Why Scapegoating Is A Typical Human Response To A Pandemic

First comes the disease. Then the scapegoating.

Whether it’s Ebola, cholera and now COVID-19, Jesse Verschuere has witnessed “a pattern of stigma against others in every disease outbreak” he has responded to as part of the international medical humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders.

The objects of prejudice have included health-care workers, minorities, immigrants, indeed any outsider or other who looks or acts different from those in the local community, says the Belgium-based Verschuere, who works to improve the ability of communities to obtain health care.

This bias occurs around the world.

And it’s not anything new.

Villainizing an unknown other as guilty of spreading, causing or exploiting disease has a long, hate-filled history, says Debora MacKenzie, author of the new book Covid-19: The Pandemic That Should Never Have Happened and How to Stop the Next One.

Back in 14th-century Europe, Jews were blamed — and thousands of them slaughtered — by Christian mobs who baselessly accused them of spreading the deadly bubonic plague by poisoning wells and streams. In 19th-century America, immigrants from Ireland, Italy and China were censured, variously and also baselessly, for bringing with them cholera and polio, among other feared infections.

So perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that in the wake of COVID-19, the blame game is playing out once again.

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This link between disease and blame is rooted in evolution, says Mark Schaller, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia and co-author of Social Psychology of Prejudice. According to Schaller, aversion to unfamiliar outsiders is an instinctual, unconscious response to avoid the risk of infection. It forms part of what he calls the behavioral immune system, a kind of psychological parallel to the physical immune system.

This aversion to outsiders may have served a purpose long ago in avoiding unknown (and unfamiliar-looking) groups that could harbor unknown illnesses. “This underlying psychology evolved in a different world, before modern medicine or public health, and is no longer adaptive,” Schaller says. “But we’re stuck with our ancient psychology, leaving us wary and with negative consequences for today” — notably, prejudicial and discriminatory responses to people perceived to be different.

Singling out immigrants in particular for scapegoating is one such negative consequence, says Tahseen Shams, assistant professor of sociology at University of Toronto and author of Here, There, and Elsewhere: The Making of Immigrant Identities in a Globalized World. As examples, she points to the 1980s, when Haitian refugees and Africans were among those blamed for the AIDS epidemic, and to the current surge of anti-Asian racism.

When external threats occur, immigrant groups are often seen “as the link bringing the threat inside our borders, closer to home,” she explains. And that, she says, leads to stigma and harassment.

The Ebola outbreak has such examples. In 2014, when a traveler from Liberia developed Ebola while visiting family in Dallas, the city’s African immigrant community was targeted and stigmatized, says Kevin J.A. Thomas, professor of African American and African Diaspora studies at the University of Texas, Austin and author of Global Epidemics, Local Implications: African immigrants and the Ebola Crisis in Dallas.

“People were already traumatized by losing family to Ebola in Africa,” he says, citing one pastor in the community mourning the loss of six family members in a single week. Then they had to deal with demeaning racist tropes in local media as well.

In this instance, the community found ways to counteract the prejudice they were facing, Thomas said. For example, they assisted with contact tracing of those who had interacted with the infected person.

Even those who come specifically to help in a medical crisis can be blamed, stigmatized, distrusted as outsiders who hurt rather than heal.

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