The July/August 2020 issue of Foreign Affairs offers
four major essays on “The World After the Pandemic” (subscription paywall).
Michael T. Osterholm (University of Minnesota) and Mark Olshaker write “Chronicle from the COVID-19
Failure – Before the Next Outbreak Arrives”, p. 10. This article reminds us that we need to take
the novel influenzas incubating in Asia (H5 and H7 strains of “bird flu”) and
have vaccines ready should they become more transmissible among humans. They argue that a universal flu vaccine is an
urgent national security need. That may be
true of coronaviruses. There is some
evidence that cellular immune resources do remember “similar” viruses that you
don’t have antibodies on the shelf for.
Francis Fukuyama writes “It Tales a State”, (p. 26, which
is a little more testing than Hillary Clinton’s “It Takes a Village” (I never did
a book preview on that, or did I?)
Danielle Allen writes, “A More Resilient Union: How
Federalism Can Protect Democracy from Pandemics”, p. 33 Federalism has meant states managing their
own stay-at-homes, reopenings (although they are making regional agreements
among governors) and rebounds of cases, it looks like now. Federalism is a controversial idea in
political theory of democracy (Vox’s Ezra Klein likes to question it, as has
leftist Carlos Maza).
Stewart Patrick writes “When the System Fails: COVID-19
and the Costs of Global Dysfunctions”
How can you explain how 17-year-old Seattle high
school student Avi Schiffmann realized in December that COVID that this virus
in China would explode and needed to be tracked? Did
the CDC? CIA? Trump didn’t take it seriously, of course.
Even John Fish (20, involved for a while in a project
to make ventilators cheaply in Montreal, while on his gap year from Harvard)
says he didn’t grasp the gravity of the situation until February.
The young people own this problem now. David Hogg, where are you? Maybe we need to lower the minimum age for the presidency below 35.
Picture: Skyway in Minneapolis (mine, Sept. 2019).
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