Pandemic definitions

A response to Adam Lehto

Our reader Adam Lehto makes some important points in his response to Carl’s interview to Atle Fretheim. We think Adam’s crucial sentence is as follows: 

“Despite a great deal of very welcome skepticism about detection and monitoring methods and media scaremongering, you continue to use phrases like 'the pandemic' and 'the next pandemic' as if they unproblematically referred to an objective reality that everyone can agree on.”

To understand the importance of this phrase in its historical context, we must go back to 2003 and a seminal paper by Peter Doshi charting the shifting nature of pandemic definitions.