Pandemicity, COVID-19 and the limits of public health ‘science’

[...]if one accepts that the boundaries between disease outbreaks and their political economic determinants/sequelae are blurred,3 the same question should also be asked of other ‘expert’ modelers, economists in particular. When it comes to forecasting epidemic trends, however, their contributions—from specious metrics4 like the 2019 Global Health Security Index5 to kaleidoscopic computational models of communicable disease transmission—have limited predictive power (as experience in global health has repeatedly shown). During the 2013–2016, Ebola virus outbreak in West Africa, modelers devised a dizzying array of forecasts,6 ranging from the WHO’s supposition early on that the outbreak would be contained at a few hundred cases to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s estimate of up to 1.4 million cases by January 2015.7 Interestingly, this latter model was least consistent with the observed epidemic; at the same time, however, it was claimed to be the most useful (as an advocacy tool to muster a robust international response).8 9 This is not quite what the statistician George E. P. Box had in mind when he wrote his famous dictum, ‘All models are wrong but some are useful.’10 More recently, suppositious models of the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak in the UK posited that half the country (some 34 million people) might already be infected (as of 19 March 2020)11 and that the ‘herd immunity’ approach initially adopted by the UK government was defensible.12 In the USA, health economists Bendavid and Bhattacharya upped the ante questioning whether universal quarantine measures were worth their costs to the economy.13 The duo’s neoliberal proclivities,14 coupled with this current offering in the Wall Street Journal, underscore the ideological presumptions intrinsic to any modeling exercise. For the most part, mathematical models of infectious disease transmission serve not as forecasts,24 25 but rather as a means for setting epistemic confines to the understanding of why some groups live sicker lives than others—confines that sustain predatory accumulation rather than challenge it.26 27 Similar to the role philanthropy plays in occulting ecnonomic exploitation,28 29 the modest improvements in well-being offered by the right hand of public health ‘science’ often disguise what global elites and their looting machines30 have expropriated with the left.31 That being the case, the field is in clear need of decolonising; however, it is producing some potentially us