Proposal for World Health Day (April 7, 2020) webcast conferences on “Preventing and Preparing for the next Pandemic: $ trillions available for funding the 17 SDGs.”
Memes can be more contagious as virus genes. And memes
spread faster.
“Before you finish eating breakfast in the morning, you've depended on more than half of the world. This is the way our universe is structured; this is its interrelated quality. We aren't going to have peace on earth until we recognize this basic fact of the interrelated structure of all reality.” Martin Luther King, Jr.
The world has usually looked to the U.S. for leadership in times of crisis. The rapid evolution of Covid19 events however has dramatically narrowed the vision of every individual, institution, nation, news source, and action proposal to reactionary efforts. Obviously, we want to reduce the number and likelihood of deaths, job losses, travel restrictions, shortages of critical supplies, and a global economic depression. But something else needs
to be considered: Preventing and preparing for the next pandemic — even while engaged in grappling actively with this crisis.
The U.S. and China will continue to compete for dominance in a post Covid19 world. Both systems were slow in reacting to this virus, and now both have played useful roles in reacting to it. China’s authoritarian response slowed its spread there and the U.S. economic response is mitigating it here. But both governments’ limitations – economically, politically and environmentally – have been exacerbated by the fact that their efforts have been made in national isolation. Global cooperation is vital to the success of future efforts to confront the inevitable next crisis. For the sake of sustaining freedom, security and prosperity, those
global efforts must begin now.
Because the logistical power of the military is unmatched, they have a critical role to play in these efforts. In a worst-case scenario, even police powers may need to be marshaled. Comprehensively utilizing the U.S. military’s global reach in service of healthcare research and delivery of clinical services would deploy a global system that is already in place – and therefore has the potential to prevent and respond better to other global upheavals the world cannot prevent.
Here are the military’s four fundamental tenets:
1. Early detection
2. Rapid Response
3. Research and Development
4. Prevention
This comprehensive approach is the essential core of any successful response to future global threats. Each person, organization, corporation, and nation in the world has a role to play. And, there are basically three places to act. First, where we are now (in our body,
home, city) which can be extremely costly in lives and dollars - uncoordinated and late. Second, at the political lines we have drawn to separate us and attempt to restrict flows across those borders (also expensive and rarely unsuccessful. Or last, at the origin of the
problem where resources are usually most cost effective.
Acting in cooperation on a global level is demonstrably one of the most difficult challenges for humans. Our minds focus on the close and immediate problems rather than the more distant systemic weaknesses that exist at multiple levels (city, state, nation and global). The paradox is that we are all hyperlinked in our irreversibly interdependent world. Our lives and our freedoms depend on the health of systems and structures at every level of our existence. Every natural and human engineered system known to exist are irreversibly interconnected. Our minds and our government policies see them as independent problems to be solved. This is the critical concept our minds must overcome, and then act on, if we truly value - and want to preserve - our cherished freedoms, our security and sustainable prosperity.
Viruses are the tiniest and most powerful structures that link us all together. The greatest advancements in human history came after the invention of the microscope, which revealed a formerly invisible enemy. That discovery exponentially increased human understanding of the natural world we all inhabit. However, microscopes could not see viruses. They remained invisible, despite the enormous death tolls they caused.
Today we can see them. And we’ve known for well over 100 years we can sometimes protect ourselves against them. Before the U.S. became a nation, our continental army’s strength was boosted by the knowledge that exposure to cow pox protected individuals against the dreaded smallpox.
By the late 1970s, smallpox had been eradicated from the planet — after killing more people in the previous 70 years than all the wars, revolutions, genocides and homicides during the entire century, combined. That global medical miracle was funded by the United States at a cost of just $32 million, spent over a 10-year period. To put it in perspective, the U.S. Government Accounting Office documented the cost savings to U.S. taxpayers from that one-time $32 million global investment at over $17 billion: a staggering profit in terms of global health, economics and security.
Imagine the present-day dollar savings alone if China or the U.S. had developed a Covid19 vaccine before the virus started to spread. Or, if a global primary health care system had already been established to identify it within days after it first emerged. In contrast, the U.S.
Congress has just passed a $2 trillion package (others are likely to follow) for the sole benefit of the U.S. economy. That amount doesn’t include other costs already associated with our slow reactions to the outbreak — or virtually any funding to mitigate the virus’ spread outside our borders. It appears that the lessons that the U.S. might have learned from the crucial role it played in the global eradication of smallpox have been forgotten. The likely unrest caused by increasing economic hardships caused by Covid19 will inevitably have global effects on more violence, crime, refugees, hate and expenses that a comprehensive international response could have prevented.
Have we learned anything since 2008? Will bailing out the airlines aid our Covid19 response? After the 9/11 attacks an airline passenger’s tax was added to pay for increased airline security measures. Now we can see how short-sighted that “security” policy was, as we realize that all aircraft are virtual incubators for Covid19 contagion. With more foresight, high airline profits could have been devoted to strengthening global primary health, basic education, and essential food systems wherever those planes land around the globe.
Humans, like fire departments, are generally good at responding to emergencies. But, like fire departments, when the figurative flames have gone out, we go home. Our brains seem to be hard-wired to respond to immediate, dramatic threats. Analyzing less dramatic elements in order to anticipate larger, more dangerous threats is a much bigger challenge for our Pleistocene brains. But, if we have any desire to head off the inevitable next, potentially even deadlier pandemic, that’s exactly what we must learn to do.
It would be wise to heed the World Health Organization’s estimate that half of ALL the world’s deaths from infectious diseases could be eliminated –— ELIMINATED — with universal access to clean water and adequate sanitation. This would require expenditures of approximately $150 billion more than the world is already contributing to this effort. It’s not hard to imagine that any place lacking basic sanitation only exacerbates the spread of
fecal contaminants, which is one of the vehicles of contagion for Covid19. And
meeting other fundamental human needs like basic education, primary health care
and adequate nutrition has the potential to prevent most of the world’s other
infectious diseases.
An argument might be made that, because most of us in the U.S. have access to clean water and sanitation, we have no reason for concern. Okay. But remember that it is the lowest paid and poorest people in the world that are growing, harvesting, shipping and preparing much of the food we eat. There is no longer any basis for denying our global interconnections. It is not arguable. It is a fact. Preventing illness in one country or on one continent protects all the others. Allowing one part of the world to suffer filth and
illness puts everyone at risk.
But prevention obviously isn’t enough. Viruses mutate. And Corona-type viruses are RNA based, meaning they mutate even more. Already there are various Covid19 strains that could eventually hamper vaccine development.
Viruses can also exchange gene segments (viral sex if you will). It’s believed that the so-called 1918 “Spanish Flu” actually originated on a Kansas farm where a pig virus and bird virus swapped gene segments. One unconfirmed report suggested Covid19 was a combination of a snake and bat virus. Viruses are also human engineered intentionally for pandemic preparedness and bioweapons research and defense. As the former WHO D.C. office Director Nelle Temple Brown once said “Things change! Can we?”
Mutating pathogens are just one of six other key factors that must be considered in any comprehensive approach to preventing future pandemics and improving response capacity to them.
1. Travel and Trade. (I don’t understand that first sentence, and the
second one seems to get right to the point.) Unregulated trade and travel give
pathogens an advantage of easily moving from areas of higher infection rates in
poor nations by healthy vacationers, business people, or troops heading
home. Wealthy travelers visiting areas with impoverished and malnourished
people who lack basic health service happens millions of times a week. On the
other hand, restricted trade and travel can hurt local low wage economies by
creating shortages of vital needs and make these more expensive for poor people
to acquire.
2. Poverty (lack of clean water, sanitation, basic education, primary health care service, and adequate nutrition). Although poverty and its accompanying deprivation of basic needs are crucial contributors to the spread of disease (and unrest),
policies that would mitigate these conditions are unlikely to be enacted
without unprecedented political will.
3. Environmental factors: Global warming increases spread of mosquitoes and other critters that spread disease. Extinction of species eliminates valuable natural genetic resources for advancing vaccine and antibiotic development. Human encroachment into remote areas exposes humans to previously encountered pathogens. Increased chemical pollutants can increase viral and bacterial mutations. All of these conditions are likely to increase without political will.
4. Reliance on technology: Mass production of foods and medicines can amplify human errors and increase systemic vulnerabilities to cyber or conventional disruptions, which are likely to increase. Invasive medical procedures increase use of antibiotics and thus antibiotic-resistant strains. With increases in aging populations, injuries, elective surgeries, wars, and human error due to lack of education, training, and mental health services the increasing loss of our antibiotic arsenal will cause the deaths of millions of people a year.
5. War, genocide, and ethic cleaning; Population displacement means
breakdown of health systems and movement of malnourished and diseased
populations. War related injuries means increased use of antibiotics, which also weakens our antibiotic arsenal and can be linked to the development of bioweapons. Not coincidentally, all these potential disasters are likely to increase if the underlying driving forces of poverty and human rights violations are not addressed.
6. Government dysfunction. Government’s lack of political will to invest in prevention factors on multiple levels. Without large-scale, global rejection of
nationalistic short-sighted political interests and the simultaneous recognition of international connection, governments will continue to underfund and even cut funding for vital global prevention programs. And, be more resistant to cooperative initiatives that could lower the risk of new infectious diseases, pathogen mutations, and rapid use of vital resources when they arise.
Government’s institutional reliance on independent agencies to deal with interdependent problems that require comprehensive solutions is rarely helpful. Government’s continued reliance on unenforceable global norms also stymies comprehensive global solutions. Government failure to address corruption that drains essential financial resources away from productive domestic or global public health services.
Government secrecy and its repression of public communications, movement, innovations and individual
economic initiatives also limit local capacity for addressing public health threats.
Freedom vs Security. Or maximizing freedom and security. Libertarians frequently make the argument that we should have the right to fail or succeed. But with infectious diseases individual freedoms can carry a lethal or debilitating burden on the rest of us whenever an individual act irresponsibly. This should be self-evident even beyond
humanity's greatest threat - infectious diseases. Use of drugs, careless driving or gun
ownership can harm others even when no infectious diseases are involved. During this pandemic one would be ill advised to end up in a hospital for any reason.
Irresponsible actions primarily occur when we believe that we are independent from one another. As individuals or nations. Such a belief tends to limit concerns for the
impact on others. This thinking ultimately encourages irresponsible actions on multiple levels. Depending on the situation, such action can lead to unexpected lethal or catastrophic
consequences.
Ultimately, as sovereign individuals we are all free to do whatever we want. But we will never be free of the consequences. Corporations or U.S. states are free to develop their own tests or vaccines in response to Covid19. They might come up with one that works perfectly. But the rest of us will pay the consequences for unanticipated, unnoticed, unrecorded, or unreported failures. U.S. cities and states can enact any quarantine laws or regulations their legislature passes. Individuals will choose to obey or ignore them depending on their beliefs and level of empathy for others. Some will pay the ultimate price of those laws being ignored.
What’s missing is a responsible comprehensive system for best reducing or eliminating the creation, mutation and/or spread of infectious diseases. The world has had one since 2015. It’s the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). And they address each of
the seven public health determinants listed above. This plan offers the most comprehensive pandemic prevention insurance as well as the most effective response capacity for any outbreak that we could not prevent.
In addition, achieving these goals by the year 2030 would also aid in the prevention or reduced threat of other catastrophic threats like global warming, war, genocide and terrorism. And enable humanity to better deal with these and other threats that can never be prevented.
There are two irreversibly connected factors now missing at this critical point in time. Both are needed to enable humanity to move urgently forward on the SDGs. One is funding. The other is a lack of political will to get it.
Governments are deep and dangerously in debt. And it is their limited government money (our tax dollars) that has resulted in a non-zero-sum game that forces individuals, organizations, states and even government agencies to all compete against one another for a limited amount of resources. The same competition applies for limited private funds, media attention, and access to policy makers.
Breaking that money game would require a new and enormous amount of money that would be potentially available for the movement capable of mobilizing the greatest clout. Incredibly, a different and monstrous source of funding does exist. And most of it should have been going to basic human health and environmental needs all along.
Watch the 2019 Meryl Streep movie that she produced and starred in titled “Laundromat”. It’s about money laundering. A 2017 Washington Post “myth” buster column referred to a 2014 study that estimated there’s at least $32 trillion stashed in offshore accounts put there by kleptocrats, oligarchs, drug cartels, violent extremist groups and wealthy capitalists avoiding taxes.
One piece of US legislation aimed at freezing and then seizing most of this illicit money could fund the SDGs could motivate the environmental movement, peace movement, and economic/social Justice movement to come together into an unstoppable “Movement of Movements” (MoM). This is what Naomi Klein called for at the 2014 Climate march when she insisted that event was not just about global warming. With tens of trillion dollars on the table thousands of organizations within each movement could finally come together for an
unstoppable, common, comprehensive, just and sustainable agenda. I don’t think it’s too optimistic to believe other national grassroots movements would join in.
If Covid19 doesn’t make this MoM come together for all mothers around the world, mother nature, and our mother planet, perhaps our species isn’t worth saving.
Who in their right mind would be against maximizing humanities freedom and security sustainably for future generations? Laws helped create offshore accounts and governments virtually ignore them. And we the people ignored the governments. The corruption in our global economic system is not a glitch. It has been a cog in the system's wheel of inequality.
“We the people” can change this. But we must exercise our God-given sovereignty to engineer a future where the protection of human rights is supreme to the freedom of governments and corporations to do as they please. There will be no world government anytime soon. But it is possible to sustainably and responsibly maximize our most cherished freedoms, vital security, and perpetual prosperity. Its no secret that there are
also extraordinary resources devoted to non-useful, even destructive measures
that could also be tapped once the fear that too many people rationally experience disappears. It would be a real ‘peace and security’ dividend.
We U.S. citizens can mobilize in the context of keeping the pledge we have all given (all elected officials, sports fans and military service members) hundreds of times, before our flag. We pledged “liberty and justice for all.”
Instead of fighting each other for paltry federal and state budget scraps we can come together to defeat Covid19 and prevent the evolution of other pathogens, unprecedented weaponry, or more environmental insults. Each threatening our freedoms and our security.
If not now, when? If not this, what? If not us, who? Our children?
We can’t wait. Time is not on our side. God might be. But the only thing that moves faster than the genes of viruses across borders are the memes we can share when merging our
hearts and minds using our cyber domain.
This World Health Day, April 7th, host, organize or participate in a webcast event to make these key points and begin organizing for the mother of all campaigns. What else are you going to do while physical distancing?
The
world is one. We must become one voice. Or prepare for more consequences.
“One
touch of nature makes the whole world kin” William Shakespeare
(anticipating
on Covid-19?)
"Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one
thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are
bound together. All things connect." - Chief
Seattle, Duwamish (1780-1866)
"A human being is part of the whole,
called by us 'Universe'; a part limited in time and space. He experiences
himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest - a
kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of
prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and affection for a few
persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by
widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole
nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but striving
for such achievement is, in itself, a part of the liberation, and a foundation
for inner security."
-Albert
Einstein. Quantum Reality, Beyond the New Physics, p.250.
“All this is simply to say that all life is
interrelated. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality; tied in a
single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all
indirectly. As long as there is poverty in this world, no man can be totally
rich even if he has a billion dollars. As long as diseases are rampant and
millions of people cannot expect to live more than twenty or thirty years, no
man can be totally healthy, even if he just got a clean bill of health from the
finest clinic in America. Strangely enough, I can never be what I ought to be
until you are what you ought to be. You can never be what you ought to be until
I am what I ought to be.” ― Martin Luther King Jr.
Africans speak of ubuntu (humanity), often translated as “I am because
we are.”
