By Maureen Wade, (Chair, Birmingham UNISON Retired Members Section)
A staggering monument to the incompetence of Boris Johnson’s Tory government during this pandemic is the fact that the impoverished continent of Africa, with its population of 1.2 billion, has had HALF the number of Covid fatalities than that of the UK.
On 1 December, as UK deaths topped 100,000, UN figures for the whole of Africa showed there had been 52,945 deaths.
That’s right. Africa, where before the pandemic, only Egypt and South Africa had Intensive Care Units. Where in South Sudan, the joke on the streets was “we have more Vice Presidents (five) than ventilators (four)”.
More fatalities than the Blitz
Yet under Johnson’s ‘leadership’, the eighth richest country in the world has had a death toll double the number of civilian fatalities from the Blitz in World War II, and a third more than all the US servicemen killed in the Vietnam War.
The Tories are already bracing themselves for the coming reckoning when people will ask why. They will increasingly fall back on the UK’s version of the ‘Big Lie’ – ‘you couldn’t see it coming’, the virus was ‘unprecedented’, etc.
All untrue. A global pandemic has been at the top of the UK’s National Risk Register – the list of the main threats facing the UK, compiled regularly by the Cabinet Office – since the mid-1990s, and was still the number one threat as 2020 dawned.
It was top of the list because scientists had identified the acceleration in the occurrence of ‘zoonotic’ virus – those that can be transferred from animals to humans. Zoonotic diseases were first identified in 1889 with the Russian Flu outbreak that killed one million people, which had transferred from birds. Since the discovery, zoonotic incidence tended to occur over a 30–40 year cycle.
Zoonotic epidemics becoming more frequent
However, it stopped ‘behaving itself’ in the 1980s with the arrival of HIV/AIDS. Now they have been occurring with increased rapidity – SARS (Sars-Covid) in 2003, Swine Flu (H1N1) in 2009, MERS (Mers-Cov) in 2012, and Ebola in 2014. And now Covid-19.
The rapidity and global spread are easily explained. Like climate change, we have reached a tipping point. In 1900, the world population was 1.6 billion. Today it is 7.8 billion. In 1970, there were 310 million air passengers. In 2018, there were 4.2 billion. Our expanding population encroaches more and more into the proximity of wild animals, while the domestic animal population has been massively increased to fill our bellies. Then we fly around the world more and more, spreading viruses all over the place.
Abandoned research into infectious diseases
So the threat has been there staring us in the face. What has been the response of capitalism? To ignore the science and carry on in their blinkered pursuit of quick profits. Of the 18 largest US pharmaceutical companies, 15 had totally abandoned the field of research into infectious diseases.
As Trudie Lang, Director of the Global Health Network at the University of Oxford Nuffield Department of Medicine put it: “Big pharma has stopped investing in infectious disease. You take an anti-bacterial or an anti-viral only until you clear the infection. But once you start on a statin or anti-diabetes medicine, you have to take it for life. Big pharma is investing in chronic disease because that is where the money is” (Financial Times, October 23, 2020).
A pandemic exposes all the frailties of the capitalist economic model. Take Peru for example. Their government followed all the WHO advice to the letter, imposing the world’s longest lock-down, from 16 March to the end of June, with people only being allowed to leave their home to buy food. The government committed 12 per cent of their GDP to a furlough scheme.
Most have no bank accounts
But in Peru, 40 per cent of homes do not have a refrigerator, meaning just as many trips to the market as usual. Meanwhile, only 38 per cent of the Peruvian population have bank accounts – so huge queues formed outside the allotted banks as people went to collect their cash payments. The markets and banks became the super-spreaders, and by 1 January 2021, out of a population of 38 million, 39,000 people had died from Covid.
So too the pandemic has shone a light on the UK, exposing the Tories and their business backers’ obsessional delusion that ‘business knows best’: in the scramble to try and respond after letting the virus spiral out of control last March, they made sure their ‘chumocracy’ got the plumb contracts without any proper tender process, and regardless of their ability or health experience (it’s called corruption in other countries).
Hence, they failed to deliver any semblance of a viable test and trace system, which WHO has said – and countries like South Korea, New Zealand and even Senegal have proven – was the key. Instead, we got ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ (and a second wave) as Johnson backed down to pressure from the continual bleating from big business.
Nice fat contracts for Tory chums
The UK is the eighth wealthiest country in the world, and Johnson promised ‘Moonshot’ technology, which never materialised. It was an over reliance on the widgets of the digital age, which would mean a nice fat contract for one of their chums, but also a ‘low-cost’ solution. It has only produced the former so far. SERCO, supposedly running a quarter of the UK’s test and trace facility, has pocketed £350 million in profits despite continual criticism that “… its call handlers reached a lower proportion of contacts of people who had tested positive than their local public health counterparts” (Guardian, October 20, 2020)
And while Boris ‘Nero’ Johnson fiddled away, the death toll rocketed.
Countries that mobilised around old methods were far more successful. Ethiopia (population 110 million, Covid related deaths – 2,200) performed the Herculean task, with little resources, of surveying 40 million of the country’s population, checking temperatures and travel movements.
Old-fashioned shoe leather
Cuba (population 11.3 million, Covid related deaths – 287) ordered tens of thousands of doctors, nurses and medical students to ‘go on the beat’ – with a round of around 300 homes each, every day they knock each family up, looking for any signs of the virus. Public sector shoe leather beat private sector call centres.
As Agnes Binagwaho, Vice Chancellor at the Rwanda University of Global Health Equity, commenting on Africa’s achievement, said: “We didn’t do this because we are rich. We did it because we are organised” (Financial Times, October 23, 2020).
