EDITORIAL
STEVENGISLAM
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If hindsight is 2020, is foresight 2021? L
ooking back, 2020 was always going to be turbulent. US election years often are. As the year came into being, on its very first day – to a backdrop of Italy-sized infernos engulfing Australia - the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission released a briefing about the outbreak of a pneumonia strain with an unknown aetiology – 44 cases in total. For most of us in Europe, the virus going around a city in China that few of us could point to on a map, as awful as it sounded, didn’t affect us. After all, bird flu worried us back in 2005 and then seemingly vanished. A few years later, swine flu made the headlines but seemed to go the same way. This Coronavirus – the one worrying all the health experts on the news - would surely follow a similar pattern. Perhaps we’d all settled into a state of collective complacency, almost blithely assuming that some clever people would sort it out again. Few of us imagined it would reach global pandemic proportions. And, most likely, even fewer of us imagined that what felt like the end of the world as we knew it, would actually feel fine. Despite what Hollywood taught us, society didn’t collapse into an orgy of looting, violence, and anarchic nihilism. Instead, something quite remarkable happened. People started being nicer to each other, telling each other to “Stay Safe” – to a point that it almost seemed disingenuous. Governments handed out money in a way that would’ve previously been lambasted as fiscal irresponsibility. It was arguably the first truly globally unifying event the world has ever seen. In our collective effort, from San Francisco to Sydney, Santiago to Shanghai, we were all doing the same thing - nothing. Except, of course, for those who weren’t. Those people were doing everything. Every day, putting on their PPE armour and heading to the frontlines to do battle with an enemy that we didn’t understand. While many politicians floundered in ignorance or incompetence, others took charge calmly and quietly. Our doctors, nurses and key workers stepped up and did their jobs. As one British MP pointed out in parliament, many of those working hardest during the pandemic,
to keep our food supplies moving and the bases of society functioning, were those whom we’d labelled “unskilled workers”. Now, on the cusp of December, with at least four vaccines in the works, a bright new year beckoning, and a semi-sensible old white guy getting ready to move into the White House as a much less sensible old white guy is snuck out through the rear staff entrance, under a blanket, with his tail through his legs - we can begin to breathe a sigh of shared relief. We’re not out of the woods yet, of course. We still have winter to get through. And it will be several months before the vaccine can be rolled out sufficiently enough that life can start to settle on whatever the new normal will be. And while we should be cautious about complacency, we should allow ourselves a moment of quiet pride. When things got scary, most of us put aside the old adages that seemed so sacred not that long ago and worked together towards a common goal. In the past year, amidst all the sickness, death, and political turmoil, we have seen countless shining examples of the very best of humanity and human endeavour. We have, unfortunately and somewhat inevitably, also witnessed the worst aspects of society at play during 2020. In the US, while over 40 million people filed for unemployment, a handful of billionaires watched their bank balances bulge. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos saw his personal fortune swell by a jaw-dropping $48 billion between March and June. Tesla’s Elon Musk benefitted to the tune of $17.2 billion, while Zoom’s Eric Yuan, had to suffice with a meagre $2.5 billion. In total, it is estimated that billionaires in the US profited by $637 billion during the pandemic. While it would be easy to shrug this off as “right place, right time”, or argue that these men have worked hard for their money – which they undoubtedly did at some point in their lives – the fact that the global poor continues to suffer disproportionately should leave a bitter aftertaste following the self-congratulatory high that the news of a successful vaccine brought. The vaccine should be just the first stage of a post-Covid world. We’ve seen what we
can do when we pull together and put the common good ahead of personal interest. Earlier this week at a virtual G20 summit, German Chancellor Angela Merkel – that rarest of political figures who retained both credibility and sanity during the crisis – voiced concerns that not enough progress had been made in ensuring access to the vaccine for the world’s poorest. French President Emmanuel Macron – admittedly somewhat less credible - spoke of forging industrial partnerships, and even uttered words that would have been almost sacrilegious pre-Covid and spoke of sharing intellectual property rights. The will is there, and the right words are being spoken. Now, that will and those words must translate into action amounting to real and lasting change. Cautionary kudos goes to AstraZeneca - the UK pharma firm, which pledged to roll out the vaccine for no profit “during the pandemic”. Though it retains the contractual right to declare the pandemic over from July 1, 2021. January will begin with the UK leaving the European Union and end (theoretically) with the end of Trump’s tenure as president – an ideal time to take stock. The forces that led to the election of Trump and to Brexit are the same forces that created enough distrust in politics, business, industry, and the system, to make conspiracy theories appear plausible. These events are the symptoms, not the sickness. Capitalism is in crisis and will remain so as long as the money keeps trickling upwards, because with that upwards flow comes the perception that the rewards of the innovation and progress that capitalism has brought are reaped predominantly by the few. It is entirely possible to harness the political and public will that carried us collectively through the crisis and forge a fairer society for those most vulnerable to its sharper edges. Moving forward, let’s have more AstraZeneca and less Amazon, and everybody, including capitalism, will benefit – because while we may be on the cusp of beating Covid-19, the n underlying crisis is still ongoing. Industry Europe 3
