Designing Vaccines for People, not Profits

 

Designing Vaccines for People, Not Profits

Dec 1, 2020  MARIANA MAZZUCATO, HENRY LISHI LI, ELS TORREELE

 

For all the hope spurred by announcements of demonstrated efficacy in multiple COVID-19 vaccine candidates, there is still a long way to go to deliver on the promise of a universal, freely available "people's vaccine." As matters stand, national and private interests are trumping the principle of health justice.

LONDON – Recent announcements of demonstrated efficacy in COVID-19 vaccine trials have brought hope that a return to normality is in sight. The preliminary data for Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna’s novel mRNA vaccines are highly encouraging, suggesting that their approval for emergency use is forthcoming. And more recent news of effectiveness (albeit at a slightly lower rate) in a vaccine from AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford has fueled optimism that even more breakthroughs are on their way.

In theory, the arrival of a safe and effective vaccine would represent the beginning of the end of the COVID-19 pandemic. In reality, we are not even at the end of the beginning of delivering what is needed: a “people’s vaccine” that is equitably distributed and made freely available to all who need it.

To be sure, the work to create vaccines in a matter of months deserves praise. Humanity has made a monumental technological leap forward. But the springboard was decades of massive public investment in research and development.

Most of the leading vaccine candidates prime the immune system’s defenses against the viral “spike protein,” an approach made possible through years of research at the US National Institutes of Health. More immediately, BioNTech has received $445 million from the German government, and Moderna has received $1 million from the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations and more than $1 billion from the US Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority and the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine has received more than £1 billion ($1.3 billion) of public funding.

But for technological advances to translate into Health for All, innovations that are created collectively should be governed in the public interest, not for private profit. This is especially true when it comes to developing, manufacturing, and distributing a vaccine in the context of a pandemic.

No country acting alone can resolve this crisis. That is why we need vaccines that are universally and freely available. And yet, the current innovation system prioritizes the interests of high-income countries over those of everyone else, and profits over public health.

 

The first step toward a people’s vaccine is to ensure full transparency of the clinical-trial results, which would enable independent and timely assessments of safety and efficacy. The publication of scanty, preliminary data through corporate press releases is meant for financial markets, not the public-health community. This practice sets a bad precedent. While pharmaceutical share prices surge, health professionals and the public are left second-guessing the reported results. As more details about the flaws in clinical trial design and implementation for the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine emerge, so do the calls for open science and immediate sharing of protocols and results.

In addition, critical questions about the leading vaccine candidates remain unanswered. Responding to political and economic pressure in high-income countries, pharmaceutical companies are rushing their vaccine candidates across the finish line. Accordingly, they have designed their phase-three clinical trials to deliver the quickest possible positive read-out, rather than addressing more relevant questions such as whether the vaccine prevents infection or just protects against the disease. It also is unclear how long the protection will last; whether a given vaccine works equally well in young and old people, or in people with co-morbidities; and how the top candidates compare to one another (critical for designing effective vaccination strategies).

Moreover, national interests – especially those of developed countries – remain the dominant factor in vaccine rollout. While the international purchase and distribution platform COVAX represents a momentous step forward, its impact is being offset by massive bilateral advance-purchase agreements by rich countries that can afford to bet on multiple vaccines. For example, high-income countries have already bought close to 80% of the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccine doses that will be available within the first year.

All told, rich countries have laid claim to 3.8 billion doses from different vaccine makers, compared to 3.2 billion (which includes around 700 million doses for COVAX) for the rest of the world combined. In other words, high-income countries have pre-ordered enough doses to cover their populations several times over, leaving the rest of the world with potentially too few to cover even their most at-risk communities.

At the same time, because the vaccine race is focused primarily on Western markets, some candidates are scarcely viable outside of a developed-country context. The Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine must be kept at -70ºC, which is colder than an Antarctic winter. Distributing this vaccine will create costly and complex logistical challenges, especially for low- and middle-income countries. Although other candidates – such as the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine – are stable at higher temperatures, it is notable that such glaring features of market discrimination are built into the first product to reach the approval stage.

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Beyond national interest lurks the problem of even narrower private interests, which stem from an over-financialized biopharmaceutical innovation model. The business model for future vaccine development is already being sized up now that the pandemic has revealed the potential windfall for investors. But while they benefit from sky-rocketing stock prices, soaring capital gains, and dumping a company’s shares the same day it announces promising preliminary results in a clinical trial, delivering a people’s vaccine has become an afterthought.

The COVID-19 crisis is a perfect test of whether a more public-health-oriented approach to innovation and production will prevail in the years ahead. While Pfizer is sticking with the model of maximizing shareholder value, AstraZeneca has at least pledged not to profit from its vaccine “during the pandemic.” Yet, despite all the public investment that underwrote these innovations, the process will remain opaque, leaving one to wonder if AstraZeneca is actually ready to prioritize public health over profit and offer its vaccine at cost.

While the recent vaccine news has brought hope, it also has exposed the pharmaceutical industry’s broken business model, casting doubt on the prospects of delivering a people’s vaccine and achieving Health for All. Business as usual may allow us to scrape by in this crisis. But there is a better way to do things. Before the next pandemic arrives, we must recognize vaccines as global health commons, and start to reorient the innovation system toward symbiotic public-private partnerships governed in the public interest.  

MARIANA MAZZUCATO

Writing for PS since 2015
20 Commentaries

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Mariana Mazzucato, Professor of the Economics of Innovation and Public Value at University College London and Founding Director of the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, is Chair of the World Health Organization's Council on the Economics of Health for All and the author of The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy and The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths.

HENRY LISHI LI

Writing for PS since 2020
1 Commentary

Henry Lishi Li is a research fellow in health innovation at the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose.

ELS TORREELE

Writing for PS since 2020
2 Commentaries

Els Torreele is a visiting policy fellow at the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose.

 

The Case For a Quadripolar World by Daron Acemoglu

 

The Case for a Quadripolar World

Dec 3, 2020   DARON ACEMOGLU

 

According to the conventional wisdom, the twenty-first century will be characterized by the global shift from American hegemony to Sino-American rivalry. But a bipolar international order is neither inevitable nor desirable, and we should start imagining and working toward alternative arrangements.

CAMBRIDGE – Having diminished America’s global role while refusing to accept China’s growing clout, Donald Trump’s presidency represents the last gasp of a unipolar epoch. But while many assume that the unipolar post-Cold War world is giving way to a bipolar international order dominated by the United States and China, that outcome is neither inevitable nor desirable. Instead, there is every reason to hope for, and work toward, a world in which Europe and the emerging economies play a more assertive role.

To be sure, as the world’s most economically successful autocracy, China has already achieved significant geopolitical influence in Asia and beyond. During the two most recent global crises – the 2008 financial collapse and today’s pandemic – the Communist Party of China quickly adjusted the country’s political economy in response to changing circumstances, thereby solidifying its grip on power. Because countries that do not want to toe the US line now routinely turn to China for inspiration and, often, material support, what could be more natural than China emerging as one of the two poles of global power?

In fact, a bipolar world would be deeply unstable. Its emergence would heighten the risk of violent conflict (according to the logic of the Thucydides Trap), and its consolidation would make solutions to global problems wholly dependent on the national interests of the two reigning powers. Three of the biggest challenges facing humanity would either be ignored or made worse.

The first challenge is the concentrated power of Big Tech. While technology is often presented as a key front in the US-China conflict, there is considerable congruence between the two countries. Both are committed to the pursuit of algorithmic dominance over humans, whereby digital platforms and artificial intelligence (AI) are used as tools by the government and corporations for surveilling and controlling the citizenry.

There are differences, of course. Whereas the US government has adopted Big Tech’s own vision and become subservient to the industry, Chinese tech giants remain at the mercy of the government and must abide by its agenda. For example, recent research shows how local governments’ demand for surveillance technologies shapes Chinese AI creators’ research and development. In any case, neither country is likely to strengthen privacy standards and other protections for ordinary people, much less redirect the trajectory of AI research so that its benefits are unambiguous and widely shared.

Likewise, advocacy for human rights and democracy would be a low priority in a bipolar world. With repression in China growing, the US may appear by comparison to remain an exemplar of these values. But America’s principled commitment to democracy and human rights is thin and generally not taken seriously abroad. After all, the US has overthrown democratically elected but insufficiently friendly governments in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. And when it has supported democracy in places like Ukraine, it has generally had an ulterior motive, such as the desire to counter or weaken Russia.

The third big issue likely to receive short shrift in a Sino-American bipolar world is climate change. In recent years, China has appeared more supportive of international agreements aimed at reducing greenhouse-gas emissions than the US has. But the two superpowers are not just the world’s two biggest emitters; they also are both beholden to energy-intensive economic models. China will remain dependent on manufacturing growth, while consumers and growth industries (like cloud computing) will sustain high demand for energy in the US. And one can expect that both sides’ short-term interest in economic supremacy will trump everyone else’s interest in a swift green transition.

All of these problems would be more likely to be addressed in a world with two additional poles, represented by the European Union and a consortium of emerging economies, perhaps within a new organization – an “E10” – comprising Mexico, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Turkey, South Africa, and others. Such a quadripolar world would be less conducive to a new cold war, and it would bring more diverse voices to global governance.

For its part, the EU has already emerged as a standard-bearer for privacy protection and regulation of Big Tech, and it is well positioned to push back against algorithmic automation. Even though it is US and Chinese companies that largely drive concerns about privacy, consumer manipulation, and labor-replacing AI, the European market is so large and important that it can tilt the playing field globally.

But a strategic pole that speaks for emerging economies may be even more consequential. If AI continues to displace humans in the workplace, emerging economies will be the biggest losers, because their comparative advantage is abundant human labor. With automation already cutting into the supply of jobs that had previously been offshored to these economies, it is critical that they have a voice in global debates that will determine how new technologies are designed and deployed.

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Europe and the emerging world also can form a powerful constituency against fossil-fuel emissions. While the EU has become a world leader in decarbonization, emerging economies have an acute interest in climate action, because they will suffer disproportionately from global warming (despite having contributed the least to the problem).

To be sure, a quadripolar world would not be a panacea. With a wider array of voices and the possibility for more opportunistic coalitions, it would be much more difficult to manage than was the unipolar world of the recent past. With Brazil, Mexico, India, and Turkey all now led by authoritarians intent on silencing their opponents, independent media, and civil-society groups, Europe inevitably would find itself at odds with this bloc when it comes to human rights and democracy.

Yet, even here, a quadripolar world would offer more hope than the bipolar alternative. Bringing these countries to the international table might make them more willing to countenance opposition at home. Moreover, emerging economies can cooperate as a united front only if they abandon their most authoritarian, nationalistic, and destructive behavior. Ushering in a quadripolar world may thus yield unexpected dividends.

DARON ACEMOGLU

Writing for PS since 2012
28 Commentaries

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Daron Acemoglu, Professor of Economics at MIT, is co-author (with James A. Robinson) of Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty and The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty. 

 

 

What Yellen Must Do by Joseph E. Stiglitz

 

What Yellen Must Do

Dec 2, 2020JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ

 

Although the United States has survived  four years of gross incompetence and pathological mendacity, it now faces the daunting task of achieving a sustainable post-pandemic recovery. Fortunately, no one is better equipped to deal with today’s economic challenges than the next US treasury secretary.

NEW YORK – US President-elect Joe Biden’s decision to appoint Janet Yellen as the next Secretary of the Treasury is good news for America and the world. The United States has survived four years under a mendacious president who has no understanding of, let alone respect for, the rule of law, the principles undergirding democracy and the market economy, or even basic human decency. Not only has Donald Trump spent the weeks since the presidential election spewing lies about non-existent voter fraud; he has also convinced a large majority of his party to embrace these lies, thus revealing the frailty of American democracy.

 

Undoing the damage will not be easy, especially with the COVID-19 pandemic compounding America’s problems. Fortunately, no one is better equipped – in intellect, experience, values, and interpersonal skills – to deal with today’s economic challenges than Yellen, whom I first met when she was a graduate student at Yale University in the 1960s.

First on the agenda will be recovery from the pandemic. With multiple vaccines in sight, the immediate task is to build a bridge from here to the post-crisis economy. It is too late for a “V-shaped recovery.” Many businesses have gone bankrupt, and many more will do so in the coming weeks and months; household and firm balance sheets are being eviscerated. Worse, headline figures may belie the depth of the crisis. The pandemic has taken a massive toll at the bottom of the income and wealth distribution. Those who have availed themselves of policies to prevent evictions and foreclosures are nonetheless falling deeper into debt, and could soon face a reckoning.

The current outlook would have been much better if only we had had a president and Congress that recognized back in May that COVID-19 would not just disappear on its own. Strong initial support programs that needed to be extended were not, resulting in avoidable economic damage that will now be hard to reverse.

The devastation of the restaurant and travel industries has received plenty of attention, but this may be merely the tip of the iceberg. Educational institutions, especially many colleges and universities, have been hit badly. And state and local governments constrained by balanced-budget laws now face plummeting revenues. Without federal aid, they will have to make deep cuts to employment and public programs, which will weaken the broader economy.

The US desperately needs large rescue programs targeted specifically at the most vulnerable households and sectors. The resulting debt from increased spending should not be viewed as a hindrance, given the enormous cost of doing too little. Besides, with interest rates near zero and likely to stay there for years to come, the costs of servicing new debt are exceedingly low.

Moreover, many of the necessary recovery programs can be designed to serve multiple goals, by putting the economy on a more sustainable, resilient, and knowledge-based footing. Much will depend on Congress, but the economic case for providing more support is clear, and Yellen is well equipped to articulate it.

Much will depend on the global recovery as well. Here, the new administration will have more room to maneuver. There is already strong global support for a massive $500 billion issuance of Special Drawing Rights, the supranational currency overseen by the International Monetary Fund, which would go a long way toward supporting many struggling economies. Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi blocked this option. It should now be at the top of the agenda.

Moreover, with many countries soon to be unable to meet their debt obligations, a quick and deep restructuring would help enormously. To move that process forward, the Biden administration should state clearly that it is in America’s own national interest to uphold the basic principle of sovereign immunity, as endorsed by the overwhelming majority of United Nations member states in 2015. Debt restructuring is necessary for the global recovery and is the humanitarian thing to do. If there was ever a time when the principle of force majeure should apply, it is now.

Restoring multilateralism would help, too. For the past four years, innumerable conflicts between the US and everyone else has cast a pall of uncertainty over the global economy. It should go without saying that uncertainty is bad for business and bad for investment. A return to normalcy on the part of the US – rejoining the Paris climate agreement and the World Health Organization, for example, and re-engaging with the World Trade Organization (and allowing judges to be appointed to its Appellate Body) – would thus go a long way toward restoring confidence.

But a return to normalcy must not mean a return to neoliberalism. On trade and many other aspects of the twenty-first-century economic framework, policy agendas need to be revisited and reformed. It is unclear how far Biden will go down this road. But we can at least be confident that the new administration won’t embrace the zero-sum logic that underpinned Trump’s approach to everything.

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Ensuring global stability will require deep cooperation in combating climate change, pandemics, and many other threats. The challenge will be to find ways to do so while remaining fully and vocally committed to our values. While Trump severely undermined the international political and economic order, its fissures were long evident before he arrived.

After all, the 2008 financial crisis discredited neoliberalism, with its belief in unfettered deregulation; and the subsequent euro crisis demonstrated that austerity under such conditions does not work. It is clear that neoliberalism has led to lower growth, higher inequality, and all of the social and political consequences that we have seen in recent years. Now, the pandemic has put the final nail in neoliberalism’s coffin, revealing an economy utterly lacking in resilience and a state left incapable of responding effectively to a crisis.

Yellen can help to provide the leadership necessary to build a better post-pandemic world. To succeed, an ideology that serves the few at the expense of the many must give way to one based on democratic values and shared prosperity.

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JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ

Writing for PS since 2001
284 Commentaries

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Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics and University Professor at Columbia University, is Chief Economist at the Roosevelt Institute and a former senior vice president and chief economist of the World Bank. His most recent book is People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent.

Anti-Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Warfare and its strategic implications by Fatih Ceylan

 

ANTI-UNMANNED AERIAL VEHICLES WARFARE AND ITS STRATEGIC IMPLICATIONS

Fatih Ceylan | Ambassador (Retired) and EDAM Non Resident Fellow

 

There have of late been a flurry of articles on progress being achieved in designing and producing anti Unmanned Aerial Vehicles/Systems assets by a high number of firms around the globe. This is understandable because of the frequent employment of UAVs/Ss with success in different conflict zones. It looks evident that the trend to explore and improve technologies of anti UAVs/Ss will continue unabated.

UAV/S started to take the stage, albeit in primitive forms, in the mid- 19th. century. Since then there has been an unprecedented evolution both in their employment and technology. Efforts to develop their capabilities and designs gained some traction in the late 1970s and various systems have been put into use, particularly in the military field. What we today witness is an ever increasing use of different types of UAVs/Ss both in military and civil domains. And it has become evident that their employment will increase greatly in the foreseeable future.

It is undeniable that successful employments of different types of UAVs/Ss, or Remotely Piloted Vehicles/Aircrafts (RPA) to use a commonly referred term in military circles, have made these platforms much more attractive for many military and defence experts.

There exist primarily three classes of UAVs/Ss in use; micro, mini(miniature) and small UAVs/Ss (Class I in NATO jargon); medium-sized tactical systems(Class II), and Medium Altitude Long Endurance (MALE) / High Altitude Long Endurance (HALE) type UAVs/Ss (ClassIII) that could be described as strategic level types. There also exist Ultra High Altitude UAVs/Ss, still in experimental stages, which could be defined as sub-orbital satellites or high altitude pseudo-satellites using either solar energy or traditional types of fuel.

 

 UAVs/Ss have become extremely useful platforms both in the civil and military domains. They are used for protection/ defence of High Value Assets (HVA) such as airports, seaports, military bases, maritime and aerial assets, deployed troops and non-expendable military assets and capabilities. They also contribute to having a more accurate Recognised Air Picture (RAP) to enhance air superiority in different theatres both in peacetime and wartime. They are also effective instruments in conducting Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance efforts, mounting counterterrorism operations and surgical strikes against adversary’s military capabilities in the military field as well as in delivery of goods, postal services, covering large scale media events etc. in the civil sector.

They are also used for sinister purposes by state and non-state actors against military assets and capabilities in different theatres of war, for espionage, including the industrial field, sabotage and disruptive activities in an ever expanding spectrum. Hence the clear need to develop a new generation of anti UAV/S technologies and counter measures against the potential damage they could inflict on civil and military sectors.

 

TRIGGERS INTEREST IN ANTI-UAV SYSTEMS

It is somewhat ironic, although understandable, that analyses on anti-UAV systems are in comparative terms scant barring the last few years. There are certainly novel and innovative/ disruptive technologies and emerging concepts based on them , but they seem to be in their incipient stages. A brief look at the counter measures against UAVs/Ss follows the usual pattern of detecting, tracking, engaging and neutralising. There exist different techniques, technologies, procedures and practices in use both in detecting/tracking vector and in engaging and destroying UAVs/Ss.

Detecting and tracking ‘Low, Slow and Small’(LSS) type UAVs/Ss, which fly at low altitudes (below 5.000 feet), are a subject that increasingly attract the attention of military and defence experts and planners. Different counter measures are in play when it comes to Line of Sight(LOS) and Beyond Line of Sight (BLOS) LLS type UAVs/Ss.

In detecting, tracking and engaging UAVs/Ss used for malign intentions the whole gamut of electronic jamming, electromagnetic operations, ‘spoofing’, that is, radio frequency engagements/attacks, Directed Energy Weapons such as High Power Microwaves or High Energy Lasers would be employed. GSM related capabilities against UAVs/ Ss could also be utilised, particularly for medium to high altitude UAVs/Ss. There is even the use of trained birds of prey for downing LSS type UAVs/Ss.

The challenge faced here is the degree of autonomy of the UAVs/Ss to be countered. If the type of UAV/S is self autonomous and equipped with a highly intriguing algorithm, then it would require daunting work to deal with it. The difficulty of making ultra high long endurance UAVs/ Ss and those UAVs/Ss equipped with hypersonic propulsion intended to achieve the speed of Mach5 and beyond are challenges yet to be seriously considered.

Conventional counter measures such as counter rocket, mortar/projectiles and artillery as well as general purpose air defences are among the more familiar methods of intercepting, engaging and neutralising UAVs/Ss. However, there are limits to countering the threat of UAVs/Ss when such assets are employed. They would prove useless or offer limited success, particularly when there is a swarm attack of ‘kamikaze UAVs/Ss’.

The crucial point to detect and track UAVs/Ss both in lower altitudes and medium to high altitudes is to have enhanced early warning capabilities in place. The ideal scenario in this field of activity would be to detect them and their operators/ locations before they take off with their payloads. That is indeed a very challenging strand of work, which, however, must be among the primary objectives of countering UAVs/Ss.

Another intriguing aspect facing defence/military experts and planners is to elaborate tactics, techniques and procedures for those UAVs/Ss designed on artificial intelligence using 5G networks. Dedicated development and research on this aspect is necessary to succeed in anti UAV/S warfare.

Due to the different types and capabilities of UAVs/Ss, defence against them must be layered like in the case of Ballistic Missile Defence. The proposed layered architecture must have the ability, preferably embedded in its design and production, to defend against UAVs/Ss by using cyber capabilities both in defensive and offensive modes to render the attacking UAV/S’ algorithm dysfunctional. Consequently, integrating cyber capability to anti UAVs/Ss assets may prove attractive. That would certainly not preclude the need to counter them by leveraging existing cyber capacities.

There have been successful initiatives to introduce stealth technology in UAVs/Ss and this would enhance over time. Given that, anti UAV/S capabilities should be designed not to allow those UAVs/Ss with stealth technology to infiltrate into defence lines of a designated area. And that requires a very sophisticated network of highly developed radars able to detect those UAVs/Ss having built-in stealth capability.

It is well known that not all types of UAVs/Ss have allweather capability, which are one of their weaknesses. Under circumstances where those UAVs/Ss without stealth technology are in use, producing non-conducive climatic effects to hinder their operations might well be a simple, but an effective defensive measure against them.

Production and use of UAVs/Ss in civil and military domains have gained tremendous traction in recent years. This fashionable trend is likely to continue for the foreseeable future. By contrast, defensive and offensive measures against them pale in comparison to investments in further research and development of UAV/S. However, we are witnessing particularly in the last few years serious attempts and initiatives on designing counter UAVs/Ss assets and capabilities. This is bound to achieve progress given the fact that UAVs/Ss have been inflicting heavy damages in different theatres of conflict and also causing the loss of civilian lives. The collateral damage they wreak, when used in dense areas, is exorbitant.

It is certain that defensive and offensive capabilities will soon be in place to counter UAVs/Ss. Because of the complexities involved in anti UAV/S measures due to the highly sophisticated use of technology in UAVs/Ss, the defensive/ offensive toolbox to be developed for anti UAV/S is destined to be by default multi-domain and interdisciplinary bringing together different strands of activity and practice. Any anti UAV/S architecture must be layered like BMD and leverage, to the maximum extent, AI capabilities extending to space-based systems.

Novel technologies to be launched for the sixth generation aircraft should proceed in tandem with anti UAV/S architecture informing its design and capabilities. While further developing anti UAV/S platforms, the means of integrating defensive/offensive capabilities against UAVs/ Ss into the current and future BMD architecture should be explored, thus fusing both BMD and anti UAV/S capability in the same toolbox. In a nutshell, BMD and anti UAV/S should be interoperable and ‘talk to each other.’ Defensive/ Offensive anti UAVs/Ss architecture that smack of Iron Dome should be re-designed to cater also for priorities and needs of an anti UAV/S capability. This would indeed be a costly endeavour, but it is worth it because of risks and threats involved due to UAVs/Ss.

How to design and develop UAV/S-specific Identification Friend or Foe (IFF) system or to adapt the current IFF capability to be mounted on evolving anti UAV/S platforms is yet another aspect in need of further exploration. To achieve that ultimate goal toward making anti UAV/S assets much more effective against all types of UAVs/Ss, tireless efforts should be deployed to seek an exhaustive inventory of libraries being used in existing UAVs/Ss. This may well prove to be an almost untenable objective, but it is worth trying to expand the pool of such libraries to detect and track friendly assets and distinguish them from those to be used by potential adversaries.

 

 

 

The Irish famine and other pandemics in the British Islands Like Typhus, but also Not Hugh Pennington (LRB) 30 November 2020

 

Joe Biden’s great-great-great-grandfather, Edward Blewitt, was overseer at the Ballina Union Workhouse in County Mayo from 1848 to 1850 during the Great Irish Famine. Many died in the workhouse and others perished in the temporary fever hospital built against one of its walls. With his family, Blewitt emigrated to Pennsylvania in 1851. He did well, despite the political power of the anti-Catholic, anti-Irish Know Nothing movement, a nationalist and Protestant political party, which in the 1850s had a hundred congressmen, eight state governors, and a controlling position in half-a-dozen state legislatures. Before his job at the workhouse, Blewitt had been an engineer for the Irish Ordnance Survey; in Pennsylvania he helped to lay out the new mining town of Scranton.

The Irish famine stands as the most lethal pandemic in the British islands since the Black Death. The four cholera pandemics that struck between 1831 and 1866 killed 113,000 in England and Wales. The 1918-19 influenza pandemic killed 179,624 in Britain and Ireland. Covid-19 has so far killed 58,245 in the UK and 2052 in Ireland. One million died in Ireland during the famine.

The famine’s cause was the fungus Phytophthora infestans, genotype HERB-1, which came from the tubers of wild potatoes growing in the Toluca Valley in central Mexico. It spread to the US in 1843, causing potato blight, and south to the Andes. It then travelled to Belgium, and moved on to Ireland in 1845, when it caused a big potato crop failure, repeated in the next three years. 1846 and 1848 were particularly disastrous. The acid Irish soil, the wet sunless climate and environmentally efficient lazy beds suited potato cultivation perfectly. The crop was nutritious and needed little preparation, and until 1845 the favoured variety, the lumper, was disease free. About three million people ate little else, a working man getting through five kilos a day. Lumpers also fed the pigs and chickens.

The Phytophthora-induced failure killed men, women and children. Some starved to death and some got scurvy, but the majority died of typhus. Others were carried off by relapsing fever. Both diseases were spread by lice, and were known as famine fevers because their incidence escalated from endemic to epidemic in such bad times, as well as during wars. Others died of dysentery, the bloody flux. Cholera came from Scotland in late 1848, peaking in May 1849, but it had nothing to do with the famine.

By the later years of the 19th century, it was established that typhus mortality increased steadily with age, being about 2 per cent for patients aged 10 to 15, and rising to 67 per cent for those over 60. In the voluntary hospitals it was lower in paying patients (15 per cent) than in parochial paupers (28 per cent). In the United States it was much higher in blacks than whites, and in Britain was higher in the very fat. Covid-19 is extraordinarily similar, in spite of typhus being caused not by a virus but by a bacterium that infects its victims when they scratch their skin in areas contaminated with the faeces of infected lice. Breathing in bits of dried louse faeces was another transmission route. Workhouse staff, clergymen and doctors usually caught typhus this way; many of them died during the famine. Edward Blewitt was lucky. Why typhus and Covid-19 mortalities vary in the way they do is a mystery.

By the 1920s typhus mortality in Britain had fallen to zero. The concept of herd immunity was first fully defined during that decade, and it was pointed out that the herd was now immune to typhus, not because the individuals comprising it had specific immunity, but because most members of the herd were not lousy. Even if the organism was imported, it could not spread, despite all in the herd being fully susceptible. Covid-19 isn’t like that. The only kind of herd immunity we can rely on to control Covid-19 depends on making individuals insusceptible to infection by developing specific immunity. Vaccination may deliver this. It is too early to tell whether it will.

Predicting the emergence of new pathogens with pandemic potential is enormously difficult. The Phytophthora pandemic exemplifies the challenge. It came out of Mexico more than a century before potatoes were cultivated there for sale (Mexicans have traditionally preferred maize). The small tubers of its wild hosts in the Toluca valley were not commercially marketable. But to start the pandemic, soil containing Phytophthora spores or live infected tubers had to be transported to the United States and Europe, an extremely unlikely event, which explains why blight did not appear in Europe for more than 250 years after the introduction of cultivated potatoes from South America in the late 1500s.

Evolution means that even detecting and characterising a new pathogen at the beginning of a pandemic will be an insecure foundation on which to make predictions. The Phytophthora HERB-1 genotype that caused the famine lasted only fifty years. Twentieth-century strains of the fungus have the US-1 genotype. But they haven’t lost their virulence, and remain the most destructive disease of the world’s third largest food crop, causing losses that could feed hundreds of millions of people. For Covid-19, attention has focused on the Spike protein, and whether mutations will diminish vaccine efficacy.

One worry is that genetic changes will increase virulence. This hasn’t happened in a coronavirus that infects pigs. Transmissible gastroenteritis virus (TGEV) remained unchanged for at least forty years, until the RNA coding for its Spike protein lost bits of its gene sequence, and its name changed in the 1980s to porcine epidemic diarrhoea virus (PEDV). Both viruses caused acute diarrhoea and vomiting and high mortality in suckling pigs. After another twenty years, the RNA coding for the Spike protein lost more genetic information, and the virus became less virulent, killing only 5-10 per cent of infected piglets. Optimism that Covid-19 might behave in the same way must be very guarded; not only does PEDV causes a very different disease in a different host, but attempts to develop effective vaccines against it have not been particularly successful, and it has been shown to spread on the wind from farm to farm as far as ten miles.

The political reputations of Jacinda Ardern and Nicola Sturgeon have been enhanced by their handling of the Covid-19 pandemic; not so those of Boris Johnson or Donald Trump. Enormous sums of money have been borrowed to alleviate the economic effects of lockdowns. In Ireland during the famine, maize and corn were bought in. Public works and soup kitchens were funded by loans. Enormous temporary fever hospitals were built. Unlike the 2020 Nightingale Hospitals, they were used to the full. But outlays during the famine were only about 2 to 3 per cent of public expenditure. Folklore has it that the gombeen men, the meal-mongers, made big profits during the famine, like the purveyors of personal protective equipment in 2020.

It is too early to tell what long-term political impacts the current pandemic will have. The revolutions of 1848 did not reach Ireland; there was no equivalent of the Habsburg Empire’s abolition of the Robot (unpaid forced peasant labour). But the acceleration of the diaspora coincided with the establishment of the Irish as a political force in the United States. After Biden’s election win, a piece of old footage emerged from last January, when a BBC reporter asked the then primary candidate for ‘a quick word’: ‘The BBC?’ Biden replied. ‘I’m Irish.’ It took him a second to break into a grin.

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Deglobalisation by Oriental review

 

Deglobalisation

orientalreview.org/2020/11/30/deglobalisation/

By ORIENTAL REVIEWNovember 30, 2020

The virtual G20 summit highlighted the death of globalisation, despite all the conscientious efforts of those involved, and it highlighted that deglobalisation in the post-COVID world has already taken place. This isn’t about some conspiracy against the conventional “American unipolar world” (in the form of a Pax Americana) or an attempt to recreate the stand-off between East and West that occupied the second half of the 20th century. Deglobalisation and multipolarity are already a reality, regardless of what the think tanks in Washington or Brussels have to say on the matter.

The problem is that there is no single global political agenda, just as there is no single political language with which to discuss it. Moreover, there is no kind of geopolitical tuning fork (or even tuning forks) that the global community can use for guidance.

There are common problems ranging from the coronavirus pandemic to the global economic crisis, but there are no common solutions and nor will there be. This is simply because, at the global level, the way that countries interact with each other has switched to zero-sum game mode. The success of a particular country is regarded as a defeat for its competitors. At the same time, there seems to be a complete readiness to sacrifice certain common interests (not to mention humanitarian considerations) simply to prevent a geopolitical rival from chalking up a political, economic or PR victory.

A few obvious examples suggest themselves. At the G20 summit, the Chinese president proposed creating some kind of digital device for enabling freer movement between countries that would provide considerable support to the global economy and international trade, and help revive the tourism industry (which is critical for many countries, including extremely poor ones).

In fact, it was suggested that an international mechanism be created for the mutual recognition of a “health QR code” that will be based on test results. “I hope that as many countries and regions of the world as possible will join this mechanism,” Xi Jinping said.

On an objective level, the creation of an international and generally recognised “digital confirmation” that a particular tourist, diplomat or businessperson is healthy and can travel into a country (as well as return home) without needing to be quarantined or bypass borders that have been closed due to the coronavirus is a good idea. But there is absolutely no chance of it being implemented on a global level any time soon, primarily because it was Xi Jinping who proposed it. From the point of view of Western leaders, there is no way they could give their consent to proposals put forward by Beijing that emphasise the advanced nature of China’s information technologies.

The next example relates to the world’s poorer countries and their lack of access to coronavirus vaccines, which could well mean that they remain coronavirus hotbeds, with everything that implies. In his speech, Vladimir Putin emphasised the need to ensure global access to vaccination: “Russia supports the draft key decision of the current summit aimed at making effective and safe vaccines accessible for everyone. Undoubtedly, immunisation drugs are, and must be, in the global public domain. Our country, Russia, is ready to provide countries in need with the vaccines developed by our researchers: these are Sputnik V, which is based on human adenovirus vectors and is the world’s first registered vaccine; EpiVacCorona, which was developed in a Novosibirsk research centre; and a third Russian vaccine that is on the way.

Family Photo composite for the annual G20 Leaders’ Summit is projected onto Salwa Palace in At-Turaif, one of the country’s UNESCO World Heritage sites, in Diriyah, Saudi Arabia, November 20, 2020

“The scale of the pandemic obliges us to use all the available resources and research at our disposal. Our common aim is to build portfolios of vaccines and provide the world’s population with reliable protection. This means that there is plenty of work to go around, distinguished colleagues, and it seems to me that this is one of those times when competition is perhaps inevitable, but we should be guided, primarily, by humanitarian considerations and make these our priority.”

Everything will be fine on a declarative level, but the G20 as a whole will not agree to any specific actions that (following basic logic) would entail the creation of a common fund to finance the vaccination of those living in poorer countries using the most affordable and effective vaccines, since this would naturally be Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine, as it is cheaper than its American and European counterparts and, unlike the Pfizer vaccine, does not need to be stored at -70°C. The latter point is a serious problem even for America’s medical infrastructure, not to mention the medical infrastructures of South America, Africa and Eastern Europe.

If looked at from the point of view of Washington and Brussels, the problem once again is that the vaccine is Russian (although they are clearly not satisfied with the Chinese vaccine, either).

Vladimir Putin is calling for a show of humanism by putting the “inevitable competition” to one side, but the chance of this call being heard is extremely slim, especially considering the ongoing propaganda campaign by Western media outlets to discredit the Russian and Chinese vaccines.

The list of topics on which there was no substantive dialogue at the G20 summit (although there was a series of monologues by global leaders) goes on: WTO reforms; the foreign-currency debt problems of developing countries; and the global trend towards protectionism. The position of Western leaders is crystal clear. They talk a lot; they don’t listen to anyone; and their proposals boil down to a simple formula – everyone should do as we say, then everything will be fine – and, in this regard, Washington’s position is unlikely to change with the new president.

The lack of anything substantial at the G20 summit clearly shows that the world is not moving towards competing geopolitical blocs or a restoration of the “American world” (as Washington is hoping for), but towards a future where agreements can only be reached at the level of bilateral negotiations between specific countries. Officially, the world of the G20 still exists, but, in practice, we are approaching what the well-known US political scientist Ian Bremmer called a “G-Zero world”, a world in which everyone is essentially for themselves, and the acceleration of this transformation will probably be the coronavirus’s main historical legacy.

Reposts are welcomed with the reference to ORIENTAL REVIEW.