Is the opposition right to insist that decision-making authority to deal with the pandemic should be transferred to the Superintendent of Public Health, Charmaine Gauci? No, it’s not the right response to Robert Abela’s mistakes. The prime minister has been weak-willed but the opposition is wrong-headed.
To understand why, it helps to begin by looking at famines, rather than other countries afflicted by COVID-19.
Famines are frequent in autocratic regimes but no democracy has ever suffered one. Democracies have suffered droughts; but famines are about the distribution of food, not just its scarcity. The rich always remain well-fed in autocratic regimes.
Democracies change the equation. They don’t have more virtuous politicians. They do have a better signalling system. The spectre of a settling of accounts at the polls prods even the most cosseted politician to be responsive to voters’ urgent concerns. Democracies respond to crises more slowly than modern dictatorships but, in the end, they handle them better.
What does this have to do with COVID-19, which has struck democracies and tyrannies alike?
To start, we don’t really know if the pandemic has been neutral between political systems. The data out of China and Iran (say) is more slender and opaque than data out of the US, France and Italy.
The interpretation of the data is also inevitably controversial. Do you count the US as one system or 50 – one health system for every state? To compare success, do you simply count every COVID-related death or do you work out the proportions of deaths in relation to the distribution of ‘underlying conditions’ – like diabetes, obesity, poverty and old age – that pre-existed the pandemic?
This radical uncertainty is in itself an important lesson. The pandemic is about the distribution of the virus, not just its presence, and the spread depends on multiple factors – social, economic and cultural, not just medical. Experts are the right people to figure it out but, even with hindsight, it will take large teams a long time to do so.
So much for hindsight. How good is experts’ foresight? In a crisis with multiple variables, no one is an expert on all that’s involved. This year, the democracy that caused the most controversy is Sweden – precisely the one whose government entrusted epidemiological experts to make the critical decisions. We still can’t tell for sure if the Swedish experts got a lot right (after all). But where they certainly failed – in adequately protecting the elderly in care homes and immigrants in multigenerational households – it’s because they got the biology right but the economic sociology wrong.
To burden Gauci with the decision making is to entrust her with responsibility that begins with her area of expertise but reaches far beyond it.
No one, anywhere, knows for sure what the trajectory of the pandemic is- Ranier Fsadni
Some critics imply that Gauci should be entrusted with sweeping powers for a short period, until contagion is brought ‘under control’, so that then we might look forward to a more normal Christmas. How do they know that this would be the result?
No one, anywhere, knows for sure what the trajectory of the pandemic is. Quality of leadership isn’t irrelevant. Donald Trump on masks, Abela on waves being “in the sea”, both deserve criticism. But leadership isn’t decisive, either. The pandemic is flaring up all over Europe, despite different degrees of competent leadership.
And we don’t yet know what the cold weather will bring. Probably a Christmas lunch celebrated as a buffet, with family scattered around a living room, rather than cosying up around a raucous dinner table.
The decisions aren’t helped by ‘following the science’ because science is still at the stage of producing hypotheses. What we know for sure still does not amount to much more than: social distancing and washing hands are vital; masks are a very good idea; limiting the people you mix with is advisable and outdoors is better than inside; consult your doctor if you need more vitamin D.
Organising society on the basis of these maxims doesn’t call for science. It calls for trade-offs and enforcement. Both are political. Trade-offs concern risk management; enforcement imposes penalties. In a democracy, anyone who decides what risks we take on, and what penalties we are liable to, should be accountable directly to us.
Besides, the people best placed to decide on trade-offs and enforcement are politicians. They are the ones receiving the information from all quarters – the health system, the economy, society. They’re the ones with the authority to make decisions in all those areas. That doesn’t mean the right decisions will be made but it maximises the chance of a rapid response to mistakes.
It’s wrong-headed to blame politicians simply for being responsive to popular pressure. What matters is the actual decisions made.
Take the case of Abela, accused of going easy on enforcement in a quest for votes. Yes – but that short-term thinking has cost him plenty by eroding his authority and popularity. And he is responding to the backlash. Political responsiveness is not an experimental science but it works on trial and error, too.
Don’t knock the quest for votes. It doesn’t necessarily corrupt the decision. As in the case of famines, survival at the polls is one of the best incentives we have to make cocooned politicians attentive to what the rest of us have to go through.
Of course, the ability of politicians to rise to the occasion matters. Some of Abela’s decisions do suggest a serious lack of comprehension of the nature of the pandemic. But political failure is no excuse to call for the decisions on trade-offs and enforcement to be made by the Superintendent of Public Health.
That doesn’t turn the decisions over to an expert. It simply makes her an unelected politician.