Page 10 - Issue 14

Haunted by ‘economism’

In a post-corona world, zoonotic spillover and
Chinese “wet markets” will have to become the
concern of the international community. If Iran’s
nuclear arsenal project can be closely monitored,
there is no reason why we should not demand
international monitoring of the sites and sources of
potential zoonotic spillovers. The business
community all over the world may finally realize
that in order to exploit the world, there will need to
be a world.

But what is new about this crisis is how much it is
haunted by “economism.” The British model for
responding to the medical threat initially
embraced (and subsequently abandoned) the
least intrusive path of intervention, for the sake of
maintaining regular economic activity. It opted to
let nature take its course, according to the model
of auto-immunization (that is, contamination) of
the younger 60 percent of the population, even
though that would mean sacrificing an estimated 2
to 4 percent of its population (this model was also
adopted by Holland and Sweden).

In the Italian city of Bergamo and its environs,
industrialists and governing officials demanded
that workers keep working, even when the virus
was already present. In Brazil, the courts ruled
against President Jair Bolsonaro’s claim that the
health of the economy could not be sacrificed for
an imaginary threat to the health of the populace.