Covid will not be our last global health crisis – we need a long-term plan
For decades, scientists warned that urban encroachment on pristine habitats would unleash dangerous new viruses. Covid-19 should not have been a surprise – and, since viruses always mutate, neither should Omicron have been.
Just as Omicron replaced Delta, something else will replace Omicron. It might be a fresh variant of Covid; it might be something completely new.
“[A]nother pandemic is coming,” says Debora MacKenzie in her book Covid-19: The Pandemic That Never Should Have Happened, “and no one can predict which pathogen will cause the next one.”
That doesn’t mean we can’t prepare. Even as we deal with Omicron, we need a long-term strategy, so that we’re not caught unawares countering each fresh outbreak.
Here are four necessary (though perhaps not sufficient) slogans to arm ourselves with.
1. Make vaccines free, everywhere and for everyone
In the 1950s, when a journalist asked virologist Jonas Salk who owned the polio vaccine, he replied, “Well, the people I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?”
Humanity eradicated smallpox by treating vaccines as a public good, created (for the most part) by publiclyowned agencies and distributed on the basis of need.
But that was before big pharma, in what journalist Alexander Zaitchik calls “a profoundly undemocratic expression of concentrated corporate power”, pushed for the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (Trips) of 1994, an agreement that transformed vaccines into private intellectual property.
Thanks to Trips, the horror of Covid-19 delivered a massive payday for pharmaceutical corporations like Pfizer and Moderna, even as they declined to license the technology to manufacturers in developing nations, arguing, controversially, that the lack of expertise, resources and manufacturing capacity in those regions makes doing so pointless.
To date, the world’s poorest nations have received only a woeful 0.6% of available Covid vaccines, an obscene disparity and one that creates a pool of permanent illness in which the viral mutations can develop.
As the People’s Vaccine Alliance (an organisation backed by Amnesty International and a stellar array of former and current world leaders) says, no one’s safe until we’re all safe.
A pandemic in which more than two million people have died should not be a cash grab.
Patents must be abolished. If the corporations can’t deliver vaccines to everyone, they should be nationalised and replaced by institutions that will.
2. Rebuild health and science
The Covid-19 crisis revealed the international consequences of underfunded and neglected health services.
Medical staff have performed heroically during the pandemic but everywhere they are burnt out and exhausted.
Governments must invest massively in medical resources, reversing the austerity of the last decades and creating the specialised facilities – from purpose-built quarantine centres to emergency wards to stockpiles of protective equipment – that will be needed.
That means more frontline staff in every setting from hospitals to old age homes; it also means more researchers
and scientists.
In Australia, the university sector continues to collapse, having lost a staggering 20% of its pre-pandemic workforce. Ongoing budget shortfalls threaten both teaching and research.
Medical expertise and research capability can’t be created overnight. We must start rebuilding now.
3. Create community-driven, health-focused responses
Pandemics disproportionately affect the poor, the marginalised and the oppressed. The people most at risk from viruses tend, in other words, to be those who fear or distrust the authorities.
That’s why the response to a medical emergency should not centre on police and soldiers.
Many governments reacted to the emergence of Covid-19 with punitive measures such as curfews, military patrols and new criminal laws. But a health crisis is neither a war nor a policing operation.
There’s a much better model to follow. The remarkably successful campaign against HIV/Aids was spearheaded by activists from communities directly affected by the pandemic. It was they who disseminated information, offered services and induced behavioural change, even as they fought against prejudice and discrimination.
With a frightening disease spreading, agency and outcome can’t be separated. A population that takes charge itself, that translates health messages into its own idiom, that collectively decides on what to do and how, will deliver far better results than the sternest policeman.
Because a pandemic exposes social inequality, the best responses will necessarily entail a fight for social justice – and, as such, they will be led by the oppressed themselves.
4. End the war on nature
We can and should plan to mitigate the effects of novel viruses. But we will only reduce their frequency if we curtail the ecological destruction that contributes to pathogens crossing into human populations.
As cities expand into previously uninhabited wilderness, habitat loss brings animals and birds into unnatural proximity with people, allowing viruses to find human hosts. The impoverished fringes of sprawling metropolises, and the industrial agriculture associated with them, provide an ideal setting for mutations – and in a globalised world, an infection in one place becomes an infection everywhere.
That’s why scientists worry so much.
As MacKenzie warns, there are lots more coronaviruses out there – and plenty of fresh horrors we’re yet to encounter.
We can’t keep playing whack-amole with each new crisis.
We know what’s coming.
If we don’t plan to counter it, tomorrow will be like today, except much, much worse.
Indeed, Covid-19 should be understood not as an additional disaster piled upon a calamitous heap of fires, floods, heatwaves and tornadoes, but as a specific manifestation of a broader environmental emergency.In a way, that might even be good news (or, at least, as close as we get now), since the fight against the pandemic isn’t a distraction from the fight against climate change.
Rather, the two represent two facets of the same campaign, an increasingly desperate struggle to salvage the future.