not only do they miss asymptomatic infected people, but they also produce many false positives, with individuals displaying fever symptoms for reasons separate from the novel Coronavirus.

He critiqued this biosecurity model of preparedness further, saying, “What is the point of overstretching a system which needs to dedicate its resources to containing this virus? You have a system with limited resources. Where are you going to allocate them? You can allocate them at the borders where they’re going to produce many false positives and miss most of the cases, creating a false sense of security and stretching your resources, or you can place these resources in primary health care. What do we really need?...Well, always the answer is we need more nurses and doctors.”

On the other hand, Dr Lynteris commended the community containment measures which have been seen across the globe, “Ultimately in all cases of epidemics and pandemics, we rely on quarantine and isolation. These are the big tools we have. They’re 15th century tools, they have nothing to do, per se, with bacteriology or modern understandings of medicine. These are the inheritance of pre-bacteriological understandings of disease and yet they have adapted to bacteriological understandings and virological understandings of disease and they’re very efficient. They’re the only things that are efficient in the absence of vaccinations or actual cures, which we have neither for this disease.”

The question is, how far you take this. When we spoke to Dr Lynteris, Wuhan was still in lockdown but the UK had yet to impose lockdown measures, and the outbreak had not yet been declared a pandemic. “When do you decide that people have to lockdown, like they did in China? Frankly, the reason that this disease, this outbreak, has not yet taken pandemic proportions is because China took these draconian measures.” Dr Lynteris said that he believed that the Chinese lockdown was “absolutely necessary” given the timing of Chinese New Year generating mass internal travel. In a time of crisis, complicated questions arise surrounding the value of democracy and the simultaneous requisite for emergency powers to be implemented. The question of which actions are appropriate to take, is always context dependent. Dr Lynteris explained how China had the political, logistical, and ideological capacity to act as they did, “They had the power to say, ‘No, we’re locking down’.” This power also enabled the state to enforce closures on certain companies and factories, and redirect industries to ensure basic provisions were met. Ideologically, “the capacity of a police state where if you didn’t do that, there were enormous penalties of imprisonment” ensured conformity. But Dr Lynteris also warned against being so simplistic. “We must realise that there is a hegemonic capacity as well, there was a degree of consensus, that people did believe that this is the best way. It’s a combination of people being afraid to do otherwise and people believing”.

Moving the discussion on from governance of the response, to the media reaction, we asked Dr Lynteris if he thought that the general discourse surrounding Coronavirus was over-sensationalised, or whether it was appropriate to the level of risk. He sighed, stating that the media went from ignoring it, “to freaking out”. We added that some of the headlines we had seen were quite extreme - racialised and apocalyptic: “That’s kind of the problem of the media”. He mentioned “unbelievably bad stories”, conspiracy theories, rife with xenophobia. On the other hand, he noted that some media have shown a “genuine interest in engaging with social scientists”. Dr Lynteris himself was facing the tough deadlines and sleepless nights involved with meeting article or interview requests. He works to ensure that “critical, social-scientific approaches” also reach the public.

We asked him whether the scientific community has a responsibility in controlling that reaction to the epidemic and disproving some of those media suggestions; he believes so. “When we spot these inaccuracies or fake news or complete misreadings of a situation, I think we have the responsibility to intervene, absolutely. If not, we’re failing in our vocation, in our duties, in everything”. He added that working to combat stigmatisation is one of the most important areas within this.

Dr Lynteris says that stigmatisation “has been a side effect of epidemic containment and control throughout history”. The WHO stresses that we must ensure that policies do not lead to stigmatisation, which Dr Lynteris called “an epidemic in itself”. But alongside these perennial reactions, he referred to the “horrible new phenomenon of people calling people of Asian origin ‘viruses’”. This “metonymic operation” has become widespread across the Western world, and Dr Lynteris believes it is the first time that stigmatisation has taken this form - identifying people of a certain race as the virus itself.

Finally, we looked at two different geographical scales of the crisis, asking Dr. Lynteris to what extent he thought that the novel Coronavirus was a significant threat to us here in the UK, or an ‘existential risk’ to humanity. “Existential risk is one of my favourite things!” Dr Lynteris quipped before going on to say more sternly, “of course it’s a risk to the UK and we’re going to see this in the coming weeks. It depends how the UK handles it”. He was also certain that COVID-19 would come to St Andrews: “We’re not an island… It’s likely to go anywhere where there are a lot of people travelling and visiting, and university towns are very active and very cosmopolitan places, which is a great thing, but of course this means that it’s likely”. At the time of writing, Dr Lynteris’ prediction has already come true; on the 7th April the last recorded number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the UK reached over 55,000 [4], and the first positive case was confirmed in St Andrews on the 13th March [5].

However, Dr. Lynteris explained that what is more important is how communities respond to prevent inter-community transmission. In headline news, the British Government provided advice on hygiene and social distancing, but their policy of ‘herd immunity’ came into question by political leaders and the WHO and was later dismissed. Since then, lockdown measures have been imposed however the question still remains: should a harder line be taken to prevent community transmission? With great uncertainty, and the crisis unfolding so rapidly, the answers to such politically charged questions will only be visible in the months to come.

Dr Lynteris ended by returning to existential risk, bringing out ‘Human Extinction and the Pandemic Imaginary [6]’ - “a timely publication again unfortunately”. Referring to COVID-19, he said that “rather than asking whether this is an existential risk, the more interesting question is to ask how this plays into this imagination of pandemics as leading, or potentially leading to human extinction”. We asked whether he thought that this remained an imaginary, or was becoming a genuine real threat, to which he replied: “I don’t think that imaginaries are not real… they always rely on something of reality.”

Returning to a historical dimension of disease, Dr. Lynteris explained that “of course pandemics can lead to population collapses”, but rather than questioning the possibility of societal collapse, Dr Lynteris is questioning “how this is informing the way in which we think of ourselves as humans and our relation to the world.”

He went on to expand on this saying, “Most of the stories we tell ourselves about pandemics and the end of the world are not really the scientific stories, which are very complex”. Instead, “They’re very simplified stories... which portray an end of the world which is very problematic because it always shows a virus coming from the non-Western world, usually from a jungle or from the ‘wilderness’”. These representations of disease lead to “a re-tropicalisation of the world [where] nature is waiting for this virus to liberate itself from humanity”. Dr. Lynteris wondered why we imagine this future fate to be the case. Perhaps because “the only way in which we imagine humanity is a humanity which is in a relation of mastery to nature. We cannot imagine humans coexisting with the natural world in any other way other than being masters of it… all these anxieties, the existential risk anxieties, are because our imagination of the pandemic end of the world is a world where we will have lost mastery of the world. And this really frightens us, and I think we really need to start dealing with this anxiety”.

Having thanked him for a fascinating interview, we left Dr Lynteris’ office with plenty of food for thought; intrigued by the ethical, political, geographical, and existential questions that arose from the discussion, and concerned for the fate of our own world. For the mutual benefit of people and planet, humanity needs to find “other ways of interacting with a non-human world other than domination and mastery”.

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[1] Lynteris, C. (2019). Framing Animals as Epidemic Villains: Histories of Non-Human Disease Vectors. London: Palgrave MacMillan. [2] Huang, C. et al. (2020). Clinical features of patients infected with 2019 novel coronavirus in Wuhan, China. The Lancet. 395(10223). pp.497-506. [3] Maruyama, M., Wu, L., and Huang, L. (2016) The modernization of fresh food retailing in China: The role of consumers. Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services. 30. pp.33-39. [4] Clarke, S., and Gutiérrez, P., (2020). “Coronavirus UK: how many confirmed cases are in your area?”, The Guardian. [Online] Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/07/coronavirus-uk-how-many-confirmed-cases-are-in-your-area-covid-19-map (Accessed 7 April 2020). [5] BBC (2020). “St Andrews confirms case of Covid-19”, BBC News, Scotland. [Online] Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-51872202 (Accessed 16 March 2020). [6] Lynteris, C. (2020) Human extinction and the pandemic imaginary. New York: Routledge.