The virus of tyranny is alive and growing and there’s no permanent vaccine – ABC News

Whoever wins the US presidential election will likely not triumph because of coronavirus.

The pandemic is not among the top three issues on the minds of Americans, according to the Pew Research Centre. First is the economy, then health care (not COVID-related) and then the make-up of the Supreme Court.

Coronavirus is the fourth most pressing concern in this election and it matters more to Democrat voters than Republican.

It makes sense. Despite the tragedy of more than 225,000 dead and 8.6 million infections, there are 328 million people in the US. Most have no personal experience of the virus.

Don't know how many people you can invite over? Not sure about the best way to protect yourself at the shops? Send us a question and we will try to answer it.

According to some estimates, COVID-19 is not among the top 10 killers in the world this year. The majority of people who contract coronavirus successfully recover and many experience no symptoms.

The coronavirus crisis is not unprecedented, nor a once in a century event.

The Asian flu of the 1950s killed more than a million people worldwide. An estimated 35 million people have died from the AIDS virus since it was first identified. Just a decade ago, H1N1 (swine flu) spread far more widely albeit less lethally than COVID-19, with some studies showing it infected more than a billion people worldwide.

That is not to deny or downplay the risks of coronavirus: It is highly contagious and threatening especially to the elderly or vulnerable. To battle the virus, entire societies have gone into lockdown and the global economy has been devastated.

But beyond the numbers, personal tragedies and economic hardship or the debates about who has the most successful mitigation strategy COVID-19 haunts us.

The French philosopher Jacques Derrida coined the term "hauntology" to describe how the past hovers over our present like a ghost.

Buried in our collective memory is the fear of viruses. Throughout history plague and disease have obliterated societies. The 1918 Spanish Flu outbreak killed more people than World War I.

In our fear, we weaken our immunity to another virus that also preys on anxiety and vulnerability. This virus is a killer too, it has been with us throughout human history and there is no permanent vaccine.

It is the virus of tyranny and it is alive and growing in our world now.

To fight coronavirus we have had to surrender our freedom; we have done it willingly and on balance, for good cause. We have saved lives.

But we have to be alert to the creeping intrusion of state control into our lives. History tells us freedom lost is hard to regain.

Freedom was in retreat well before COVID-19. As part of the war on terror, western democracies have eroded civil liberties. In a growing number of countries, would-be autocratic strongmen have seized power; rule of law and freedom of expression and free press have been wound back.

Technology has invaded our privacy; foreign governments meddle in elections and fake news makes it harder to know who to trust or what to believe.

The virus of tyranny has already found itself in the bloodstream of liberal democracies.

Tyrants through the ages have exploited the fear of viruses to justify or incite the most barbarous crimes against humanity. They use the language of germ warfare.

Joseph Stalin's henchman Vyacheslav Molotov said enemies needed to "be isolated" or "society would have been infected". Heinrich Himmler sent millions to the Nazi gas chambers calling his victims "a bacterium", a "sepsis" that needed to be cauterised.

Adolf Hitler called the holocaust a "surgical procedure" to rid Europe of the "Jewish disease".

Comparisons to the Nazis are wisely avoided and Donald Trump is not Adolf Hitler. But Trump exploited fear of outsiders, promising to build a wall to keep out illegal Mexican immigrants who he said were bringing "tremendous infectious diseases" across the US border.

In China, the Communist Party has locked up a million Uighur Muslims in re-education or brainwashing camps, saying they are "infected by an ideological illness".

According to a Communist Party audio recording, the Uighur population is a malignant tumour that must be cut out.

Two years after World War II, the writer Albert Camus published his novel The Plague, about a rat-borne disease that forces an entire city into lockdown.

It was an allegory of authoritarianism. When the plague receded, Camus warned that "the bacillus never dies for good". He wrote that the virus "slumbers ... until one day it will rouse up again".

Philosopher Michel Foucault also made the link between the plagues of the 17th century and authoritarian control. Behind state imposed discipline, Foucault wrote, "can be read the haunting memory of contagions".

One of the world's leading thinkers, Bernard Henri Levy, says we need to heed the warnings of Foucault. In his latest book The Virus in the Age of Madness, Levy stresses that when the virus passes we must quickly put away the masks and return to shaking hands or we will lose some essence of what it is to be human.

He supports compliance with health protocols to deal with this emergency but is sceptical of deferring to "experts" or "science" as if there is just one scientific community and one scientific opinion.

The "scientific community", he says, is "riven with fault-lines ... petty jealousies, esoteric disputes". Levy writes that we should follow the advice of "those who know" the same way that we heed the advice of any experts: "Not blindly."

Scientific truth, he cautions, is never more than a "corrected mistake". Like Foucault or Camus, Levy warns of the dangers of the "virus of tyranny" and the need to balance freedom against the necessity to fight the pandemic.

He says health can become an obsession what he calls a "doctrine of hygienics": "All social and political problems are reduced to infections that must be treated; and the will to cure becomes the paradigm of political action".

After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the world rejoiced at the "triumph of liberal democracy". Thirty years later, democracy is in retreat, and authoritarianism is on the rise. China is fast approaching an authoritarian superpower.

That coronavirus came out of China adds to our fear and vulnerability. COVID-19 forms part of a perfect storm of decades of terrorism, war, instability and economic strife that has battered our world.

The world is haunted by contagion and tyranny; both play on our deepest fears, each feeding into the other. In COVID-19, tyranny may have found a perfect host.

To beat the disease we've all, to some degree, had to become a little more authoritarian.

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The virus of tyranny is alive and growing and there's no permanent vaccine - ABC News