Warning from Curry’s Mike Ryan as Trócaire award is given to him
CURRY native Dr Mike Ryan has warned that as a civilisation we are “writing cheques we cannot cash” and that it is our children who will pay the price.
He made the comments as he picked up an award for his efforts to highlight the needs of poorer countries in the face of the Covid pandemic.
Dr Ryan, who is executive director of the World Health Organisation’s health emergencies programme, is a joint recipient of this year’s Romero award, which is presented annually by the charity Trócaire.
He was honoured for having “consistently highlighted the threat of Covid-19 in the developing world and the need for global solidarity in our response to the virus”.
Trócaire said that “this message is so important now at a time when the unequal distribution of vaccines threatens to derail the global effort to combat this virus”.
The Sligo man won the award along with Dr Lilian Otiso of Kenyan healthcare provider LVCT. Accepting the award, Dr Mike Ryan said: “Covid-19 does not discriminate. We too cannot, must not, discriminate in our fight against this pandemic. Doing so will only work in the pandemic’s favour. The last eight months have shown us that unity, not singularity, defeats pandemics.” Ryan says we are creating the conditions where epidemics flourish. He said that we are “chasing that thing that people call economic growth”.
“In my view that is becoming a malignancy, not growth, because what it is doing is driving unsustainable practices in terms of how we manage communities, how we manage development, how we manage prosperity.
“We’re writing cheques that we cannot cash as a civilisation for the future and they are going to bounce. “My fear is that our children are going to pay that price. Some day when we are not here our children will wake up in a world where there is a pandemic that has a much higher case fatality rate and that could bring our civilisation to its very knees.
“We need a world that’s more sustainable, where profit is not put before communities,” he stressed.