In December 31, 2019, the WHO China office heard the first reports of a previously-unknown virus behind a number of pneumonia cases in Wuhan.Following this development, United States Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have asserted that Coronaviruses are “a large family of viruses that are common in people and many different species of animals, including camels, cattle, cats, and bats.
A main narrative then alluded to the possibility that the new virus could have originated from a Wuhan seafood market, where wild animals, including marmots, birds, rabbits, bats and snakes, were traded illegally.
This has highlighted the distance between fiction and reality.However, a number of China politics observers and Western military officials have claimed a strong link between Coronavirus and recent research conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Some have argued Coronavirus is one thing and the “dark secrets”, being developed in biowarfare labs around the world, are quite another.
Meanwhile, Since 2009, there have been five declarations of international public health emergencies: the swine flu pandemic in 2009, a polio outbreak in 2014, the Western Africa Ebola outbreak in 2014; the Zika virus outbreak in 2015 and another Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2019. Between 2011 and 2018, WHO detected 1,483 epidemic events in 172 countries. And of course the panic have helped sell alarmist signal.
At the age of fast Internet and social media, the world opinion has consumed a variety of virus misinformation and disinformation and internalized deep fear and anxiety.
There have been allegations about the existence of ‘secret labs’, ‘government plots’, and implicit ‘manipulation’ of the virus in the U.S.-China geo-economic competition. So far, two dominant narratives have circulated the globe: China ‘manufactured’ the virus, and the United States ‘started’ the outbreak deliberately. Sure, this is definitely a conspiracy error of origin, like one of my Professor would say.
As an uncontrollable cross-border pandemic, Coronavirus is a new harrowing reminder of the fragility of human life; and can be interpreted as the most democratic super disease of our time, with no discrimination on the basis of any particular race, geography, political ideology, wealth, or degree of development or underdevelopment. It spares neither leave nor remain, neither imams nor pastors, Chinese doctor, and respects no national border.
This further deduced that the dominant neoliberal system is forcibly getting a reality check through a tiny virus. Arguing this within a psychological profiling, human dimension and precedency of society before economy and profit in reconstructing a pervasive social democratic system, as a driver of neoliberalism and intensification of globalism.
Howbeit, Coronavirus has imposed a de facto trickle-down-effect on the famous negative shift of economic entanglements. Imagine the world shutting down economic hub in an effort to halt the spread of Coronavirus.
No doubt, the spread of Coronavirus, or Covid-19, has brought the world to it kneel.
However, the new pandemic has revealed the most cynical aspects of neoliberalism in a strategic competition of the global powers(U.S. and China in perspective).A more focus on ‘Capitalism versus Coronavirus’ debate, would help illustrate neoliberal model of ill-suited and ill-equipped global world market paraded in neoliberal so-called theory with devastating effect of global testing virus pandemic. It is no rhetoric that we are going down scrambling, with this virus spreading in a pandemic proportion.
In Africa and particularly in Nigeria, 2020 will go into Guinness book of history as a year that has exposed not only a public health failure, but has also indicated an era of political grandstanding and cluelessness. A year that exposes our political leaders and their incapacitation, some religious leaders with their loves of money and also has place some good leaders on the pedestrian of posterity.
Conversely, the insinuation of dualities circulating in the public sphere worldwide that Coronavirus a ‘nature-made’ or ‘man-made’ pandemic? remain under a scientific validation whether the truth from various conspiratorial assumptions about a deliberate causality and possible manipulation of the virus is as a result of geo-strategic strive in the face of economic desperation is a fact grounded in a research fecundity.
– Martins Mejabi, a journalist, writes from Kogi State.
