I LEARNED a lot about pandemics and epidemics during Covid-19 as it was the first real epidemic that affected me, and I assume most of us directly. I wasn’t in Hong Kong during SARS and other epidemics like Ebola were fortunately contained and spared us. These days, I observe government issues like flood control, with shallow populist proposals from some legislators as a response and the absence of long-term planning and sustained execution being prevalent. During my life, government policy and administration has ranged from horrible to bad to passable to decent.
Over the weekend, I thought back to what my best friend, Dr. Rodrigo Romulo, who is an infectious disease specialist, told me about viruses and their spread and mutation at the height of Covid-19, and saw an analogy to bad governance and corruption. Dr. Romulo told me that viruses mutate as they live off the host, so they ideally want to weaken but not kill the host. If they kill the host, they die as well. If the virus merely weakens the host, it survives and can spread. Hence, the mutations that allow both the virus and host to survive develop. The mutated virus then spreads, versus those that die either by the host successfully overcoming it or dying with the host. Makes a lot of sense, and I never understood viruses that way until Dr. Romulo explained how they evolve through mutation.
I got Covid post-vaccine availability late in the cycle. Frankly, it was so minor that it was merely an inconvenience. I was lucky to be relatively healthy for someone my age, but the biggest break was to have gotten it through a strain late in the cycle and being vaccinated, so it only had negligible effects on me and lasted two days. Might have been very different if I got it early or was not vaccinated.
From Google AI, here are some quotes on why viruses mutate which underlies my hypothesis on less than exemplary governance.
“Viruses mutate because they make accidental mistakes when copying their genetic code inside a host cell. These random changes are not planned by the virus; they happen naturally as it rapidly reproduces. While many changes do nothing or weaken the virus, helpful mutations allow it to survive, spread easier and bypass immune defenses.”
“Why mutations continue — Survival pressure: When human immune systems or vaccines learn to fight a virus, only the random mutated versions that slip past these defenses survive to reproduce. Better transmission: Mutations can help the virus stick to cells better or travel more efficiently from person to person.”
How does that relate to bad governance?
Ideally, it would be great to have good governance, through wise policies, sustained execution with competent, and honest government officials and reliable partners. Successful countries did not start with good governance but over time improved and achieved sustained economic growth (initially through industrialization and manufacturing for high population countries). This also lessened corruption through the dual benefit of less need to be corrupt by being able to pay people better and fund the agencies fighting it at proper levels. This does not happen overnight and has many forward and backward steps, but that is the overall direction of economic progress, coupled with sustained effort for both inclusive economic growth and less corruption that gets and keeps you on that path. It is also the mentality that this is a constant and not a goal to achieve but instead to constantly work at. Not unsustainable and sometimes gimmicky anti-corruption drives and the like.
To the typical comment that you cannot change corrupt people and so on, let me again ask for some critical and nuanced thinking rather than simplistic either/or thinking. Those who are incorrigibly corrupt will stay that way. Those corrupt out of necessity or surrounded by it will have less incentive to do so and fear being caught and the consequences more. If conditions change sustainably, most will probably stop being corrupt out of fear, better pay and decreasing prevalence among peers. Then with corrupt participants down to the incorrigible, it will be easier and more effective to move against those fewer hardcore ones like they do in Singapore, Hong Kong and South Korea. This was largely accomplished after achieving a decent level of prosperity.
Getting back to bad governance which I condemn, I am merely observing that this has been with us since before I was born and probably post my time. I am not picking on any specific administration though some are better or worse than the norm. This sadly is systemic but even within that there are degrees and variations.
To me, degrees of corruption and bad governance seem to be analogous to virus mutation.
If corruption is modest, it is frankly a cost of doing business, and merely an inefficiency like a relatively inconvenient but merely irritating minor virus mutation. If more serious and pervasive, then like a major virus, it might not “kill” the host, but definitely harms it and affects performance and the operations and achievements of the host. If oppressive, then while it does not kill, it affects the host in a major way and leads to action to combat it. Sometimes the action beats it back, or it just fights it to the level of a standstill or modus vivendi. That is far from ideal and seriously harmful, but not fatal.
And unless pushed back, it definitely affects performance and results in a major manner and over the long term as it enters into decision-making in a critical way.
If so powerful that it is fatal, then eventually both the host and the virus die. Then what results? A dominant new host or a dominant new virus?
The author is an independent director of the state-run Maharlika Investment Corp.
