How many more images of Covid disaster will it take to jolt rich countries into action?
As the number of Covid-19 cases rose dramatically in Europe and the US during the early part of last year, something strange seemed to be happening in the global south. South Africa’s entire death toll was less than 100 at the same time that Britain was losing more than 1,000 lives a day. India’s death rate during this period was so low that it was termed a “mystery”. More confident conclusions were drawn about Africa’s fate; some thought it had been spared the worst of Covid-19 because it took decisive action early on in the pandemic, while others said the continent had been saved by its warm climate, its low elderly population and its “good community health systems”. There was even brief excitement about the curative potential of homegrown sweet wormwood, a plant that the president of Madagascar claimed was a treatment for Covid-19.
Most of this reasoning was speculative. But by the late summer of 2020, two clear trends were emerging. While parts of western Europe were enduring a devastating first wave of Covid-19 cases, Africa and southAsia were experiencing a slow-moving, sometimes stalling rate of infection and a comparatively low death toll. Those trends are now being reversed.
With vaccination programmes gaining momentum in the global north, the pandemic in western countries finally appears to be waning. The opposite is happening in low-income countries. Most can expect no access to either vaccine technology or donations in the near future. Healthcare facilities are overstretched and under-resourced, and data collection is limited, meaning death statistics are unreliable. Most of the world’s population outside rich countries are confronting an extended Covid crisis. Indeed, for several countries there is no way of estimating when the pandemic will be over. Instead, what lies ahead is an open-ended stretch of uncertainty, as populations try, and inevitably fail, to coexist with this virus.
For every measure that placed Africa and south Asia in a good position at the start of the pandemic, there is another that undermines it. There are indeed strong community health systems in parts of west Africa, a legacy of the Ebola crisis. Those networks can raise awareness, but without the ability to test for Covid-19, they areunable to get a clear idea of infection rates. The same applies to mortality figures. In rural areas, many people don’t have access to large hospitals, and some deaths aren’t formally recorded. The fear of social stigma that a Covid-19 diagnosis can carry means some people bury their deceased relatives in haste, without getting a diagnosis or alerting family and social networks.
Instead of reliable data, those of us with family and friends in low-income countries have hushed, anecdotal evidence that does not correspond to official accounts. We measure waves by keeping track of what we hear; we learn to recognise the signs. Whenever relatives tell us of a quick illness or a hushed-up death, the deceased person is added to an informal mental tally of Covid-19 cases.
Successfully defeating the virus depends on having solid numbers and a dashboard of data. Without those, scientists are fighting this disease in the dark, as Michelle Gayer, director of emergency health at the International Rescue Committee, recently told the business publication Quartz. When a virus is allowed to quietly spread and scientists don’t have the data to map its trajectory, it’s difficult to tell what’s actually happening until a traumatic spike in death rates sheds light on the number of cases.This is the current reality in India, and while I don’t wish to be a doom-monger, it seems likely this will soon be the case in other countries too.
A brief survey of a few of the largest African countries by population shows how volatile the situation still is. South
Africa and Ethiopia remain on the UK’s red list and are in varying stages of lockdown while their governments cobble together vaccine programmes. Kenya has wobbled out of another lockdown but maintains a strict curfew and remains on the red list. Egypt has truncated the school year and appears to be heading for the peak of its third wave. The main coping strategies available to these countries are sisyphean cycles of lockdowns and easing. These buy governments time and reduce the pressure on limited healthcare facilities, but they ravage the economy in the process. In poorer countries where state support is limited, lockdowns can be as deadly as the virus itself, because they remove people’s ability to make a living.
The outcome is not only sporadic flare-ups or confined challenges, but an entire population trapped by and condemned to live with the virus. The bestcase scenario is that governments are able to contain a high peak of cases through lockdowns, while lives and livelihoods are lost to economic restrictions. The worst is the kind of explosion we are seeing in India. Some observers estimate that the virus will kill more people in 2021 than it did in 2020.
Which brings us to what can and should be done. That the pandemic is not playing out in poorer countries with the same virulence we saw in western countries does not mean there aren’t slow and deadly fires smouldering, which could yet grow into an inferno. There is a delay built into our responses to Covid-19, both at home and abroad. As western governments learned from the first wave, by the time the heavy death tolls are upon us, it is already too late. By the time the world had seen the images from India showing mass cremations, the country was already embroiled in a crisis. Those images prompted Joe Biden to reverse his position and pledge to send a “whole series of help”. I’d wager that if the world had been exposed to similar images from other countries, it would have become untenable for the west to maintain vaccine apartheid.
But we shouldn’t have to wait for images like those to spur action. What is required is something far more ambitious than vaccine donations. The world needs a global logistical exercise, a sort of Marshall plan that would provide financial support, expert manpower and medical technology. In the US, Democratic senators, progressives, NGOs and an alliance of 175 former world leaders and Nobel laureates have come together to apply pressure on Biden to waive intellectual-property protections on vaccines. As the virus recedes in the west, now is the time to apply this kind of pressure on leaders to deliver the south from its almost certain fate. By the time the real numbers of deaths and infections in poorer countries become clear, it will be far too late for many people.
• Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist
vote Labour in 2019 is often accompanied by a warning that they may not do so in future, if the party “wraps itself in the flag”. Among some who fear that Starmer is attempting to resurrect Blairite centrism, the typical denizen of a red wall seat is presented as a kind of northern successor to Basildon man in the 1990s, when Tony Blair moved Labour rightwards in order to woo aspirational voters in the south.
There is no legitimate parallel. Basildon man was an upwardly mobile son of Thatcherite individualism. For most of the working-class voters who have turned their back on Labour over the last 20 years, ideas of Britishness, England, place, pride, honour and industry have nothing to do with the right. They are a way of talking differently about values of the left; of excavating a buried but still felt communitarian dimension to life. A fascinating paper published last year in the Journal of Working-Class Studies argues that much of the red wall rebellion was driven by a memory of the “mutual bonds and feelings of togetherness that were engendered by industry and industrial work”. These traces of the past, crucially, outlive the economic context that generated them. They are “reinforced
rather than dissipated by the contemporary absences of industry and industrial work”. Anyone who lives in or has visited the mill towns of West Yorkshire or the villages of the Durham coalfield will know how true this is.
More than half of Labour’s priority target seats in England and Wales are “standalone” towns that are not part of a wider city conurbation – places like Darlington, Lincoln or Wrexham. If Labour fails to work with the romantic desire for stronger collective attachments and identities, it will find that the Conservative party does the job for it. The New Social Covenant unit recently set up by Boris Johnson’s political secretary, Danny Kruger, has planted its flag on this terrain. Introducing its aims, Kruger wrote: “The purpose of politics is to strengthen the family, community and nation so they can exercise their beneficent influence on individuals.”
Kruger is an Old Etonian, and the Guardian reader can be forgiven a reflex rolling of the eyes. As it should, the liberal left will always interrogate such language for the power relations which that trio of warm nouns conceals, asking questions about who might be excluded from their communitarian embrace. Immigrants, ethnic minorities and single mothers, for example. But if it wishes to win back hearts and minds in the constituencies it has lost, the left cannot simply write this language off as the intellectual property of the right.
From Victorian New Liberals such as TH Green to the great Marxist historian of the English working class, EP Thompson, British progressive thought has a venerable tradition of defending the rights of community against capitalism, the market and individualism. But for fear of creating insiders and outsiders, most of Labour has ceased to think deeply about the “we” and the “in common”. As the totemic Brexit debate over freedom of movement illustrated, its deepest moral concern is to promote the rights and freedoms of the individual. The tension between liberalism and communitarianism could be creative, if both sides of the debate were given a fair hearing. But across too much of the left, for too much of the time, the longings of Labour’s lost voters are still not being listened to.
Julian Coman is a Guardian associate editor
side of Georgia to support Carter’s bid for the presidency in 1976. Biden’s colleagues decried him as an “exuberant” idealist at the time.
There’s also an increasingly stark comparison between the Carter and the Trump administration.
James Gustave Speth served as the chairman of Carter’s Council on Environmental Quality. As Carter’s chief adviser on environmental matters, Speth helped brief Carter on climate change and direct policy. He finds the contrast between Carter and Trump “striking”.
“People see now that Carter was at a pole,” Speth tells me. “Carter was the opposite of Trump – and everything that people despised about him. Carter had integrity, honesty, candor and a commitment to the public good of all else. Carter was a different man, totally.”
Carter’s vice-president, Walter Mondale,
died a month ago at 93, perhaps putting an exclamation mark on the need to expedite overdue praise and understanding. Speth agrees that it would be best to speed up our recognition of Carter. “So many fine things are said over the bodies of the dead,” Speth said. “I’d love to have the recognition occur now.”
Speth is also working on his own book on the Carter administration, that covers the Carter and subsequent administrations on climate and energy and highlights the failure to build on the foundation that Carter laid. His project, soon to be published with MIT, carries a damning title: They Knew.
One of the most profound– even painful – parts of watching documentaries like Carterland is bearing witness to the fact that Carter was right on asking us to drive less, to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, to focus on conservation and renewable energy. Not only was Carter’s vision a path not taken, it was a path mocked. Reagan removed the solar panels from the White House, politicized the environmental movement and painted it as a fringe endeavor.
“Carter was our only president who had a visceral environmental and ecological attachment. That was part of his being,” Speth says. “We had an opportunity in 1980 – but we’ve lost 40 years in the pursuit of a climate-safe path. We can no longer avoid serious and destructive changes, period. That didn’t have to happen.”
I ask Speth why getting Carter’s legacy right matters. First, Speth says, it’s important to recognize the example Carter set for looking ahead, in a culture that prizes soundbites and short-term gains. “Carter was a trained engineer who believed in science,” Speth points out. “He understood things on a global scale, and believed in forecasting. Preparing for the long run is rare in politics.”
Carter’s biographer Alter agrees. “If there is a gene for duty, responsibility and the will to tackle messy problems with little or no potential for political gain,” he writes, “Jimmy Carter was born with it.”
While none of these recent documentaries or biographies seeks to portray Carter as a saint or even politically savvy, they do insist that his presidency was more successful than history has acknowledged, particularly on the energy, conservation and human rights fronts. Still, there are aspects of his single term that will probably remain embedded in his narrative, such as his tenuous relationship with Congress, early catering to segregationists to win votes, and Iran’s hostage crisis.
What can we learn from the shifting narrative around Carter’s presidency?
“You can talk about how Carter was an underrated president,” film-maker Jim Pattiz says. “But can you ask yourself: what qualities do you actually want in a leader? Do you want someone who will challenge you to be better, or speak in catchphrases and not ask much of you?
“This film is a cautionary tale,” Pattiz says. “We can elect another Carter. Let’s reward leaders willing to do the right thing.”
Jason Carter has lived with the nuances and inconsistencies in the narrative surrounding his grandfather’s presidency his entire life. “Stories are always summaries,” he says. “They leave out so much so that we can understand them in simple terms. Public narrative, these days, is so often about politics. It should really be about the great, public problems we’re solving. There’s a difference.
“I don’t want history to be kind to my grandfather,” Jason Carter tells me. “I just want history to be honest.”
Advocates also argued that felony convictions should not be justification for deportation. “They are framing the deportation policy as a public safety policy – that they are deporting people who are an ‘imminent danger’,” said Anoop Prasad, ALC staff attorney who represented Pham. “But we see that is not true. California is releasing people on parole having explicitly found they do not pose a danger … and then still hands them over to Ice to be deported.”
On his flight to Vietnam, Pham tried to comfort the people around him, including some who he said barely spoke Vietnamese and had lived in the US for decades. Some were recently picked up by Ice and appeared in denial: “They were really lost … They have families and businesses and properties they are leaving.”
He and others were, however, relieved to be out of Ice custody, where he said they had not been given an opportunity to get vaccinated and had recently encountered another detainee infected with Covid.
‘I just want to hug my parents’
Pham may never be able to come to the US. His deportation order, in effect, constitutes a lifetime ban, Prasad said, unless the California governor would move to pardon him.
Meanwhile, advocates are campaigning for a proposed California state law that would end transfers from prisons to Ice and save people from deportation – and urging Biden to exercise his discretion and not deport people based on convictions.
In Ho Chi Minh City, Pham said it was overwhelming to adjust to being free for the first time since he was a teenager, while also being exiled thousands of miles from his family. He has been able to visit some relatives in Vietnam, but said Ho Chi Minh City felt largely unfamiliar. He did, however, recognize the corner where he was assaulted as a 12-year-old.
Pham might pursue teaching English, though for now is still just getting accustomed to technologies he never used behind bars.
Pham’s family hopes to travel to Vietnam, but his father has recently fallen sick.
“I pray every day for Covid restrictions to be over and that I would be strong to beat my poor health so that I can hopefully see Tien again,” his father told the Guardian. For now, he added, “We continue to see Tien over a screen.”
Pham said it was hard to think that his family reunification in California would never come to pass.
“I pictured it so many times … I always felt that America is my home. My family, my loved ones, my friends, they are all there,” he said, adding, “I just wanted to give my parents a hug and tell them, ‘Mom and Dad, I’m home.’”
I pray everyday for Covid restrictions to be over and that I would be strong to beat my poor health so that I can hopefully see Tien again
Tu Pham