---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Patrice Riemens <[email protected]> Date: Fri, Sep 26, 2014 at 5:17 AM Subject: [Fwd: <nettime> Guillaume Lachenal: Ebola: a brilliantly scripted disaster movie] To: Michel Bauwens <[email protected]> Cc: [email protected], [email protected] Speaking of translations ... Good Night/ good Morning p+5D! ---------------------------- Original Message ---------------------------- Subject: <nettime> Guillaume Lachenal: Ebola: a brilliantly scripted disaster movie From: "Patrice Riemens" <[email protected]> Date: Wed, September 24, 2014 19:09 To: [email protected] -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Original (French) to: http://www.liberation.fr/monde/2014/09/18/chronique-d-un-film-catastrophe-bi... Ebola: a brilliantly scripted disaster movie by Guillaume Lachenal "It is useless to laboriously interpret disaster movies in terms of their relation to an "objective" social crisis or even to an "objective" phantasm of disaster. It is in another sense that it must be said that it is the social itself that, in contemporary discourse, is organized along the lines of a disaster-movie script." wrote Jean Baudrillard in 1976. Apocalyptic movies have for some time been the object of analysis in serious publications, as they are the mirror of our societies' angst in the face of pandemics. But the Ebola epidemic ravaging West Africa calls for a more radical critique. The current crisis is not some nightmare taking place under our very eyes "just like in a disaster movie". It is not an anomaly, nor an accident taking health authorities by surprise; it is also not, to use development gobbledygook, an organizational, financial, and political 'challenge' the international community needs to rise up to. The exact reverse needs to be told in no uncertain terms: the Ebola crisis is the outcome of 20 years of political choices and deliberate policies. It is a man-made catastrophe, not only through the intentional hollowing out of African primary health care systems thanks to neo-liberal reforms (aka 'structural adjustments' -tr), but also because of the willful mobilization of all private and public health actors towards the advent of a new era of "Global Health". This mobilization, effective since 2005, has been characterized by an unheard of increase in health-directed funding for countries in the global South, which had made Africa its number one priority - for the sake of world-wide sanitary security. The glorious times of the big narrative are back: success stories about the eradication of diseases, glossy brochures with smiling children, Bill Gates and Big Pharma joining hands on the world stage are at the order of the day. We have entered a new era where nifty smartphone applications, public-private partnerships, and 'sustainable innovation' are going to work out their magic on African health issues, one at a time. Gone from the picture are the decrepit primary health centers, the continuous power outages, and depleted stocks of medicines. The world of Global Health shines like an advertisement for beauty products. The disaster unfolding under our eyes is the direct result of these security-oriented, spectacle-driven, scripted health policies, which have all ben implemented at the expense of the African health systems and the people working in them. " Pandemic Preparedness" has been the leading principle in world health, both in the Global North and the Global South since the SARS and avian flu crisis of 2003-2005. And in the slipstream of US post-September 11 mobilization, the grants earmarked for 'bio-terrorism' et 'emerging diseases' research - by definition, research on not yet existing pathogenic agents - have all but wiped out public research funding for 'ordinary' health issues, and this was especially the case during the Bush presidency. Contrarily to what has been written, Ebola has never been a neglected subject - rather the reverse: ever since the first outbreak in 1976, the virus has been knock-out argument to buttress fundamental virological research ( building high-security labs in particular, during the early eighties) while being used to talk down preventive health policies and other 'old school' social approaches. No tender, no press release on 'bio-security' would fail to mention the Ebola virus, so potent it is, and that even before the current outbreak, to conjure up the spectre of an emerging threat. For the past twenty years Ebola, together with SARS, smallpox, and the avian flu has been the true raison d'etre of governmental pandemic preparedness programs. With full-size simulated emergency drills, guarded godowns filled with surgical masks and gloves, preparedness was the political parole of the new millenium, partially inherited from the cold war military programs. The H1N1 flu pandemic of 2009 saw it come to its own, big time - indeed, one can say that never has the world been so well 'prepared'. Africa has not stayed in the margin of these endeavors. Fired up by the WHO and the American CDC (Centre for Disease Control), African state joined enthusiastically the 'preparedness' drive. And the continent did not lack experts to lead the initiative: in several African countries the 'search for emerging viruses' employs scores of international researchers and their local partners. Considerable progress has been made over the past years regarding knowledge about pathogens, among them Ebola and HIV, originating in animals such as bats and big apes. Just as in Europe did the threat of fresh pandemics, and especially flu-related ones, stimulate the set-up of preparedness action plans, all starting with the obligatory "mock-up practice drills": scripted role-plays intended to test the readiness of authorities - playing their own role - in the face of a (virtual) pandemic. All well, but for the fact that in context of the actual situation in African countries, the word 'simulation' must be taken in a very literal sense indeed. Gathering in a conference room, ministers and WHO experts plot virtual interventions, whether of the military, police, or sanitary kind - with all participants knowing full well that these are devoid of any real bearing _on the ground_ due to the woeful lack of equipment, troops, police personnel, and medical infrastructure. The very idea of _preparedness_ fulfills itself in the realm of the absurd: public health boiling down to a simulated war against an imagined threat. Africa is getting ready as never before, it does nothing else than that, so to speak. Yet another jaded tale - save that these pandemic preparedness exercises siphon off a major part of the African health authorities' energies and resources, even as these are confronted with far more urgent sanitary emergencies. Thanks to Wikileaks, we now know that the US Embassy in Sierra Leone was already worrying about this state of affairs in 2007. But the main problem with these simulation exercises is that they represent, in condensed and unadulterated form the new paradigm of Global Health, Africa style: a type of intervention where real action on real diseases has become secondary to vast, assumptive and speculative 'viral surveillance' programs. A good example of the latter is provided by the Californian 'virus hunter' Nathan Wolfe and his initiative on 'preventive treatment' of HIV, or his 'mobile health' projects whereby smartphones are supposed to abolish distances and make good for the lack of medical personnel and other failings of African health systems. The 'real economy', to borrow a term from the financial world, stands only in distant connection with the, symbolic, but also monetary, profits brought into play by the largely virtual interventions in the realm of Global Health. As the 2014 Ebola epidemic has by now killed almost as many people as September 11 it does indeed look like a crisis: namely the blowout of a speculative bubble. "Just as in a disaster movie", to quote Baudrillard again, reality and fiction have ended up in a feedback loop. This because pandemic preparedness has raised the _script_ and the _(computer) game_ to the level of a full-fledged political procedure, a method to 'organize the social', marginalizing the prevention-based approaches of 'old school' public health policies, paving the way in the process for fresh outbreaks of 'old' epidemics such as cholera (25.000 African cases in 2013 !). The advent of 'Global Health' is nothing but the last phase of a destructive historical sequence inducted by structural adjustment policies in the 1990s transforming African (public) hospital wards into a Mad Max style rust belt of squalid slums. But it marks also the triumph of _storytelling_ blossoming into a full-fledged discipline, a crucial competence, maybe even the only legit one left in the world of Global Health. The superstars of the fight against future pandemics like the US biologist Nathan Wolfe have completely blurred the line between fiction and reality, public health action and cash machines: Dr Wolfe has built his career on emerging viruses in Cameroon (Ebola among them), and then embarked on a 10 years stint of television appearances, plugging his surveillance project of African pathogens. That his efforts did not in anyway translate into substantial advances on the ground was inconsequential to him obtaining a six-digit advance on his latest book "The Viral Storm'. Wolfe morphed his research team into a start-up, financed among others by the Google Foundation dishing out $ 1m for every new virus identified. His seductively scripted TED conferences overwhelm his audiences and play in a loop on YouTube. He was also scientific advisor for the zombie film 'I am a Legend'. His little company Metabiota Inc. naturally took up pole position in the Ebola campaign. On the ground by last May, the start-up's virologists were true to their promise to save the world, with marching orders from the US Department of Defense to organize Sierra Leone's _'preparedness'_ at the moment the epidemic was devastating neighboring Guinea. _A complete success story_, Sierra Leone is now uniquely prepared"_ his team wrote on May 12. By now we know how that particular movie did end. Guillaume Lachenal is assistant professor at Paris-Diderot University and the Paris School of Political Sciences. He lectures on "Global Health in Africa, Critical perspectives". -------------- Q&D translated by yrs truly Amsterdam September 23, 2014 # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [email protected] -- Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net <http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/