The World Health Organisation has declared the latest Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo 'deeply alarming,' which is medical diplomacy for 'we are all clenching our buttocks in unison.' The UK, ever the Good Samaritan with a stiff upper lip and a chequebook half-heartedly open, has pledged support to the global health response. This is, of course, the same UK that once thought Brexit was a cracking idea and whose idea of public health is a good queue at the GP.
The numbers, as they always are: 18 confirmed cases, 14 dead. The fatality rate is a grotesque 78%, which makes the common cold look like a polite cough in a library. But let us not forget the geopolitical nuances. The outbreak is in North Kivu, a region so volatile that even the germs carry machetes. Conflict, displacement, and suspicion of outsiders are the real co-morbidities here. The locals, understandably, view white coats with the same enthusiasm as they view white colonisers.
Enter the British taxpayer, funding 'surveillance' and 'contact tracing.' Orwell would have wept. We are spying on a virus, but we call it public health. The UK's response is being overseen by the Department for International Development, a ministry that spends its days deciding whether to save babies or buy tanks. The answer, as always, is a bit of both, served with a garnish of moral superiority.
But who will win this battle of microbe versus mankind? The virus, with its elegant simplicity of replication, or humanity, with its committee meetings and funding gaps? The odds are, as ever, on the side of the organism that doesn't need a passport.
Meanwhile, the global spotlight is less on the victims and more on the performance of Britain's aid budget. Will we be the heroes or the hypocrites? The answer, I suspect, lies somewhere in the gin aisle of an airport duty-free, where the tired correspondents of the world drown their sorrows in Gordon's. Ebola is deeply alarming, but so is the fact that we have learned nothing from the last half-century of plagues.
Let us raise a glass of lukewarm tonic to the front-line workers, the real saints in hazmat suits, who risk their lives so that Boris Johnson can tweet about 'global Britain.' The disease may be alarming, but the political theatre is a farce of epic proportions.
