Having said that, I have noticed a couple more important stories buried under the emotion-laden fluff. I thought it might be useful to mention them---hopefully more to reinforce than to originally inform.
&&&&
First of all, I noticed a story in the Toronto Star about health care workers concerned about the Doug Ford's decision to get rid of the previous Liberal government's legislation that gave everyone---even minimum wage people---at least two paid sick days a year. The other thing is that our dear Premier's legislation reinstated the idea that employers can force employees to go to a doctor's office to get a sick note. The sop that the Conservatives threw to workers is that everyone is entitled to three unpaid sick days a year.
As was pointed out, this is a monumentally stupid state of affairs in a world where there things like infectious diseases and epidemics. It means that people have a very strong economic inducement to go to work when they are feeling sick. Among other things, this means that when you buy a meal from a restaurant, there is a good chance that one of the people handling your food will have a communicable disease which they can share with you.
It also means that even if you are lucky to work in an environment with paid sick days you might be forced (as I was several times before I retired) to waste the time of an over-worked health care professional, to leave your home where you are resting (and isolated from the rest of the population), and, wait in a room full of similarly sick people (who might have compromised immune systems) so you can share your illness with them.
&&&&
Secondly, I noticed that experts on emerging infectious diseases were complaining that this new strain of disease had probably emerged when a disease endemic in bats managed to "jump species" into human beings. Why would it do so? Well, primarily because some human cultures have a weird tradition of eating "wild animals". I'm not talking about First Nations people hunting seals, caribou, etc---I'm talking about rich folks chowing down on, mmm, delicious bat soup. If you can believe this National Geographic article, China has temporarily banned this trade and lots of ordinary people there are pressuring the government to make this permanent. Here's a short Youtube video that shows the same thing in Indonesia.
As the National Geographic article above points out, this is not an "innately Chinese" thing, but rather something that only a very small number of people do. It is completely and utterly different from what our indigenous people do, as the animals are kept alive, travel long distances, are sometimes factory farmed, and, sold by disgusting markets where many different species are kept "cheek by jowl" in appalling conditions.
This has created a perfect situation to super-charge the evolution of new strains of infectious diseases for human beings. Just to give you an idea of how bizarre this situation is, there is also some evidence that the virus moved from bats to poisonous snakes (cobras or kraits) before being transmitted to humans. Snakes and bats are two of those species being jammed together in cages at these idiotic disease factories.
&&&&
One last bit of grotesque information. One of the problems that comes from these infectious diseases stems from the fact that in the modern neo-liberal paradise that we've created a lot of our basic research on things like vaccines is done by private drug companies. And the problem is that there's not a lot of money to be made by creating vaccines for emergent diseases. You do that by sending out "germ hunters" to poke around in places like wildlife markets to collect samples and try to figure out what might be the next nasty pathogen. Then these are sent to government laboratories that can classify, identify, sequence the genes, and, so lots of the time-consuming preliminary work that would allow someone to rapidly create a vaccine for it if it emerges as a public health problem. We also need to create infrastructure around the world to keep track of emergent diseases and speed up the response if a pandemic comes along.
The problem from a business point of view is that almost none of this work will create any revenue because it is preventative. It might be the case that some corporation might end up with something that would end up being used by huge numbers of people---like the current flu vaccines. But the fact is, that there's no real way of knowing which particular disease that will be ahead of the nasty pandemic. And once we have a second "black death" knocking at our doors---given modern air travel---it might very well be too late to accomplish anything before huge numbers of people are already dead.
According to an article I found in Human Vaccines & Immunotherapeutics there has been a push to create this sort of infrastructure.
In response, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Economic Forum, Wellcome Trust and the governments of Norway and India co-founded the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) in 2016, which aims to “stimulate, finance and coordinate the development of vaccines against epidemic diseases, especially in cases in which market incentives alone are insufficient”. Other entities, such as the governments of Germany and Japan, have since joined as investors.But it seems to me that it's kinda ridiculous that this is something that is being funded by a small number of countries and a couple charities instead of being something that every nation on earth (or at least every wealthy, technologically sophisticated nation) supports simply as a way of "paying your dues".
&&&&
Support indie media, subscribe through Patreon or Pay Pal.
&&&&
Ultimately, this pandemic is just like the climate emergency. It's a symptom of human governments' inability to deal proactively with problems that are emerging from the dramatic expansion of human technology. Why is it that a scientist can't go to a government, explain this sort of problem, and, then get some action on it? Instead, we have to go through this crazy process where activists have to labouriously build consensus, fight back opportunist politicians who try to whip people into a frenzy of opposition, and, ultimately clean up the mess because we waited far, far too long to take rational action. The existing process simply takes too long and inevitably will lead to world-wide catastrophe.
&&&&
Furthermore I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!
No comments:
Post a Comment