Year in Review (2021)
Time for my annual “year in review” blog!
In many respects the year 2021 felt like a repeat of the
year 2020 (sigh!), as half of both years were spent in isolation, lockdown and me
doing online teaching and my kids at home doing online learning [sic]. After a brief 3 month stint with in-person
teaching from Sept- November, it looks like I will be going back to online
teaching again to start the 2022 academic year (this despite the University having
imposed a vaccine mandate and mandatory face mask policy on all faculty, staff
and students back in Sept 2021).
The mantra “you can never be too cautious” seems to be the
default mode of reasoning for our province’s public health experts and politicians
for the past 18 months, and sadly it has (IMHO) demonstrably proven itself to
be a failed mode of reasoning and rather ineffective way of communicating to the
general public how to responsibly balance different types of risks and benefits. The narrowly conceived public health goal of
success since May 2020 has been equated with “not overwhelming healthcare with
severe COVID-19 illness”, but this has overlooked the reality that the mental
health toll of the prolonged mitigation efforts (which will be measured in
years, not months or weeks), especially on the young, to delay the spread
of the virus has also increased demands on healthcare though sadly little, if
any, support has been available. So our
long-term “delay the spread of the virus indefinitely” strategy has been
compounding many pre-existing (and very serious) public health problems. The irrevocable negative impact on childhood,
adolescent and young adult obesity rates, education and development, as well as
mental health will be devastating for a whole generation.
Tragically I think it will be many more years before an
impartial and evidence-based assessment of these issues can take place. At the moment most are still in the grips of
fear of a virus we still do not know very much about, and thus the precautionary
principle has been peddled as responsible public health decision-making to make
folks at least feel safer.
The big new development with the pandemic in 2021, beyond
the media obsessively tracking and reporting all the “variants of concern” (first
Delta, and then the ominous sounding OMICRON) was the COVID-19 vaccines, hailed
as the solution out of the pandemic once sufficient numbers of people were vaccinated. Contentious debates and policies pertaining
to vaccine passports, and then boosters, ensued. And thus 2021 ends with record-breaking
numbers of positive cases in my city and province, but the impact on serious
illness and death remains to be observed and assessed.
Despite the persistence of this pandemic for 2+ years, I still
stand by my initial assessment that COVID-19 itself is not the most significant public health predicament of the
past century, nor of today (which does not imply that it is not a significant
public health problem, it certainly is (especially for older populations)).
However, there is one caveat I will add now given how things
have played out since May 2020- if we include the adverse health, educational and
financial consequences of the prolonged mitigation measures most developed countries
have pursued for nearly two years- such as the impact on anxiety, isolation, mental
health, obesity, suicide, domestic abuse and marital breakdown, unemployment,
educational deficits, delays in other medical interventions, impact on the
economy, etc.- the pandemic’s full impact is significantly larger. My initial assessment did not anticipate that
countries would pursue a strategy of long-term virus mitigation until vaccines (and
then boosters) were widely available and beyond. To be honest if you had asked me back in May
2020 what the chances were that such a strategy would have been adopted long-term
(that is, after the initial 3 month lockdown (when little was known about SARS-CoV-2)
I would have said “zero”. That was my
view not simply because of the clear adverse side-effects of such policies on
mental health, liberty and the economy, but because there was no empirical
basis for thinking such a strategy was viable in the long-term (in terms
of both compliance from the general public and in terms of doing anything other
than simply delaying the spread of the virus till such measures were relaxed). Unfortunately the adverse health impact of
these mitigation measures will persist for years after the public’s fixation on
SARS-CoV-2 (and the virus’s evolution) has dissipated. We could call this effect “Long COVID lockdown”. But, I digress!
Watching the mental health toll of the lockdown measures- on
family members and friends, and my students and reading the rapidly emerging data
from empirical studies on these effects (on anxiety, addictions, obesity, undiagnosed
diseases, etc.)- has been absolutely devastating to witness. I intend to spend the next decade of my
research canvassing the toll of both the virus and the public health successes,
experimental “pivots” and disastrous blunders.
What I had thought would initially be a 1-2 year research project will
now take probably closer to 10 years to research, write and complete. I have decided to prioritize doing a
competent and thorough job of analyzing these empirical and policy issues vs just
rushing to get something published.
In the coming winter (2022) term I am teaching a new 4th
year seminar titled “The Politics of Pandemics and Epidemics” which applies a
public health ethics lens to the societal challenges of mitigating the health
risks from 4 infectious diseases (malaria, HIV/AIDS, Ebola and COVID-19) and 3
non-infectious “epidemics” (obesity, the “war on drugs” and gun violence). Teaching this new course regularly will
permit me to expand my public health research interests beyond the issues I
have focused on for the past 20 years (e.g. the genetic revolution and aging
research).
Despite the continued upheaval of the pandemic, I was
inspired on both the teaching and research fronts in 2021. In the winter term of 2021 I continued with
my online teaching, especially for the large class of 270 students, designing
extended lecture videos on Rousseau, Burke and conservatism, Black political
thought, Wollstonecraft and feminism, utilitarianism, Marx and Fanon.
2021 proved to be an exceptional year for my research and
writing. As an introvert I was fortunate
to be able to make the most of the time in isolation by diverting my energies
almost exclusively to reading and writing.
I published my first article on the COVID-19 pandemic, and wrote (and then
had quickly accepted for publication and actually published) 2 articles on the
50th anniversary of “the war on cancer” (here and here). And a book chapter on toleration also appeared in print, a long article on how to theorize about justice in the genome era, and I wrote the first draft of half of a new textbook on the
history of political thought (this project will consume most of my attention
through 2022). The year 2021 was probably
my most productive year ever for research, because there wasn’t much else I
could do for most of the year.
What will the year 2022 bring? In terms of science and innovation, I am
hopeful serious progress will continue to be made with respect to the development of an applied
gerontological intervention. I still maintain
that such an intervention will end up being this century’s most significant advance in public
health because advanced age is the most significant risk factor not only for
cancer and COVID-19 mortality, but for most disease, frailty and disability. This is not a story you are likely to hear in
the evening news. But what gets “clicks”
on news stories, or “likes” on social media often bears little, if any, resemblance to what is actually going on, from a “big picture” perspective, with today’s
aging populations.
I am optimistic the year 2022 will see us at least get into
a different collective mindset about (i.e. accepting that we must learn to live
with SARS-CoV-2 and return to normal life) this pandemic, given that the ending of this
pandemic will not likely be televised. All the best for a New Year!
Colin
posted by Colin Farrelly at 4:23 PM
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