One can almost hear the collective sigh of relief in certain air-conditioned rooms when the news broke of a young laboratory technician in Irkutsk dying of pneumonia of undetermined etiology. At last: something that might be dressed up as the next big thing. Pneumonic plague, the reports whispered. A research institute that actually works with the stuff. Contacts under observation. The whole apparatus of dread wheeled out with the weary professionalism of a travelling circus that has performed the same act too many times. If this were the real article, borders would be slamming shut faster than a politician’s mouth after an inconvenient question. They have not. President Trump has not grounded the world’s airlines. Nations have not sealed themselves like medieval cities under siege.
The reason is simple enough for even a public-health bureaucrat to grasp if he were ever required to: the official Russian assessment, and the World Health Organization’s subsequent risk rating, treat the episode as contained, unconfirmed as plague, and of low to very low international concern. Contacts have been monitored and largely released. No secondary wave of confirmed cases has materialised. Yet the media machinery, that tireless generator of ambient anxiety, continues to hum. How touching, how almost endearing in its predictability, that the same circles who treated every seasonal flu as a potential civilisation-ender should now discover fresh reserves of solemnity over an unconfirmed Siberian pneumonia. One might have hoped that after the late unpleasantness with the coronavirus they would at least change the script. Instead they have returned to the well-thumbed playbook, confident that the audience has forgotten the last performance.
Consider the monkeypox episode of 2022, that short-lived festival of selective alarm. A real virus, yes, circulating with particular efficiency in specific networks, mostly among men who have sex with men. The public-health apparatus swung into action with the usual mixture of genuine concern and theatrical overreach. Emergency declarations were issued. Vaccine campaigns were launched with the urgency once reserved for actual pandemics. Media coverage oscillated between lurid speculation and careful euphemism. And then, almost as abruptly as it had arrived, the thing subsided. Cases fell. The emergency ended. The same voices that had treated it as the next great threat moved on without apology or reflection, as if the entire episode had been a useful dress rehearsal rather than a demonstration of how quickly narrative can outrun evidence.
The exasperation one feels is not primarily with the virus, which does what viruses do, but with the human operators who treat every laboratory mishap or regional cluster as an opportunity to reimpose the psychology of 2020. The global managerial class—those itinerant experts, foundation-funded influencers, and institutional spokespeople who discovered during the last crisis that fear is a more reliable currency than competence—appear constitutionally incapable of learning the simplest lesson: people notice. They notice when the same rhetorical devices are recycled. They notice when borders stay open for a “plague” that would, in any earlier century, have emptied ports. They notice when the story requires perpetual escalation just to maintain the necessary level of dread before an election cycle.
There is something almost touching in the persistence. Having watched one carefully cultivated scare lose momentum, the operators simply select another pathogen, preferably one with historical resonance and a suitably medieval name, and try again. Plague carries the right cultural freight. It summons images of rat-infested harbours and blackened extremities. Never mind that the actual epidemiological picture in Irkutsk remains stubbornly ordinary by the standards of high-containment laboratories that have handled far more exotic agents without collapsing civilisation. The point is never the specific microbe. The point is the atmosphere.
Fortunately, the atmosphere is no longer quite so easy to control. When Elon Musk acquired the platform formerly known as Twitter and turned it into X, he did something more consequential than most of the professional commentary class have yet admitted. He removed the primary throttle on spontaneous, unfiltered contradiction. The old gatekeeping arrangements—whereby certain narratives could be amplified while competing ones were throttled, labelled, or disappeared—lost much of their force. Ordinary people, scientists outside the approved circuits, and even the occasional laboratory technician with an inconvenient timeline can now reach audiences that once required institutional permission. The result is not chaos, as the professional worriers predicted, but a rough and imperfect form of accountability. Claims that once travelled unopposed now meet immediate, often rude, scrutiny.
The monkeypox cycle already showed the limits of the method; the current Siberian episode is testing those limits again under less favourable conditions. No less instructive was the coverage of hantavirus, that sporadic rodent-borne inconvenience which certain corners of the press insisted on treating as the next scheduled apocalypse. A few infections linked to mouse droppings in remote cabins or rural outposts would trigger the familiar cascade: sombre graphics, expert warnings about aerosol transmission, and the solemn implication that civilisation itself might soon be gasping for air. The tone suggested Black Death 2.0 with better production values. Then the cases remained local, the fatalities stayed mercifully few, and the same outlets that had hyped the threat simply packed up their cameras and moved on, as if the entire exercise had been a useful test of how long the public could be kept on edge by a virus that had never shown the slightest ambition to become a global spectacle. The pattern was becoming hard to miss.
One does not need to believe in a single smoke-filled room of cartoon villains to recognise a pattern of incentives. Institutions that expanded their budgets and authority during the last emergency have every reason to keep the sense of permanent emergency alive. Media organisations that discovered the commercial value of sustained anxiety have every reason to inflate the next candidate. Politicians who found that emergency powers simplify governance have every reason to look for fresh pretexts. The rest of us are under no obligation to play along.
What finally began to puncture the solemnity was the memes. Where once the official narrative could proceed with its gravity largely intact, a single well-timed image—a cartoon rat in a hazmat suit, a side-by-side of successive “this time it’s different” headlines, or a simple caption reducing the latest laboratory drama to farce—could travel farther and faster than any carefully worded press release. The scaremongers found themselves confronting not sober counter-arguments but the collective laughter of people who had seen the same performance too many times. Memes did what earnest rebuttals often failed to achieve: they made the apparatus look faintly absurd, and once something looks absurd it becomes considerably harder to fear. In that sense the humble meme became one of the more effective public-health interventions of the age.
So let us express the appropriate sentiment with the clarity the occasion deserves. To the professional scare-mongers, the foundation-funded amplifiers, the institutional voices still hoping that the next pathogen will restore the deference they briefly enjoyed: this particular performance is already failing its dress rehearsal. The population has seen the set design before. The props look second-hand. The dialogue is recycled. Thanks in no small part to an open platform that no longer pretends neutrality while enforcing orthodoxy, the audience can now shout back in real time.
May the present scare join its predecessors in the growing archive of overplayed hands. May the next one meet the same fate. And may those who keep trying this transparent routine eventually discover that the only thing more exhausting than perpetual crisis is the spectacle of people who refuse, at long last, to be perpetually crisis-managed.