When COVID descended from the sky, oooooooh it seems like two days or a thousand years ago, there was an initial commitment to global working-together, hands-across-the-etc. And then the nations of the world fell into an unseemly heap in their scramble for the vaccines which appeared in a haphazard fashion, before reassembling some modicum of decency and creating COVAX, the scheme to share vaccines worldwide.
Then, after it became clear that booster shots would be necessary, the scramble started afresh, on top of what was already a stuffed-up process.
And then the Omicron strain appeared out of Africa to remind us of what happens when you treat a global disease in a global society as a series of national epidemics. After some mumbling about “vaccine nationalism”, the appearance of the new strain prompted nations like the UK to … loosen requirements for booster shots, and shorten the gap between to three months, from six.
The truth is that COVID has revealed to us afresh not only the utter amoralism of the global set-up, and how easily the peoples of the world collapse back into nationalism, but also how threadbare and all but absent are the mechanisms by which we might change that set-up.
COVID-19, though it has taken many millions, run a scythe through the chronically ill and the old, has, as we have noted, proved a comparatively gentle first outing for what one might call global multidimensional pandemic — one that’s already in the airport lounge with you as you’re reading of its discovery in Botswana on your phone. Both Delta and Omicron in their own way continued this. If you believe in an intercessionary god, or that we’re a simulation by higher-dimensional beings, you’d have to say we’re getting the clues — pssssst: set up genuine global governance — that that’s really reserved for the remedial class.
Instead, what has been revealed is that we have no global governance in the areas that would genuinely distribute power and rely on global consensus to answer the challenges humanity faces, but we have an A-1 system of global governance for the maintenance of property rights — as exemplified by the ramshackle process of global vaccine distribution compared with the smooth and vast operation preventing any loosening intellectual property rights over molecules.
We knew that already; COVID simply made it very, very clear. Not so much as to change much actual behaviour, but sufficient to terrify us about what would, or will, happen if or when a pandemic with a nastier profile comes along and public health systems genuinely and rapidly collapse. Would such an occurrence actually see us perform better — since executive power would simply take total charge, with no quibbling about rights or bodily autonomy etc — or would the failure to establish such bodies before the disaster mean that we would never get a full grip, and see societies ravaged beyond anything we have recently known, before control was reasserted?
Certainly the facts surrounding vaccine distribution are hair-raising enough. With no central authority to pilot this process, COVAX was created in 2020 at, where else, a cocktail party at the Davos World Economic Forum shindig. Rather than the World Health Organization being the single leading authority, COVAX was strung between multiple authorities.
As Mark Eccleston-Turner has noted in a series of articles, COVAX should have existed a decade before COVID — which is, after all, the third SARS outbreak we’ve had in 20 years — and its mission was almost wholly disregarded from the start as the scramble for vaccines began. The unseemly manner in which questions of first dose, second dose, AstraZeneca v Pfizer and booster shots shoved aside any larger discussion of either the rational self-interested case for universal distribution or the general ethical one about what is owed to all humanity.
No global political leader emerged to gainsay that rush, and mainstream media editors showed little interest in keeping the focus on the moral, global case.
One could say that our global response to COVID shows what would happen if a more lethal pandemic came along. But here past is prologue. We’ve already seen HIV/AIDS ravage the global south after being contained in the north, with a similar lack of mobilisation. Beyond that is the deeper structural truth: a global health system that was under construction in the post-World War II decades has been ravaged and undermined by the 1980s shift to the “Washington consensus” on private development funding, neoliberal markets and endless leaching interest payments from the south to the north.
It is this chaos that is now being expressed within COVID. Had we not taken this path over past decades our response would not be playing out this way.
There is much to critique about the self-interest and concealed ideologies of the era of “global development” up to the late 1970s, but one can say that the debate was on a shared plane of rational ends — development for human autonomy and decisions made towards universal outcomes. The collapse back into global capitalism, with a contentless notion of growth, damaged the system capacity to argue rationally.
After several decades of this, the COVID response — drug buy-ups; vaccine buy-ups; refusing drug generics; letting Africa and elsewhere languish at 5% — was what we got, and what looked normal. That is real decline, global reversal — not merely that such happens, but that it looks inevitable. We are to some degree back in the 19th century, before even the League of Nations, amid the chaos of the great game.
The other story to tell is, of course, entirely opposite: how global networks of scientists, silo-ed by private and state institutions, broke down those walls with networked cooperation to supercharge the capacity to create forms of scientific working.
Big pharma has been cracking down on relaxing internet protocols precisely because they know they were multiply relaxed daily to get the vaccine moving — and it is that cross-hatched cooperation that sped up the vaccine process. That is post-capitalist, but also post-territorial, threatening established notions of state power as the building blocks for global governance.
No wonder everyone is so keen to get this system back in its gift boxes and its state-jackets. In the slow unwinding of the Greek alphabet are possibilities which are becoming harder to suppress.
I always thought that a system where individual nations were responsible for their own backyard, and that any arrangements beyond this (in trade, peace treaties, etc ) were by cooperation and consensus of these nations, was both an effective compromise and a kind of self-correcting Utopia.
Then came the shocking implementations of Brexit, the end of Trump’s presidency, and the international COVID response, and I almost wish that the world was a single socialist nation. But whenever I remember that interesting multinational experiment, the EU – and the constant friction between the whole and its parts – I realise that there is no perfect solution. An individual’s lust for greed and power is always going to overrun another’s attempt to consider the welfare of others, and our only hope is that there are enough good people in the world to drown out the effect of the evil, nasty, greedy and selfish brigade.
The EU may not be perfect but at its heart are its citizens as witnessed by the strong consumer and privacy laws. After living through the chaos of Berlusconi I long for an adult in charge with the calibre of Mario Draghi. Perhaps we could consider an apolitical technocrat as PM as a solution?
I would not say ‘reveals’, so much as ‘confirms’ that which we already know.
It’s a strong reminder that Labor has bragging rights when it comes to our health system. And any liberal , Country or national, Democrat , etc, that championed medicare deserves acknowledgement.
When our nuffy leaders go about their wedgies , perhaps Labor could consider celebrating this achievement and talk about spending up on health workers ,training and wages, preparing for our future.
Fingers, toes tingle when Guy, every now and again goes out on a limb.
“The truth is that COVID has revealed to us afresh not only the utter amoralism of the global set-up, and how easily the peoples of the world collapse back into nationalism, but how threadbare and all but absent are the mechanisms by which we might change that set-up.” A way of seeing, reaching out. Exploiting the known, in order to visualize unknown. ie “If you believe in an intercessionary god . . . . .you’d have to say we’re are getting the clues – psssst set up genuine global governance . . . . ” Advance and retreat? Future Governance in realm, not only of the known; but possibly more so(?) inevitabilities of Global climate threat and/or natural world’s response to human virus, though we be?
Covid was never lethal enough to scare the politicians into action.
I guess the benchmark is SARS #1 – it was taken seriously and eradicated. But it was somewhere between 2% and 75% lethal depending on patient age. With Covid the numbers are about 10x lower.
If “the west” had acted like East Asia the pandemic would be over – instead we live in a global petri dish and may or may not face a properly lethal omega variant at any time.
On the plus side a proper black death style cull might fix the climate crisis though we’d need at least 90% lethality.
Sounds like win-win whoopee to me.
You really need to stop drinking the ecofascist kool aid. People like you are all for 90% of the population dying because you’ve lived an exceptionally privileged life and believe that those 90% would be elsewhere. Ask someone from the DRC what they think about 90% of the world’s population dying.
Woosh!
There’s no may not about it. We will face a far more lethal pandemic, and it may well be sooner than we like to think. This pandemic has given governments and the community some idea of the tools we can use to deal with it, and the challenges we will face. I suspect that when the children of the fash anti vax mob are dying, they may well change their tune.