Five years ago, I read the story of Dr. Félix Báez, a Cuban doctor who had worked in West Africa to stop the spread of Ebola. Dr. Báez was one of 165 Cuban doctors of the Henry Reeve International Medical Brigade who went to Sierra Leone to fight a terrible outbreak in 2014 of a disease first detected in 1976. During his time there, Dr. Báez contracted Ebola.
At the end of July 2019, I visited the Gannan Tibetan autonomous prefecture in Gansu province that has a population of about 700,000. We drove 230 kilometers from Lanzhou, capital of Gansu, to Hezuo, the prefecture seat area of Gannan, on a first-class highway through picturesque landscape, and passed through many excellently designed and built tunnels several kilometers long. The cost of building those tunnels alone could easily be in billions of dollars. And to think that China has spent such a huge amount just to make the lives of less than 1 million people better.
Not much, apart from football, unites the Colombian people. If a 2014 Interior Ministry survey called “The Power of Football” is to be believed, then 94 percent of the Colombian population say that football is either important or very important. Patrocinio Bonilla—called Patrón—was on the side of those who believed that football was very important, indeed essential. Patrón was murdered on August 11, 2020. Patrón lived in Chocó in northwestern Colombia, where 96 percent of the people identify as Afro-Colombian or as part of the Emberá Indigenous community. Chocó is treated as a backwater of the country, with no real infrastructure in the province’s expanse and little social policy to enhance the lives of its population.
As governments around the world seek to save lives by slowing down the spread of the coronavirus, they have to take dramatic measures, with big implications for economic activity. John Ross, former Director of Department of Economy and Business Policy in London and senior fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies of the Renmin University of China, shares his thoughts on the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic across the UK.
The WEF is an NGO, registered in a lush suburb of Geneva, with ambitions towards worldly power command. The IMF, created under the UN Charter, is an official international financial organization – one of the two Bretton Woods Institutions, the other one being the World Bank. The IMF was created to watch over and regulate the world monetary conundrum. Both, IMF and WB, are controlled by veto-power by the US Treasury. The discourse of both, the WEF and the IMF, is to “doing as much good to a covid-disaster stricken world as we can.” None of them mentions how their actions will put the world – especially the developing world, into even deeper ‘sustainable’ disaster.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, the US president has been trying to shift the responsibility for his administration's failure to contain the outbreak at home by blaming the WHO(and China, in good measure) for the spread of the public health crisis. That the WHO has faced threats and criticisms from the White House shows that the US' unilateral approach is not restricted to trade and political matters; it extends to health and other public welfare fields too.