Never one to miss the opportunity for a cheap shot, former US president Donald Trump once used Twitter to brand Covid-19 “the China virus”.
Unsurprisingly there was a rise in anti-Asian sentiment on Twitter as a consequence.
Trump is not the only politician to use racism to pursue his political ends. The so-called migrant crisis in the English Channel is the direct result of the British government’s ‘hostile’ immigration and asylum policies which have demonised those fleeing from persecution in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia and other global hotspots.
We’ll come back to ‘global Britain’ in a moment.
The Trumps ‘haven’t gone away you know’, and their familiar line in xenophobia surfaced again after the World Health Organisation decided to name the latest coronavirus variant Omicron – the 15th letter of the Greek alphabet.
This approach to naming the virus’s variations was supposed to put an end to people using the name as a proxy for international one-upmanship.
But the American right has jumped on the World Health Organisation’s decision to skip the letters Nu and Xi on the grounds that Nu sounds too much like new, and Xi is a common Chinese surname, and using it risked repeating the sins of the ‘China virus’ tag.
Xi also happens to be the family name of the Chinese president Xi Jingping. “As far as I’m concerned the original will always be the Xi variant,” quipped Donald Trump Junior. Old habits die hard.
To be honest, I was surprised we had moved beyond the Delta variant, but I have since discovered that there are variants called Epsilon, Kappa, Iota, Theta, Eta, Zeta and Mu. There are only nine more letters to go in the Greek alphabet, and then we will have to find another naming method.
As things stand, that day cannot be too far off. Viruses mutate, and this one is no different. We might have only heard about Omicron this past week, and the number of confirmed cases is still comparatively low. But given the lag between infection and testing, it is almost certain that it is already widespread.
And if this virus has taught us anything, it is that we live in a world free of borders, for viruses at least.
Two variants – Epsilon and Iota are associated with the United States; and two with Brazil, Gamma and Zeta. But the world tour includes Kent (Alpha), India (Delta and Kappa), Philippines (Theta) and South Africa (Beta and now Omicron).
The response to this latest variant has been panic in the West, mixed with the usual raft of ‘after the horse has bolted’ measures: restrictions on flights, closure of borders, self-isolation, mask mandates. Of themselves, some of these measures will slow the progress of the new variant.
But these are short-term fixes completely unsuited to the challenges of this virus.
The simple fact is that almost two years into this pandemic we have not learned the lesson that we are all in this together. The world knows that the only way we can defeat this virus is by concerted global action. But the stark truth is that the developed world does not really care.
As I write this, I know I am one of the privileged. While billions of my fellow human beings are unprotected, I am double-dosed and boosted – the beneficiary of an ‘I’m all right Jack’ public health policy.
But that policy fails to recognise that ‘I am not all right Jack’ if the virus flourishes in developing countries – free to exploit gaps in the human genome to get stronger, more potent and more deadly.
Variants are emerging because of the abject failure of western governments to provide vaccines to the developing world. Worse, our governments are not only hoarding these vaccines, they are destroying millions of vials because they are past their use-by date.
Just three in 100 people have been vaccinated in low-income countries. In Ireland vaccination rates are around 90 per cent of the population over the age of 12.
What we have failed to recognise, as we nurse our sore arms, is that these vaccines are no protection to mutations yet to come. Omicron may not get us, but what about Upsilon, or Psi – or that most totemic of Greek letters, the final one Omega?
It should not be lost on us that in religious symbolism Alpha and Omega represent the beginning and the end.
The global community must put in place a global effort to get vaccines quickly to the poorest among us. If they will not do it out of common humanity, they should do it out of self-interest. The science is clear. Omicron is an ominous warning.
