(Image: Tom Red/Private Media)

When COVID descended from the sky, oooooooh it seems like two days or a thousand years ago, there was an initial commitment to global working-together, hands-across-the-etc. And then the nations of the world fell into an unseemly heap in their scramble for the vaccines which appeared in a haphazard fashion, before reassembling some modicum of decency and creating COVAX, the scheme to share vaccines worldwide.

Then, after it became clear that booster shots would be necessary, the scramble started afresh, on top of what was already a stuffed-up process.

And then the Omicron strain appeared out of Africa to remind us of what happens when you treat a global disease in a global society as a series of national epidemics. After some mumbling about “vaccine nationalism”, the appearance of the new strain prompted nations like the UK to … loosen requirements for booster shots, and shorten the gap between to three months, from six.

The truth is that COVID has revealed to us afresh not only the utter amoralism of the global set-up, and how easily the peoples of the world collapse back into nationalism, but also how threadbare and all but absent are the mechanisms by which we might change that set-up.

COVID-19, though it has taken many millions, run a scythe through the chronically ill and the old, has, as we have noted, proved a comparatively gentle first outing for what one might call global multidimensional pandemic — one that’s already in the airport lounge with you as you’re reading of its discovery in Botswana on your phone. Both Delta and Omicron in their own way continued this. If you believe in an intercessionary god, or that we’re a simulation by higher-dimensional beings, you’d have to say we’re getting the clues — pssssst: set up genuine global governance — that that’s really reserved for the remedial class. 

Instead, what has been revealed is that we have no global governance in the areas that would genuinely distribute power and rely on global consensus to answer the challenges humanity faces, but we have an A-1 system of global governance for the maintenance of property rights — as exemplified by the ramshackle process of global vaccine distribution compared with the smooth and vast operation preventing any loosening intellectual property rights over molecules.

We knew that already; COVID simply made it very, very clear. Not so much as to change much actual behaviour, but sufficient to terrify us about what would, or will, happen if or when a pandemic with a nastier profile comes along and public health systems genuinely and rapidly collapse. Would such an occurrence actually see us perform better — since executive power would simply take total charge, with no quibbling about rights or bodily autonomy etc — or would the failure to establish such bodies before the disaster mean that we would never get a full grip, and see societies ravaged beyond anything we have recently known, before control was reasserted?

Certainly the facts surrounding vaccine distribution are hair-raising enough. With no central authority to pilot this process, COVAX was created in 2020 at, where else, a cocktail party at the Davos World Economic Forum shindig. Rather than the World Health Organization being the single leading authority, COVAX was strung between multiple authorities. 

As Mark Eccleston-Turner has noted in a series of articles, COVAX should have existed a decade before COVID — which is, after all, the third SARS outbreak we’ve had in 20 years — and its mission was almost wholly disregarded from the start as the scramble for vaccines began. The unseemly manner in which questions of first dose, second dose, AstraZeneca v Pfizer and booster shots shoved aside any larger discussion of either the rational self-interested case for universal distribution or the general ethical one about what is owed to all humanity.

No global political leader emerged to gainsay that rush, and mainstream media editors showed little interest in keeping the focus on the moral, global case.

One could say that our global response to COVID shows what would happen if a more lethal pandemic came along. But here past is prologue. We’ve already seen HIV/AIDS ravage the global south after being contained in the north, with a similar lack of mobilisation. Beyond that is the deeper structural truth: a global health system that was under construction in the post-World War II decades has been ravaged and undermined by the 1980s shift to the “Washington consensus” on private development funding, neoliberal markets and endless leaching interest payments from the south to the north. 

It is this chaos that is now being expressed within COVID. Had we not taken this path over past decades our response would not be playing out this way.

There is much to critique about the self-interest and concealed ideologies of the era of “global development” up to the late 1970s, but one can say that the debate was on a shared plane of rational ends — development for human autonomy and decisions made towards universal outcomes. The collapse back into global capitalism, with a contentless notion of growth, damaged the system capacity to argue rationally.

After several decades of this, the COVID response — drug buy-ups; vaccine buy-ups; refusing drug generics; letting Africa and elsewhere languish at 5% — was what we got, and what looked normal. That is real decline, global reversal — not merely that such happens, but that it looks inevitable. We are to some degree back in the 19th century, before even the League of Nations, amid the chaos of the great game.

The other story to tell is, of course, entirely opposite: how global networks of scientists, silo-ed by private and state institutions, broke down those walls with networked cooperation to supercharge the capacity to create forms of scientific working.

Big pharma has been cracking down on relaxing internet protocols precisely because they know they were multiply relaxed daily to get the vaccine moving — and it is that cross-hatched cooperation that sped up the vaccine process. That is post-capitalist, but also post-territorial, threatening established notions of state power as the building blocks for global governance.

No wonder everyone is so keen to get this system back in its gift boxes and its state-jackets. In the slow unwinding of the Greek alphabet are possibilities which are becoming harder to suppress.