Africa: Coronavirus media coverage must avoid mistakes in AIDS pandemic in Africa

As COVID-19 becomes the most powerfully covered virus in history, there is an important lesson to be drawn from another global pandemic media report: HIV / AIDS.

Who in the world deserves to save depends at least in part on the story the journalists tell. This was one of the discoveries of My study Covering the British media coverage of the AIDS pandemic in Africa, we analyzed 1,281 news reports between 1987 and 2008.

In the midst of the pandemic, journalists helped to clarify how intellectual property law and the business models of large pharmaceutical companies ignore the health needs of people living in poor countries. Such reports played an important role Create political momentum For mass deployment of life-saving treatments in the southern part of the world.

But AIDS also provides a darker lesson on the media’s ability to normalize the deaths of millions around us.

Fill the story-and the dead

Until the late 1990s, millions of people who died of AIDS-related causes throughout Sub-Saharan Africa were not a problem for British media. The earliest waves of coronavirus deaths in China are barely registered with international media radars. My analysis found that BBC News reported only 14 times AIDS in Africa between 1987 and 1995. The Financial Times carried only 18 stories in the same period.

Little has changed since the discovery of life-saving antiretroviral therapy in 1996. Left out of reach For the majority of people living with HIV / AIDS. In 1999, 24 million HIV positives In sub-Saharan Africa. In some countries, the prevalence has risen to over 20%. Even so, by then the pandemic deserved only the first front page of a British newspaper.

In 2001 economist “The world is not going to save Africa from aid. Only Africans can do it by changing their behavior.” The remarkable concentration of pandemics in Africa was conveyed to economist readers, Caused by the estimated hypersexuality of Africans, cultural “myths”, and incompetence of continental leaders. Since being a magazine, poverty has also been blamed Written in 1998“People who can’t afford a TV will find other ways to spend the night.”

These assertions, which are rooted in the obscured racist hypothesis, distracted from how the rules of the World Economic Order undermine the public health capacity of developing countries.

The global AIDS pandemic is shaped by a complex interplay of epidemiological, behavioral and cultural factors. But the unequal distribution is Punish heritage External debt and conditions for government reform imposed on the continent by the IMF and the World Bank. Stephen Lewis, the UN’s special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, accused it of “a form of capitalist Stalinism.” African health infrastructure destroyed Between the 1980s and 1990s.

Still, in over 20 years, we have found only one case that has explicitly linked the AIDS crisis to the encounter with African neoliberalism. Announced at Guardian in July 2000 letter To the editor by a medical aid worker entitled “Our Sin in the Land of Death”.

The most disturbing result of my study with the spread of COVID-19 is the ability of this media coverage to mask the way the pandemic is shaped by the world’s grotesque inequalities. To the country A fragile healthcare system.

Profit, patent, power

of The struggle for access to life-saving HIV drugs What happened at the turn of the Millennium showed that this need not be the case. International media have attacked the world’s strongest pharmaceutical companies against a coalition of activists and NGOs and have become a central venue for this battle.

AIDS suddenly began in the early 2000s, Top page newsJournalists Spotlight the Uncertain World of International Trade Politics Pharmaceutical company In protecting their patents.

The story of profits, patents, and power was wrapped in a deep, empathic account of human suffering. AIDS victims were no longer just the subject of our sympathies and moral judgments. They now have names, families, friends, and GuardianSave grace“A series from Malawi. This period was exceptional in the history of HIV/AIDS treatment by the media-the media coverage has fallen sharply since the mid-2000s.

Coronavirus alert

As the search for the COVID-19 vaccine intensifies, journalists must actively question whether the government and drug companies have enacted all steps to ensure Universal access..

It has already been seen Those Who led the campaign for access to affordable AIDS drugs. Was surprised at the outlook Profit by a major pharmaceutical company, They are concerned that coronavirus treatments may remain out of reach of less privileged people again.

There are some promising signs that large pharmaceutical companies do not actively seek to insist on them Exclusivity.. Perhaps they are afraid of another monument PR failureOccurred at a large number of times Pharmaceutical company sued South African government on AIDS drugs in 2001. Some experts I’m not very optimistic about COVID-19 and fear that it will be the pharmaceutical company that will ultimately decide who will live and who will die.

How COVID-19 ends is partly rooted in the history of global inequality, where the script written by journalists and their ability to tell stories admitting a pandemic have always accumulated. It depends on our own role in it. When it comes to coronaviruses, it’s calm that HIV/AIDS almost always claims 500,000 lives Every year only in sub-Saharan Africa.

Rudek Stabinoha, Media and international development instructors, East Anglia University