A gas stove element. The metaphor "gaslight" comes from the fact that the gas (the metaphor for the problem) is consumed by the flame (the denial/obfuscation).

COVID-19 is hardly over, and yet the narrative of the “post-pandemic” world persists. We are being told that we should be getting back to “normal,” all the while the Omicron variant spreads rapidly across the globe and vaccine access remains limited to the world’s wealthiest nations.

“Gaslighting” is the vernacular for emotional manipulation that undermines our sense of reality. It minimizes, and at times erases, the harm caused to us by abusive behaviour. It can make us feel unheard, unseen and, at worst, question our own experiences. Racialized, queer and feminist communities have written extensively on the role gaslighting plays in upholding inequalities. It’s what’s happening now with the B.C. and Canadian governments’ response to the pandemic. 

In B.C., the links between inequalities and the pandemic are stark; persons with disabilities face increased risk of hospitalization and death, especially those living in congregate settings. Racialized workers have borne disproportionate economic impacts, experiencing higher levels of financial insecurity and unemployment, while Project 1907 documents a dramatic increase in anti-Asian hate incidents in the British Columbia since the pandemic began. The true impacts of the pandemic are not always recognized. They are without a doubt unevenly distributed.  

Whether driven by a focus on the economy above the wellbeing of workers, white supremacy’s refusal to acknowledge the pandemic’s ongoing impacts on racialized communities, or toxic masculinity’s tendency to conceal vulnerability and “push through” the emotional pain of the pandemic, gaslighting is culturally systemic.

When it comes to COVID-19, this has made a bad situation worse. One example lies in the emergence of the Omicron and Delta variants of COVID-19 in the midst of declarations of a “post-pandemic” world, as if the resolution to our predicament does not depend on equitable international access to vaccines.   

Unlike 1955’s polio vaccine, left unpatented to ensure global access, we withhold effective and far-reaching global vaccination campaigns because of capital gains linked to vaccine patents, and with it our hopes for a quick resolution to COVID-19. We are told that withholding access to a life-saving vaccine stifles future “innovation,” but clearly, the right for the world’s wealthiest to innovate is more important than the right to life for billions.

As more mutations develop through unchecked spread, more opportunities for the virus to foil our vaccines grow. This uneven distribution of access to vaccinations is rooted in economic inequalities that reach back to colonial projects that have stripped local resources from the Global South, and neoliberal economic agendas that mediate access to healthcare, privileging the wellbeing of wealthy nations above others.  

The collision course of harm and denial doesn’t just have broad global implications, but consequences for individuals caught between narratives of a “post-pandemic world” and the realities of COVID-19. 

As inflation rises and housing prices increase, British Columbians have been cut off the Canadian Recovery Benefit (CRB), a move decried by anti-poverty activists and seniors’ advocates. Furthermore, recipients of provincial disability and welfare are receiving less financial support than CRB provided. British Columbians continue to balance work, school and family life amidst an ongoing global pandemic, reporting increases in stress, anxiety and depression.

Debates on COVID-19 denial often fixate on anti-vaxxers, an overt form of denial centred on conspiracy theories and neoconservative vies for the “freedom” of the rights of the individual over collective wellbeing. (This is different from persons with rare health conditions for whom vaccines aren’t recommended or the reticence of communities that have experienced medical racism, like survivors of dangerous nutritional experiments conducted on Indigenous children by Health Canada in the 1950s.)

Less than 50 per cent of the global population has been fully vaccinated and just 5.7 per cent of individuals have received one vaccine dose in low-income countries. This is not enough to stop COVID-19 in its tracks or to prevent the development of new variants that could undermine our current vaccination campaigns here in B.C. and elsewhere.      

There is also often a discrepancy in awareness of the virus’ broader impacts; more affluent populations, sheltered initially from spread of the virus, might not deny the virus itself, but rather the substantial secondary impacts. Racialized and LGBTQ2+ communities, who have borne disproportionate impacts of the pandemic all along, understand this all too well. Calls for B.C. to document disaggregated data and COVID-19’s differential impacts come directly from systemically oppressed communities most affected in the province.

Apartment dwellers and those in congregate settings like long term care, shelters, and group homes, for which social distancing has been more difficult, have also found it harder to ignore COVID-19’s realities — be it in terms of contraction of the virus itself or the psychological impacts of a lack of outdoor or indoor space during social distancing measures.

Health care too has fallen disproportionately to women and racialized workers; for example, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives has documented such trends in the Care Aid workforce. Health-care workers across Canada are burnt out, and when ICUs are at capacity with primarily COVID-19 positive patients it’s hard to pretend we live in a “post-pandemic” world.

In October, Saskatchewan reported 156 COVID-19 related deaths, the province’s highest monthly death count since the pandemic began. The Northwest Territories reported record caseloads the same month. This has been attributed by epidemiologists to the rise of the Delta variant and increased travel to the territories. Now, as cases of the Omicron variant rise internationally we may be forced to reckon with global vaccine inequalities and the broader impact on B.C. and other provinces.

As vaccination rates increase in B.C. and the rest of Canada and businesses reopen, the phrase “back to normal” and “build back better” can be heard from left, right and centre. But what is normal, and better at what, exactly? Let’s go back.

Deconstructing “back to normal”

The pre-pandemic normal was a world that continued to perpetuate the Doctrine of Discovery, the legal genesis of racial hierarchization and subjugation, colonialism, and genocide that is still embedded in our health care, criminal justice and education systems.

We needn’t look far – in B.C., independent investigations such as the 2020 probe into anti-Indigenous racism in the health care system further supports what many have known for so long: that racism and colonialism were alive and well in the pre-pandemic normal.

Normal is a capitalist economic system that worships growth above all at the expense of the natural world, fuelling climate catastrophes and zoonotic diseases.

Is it any surprise that the COVID-19 pandemic is no longer a top concern in the minds of many Canadians despite grossly inequitable global vaccine distribution? This renders many lives vulnerable to succumbing to the disease and enables the possible development of new variants such as Omicron, which would inevitably threaten all of us regardless of the GDP of our country of residence.

Listening to interconnectedness

The undeniable truth COVID-19 has taught us is of the inextricable interconnectedness of all beings.

In 2020, as the world stood still, indoors, and in quarantine, many of us were able to tune in more to the grim realities facing not just human lives, but the planet. We were able to truly listen and bear witness to millenias of racism and colonialism, decades of global income inequality, and the impending climate catastrophe fuelled by unchecked greed. We saw a collective shift of worldviews and priorities, evident in widespread rallies on the streets of Vancouver and in Toronto calling for racial justice, or marches led by incredible young leaders demanding climate justice and action on the streets of Kampala and Bogota. This shift was also evident in the rise of mutual aid and collective care towards others, even in urban centres of the Global North where these practices are less culturally embedded.

It was as if the stillness and quiet of lockdown woke many of us up from the dangerous myth of individualism, disconnection, and self-interest-above-all, and moved us to collectively resist the continued denial of the experiences of those marginalized and the impending doom of climate emergency.

In 2020, many of us saw glimpses of what we could be: a society where we prioritize the survival of all forms of life and one where we honour the undeniable reality that we are all interconnected.

2021: “Back in business” and the violence of global vaccine inequity

Despite the collective shift of 2020, forces of neoliberal economics persisted in 2021 and came back with a vengeance.

Governments all around the world rushed to save the economy despite repeated warnings from scientists and experts of the dangers of loosening public health measures too soon. A grim example can be seen in Alberta Premier Jason Kenney’s lifting of almost all public health measures this summer to “get the economy back on track” while declaring the pandemic over, and Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe’s denial of the seriousness of this pandemic by refusing to quickly implement public health measures. All of this while thousands of lives were still impacted by COVID-19 in these provinces.

Both so-called-leaders not only denied the realities of the people in the provinces they are supposed to serve, but, worse, they denied the reality of the whole world where the pandemic was most definitely not over and was in fact reaching an unprecedented rise in Africa and Asia.

They denied the basic definition of “pandemic” itself: the spread of an infectious disease throughout the global population. No one country, let alone a humble Canadian province, can declare the end of a pandemic. And, as the WHO, the United Nations, and the Gavi Vaccine Alliance continue to remind us, no one is safe until everyone is safe.

Yet two years into the pandemic, such denial persists, as we can also see from the appalling global vaccine inequity. Seventy-five per cent of available vaccines were bought out by a small group of 10 wealthy and middle-upper income countries (including Canada, with a stockpile of over 20 million COVID-19 vaccine doses).

Only 0.8 per cent of the Haitian population are fully vaccinated, while 75.7 per cent of Canadians have received both doses. People from the Global South have called this for what it is: a vaccine apartheid. And this inequity killed countless of those in the Global South: a June 2021 Guardian analysis on the connection between vaccine inequity and death rate shows that there were an average of 9.7 deaths per week in Namibia and 16 deaths per week in Paraguay – both are countries with low vaccination rates.

We are at a crossroads

In 2021, governments across Canada and other wealthy countries prepared to declare endemicity, moving towards a “post-pandemic” world, muffling the collective demands for a radically new and more just vision of the world.

And yet these global voices of resistance persevered. Local, regional, and international communities of resistance continue to sound the demands to build a better world where everyone truly belongs, grounded in a worldview that centres the interconnectedness of all lives, mutual care and the survival of the planet.

While governments are mostly getting busy to get the capitalist economy roaring again (as can be seen from B.C.’s StrongerBC plan), community members in Marpole band together to create local solutions to food insecurity while VANDU’s drug user-led movement successfully lobbied for the approval of North America’s first ever compassion club, a historic feat that will enable members to access life-saving prescription heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine during a deadly overdose crisis.

Meanwhile, Nigerian youth climate activist Vanessa Nakate spoke at the 2021 Youth4Climate conference of how the climate crisis’s grim impacts on the African continent – despite being the lowest CO2 emitter of all continents – and called on adult political leaders to “stop talking and start acting.” Nakate ended her speech by saying: 

“It’s time, it’s time, it’s time. And don’t forget to listen to the most affected people and areas.”

People who are most affected by systemic oppression, their allies, and the natural world itself have spoken over and over again throughout the pandemic: we must chart a different path and turn towards a radically new way of being with each other and the world; one that rejects injustices, greed, and self-interest.

This pandemic has provided a window of opportunity to truly listen to their demands and actualize such bold and courageous visions. To undermine their realities and go “back to normal” would result in catastrophic consequences. 

Which path will we choose?  

Karen-Marie Elah Perry

Karen-Marie Elah Perry, PhD is an applied medical anthropologist with a focus on social justice and the ways inequalities shape access to health care. Prior to COVID-19 they worked in pandemic planning...

Shila Avissa

Shila Avissa, RSW is a social policy-focused social worker, researcher, and facilitator who grounds her practice in collaboration, equity and justice.