Pandemics, Politics And Paradigms

The coronavirus crisis is a giant eraser and tester combined into one. It is erasing all equations and testing all structures.

- Dr. Dayan Jayatilleka

Governments, systems, economies, ways of life and mentalities that acquit themselves relatively well in combating the crisis and saving lives, will pass this ultimate test, while the ones that do not will begin to fail, however parabolically.

What must be rectified nationally and globally if humanity is to overcome the coronavirus crisis and prevent future ones, not to mention a far greater climate catastrophe, is for governments to shift from narrow nationalism to a philosophy of humanism; of putting human beings, human needs, human welfare, at the centre. Budgets must shift emphasis from their criminal emphasis on military expenditure and military research to human and social needs.

This is how Cuba, a developing country under a tight economic blockade, has excellent education – including higher education—and public healthcare systems as well as an advanced research capacity which has produced the famous drug Interferon Alpha 2B, now being used in China in its successful counteroffensive against COVID-19. Cuba has been humanitarian enough not to turn away ships with patients on board and also to continue its decades-old practice of sending doctors to other lands to help fight the COVID-19 pandemic – a generosity which Sri Lanka has benefited from during the tsunami.

I must echo senior columnist Sarath de Alwis who has said in these pages that he vastly prefers this present governmental dispensation to the previous one at this time of crisis. he goes on to superbly deploy the blackest humour to satirise and caricature the probable ‘Yahapalanaya’ response if that administration had been in office now.