What caused the Covid-19 pandemic?

This chapter considers the COVID-19 pandemic as an example of a complex, emergent and global phenomenon, the numerous causes of which must be examined at multiple levels through different ontological and epistemological lenses. After providing examples of biomedical explanations which depict the pandemic somewhat reductively in terms of biomedical and molecular causes, we introduce the notion of performative causality-the pandemic begins when it is "declared". We explore how a particular version of the pandemic was brought into being through certain social actions, including "front-stage" presentations of particular versions of science and more informal, "back-stage" efforts to enrol and mobilize others to back a particular course of action. We describe how scientific enquiry during the pandemic was culturally and politically shaped using the example of the flawed "droplet narrative" explanation of SARS-CoV-2 transmission. Using Bourdieu's notions of habitus, field, orthodoxy and heterodoxy, we show how aerosol scientists who were less powerfully positioned were ignored and their explanations rejected by policymakers at the World Health Organization and (consequently) by national public health bodies. Finally, we consider how the awkward and contested ways in which the pandemic may end.