Opinion Five years after Covid, it is important to ask difficult questions about how we handled the crisis
Truth has been the biggest casualty of the past five years, powered by the distortion or denial of facts and accompanied by the decline of trust in institutions
The pandemic exposed the brittle and polarised character of our own society, and of countries around the world, amplifying its worst features when faced with an existential threat (Archive) 
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Last month marked the fifth anniversary of the day when New Delhi announced the most stringent lockdown in the world, giving just four hours to over a billion people to prepare to be trapped in their homes for at least three weeks. I will never forget that evening. It was my first encounter with police brutality as I was lathi-charged along with dozens of fellow villagers as we scampered to buy groceries in the middle of the night, a brutal reward for having been patriotic citizens who obeyed our leaders’ exhortations to not hoard food. And I bore witness, in the weeks that followed, to the tragedy of millions of the urban poor, who were left without work or shelter and had to trudge on foot for days to reach their homes in distant villages. How can we ever forget those images or the harrowing devastation which swept the country the following year?
Five years later, what are the lessons we can draw from the local, national and global response to the pandemic? The pandemic exposed the brittle and polarised character of our own society, and of countries around the world, amplifying its worst features when faced with an existential threat. The results, in hindsight, were predictable. Those who wielded historic power in society, from the wealthy to politicians, from medical practitioners to scientists, from global institutions to the media, all acted in ways which fell well short of what our communities were entitled to expect. We were offered ideology instead of science. We endured hubris instead of humility. At a time when enormous uncertainties prevailed, inequities were accelerated as solidarity with the weakest, already much eroded after half a century of neo-liberal economic policies, faded altogether.
In the end, perhaps the biggest casualty of all was truth itself.
Although truth is often viewed as the objective interpretation of facts, the tension between them is as old as humanity. Still, there is no denying that this tension has been greatly catalysed by the confluence of the smartphone and social media. While the expression of truth requires thoughtful reflection, analysis and confirmation of facts, social media posts need nothing more than an impulsive, emotionally-charged reaction that could be issued in an instant and spread without any filter. The pandemic offered fertile ground to accelerate this growing rupture between truth and facts.
Thanks to the billions of dollars spent on investigating the origins of the pandemic, its impact on populations and the effectiveness of various strategies to control it, there are not only countless facts but equally, divergent versions of the truth to interpret these facts. This leads to even more questions that remain unanswered. Consider just a few of them. Could less restrictive measures like masking and staying at home when you had the infection have been just as effective as a total lockdown? Did we need to spray all items, even human beings, with disinfectant? Did we need to shut schools for as long as we did, leading to the largest loss of learning in children and decline in mental health in young people ever recorded? Did vaccination stop the spread of the infection and, if not, why was it compulsory? How much money did Big Pharma and the medical profession make along the way, peddling medicines that turned out to be useless?
And perhaps the biggest questions of all: What was the origin of the virus and how many people actually died? How is it that some of the most celebrated scientists in the world jumped to conclude that the virus emerged from the wild just months into the pandemic, while, five years later, every investigation has concluded that we don’t know its origin? If anything, it now appears that the consensus is shifting to an accidental lab leak, which, if it was ever confirmed (a remote possibility given the assiduous clean-up of the potential crime scene in Wuhan), would surely prove to be the deadliest cover-up in history.
How many people died in India? Given that the estimates of the government and those of independent scientists vary up to eightfold, and there is no reliable mortality data for the deadliest year of the pandemic, will we ever know the truth?
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Truth is increasingly fluid, and the line between truth and lies is becoming ever more amorphous, with ideology and emotions seeming to carry more weight than facts. While it may not be surprising that policy making is only occasionally guided by facts, science, which claims to put facts at the heart of its mission, often betrays its ideological moorings too. For example, I recall being warned, during the early days of the pandemic, by colleagues in the academy to quieten my advocacy against school closures and lockdowns to minimise the risk of appearing to side with the anti-science brigade. The influence of ideology on how a fact is interpreted or different facts presented to address the same question, has now become the norm for a whole range of actors — the government, civil society, pharma, healthcare providers, scientists and the media.
Truth, then, has been the biggest casualty of the past five years, powered by the distortion or denial of facts and accompanied by the decline of trust in the institutions that people rely on to tell the truth. In its place, propaganda, rumour, myths and misinformation have taken hold of the collective imagination. While the pandemic today seems like a passé topic that most prefer not to think about, it is important not to forget that people were dying by the hundreds of thousands just a few years ago. Moreover, the pandemic’s enduring legacy, the inexorable decline of truth and trust, continues to dominate our lives, grievously wounding our humanity and, arguably, the very idea of democracy.
(The writer is Paul Farmer Professor of Global Health at Harvard Medical School)
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