Coronavirus Criminals and Pandemic Profiteers: Accountability for Those Who Caused the Crisis
John Nichols
London and New York, NY: Verso, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-83976-425-7
pp. e194
Although many people in western countries seem to think that the coronavirus pandemic is now virtually over, given an apparent waning of the presently dominant Omicron variant, the threat remains and will do so until everyone on the planet is properly vaccinated. The threat to public health caused by minorities of the populations of developed countries is already very evident but is put in the shade by the huge number of people of countries across Africa, Central Asia and South Asia and elsewhere whose unvaccinated status makes them the potentially involuntary incubators of new strains of the virus. Omicron might be milder than Delta, albeit rather more infectious but that is no guarantee that a new variant will follow the same pattern. Governments (apart from China) are telling their people that they are just going to have to live with the disease – that is, pretend it is not there and put up with the consequences. The government of Thailand, where I live, is preparing to re-open the country to international tourism despite the country now facing its highest ever levels of infections and of deaths. There may one day be a new normal of living with the virus but we have not reached it yet.
Of course, although the virus threatens everyone equally (some are more vulnerable than others but we might any of us succumb – not to mention the scarcely understood contours of the long covid syndrome – not everywhere has been equally affected. China, for example, has suffered 4.1 deaths per million of population, while the USA has suffered 2,894. Countries which have suffered the highest relative numbers of deaths tend to fall into one or both of two categories: open countries with health systems that have been overwhelmed (including Belgium and Italy) or open countries with incompetent or predatory governments which have not properly protected their people (including the UK, languishing under the narcissistic, corrupt clown Boris Johnson and 161,130 deaths at the rate of 2,410 per million, just ahead of Russia in terms of government indifference to the needs of the people). So what is the problem in the USA? Author John Nichols is quite clear in this lucid and compelling polemic, it is the lack of accountability that has created an endemic culture of impunity. To address this, he has followed in the footsteps of Michael Foot, whose Guilty Men was intended to identify the British men who had appeased Hitler and the Nazis in the 1930s, with the lamentable results with which we are all now familiar. That means a relatively short book with chapters devoted to the deeds of individuals who have been deemed culpable. The chapters are supported by detailed notes on the sources of information relating to each one in a section that appears at the end of the text.
There are no surprises about the first people to be named and shamed: we have The Killing Presidency of Donald Trump, Mike Pence: Yes-Man of the Apocalypse and The Grounding of Jared Kushner in the first three places. They are succeeded by other known miscreants, including Mike Pompeo, Betsy de Vos, Mark Meadows and Elaine Chao. These chapters may be read as a necessary corrective (for those who still need such a thing) to the idea that putting those who have no meaningful experience of public administration and nothing to commend them other than they consider government to be the enemy into high office and expecting them to produce good results. One of the more obvious conclusions to be drawn from a global pandemic is that only decisive and coherent actions at the national and transnational level will result in the provision of large amounts of protective equipment to shield essential workers and the payments required to keep people safely at home with some income to keep them going. Trump and his chums instead looked for market solutions, thereby ensuring that states and agencies would compete with each other for scarce resources which could have been manufactured and distributed at the national level. The Johnson regime in the UK tried something similar by handing out contracts for the provision of protective equipment and test and trace systems to people and companies with no experience of doing anything similar in the past and nothing to commend them other than a personal relationship with someone influential in the Conservative party (they didn’t even have to be Russian, unlike the donors that usually support it). The wholly predictable result was the waste of billions of pounds on unusable equipment or items that were never delivered. More than four billion pounds has already been written off by the Treasury and it is likely that the names of the guilty will be covered up and attempts to extract the truth will be like attempting to squeeze blood out of a stone. It is no surprise that the only successful element of the whole campaign, the vaccination programme, succeeded because it was entrusted to the public sector NHS, using vaccines created by government universities and their networks (Pfizer, meanwhile, received an initial payment of nearly US$2 billion to find a cure and has been spectacularly coining it subsequently).
There are many ways by which people have found their ways into this rogues’ gallery: incompetence; utter indifference to other people; childish rejection of science and being thoroughly rotten are some of them but that is not an exhaustive list. Nichols ranges widely and provides evidence to support all of his claims. It is in the nature of a polemic to be energetic and shrill in nature and there is not much room for light and shade here. He does not have Foot’s facility with language but makes up for it in outrage. Whether it will actually do any good in holding those responsible to account is debatable: just over one year ago the whole world witnessed an armed mob of thugs storming the Capitol in Washington DC at the behest of the then president and his lies about the election – yet most Americans seem to deny that it ever happened or that, if it did, it was justified. Now we have moved on to the next crisis and, it will be pronounced, now is not the time for politics.
John Walsh, Krirk University, March 2022
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