The k2p blog

“Globalism” is meaningless sanctimony without nations first taking care of themselves. In this Covid-19 crisis, there is no “globalised” solution and every nation is having to find its own way of handling the problem. There is a great deal of bilateral and even international cooperation, but every nation is then taking its own decisions for its own people. To be truly international, nations must first take care of themselves.

I have been waiting for the UN Security Council to pass a resolution banning the coronavirus. However such a resolution might well attract a veto from China.

The WHO preferred not to listen to warnings from Taiwan because they follow the Chinese line that Taiwan does not exist.

FT: The criticism by the World Medical Association … accusing it of “severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus”. The WMA said the WHO’s failure to heed Taiwan’s early warnings resulted in “errors that led to the world paying a high price” in the 2003 Sars outbreak and the coronavirus pandemic. …. Taiwan has accused the WHO of dismissing its early efforts to raise the red flag that the virus might spread among humans because of the organisation’s pro-China bias. It has been excluded from having “observer status” at the UN body’s annual meeting of decision makers since 2018. 

Shinzo Abe, the Japanese prime minister, was among those to call for an investigation into the WHO once the pandemic was under control. ….. Health officials in Taiwan said they alerted the WHO in late December about the risk of human-to-human transmission of the new virus but said its concerns were not passed on to other countries.

The EU is another organisation which promotes the “globalist” religion (provided the EU is first among equals). The reality is that the EU cannot take care of any member state which cannot take care of itself. The EU has proved itself impotent in time of crisis.

Forbes: Mauro Ferrari, head of the European Union’s top scientific research body, … resigned on Tuesday, effective immediately, citing a “political thunderstorm” in the European Commission in response to his plans to address the pandemic. ….. “I moved that the European Research Council should establish a special program directed at combating COVID-19,” he wrote, but that the plan was outright rejected by the European Commission, ……..
Ferrari said, in a two-page statement, printed in the Financial Times: “I have been extremely disappointed by the European response to COVID-19, for what pertains to the complete absence of coordination of health care policies among member states, the recurrent opposition to cohesive financial support initiatives, the pervasive one-sided border closures, and the marginal scale of synergistic scientific initiatives.”

However, the EU did express solidarity with Italy and Spain but had to apologise for being incapable of providing any help.

Guardian: ….. when Italy pleaded for fellow countries to send it medical equipment such as masks, France and Germany not only failed to respond, they placed export bans (since lifted) on the export of the kit Italian hospitals were crying out for. 

 ….. Another problem for Italy is that ….. it has to pay a higher rate of interest on the money the government borrows than is the case for Germany and, when the hospitals in the cities of Lombardy started to fill up with Covid-19 cases, this gap – or spread – started to widen. It was therefore deeply unhelpful for Christine Lagarde, the president of the ECB, to say that it was not the job of her institution to “close bond spreads”. …….. Last week’s virtual meeting of EU leaders was supposed to come up with a joint approach to the crisis but was instead a complete car crash.

Italy’s prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, said at the weekend: “If Europe does not rise to this unprecedented challenge, the whole European structure loses its raison d’être to the people. We are at a critical point in European history.”

The “Marshall plan” for the EU has been under discussion for over a month but the Commission cannot take their hands out of their pockets for fear of the virus.

Freedom of travel has been suspended in the EU. The EU regulations for reimbursements from airlines for cancelled flights are largely being ignored by EU member countries and their hard-hit airlines.

Of course, following Brexit, the EU has little sympathy to share with the UK.

India and other SE Asian countries have learnt to be very selective in listening to the WHO.

Tags: coronavirus, covid-19, Globalism, WHO

This entry was posted on April 20, 2020 at 9:31 am and is filed under Geopolitics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.