Politics infuse pandemic origins, often controversially.

Why We Need to Focus on the Global Response to the Pandemic, Not Its Origins

Despite the ongoing debate over the origins of the coronavirus, it’s important to shift our attention to the global response to the pandemic, which has been far from adequate. Political factors have muddied the waters surrounding the search for a definitive origin story, with scientists and researchers struggling to pinpoint the initial cases.

Historically, this has always been the case for pandemics. Take, for example, the Russian influenza that spread from St. Petersburg to the rest of the world between 1889 and 1892. Back then, people were just as preoccupied with the disease’s origins, with German physician Oscar F. Heyfelder suggesting that Bukhara in Uzbekistan was the starting point for the global pandemic. Heyfelder believed that there were too many similarities between the cases he treated in Bukhara in the spring and in St. Petersburg in the fall to ignore.

However, Heyfelder’s theory was fueled not just by his clinical perspective but also his ethnocentrism and the imperial politics of the day. In describing Bukhara as the epidemic’s origin, Heyfelder helped promote a narrative that painted Central Asia as a “backward” region which needed the help of Russia to elevate its population to “European” standards. Western newspapers and journals reinforced these biases.

While an authoritative British study by H. Franklin Parsons seemed to confirm Heyfelder’s observations, another expert, Frank G. Clemow, reached a different conclusion after conducting a thorough review of published materials. Clemow concluded that the epidemic had originated in western Siberia, specifically in the vicinity of Tomsk, in September 1889, nearly four months after Bukhara’s May 1889 outbreak and more than 1,000 miles away.

Despite the ongoing debate over the origins of the Russian influenza, it’s clear that the more pressing issue is how to prevent future local outbreaks from becoming deadly pandemics. We need to draw the right lessons from past pandemics to identify and adopt measures that can help confine the disease before it becomes a global health crisis.

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