COVID 19 pandemic makes the perfect case for the concept of this Blog: a long, global view as opposed to the narrow, partisan, parochial, and short-term approach that has brought the world to this avoidable catastrophe.
The last report from The Economist reveals the extent to which a crisis like this have been forecasted in advance... and ignored by press and politicians more interested in indefinite but more marketable problems such as global warming or inequality of income.
Quote (bold is from this author):
"In february 2018 a panel of experts convened by the World Health Organisation (who) put together a list of diseases that posed big public-health risks but for which there were few or no countermeasures. It featured various well-recognised threats, including Ebola, sars, Zika and Rift Valley fever. But it also included “Disease X”.
This illness, caused by a pathogen never before seen in humans, would, the panel said, emerge from animals somewhere in a part of the world where people had encroached on wildlife habitats. It would be more deadly than seasonal influenza but would spread just as easily between people. By hitching rides on travel and trade networks, it would journey beyond its continent of origin within weeks of its emergence. It would cause the world’s next big pandemic, and leave economic and social devastation in its wake. Indeed.
Less than two years after the report was published Disease X turned up. It began late last year in Wuhan, China, and the wider world became aware of it in January. It has now infected nearly 10m people and killed almost 500,000 of them. That death toll is also likely to reach seven figures before things are over. For Disease X now has a name: covid-19.
I told you so
Though perhaps the loudest, the who’s was not the only warning that something like this might happen. Moreover, some of the prophets, such as Peter Daszak, a disease ecologist who is head of an independent research organisation called the EcoHealth Alliance, specifically focused on the risk posed by bat-borne coronaviruses, as sars-cov-2, the cause of covid-19, has turned out to be. And the point of issuing those warnings was preparedness.
With the correct systems in place a potential pandemic, spotted early, might be nipped in the bud.
Instead, the world’s response to the new illness has been similar to its response to sars in 2002 and, after that, to h5n1 avian influenza in 2005. This is to move into a costly panic mode intended to slow the spread of the disease while scientists race to develop a vaccine. “This,” as Dr Daszak, observes wryly, “is not a plan.”
Zoonotic infectious diseases are as frequent as flu, as dangerous as HIV, and as frequently reported as the past five years of SARS, MERS, and so on. Yet, there has been more funding for finding (or implementing) "solutions" to long term, ill-defined menaces such as "global warming" or "climate change" than to actual and real epidemics such as SARS, MERS,m HIV, Ebola, to name some of COVID 19 predecessors.
Wild animals wet markets, unsanitary poultry, pig production, and distribution continues rampant and coexistence of human, bats, and civets remain as common in Asia as it was before the current pandemic.
This is not science fiction. It's just willing ignorance of overwhelming and continuous scientific evidence. At a fraction of the cost of keeping 14 nuclear carriers and billions of dollars in defense spending for the remote eventuality of a WWIII-like confrontation in the indefinite future China, the US, and the EU could have already developed an effective vaccine and treatments.
Bill Gates warned in his TED talks 5 years before this disaster, only for conspiracy theorists to attack him incited by partisan propaganda networks on the Left and on the Right side of the spectrum
Gates -whose only crime is being a self-made billionaire turned philanthropist for the past 20 years- has been leading actual efforts to fight pandemics out of his own pocket. Governments -US, EU, and China- have willingly ignored or even obstructed these and other efforts by hiding information until the crisis was already consuming the world.
This is not new. Henrik Ibsen wrote An Enemy of the People back in 1896 with the same story: short-sighted politicians serving special interests attacking science and blocking efforts to save lives.
It's belated time to look at social events with a long view, fact- and science-based perspective.
Or suffer the consequences.
