Murder is an emotive word. In law, it requires premeditation. Death must be deemed to be unlawful. How could “murder” apply to failures of a pandemic response? Perhaps it can’t, and never will, but it is worth considering.

Thus opens an interesting and thought-provoking editorial from Kamran Abbasi in BMJ (PDF) on 4 February. As always I bring the tl;dr key points.

When politicians and experts say that they are willing to allow tens of thousands of premature deaths for the sake of population immunity or in the hope of propping up the economy, is that not premeditated and reckless indifference to human life?
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At the very least, covid-19 might be classified as“social murder,”as recently explained by two professors of criminology.
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If not murder or a crime against humanity, are we seeing involuntary manslaughter, misconduct in public office, or criminal negligence?
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More than a few countries have failed in their response to the virus; the global missteps are many and well documented by the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response.
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But the global picture does not absolve individual leaders and governments from responsibility.
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[M]uch of the media is complicit too, trapped in ideological silos that see the pandemic through a lens of political tribalism, worried about telling pandemic truths to their readers and viewers, owners, and political friends … truth has become dispensable as politicians and their allies are allowed to lie, mislead, and repaint history, with barely a hint of a challenge.
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The most important lessons from this pandemic … are less about the coronavirus itself but what it has revealed about the political systems that have responded to it.

However necessary, basically nothing is going to happen.