Ghosts of pandemics past

Covid-19 was the first pandemic of the post-war era that demonstrated how globalisation could be a potent vector of disease. The medical community offered established common-sense ways to tackle the disease, but it was political ideology that drove national responses — from Donald Trump’s indifference to Jacinda Adern’s brisk vigilance to Xi Jinping’s “zero-Covid” obsession. Interestingly, the political-medical controversies that flared between 2019 and 2022 — lockdowns, vaccine nationalism, anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers, super-spreader events, all paranoid terms that have entered the public lexicon —