The C-word

Covid as the elephant in the room Ben Brooker

Dark Winter: An insider’s guide to pandemics and biosecurity

by Raina MacIntyre NewSouth

$32.99 pb, 262 pp

In the months leading up to the 2022 federal election, as the two major parties duked it out over the cost of living, integrity, and the climate crisis, one issue barely rated a mention amid the barrage of leaders’ debates, press conferences, and doorstops: the Covid-19 pandemic. Having raged in Australia for more than two years, resulting in once-in-a-generation disruption to daily life, including the world’s longest lockdown, the virus had become all but untouchable on both sides of the political divide. Labor and the Coalition obviously reasoned that the best position on Covid electorally was not to have a position at all. Neither party articulated a strategy to manage the virus, or its ever-expanding roll-call of variants, into the future. For the most part, journalists –more interested it seemed in the then Opposition leader’s ‘gaffes’ – could not bring themselves to mention the C-word either.

In Dark Winter, epidemiologist and biosecurity expert Raina MacIntyre forcefully reminds us of the reality the 2022 campaign trail assiduously ignored – most pointedly, that, while we have been repeatedly told the pandemic is over, the number of those dying from Covid is equivalent to a 737 crashing once a week. As MacIntyre points out, if plane crashes were producing as many fatalities, it would be frontpage news.

MacIntyre became a familiar face to Australians during the height of the pandemic, comparable perhaps only to Norman Swan in terms of her visibility as an expert commentator on the pandemic. Her preference for straight talking – The Sydney Morning Herald once memorably dubbed her the ‘cautious coronavirus communicator’ – carries over into this book, her first. A palpable anger permeates its pages, which give expansive shape to MacIntyre’s long-held view that the science of the pandemic has been politicised by ideologues and corrupted by commentators unwilling to address the ‘cascading failures’ of Australia’s response to the virus.

These, as Dark Winter makes clear, are many and varied. Readers will most likely not have forgotten the Morrison government’s blasé approach to vaccine procurement (‘It’s not a race’), but MacIntyre’s chief targets are not politicians but rather the functionaries – as well as members of her own profession –tasked with pandemic management. She accuses ‘non-experts’ of fabricating the idea of suppression, and takes to task the medical bodies which promoted ‘hygiene theatre’ – hand-washing and physical distancing – over face masks, which are far more effective against airborne disease (extraordinarily, it took the

World Health Organization two years to declare that Covid was transmitted through the air). Behind what MacIntyre damningly calls a ‘switch from public health to public disease’, she detects personal greed and the rewards which flow from the uncritical parroting of the official line.

This is the line that, much to MacIntyre’s chagrin, has insisted that the origins of Covid are natural rather than unnatural, a zoonotic pathogen emanating from a seafood wet market in Wuhan, China in late December 2019. Contrary to the majority view within the scientific community, MacIntyre argues that we should remain agnostic on the question of Covid’s origins, and that the possibility of an earlier leak from a partly US-funded Wuhan virology lab specialising in coronaviruses cannot be ruled out. While MacIntyre writes that, akin to previous outbreaks, we may not know for sure how or where Covid first emerged for many years, she corrals an impressive amount of evidence in favour of the ‘lab leak’ theory.

In this respect, while the book’s subtitle informs us that it is an ‘insider’s guide’ – I would argue it is both a work of history and a polemic too – MacIntyre is nothing if not a maverick, pointedly at odds with what she sees as a virology field innately biased towards natural explanations of pandemics. In one vivid illustration, she recounts the story of an outbreak of influenza H1N1, ‘Russian flu’, in 1977. While scientists, including those in the West, reported the pandemic as having occurred naturally, it was much later found out to have been caused by a lab accident or an escape from a live vaccine.

There are those who will find fault with MacIntyre’s unconventional account of Covid’s possible origins. Certainly, she makes it harder to defend herself against the charge of conspiracism by approvingly referencing Nikolai Petrovsky, the South Australian doctor who promoted his own unproven Covid vaccine and became something of a hero to anti-vaxxers. What she omits, however, may be more detrimental. While Dark Winter is a short book, I wondered why MacIntyre could not find room to discuss AIDS, surely one of the most significant epidemics of recent history, and one that, like Covid, became hostage to politics and ideologydriven misinformation with similarly tragic consequences.

MacIntyre spends less time discussing possible remedies to the problems she outlines than you would think a prognosis as dire as hers warrants. Nevertheless, one major implication stands out: global health authorities had better shape up lest the next pandemic – or bioterrorism event – prove even more calamitous than the last. It will take, as MacIntyre concedes, many more years for a full accounting of Covid to be made, but already apparent are a range of lessons we cannot afford to ignore. Inconsistent messaging, such as that around face masks and aerosol transmission, sows confusion and mistrust. Unnatural origins, whether rooted in error or design, should not be so easily discounted. And we cannot, as MacIntyre implores, allow political inconvenience to cloud the science. Given unnatural epidemics, bioterror threats, and inadequate biosecurity, she concludes that we are ‘utterly unprepared’. The ‘dark winter’ of the book’s title? An existential cataclysm not unlike a nuclear winter, the lethal spread of radiation replaced by a no less horrifying storm of vaccine- and drug-resistant pathogens. Under such circumstances, we might well look back on the days of Covid as positively halcyon. g