Last week The Tyee published my article The Next Pandemic? More Likely a Polydemic. After going through a number of unpleasant problems in global health, I concluded:
These are just some of the threats in the present polydemic, which itself is part of the present hot mess of economic decline, rising prices, war, climate change and political polarization that writers like Adam Tooze are calling a polycrisis. And it’s precisely now that Canadian health spending should be rising to support pandemic preparation and prevention, not levelling off.
From a political point of view, lower spending makes sense. The system is still trying to catch up with all the knee and hip replacements postponed for the last two years. Inflation makes it impossible to raise taxes, and the deficit spending that kept everyone afloat in 2020 and 2021 is now politically unacceptable.
Besides, governments have learned that they don’t have to take pandemics as seriously as they once did. Provincial governments that let COVID-19 rip have been re-elected. Public health measures like masks and vaccine mandates have triggered a populist backlash that some politicians are exploiting. Health-care workers are exhausted, underpaid and embittered.
So even if a government wanted to take the polydemic seriously, and to build up the system against future pandemics, it would face serious resistance from many voters, not to mention the business sector. Rebuilding health-care staff numbers and infrastructure would take billions, spent over more years than any government is likely to survive. Short-term emergencies would always take priority over long-term needs.
And when the next pandemic arrived and became a short-term emergency, neither governments nor the governed would implement or accept even proven measures to protect public health. They’d recycle COVID-19 misinformation as precedent: “It was mostly mild, it only killed old people, we got through it.”
But if it’s a pandemic as lethal as H5N1 or Ebola, which has an average case fatality rate of 50 per cent, the survivors will think otherwise.
Before 2020, the pandemic anticipators I called Flublogia were certainly worried about the impact of a new influenza or other virus. But we still had a naive faith that while it would be bad, we in North America and western Europe and Japan would have the technology and the experts to deal with it.
The response of the western nations, and especially the US, was and is a disgrace and a revelation: just as the fearsome Russian army turned out to be stupid and incompetent, so have the health systems and politicians of the "advanced" nations. If the next virus turns serious, I really doubt whether the public will listen to the advice of the health experts. Nor will healthcare workers be willing to resist another onslaught. And that, of course, will only make matters much, much worse,
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