Hoax and History

Yesterday, while reading a 2-star review of a Great Course on Amazon Prime called “Black Death” (it's been a long quarantine) I came upon this:

...since many historians actually believe it occurred, we have their "expertise" to remind us of history. It never happened, at least not in the way they said it did …

Good heavens. There are Black Death deniers? Who knew?

Googling “black death deniers” led me to what seems to be a long-standing controversy regarding exactly which virus (or other malicious microbe) was responsible for killing half of Europe. A “plague denier” is someone who believes that the devastation – which, it turns out, everyone believes in – was not caused by the bubonic plague (Y. pestis) but by something else: an Ebola-like virus, anthrax, pneumonia, or marmot plague (I'll let you go read that). Giant gerbils are also involved, as are germs from space.  I am not making this up.

It occurs to me that we have pandemic deniers, right now, while the pandemic is going on. They believe that the pandemic is a hoax. It doesn't help that the President of the United States said just this as recently as late in February (and his son said the same thing in May).

So how will the history books treat the notion that the pandemic was a hoax? How will the new world look back on us at this point? The deniers will be laughed off the stage. Right?

Although the numbers of sick and dying in the US are currently plateauing, we are focused almost entirely on opening our economy. Thousands (tens of thousands? millions?)of Americans are doing, on a daily basis, what we are clearly told is dangerous. The virus is not responding, for the most part, and so their history books will read closer to hoax than to horror. If the dire warnings do come true, well, then this history will be much different. And so many more will be dead.

The new world needs to be ready for the next pandemic – actually, it needs to be ready for this one to return, if it doesn't turn on us now. The new world will need to draw both on the fear of sickness and death, and also on the confidence that we can stand against the virus – we need to draw on our history, the story of us meeting the virus and defeating it. Without the fear, we will not take it seriously. Without the confidence, we will not make the sacrifices necessary to get most of us to the other side.

So history matters. I am afraid that, if we are not able to tell this story of great danger and great resolve, that the pandemic will drift off into history, like the hurricane that didn't actually crash onto the land. And we won't be ready – psychologically or functionally – for the next one.