Commentary: Global pandemics, conflict and networks - the dynamics of international instability, infodemics and health care in the 21st century.

Abstract

Back in early 2020, none of us knew what we were going into. The lockdown imposed in Wuhan seemed strange and alien; we took comfort from the neighbourhood singing in lockdown Italy but could not quite imagine that happening here, and when it did finally happen here, few of us had any notion that restrictions would continue for two years. Even less did we conceive that a major battle site in the war against the virus would be digital platforms from which the weaponry of online postings would be launched. And yet, social media have played a central role in the campaign to overcome the lethal effects of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and its ability to bring about a second major crisis to capitalism in just over a decade, occasioning an even greater disruption to the global economy than that produced by the financial crash of 2008 (Cankett and Andrade, 2020). This has not been confined to the messaging of health authorities and governments disseminating information about public health advice but has entailed extensive sharing and exchange of factual and non-factual information. This has resulted in the opening up of a significant gulf between contrasting beliefs about the nature of the virus and the nature of the main public health measures being deployed against it, notably vaccines and a variety of non-pharmacological interventions which incur restrictions on individual freedom. It is into this territory that the authors have chosen to enter. Rather than collecting empirical data relating to the beliefs and knowledge of individuals (e.g. Benoit and Mauldin, 2021) or the factors associated with vaccine hesitancy (e.g. Soares et al., 2021) as others have done, the authors adopt a much bigger canvas and make selected developments over the past two years their data. Their starting point is a subscription to Ian Morris’s theory that transformative change occurs every 500–1000 years resulting in epochal shifts in human civilisation and that these changes come about through what Morris terms the ‘Five Horsemen’: climate change, food scarcity/famine, rapid and large-scale population movements between regions, governance/state failure and epidemics which interact to bring about disruptive crises. To these Five Horsemen, the authors wish to add a sixth harbinger of a future destabilised world: the ‘networked infodemic’. This borrows and extends