“The next crisis could be the last crisis.”

Before the global pandemic, I would regularly attend free evening lectures at the London School of Economics. Now such events are all online and this week I attended a particularly fascinating talk by Fareed Zakaria who is an Indian-American journalist, political scientist, and author. He was introducing ideas from his new book “Ten Lessons For a Post-Pandemic World” which I have now ordered.

Zakaria emphasised that with globalisation “We have been living a life of greater risk” with faster growth but more inequality and instability. He contrasted the terrorist threat of 9/11 and the economic crisis of 2008 with the current global pandemic and underlined that, in the case of Covid 19, “It has affected every human being on the planet” and so “This is the most universal crisis which has faced us”.

He explained that zoonotic viruses which jump from animals to humans have always been with us, but that modern methods of food production almost guaranteed a new pandemic. He pointed out the fallacy of believing that “nature has a fondest for human life”. Chillingly he asserted that, unless we change the way we live, “The next crisis could be the last crisis”.

He pointed out that countries which have faced previous zoonotic crises like SARS and MERS have learned the lessons and acted more decisively this time. This has been the case with nations like China, Taiwan, Japan and Vietnam. But he was not confident that Western countries would learn the lessons of Covid because of our sense of inertia and superiority.


 




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