On March 11, it will be five years since the declaration of covid-19 or novel coronavirus as a pandemic by World Health Organization, and when it was announced by WHO on 5 May 2023 that ‘The head of the UN World Health Organization (WHO) has declared “with great hope” an end to COVID-19 as a public health emergency, stressing that it does not mean the disease is no longer a global threat’, it was announced in the same statement that ‘…the cumulative cases worldwide now stand at 765,222,932, with nearly seven million deaths…’
During the heyday of the pandemic, voices were raised for a ‘new normal’, which meant, among other things, that countries should not follow ‘market fundamentalism’, where production, and consumption decisions totally depended on price signals, while much-needed economic resilience was not prioritized ahead of short-term profit mindedness. Hence, all along roughly two decades before the coronavirus became a pandemic, it erupted in quite significant manner in the shape of SARS, and later on as MERS, yet being an epidemic it was largely ignored, while investments in the health sector kept on following mainly facial creams, and the like, where pharmaceutical companies found greater profits, instead of developing vaccines, and other needed materials like more effective and low-priced masks to contain the virus to the epidemic level, and to reduce its presence from that situation.
Hence, at the time of firstly, the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2007-2008, and then all the more when the covid-19 pandemic hit, the assault of Neoliberalism had been significantly exposed, especially in the detrimental way of low level of price controls to increase economic resilience, by not following market fundamentalism. Moreover, another consequence of this neoliberal order in the shape of too much protection provided to companies, especially in cases where the nature of the problem otherwise required less protection in the shape of virtually no intellectual property rights walls by World Trade Organization (WTO) –for instance against knowledge sharing, for keeping price low, and for creating universal access for covid-19 vaccines, and related medical equipment –yet vaccine apartheid was practiced both under IPRs protection, and through practice of vaccine nationalism– where countries in which vaccines were produced kept many times more than needed vaccine doses as precaution, while in the global South, especially in Africa, there was very little provision of vaccines, and that too at a very slow pace.
Therefore, it was declared by voices from many corners– from multilateral institutions, to policymakers, to intellectuals, to politicians– that there was need for revision of policies away from Neoliberalism, and which also meant as a consequence that a Bretton Woods 2.0 was needed, where multilateral institutions like the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization needed to be brought into the 21st century, and shun their mindsets from the otherwise strong imprint of Neoliberalism; especially since the fast-unfolding of climate change crisis, and the associated ‘Pandemicene’ was strongly keeping the door open for more frequent and more intense climate catastrophes, on one hand, and for likely more pandemics.
From wildfires raging in Los Angeles for days, to catastrophic flooding in Pakistan inundating one-third of the country in 2022, and with global average annual temperature breaching the 1.5°C threshold, and the likelihood of ‘Pandemicene’ phenomenon not only continuing to remain significant, but in probability likely increasing with the fast-unfolding of climate change crisis, all call for reminding ourselves of the strong need for bringing about a ‘new normal’.
Yet, calls for a ‘new normal’ have unfortunately taken a downhill momentum as time has passed with regard to the covid-19 pandemic. A 30 December 2024, Project Syndicate (PS) published article ‘Covid’s lessons have all been forgotten’ pointed out in this regard ‘The virus illuminated the character of the “commons,” blurring the line between individual and shared interest. It posed a collective-action problem that only a coordinated effort could address. Briefly, the widespread confrontation with death seemed to bring out a kinder, gentler side of society. But a scientific breakthrough abruptly ended this moral state of exception. As the economic historian Adam Tooze argued, the mRNA vaccine allowed global capitalism to escape a reckoning once again. The pandemic clearly demonstrated that our current economic systems, with their myopic focus on short-term interests, are fundamentally ill equipped to deal with what the ecologist and microbiologist Garrett Hardin called a “tragedy of the commons.” But this inherent fragility was soon papered over.’
From wildfires raging in Los Angeles for days, to catastrophic flooding in Pakistan inundating one-third of the country in 2022, and with global average annual temperature breaching the 1.5°C threshold, and the likelihood of ‘Pandemicene’ phenomenon not only continuing to remain significant, but in probability likely increasing with the fast-unfolding of climate change crisis, all call for reminding ourselves of the strong need for bringing about a ‘new normal’. Hence, the lessons from the time of the covid-19 pandemic, and the underlying causes of both the pandemic, and the climate change crisis, need to be kept in mind, and a meaningful effort of the nature of a ‘new normal’ needs to be made at a global level.
