The former MEP and British MP, Nirj Deva Additya has made an impassioned plea for global action now in the fight against COVID19.
Helen Clark with Nirj Deva at the European ParliamentCOVID-19 from perspectives of a former European Member of Parliament
In this evocative speech former European Union MP Nirj Deva encapsulates the harsh realities of the world dominated by COVID-19 and the threats posed by the global virus, which knows no boundaries, ethnicities and social status of those who would become victims. A global virus demands a quick and concerted global response, perhaps, quicker than the virus itself, before it strikes again and before it devours the lives of tens of thousands of people across the globe. It is a plea for global action and global unity against an invisible enemy of the humanity.
In the 30 years I have devoted to humanitarian relief and development through international institutions; I never believed this day would come.
An ignoble day when the whole world under threat from a global virus finds the UN in NY silent and empty, the Security Council absent and cowering, the WHO a mere post box, the EU Commission and Parliament shut and the international order in tatters.
How can you fight a global virus that knows no national borders with different and contradictory policies of individual nations..?
Patient No 1 was in China. In three months we are seeing Patient No xxx all over the world.
We are asking our people in each nation to lock down, do social distancing and so hope to reduce infections and reduce national deaths against the virus. We are spending billions to reduce the hardships that the virus brings to our nation.
Even if we achieve zero new infections and 100 percent recovery for those who have not died and even if our particular nation is totally virus free, just one infected person in a refugee camp in Syria will become in a short time the new patient No 1 and will again infect the whole world a few months later, and we will have to go through the whole agony again.
The virus is not a local virus confined to our borders, it’s a global virus that knows no borders.
There are no national solutions to this problem unless we decide for generations to come to shut our nation, to the rest of the world. That is patently absurd.
So what’s the point of going hell for leather nationally to deal with the problem without paying a blind bit of notice about what other countries, our neighbours are doing. .?
At present, that is what we are doing. Nationally, we may succeed, but our near neighbour a few hundred mile away may still through the wrong or late lock downs be still incubating the disease.
What then….when it comes back to our shores because a government thousands of miles away was slow or stupid or ignorant or technically unable to isolate, or test or trace or treat that ONE patient who can reinfect the world from the depths of poverty stricken of Africa, Asia or Latin America or from neglected millions in refugee camps in Turkey and Syria?
The UN always leading from behind has let us down time and time again. This time it has been cathartic, terminal and existential to mankind.
The solution lies within our grasp. It now only requires a global political will to vanquish a global threat from a global virus.
The zero tolerance solution is to convene now at the highest levels an international meeting on the Internet. At that meeting every prime minister, every president participating agrees to a common eradication and a common LOCKDOWN programme including – in very difficult circumstance around every refugee camp, if necessary, under armed guard. That programme to be devised before this conference by medical experts from infected countries where some success has been achieved to create a menu of good practices, which every country adheres to and where those countries lacking equipment, medical material, testing kits are identified and provided for.
A global zero tolerance effort to create and fast track a vaccine, keeping the lockdown to a maximum, a global effort to understand the best methods of mitigating the infection, a global effort to provide testing kits, ventilators, and protective material and finally a global vaccination programmes must be undertaken under the aegis of a new highly financed unique global institution empowered to carry out this programme.
This timely ZERO TOLERANCE action if taken now, will save trillions of dollars in lost wealth lost jobs and lost growth and prevent it happening again and again.
We were slow to understand the threat. Now we know the enormity of it. There is no more time to waste. We act now!
(Nirj Deva DL was Vice President of the International Development Committee of the European Parliament for 12 years, Co Chairman of the EU Delegation to the World Summit of the UN, a Member of the European Parliament for 20 years and the British House of Commons for 5 years.)
