Covid-19 Pandemic and Public Health Emergency as a Pretext
As the very difficult year 2020 draws to a close it bears soul-searching to look at how the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent public health emergency is faring, and how the disease and response was used for good and ill itself in the world.
Covid-19 touched every country on the planet yet not all responded equally. Some countries fared quite well, having minimal casualties, infections, and economic consequences, while other countries did very badly, and are paying a catastrophic price. WorldConsul advises continued avoidance of the badly performing- and in most cases badly managed countries as health risks, and notes risks of bad governance and human rights violations often correlate with lack of pandemic safety.
The three most populous countries to have the worst Pandemic outcomes have been the United States, India, and Brazil. This must be said with an asterisk as China has largely misinformed the world about it’s response, which may be much worse than publicly reported, with perhaps Russia also falling into this category of a possibly mismanaged response and cover up.
While many EU countries, including countries hit hard early on like Italy, France, and Spain, did very well after an initial spike and much sacrifice, the UK and Sweden alone did not. Boris Johnson seemed to purposefully lead his country down a damaging path to mirror the disastrous US response, while Sweden pursued herd immunity and ended up with 8-9 times the fatalities than their neighbors, before adjusting their response to a public health normative program. By contrast, Japan, and many east Asian countries seemed to have handled the pandemic well, as did New Zealand.
The United States meanwhile is facing an out of control Pandemic as the single worst disaster in its history since the Civil War ended in 1865- 340,000 deaths and a cost of over $17,000,000,000,000- one hundred times the casualties and cost of Chernobyl by comparison, and eclipsing US sacrifices in all of World War Two.
Other countries also followed the lead of the United States- beyond mismanagement- and used the virus as a pretext for achieving nationalist political goals, attacking political rivals, abandoning environmental and human rights regulations, and for profiteering:
Nationalism and anti-immigrant goals:
The Trump White House used the Pandemic as an excuse to blame and scapegoat the global scientific community and the World Health Organization. It defunded, then withdraw from the WHO, as part of an overall nationalist “America First” strategy of withdraw from international fora and cooperation. The Trump Administration’s plan was to to downplay the severity of the virus, and also to be the first country to develop vaccination, ahead of the country’s November 3 national elections. It used the Pandemic as a pretext to achieve other nationalist goals it couldn’t achieve legally in the courts, or through legislation: closure of it’s borders to immigration including legal asylum seekers, and removal of immigrants pending adjudication of their immigration claims.
The White House also tried to use the Pandemic as a pretext to punish US cities which are immigrant safe havens.
Closing the borders to immigrants- executive order https://immigrationforum.org/article/immigration-related-executive-actions-during-the-covid-19-pandemic/
Herd immunity- an excuse for inaction or even deliberate inaction.
New emails have recently emerged which suggest that the Trump white house was actively trying to spread the Corona virus under a policy of trying to achieve herd immunity, and sought to spread the virus at Trump political rallies and other public events. Recordings of President Trump in late January reveal he knew how dangerous the virus was and deliberately chose to “downplay” the severity for months. The White House may have failed to prepare for and execute a pandemic response in order to politically downplay the problem, blaming shortcoming on scientists, past administrations, and foreign causes, or it may have been incompetent, but other evidence shows the lack of action was deliberate.
The President’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, in charge of the federal Covid-19 emergency response, said the decision was made to “let the market” solve the problem, particularly of inadequate supplies of personal protective equipment. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/09/jared-kushner-let-the-markets-decide-covid-19-fate
Other members of his task force say inaction was deliberately weaponized when the task force believed only the President’s political opponents were being impacted- that the problem was largely limited to problems to Democratic “Blue States” and that their governors would bear the blame ahead of the elections in November 2020. Likewise, the US Senate has politicized pandemic recovery by withholding recovery funds to punish hard hit Blue States and Cities ahead of the elections, although the Pandemic is now affecting the Red GOP midlands and rural areas now in its winter second peak. https://www.businessinsider.com/kushner-covid-19-plan-maybe-axed-for-political-reasons-report-2020-7
Self-dealing and Profiteering
A full accounting for insider dealing and windfall profiteering off of PPP has not yet been made, but PPP was selling for 6-10 times normal market prices during the first Covid-19 peak. The White House used the Pandemic emergency and economic crisis to order the emergency suspension of environmental and financial regulations which has provided a windfall to corporations and the wealthy. In addition to insider trading on classified briefings on the Pandemic, one especially bad example that has been publicized is the conflict of interest case with Senator Kelly Loeffler who sat on regulatory bodies that oversaw her own family businesses in commodity and equity trading, and eliminated regulatory compliance and record keeping requirements during the pandemic emergency! https://www.gacorruptionwatch.com/en/loeffler-top-hits/coronavirus-profiting
US has developed into a world leader of financial crime including laundering money. Profiteering on the Pandemic is just another aspect of this corruption. Public corruption experts expect a black market for vaccinations will develop, and only 2 million doses of the first 12 million have been administered as of the end of the year, due to unknown supply chain problems. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/billionaires-pandemic-1-trillion-wealth-gain/ https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jasonleopold/fincen-files-financial-scandal-criminal-networks
As part of the emergency pandemic response, trillions of dollars of liquidity and loans have been added to the US economy in the form of support for financial institutions and corporations by support of financial market, fiscal policy, and low interest rates, and central bank purchase of bonds.; the US Treasury Department and Congress fought over even basic accountability and oversight of this public spending.
Hundreds of billions of pandemic emergency funding was made available, and rather predictably the first loans approved were from Trump administration supporters, and 50% of the Paychech Protection Plan loans for small businesses went to to 5% of (large) companies; the President and his family were even awarded $3.6 million.
Compared to the cascade of $trillions of dollars flowing to corporations with the Pandemic as pretext for corporate subsidy ahead of the Presidential elections, there was comparatively little support for the hardest hit: the sick, homeless, unemployed, and at risk populations like minorities, prisoners, and Native Americans. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/12/04/stock-market-stimulus-unemployment-figures/
There was even less given in support given or loaned to the developing world. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/07/us/politics/coronavirus-humanitarian-aid-united-states.html
Human Rights violations- US and worldwide
The Pandemic has served as a pretext for mistreatment and even detention of immigrants in US and third countries, including homeless persons put on limitless “home isolation”, and prisoners kept in deplorable and infectious conditions without adequate staff.
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bacheletcriticized China for using world focus on the Pandemic to escalate human rights abuses against ethnic minorities particularly in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region, Ethiopia for the mistreatment of the Tigray, and the US policy of “herd immunity” and deliberately infecting people or allowing casualties. It criticized Myanmar and Uganda for politicizing the pandemic against the opposition and Brazil for its Trumpian anti-scientific bias. https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/12/1079622
Who gets the vaccine- equity and a lesson in who’s really important
The lack of support for equitable access to vaccine by the developed countries is a lack of support to the developing world for the right to healthcare and universal human rights of equity and
Amid the global rise of the far-Right and authoritarianism, in the US, the elderly and healthcare workers were scheduled to relieve vaccines first, but instead politicians, some of whom had denied the severity of the pandemic, received vaccines first. Corruption experts warn that the wealthy and other elites will get the vaccine first, just like the rich countries will.
The Trump administration, like the Bush administration before it, was Authoritarian- the basic principle it follows is to reward political friends and destroy political opponents, with the main goal or remaining in power. There are no core policies and governance itself isn’t the objective, just obtaining extraordinary power either through the pretext of an external threat or war (“terrorism”, axis of evil) or by virtue of a natural disaster like the Pandemic. The Trump Presidency may end before the Pandemic it tried to politicize as a pretext, where the Bush/Cheney war on terror as a pretext for global domination did not. https://carnegieendowment.org/files/NBRAnalysis-Tellis_December2004.pdf
https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/vice-vs-the-real-dick-cheney
Summary and advisory for travelers:
A majority of hundreds of epidemiologists surveyed by the New York Times say they don’t think long international flights will be safe until a vaccine is widely available.
Response to the Pandemic emergency has varied widely, with the well-managed countries approaching normalcy aside from basic public health measures: washing hands, masks, social distancing, avoiding indoor gatherings. Information on these countries and transparent health information is widely available.
Travel to other countries where the Pandemic is still active or growing still must be avoided due to widespread virus infection and inadequate public health measures, the United States foremost among these countries, but also including Brazil, India, and the UK. Reliable information from China is not available. The US, Uganda, and Myanmar used the pandemic as a political weapon, and are especially dangerous threats to the global security and human rights order as we begin 2021.
In the US, an out of control epidemic, overwhelmed healthcare system, along with the rise of right-wing authoritarianism, widespread civil rights violations against minorities, deadly conditions in detention and jails, and the cost of emergency medical care make the country a dangerous destination for travelers for the foreseeable future.
WorldConsul 