Covid- 19 Shows That We Can't Take On This Enemy Alone; Globalization May Change for The Better
'Coronavirus won’t end globalisation, but change it hugely for the better.' An unregulated world can be blamed for its spread, but collective action based on evidence could be the best way to stop it. By Will Hutton, The Guardian, March 8, 2020. Excerpts/Ed:
In 2008, the world successfully pulled together – with Britain playing a catalytic role – when faced with the threat of financial collapse. In 2020, confronted with the threat of a global pandemic, it is every country for itself. There has been no international health summit of national leaders supported by the World Health Organization – although the World Bank has announced a $12bn package of assistance. There are frantic national efforts to create a vaccine and no effort to ensure that, when found and produced in sufficient scale, it will go to the places of need – in all our interests. Britain, with no vaccine production capacity of its own, is especially vulnerable.
Instead there are national bans on exports of key products such as medical supplies, with countries falling back on their own analysis of the crisis amid localised shortages and haphazard, primitive approaches to containment. The standards on isolation, quarantine and contact tracing – medieval approaches to disease control in any case vary hugely between countries.
- 'Plague Doctor,' Doctor Schnabel ('Dr. Beak'), a plague doctor in 17th century Rome, c. 1656. In the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, some doctors wore a beak-like mask which was filled with aromatic items designed to protect them from putrid air, which was seen as the cause of infection...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_doctor
The WHO, underfunded for decades, with the threat of further draconian loss of funds made only last month by Donald Trump, struggles to make itself relevant, undermined and ignored by its own members. China applies immense pressure so that its manipulated data or effectiveness are not challenged. Trump has airily dismissed the WHO’s warnings of an imminent pandemic because they do not conform to his “hunch” that the health risks have been wildly overstated. In short, if you want to create a pandemic with wholesale abdication of global leadership, do what is happening now.
The approach extends to the economy. Stock markets rightly worry about an approaching global recession – flagged by collapsing air passenger revenues and the parallel collapse of seaborne trade signalled by the lowest freight rates since 2008. However, government and central banks are not coordinating their economic response to the threat...
It is the triumph of nationalism and anti-Enlightenment values across the world. So of course Johnson, leader of the supremely anti-Enlightenment and nationalist Brexit project, complete with its disdain for experts, gave a press conference last week in which he could not call for an internationally coordinated response and the rebuilding of European and international public health capacity. Gordon Brown, in parallel circumstances during the financial crisis, did call for such coordination. Britain would contain, delay, research and mitigate on its own, Johnson declared – fighting Covid-19 metaphorically on the beaches...Yet America’s problem – just like China’s problem over unregulated markets for wild animal meat – is our problem, too. One of the foundations of the rise of the left in the 19th and early 20th centuries was the growing recognition that no individual, however wealthy, was insulated from disease epidemics. Sanitation, clean water and immunisation were public goods necessary for everyone to stay alive. The left was their champion.
..Now, one form of unregulated, free-market globalisation with its propensity for crises and pandemics is certainly dying. But another form that recognises interdependence and the primacy of evidence-based collective action is being born. There will be more pandemics that will force governments to invest in public health institutions and respect the science they represent – with parallel moves on climate change, the oceans, finance and cybersecurity. Because we can’t do without globalisation, the imperative will be to find ways of managing and governing it...
More, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/08/the-coronavirus-outbreak-shows-us-that-no-one-can-take-on-this-enemy-alone
- 6 Devastating Plagues, History
https://www.history.com/news/6-devastating-plagues
- Great Plague of London, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Plague_of_London
- The Great Plague 1665, London
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