The Politics of a Pandemic Moral Panic

COVID-19. The Politics of a Pandemic Moral Panic. Barry Cooper and Marco Navarro-Genie. Winnipeg: Frontier Centre for Public Policy, 2021.

The Politics of a Pandemic Moral Panic examines moral panic and then compares Canada and Sweden in how both countries confronted the COVID crisis. The authors adopt Stanley Cohen’s definition of a moral panic which is “an issue is distorted and exaggerated in such a way as to produce an obvious over-reaction on the part of the social and political authorities.” Such a process occurs in five stages:

1) an event or perhaps a person is defined as a threat, perhaps only a vague threat, to existing values, traditions, or interests.

2) the event is simplified; and presented in the mass (and now social) media in a stereotypical way.

3) moral barricades are manned by editors, politicians, experts, and other right-thinking people and socially authorized knowers.

4) ways of coping with disturbances are developed

5) eventually the public profile of the disturbance, event, individual, etc. declines and is forgotten or is retained as a memory and as a diffuse or potential threat.

The chief emotion associated with a moral panic is fear.

Cooper and Navarro-Genie begin by examining competing accounts of the origins of COVID-19, the wet market and the virology laboratory, and then meticulously record how is more probable it emerged from the laboratory than in nature. Either way the virus came from China. However, the WHO downplayed the Chinese origin for fear of being accused of racist, or, more likely, because Chinese influence in the WHO. The reluctance of political leaders and public health experts to place the origin of COVID in China contributed to a sense of moral panic, making the threat vague rather than concrete.

Cooper and Navarro-Genie then recount how moral entrepreneurs, like Neil M. Ferguson of Imperial College whose computer models predicted millions of deaths if action were not taken to prevent the spread of the virus. However, not only Ferguson refused to make available original source code of his model but his earlier predictions were gross exaggerations, e.g., 150,000 deaths from mad-cow disease in 2002 when only 2,704 died. These and other moral entrepreneurs essentially turned running the country of Canada to public health experts, whose expertise are in public health and not in economics, politics, and other equally important aspects of society.

While the Canadian did whatever it takes to ward off the pandemic, academics, journalists, and others began to question governmental policies such as the promotion of mask-wearing or the discouraging use of hydroxychloroquine. However, public health officials asserted that their credentials gave them authority on these and other matters that often were outside their area of expertise (Cooper and Navarro-Genie labels this as “cheap talk”). It is at this moment when Canada entered the second and third phases of moral panic: simplification and moral barriers. The Canadian populace was talked down to and told what to do because the public health officials had PhD and MD after their names.

Cooper and Navarro-Genie then turn to Sweden and compare its lax policy to Canada’s. Like Canada, Sweden claimed to be “following the science” by protecting at risk-groups, mostly the elderly, keeping schools and the economy open, and avoiding a health-care collapse. Their goal was never to stop the virus from spreading nor eradicate it; rather, it rests on the epidemiological assumption that one cannot stop the propagation of a virus by closing down entire societies. Swedish medical officials explained there was no evidence that fully enforced lockdowns were effective measures against the virus and were more concerned about unintended consequences, e.g., rise in suicide, delays in medical treatment due to lock-downs.

With massive unemployment and the economy shrinking, Canada’s economic fallout did little to prevent the Trudeau government to seize more power, such giving the finance minister nearly unlimited power to tax, spend, borrow, and lend for six months. These and other actions by the government led to a decline in trust among Canadian citizens. Given that there is a debate about immunity – how effective it is, how long will it last – Cooper and Navarro-Genie think the Swedish approach makes its society less susceptible to moral panic than Canada’s.

The Politics of a Pandemic Moral Panic provides a study case comparison between Sweden and Canada on how countries confront COVID and how the different approaches can lead to a moral panic in society. Detailed in its account but able to draw the larger lessons from them, Cooper and Navarro-Genie provide the reader of how to understand the pandemic crisis which we are still in and how better to think about it in the future. In democracies, the path we take as a country continues to remain in the citizens only if they decide to exercise it.

Print