Category Archives: Covid-19

One boat, one storm? Some youthful inspirations for mutual support

News reports last week said that levels of hunger in Central America have almost quadrupled in the past four years, a consequence of the economic crisis caused by COVID-19 and years of extreme climate events. 

That news set me to thinking about that comforting notion that the pandemic has somehow placed us all in the same boat—and then as well to the reactions to it: we may be in the same storm, but we’re in different boats. 

I first encountered the metaphor of a lifeboat to represent all of humanity when I was very young, perhaps 12 years old. My parents thought it was important that we hear a presentation by Dr. Robert McClure, the renowned medical missionary who was serving as Moderator of The United Church of Canada (1968-71). He was best known for his years of service in China in the decades before the triumph of the revolution in 1949, but he served after that in many parts of the world. 

The auditorium of Kelowna’s First United Church was full, and we sat near the back. My memory is that Dr. McClure used the technology of the time, an overhead projector, and that one of the images was a simple line drawing of people in a boat. Most of them were at one end of the boat, and the boat looked like it was about to capsize. On the other hand, it may be that his words enabled me to make in my mind a drawing of the boat that he described. His point was about global distribution of resources. Some of us have too much; others nothing at all. It is one boat one planet: your stuff won’t save you.

Not quite a decade later, I met Dr. McClure again. We were both at the United Church’s Naramata Centre at the end of April 1978. 

And, surprise, I found my notes of the event. He was in Naramata to speak at a United Church men’s conference; I was there with a very ecumenical group of about 40 youth that was attached to the Kamloops Okanagan Presbytery, and with which I stayed connected over several years during breaks from my studies in Ottawa. I had not remembered this, but my notes say that our resource person for the weekend was Gary Paterson, then the minister of the United Church congregation in Winfield, BC; decades later he too would be a Moderator. And it was Gary who introduced Dr. McClure to our group in a Saturday afternoon gathering in the upper room of a building called The Loft.

He began by “taking us” in a Concorde super-sonic jet, six-and-a-half-hours from London to Singapore. “Our world isn’t shrinking. It’s shrunk, and will continue to do so.” He spoke for about 35 minutes, and concluded: “Canada is your blessing. Now: what will you do with it?”

In between, he told us of his life in Toronto, where he lived on the 19th floor of an apartment building. He told us of the rules designed for safe living: you are not to talk to your neighbours; walk only in well-lit areas, etc. 

Then he spoke of the river people of Sarawak (a Malaysian state on north coast of northern Borneo). “They live in long houses, like an apartment building turned on its side.” The long houses were divided into small apartments, side-by-side, each family having a part that was its own. “They’ve been there for 3,000 years,” he said. “They adopted this system of mutual support.” The apartments were joined together by a long, covered verandah over the river. “Neighbours are close and friends are forever.”

He offered an example. “My hospital was near the river mouth. A woman came down—a week-long journey in each direction—for a hysterectomy. I asked her, ‘Where are your children? How could you leave your children?’ ‘Oh, but doctor,’ she said, ‘we’re long-house people. The neighbours will care for them while I’m gone. Next month when my neighbour comes down, I’ll care for her children. We’re long-house people.’”

That’s mutual support. “When you’re invited to a wedding in Borneo, it’s a commitment for you too. You pledge to see that Joe and Sally will stay together, and when problems arise, you go see Joe and tell him to get his act together, and you can bet Sally will be told something by the women. One marriage in a thousand breaks down. That’s mutual support.”

He talked about the role of youth in other countries that he had visited. Read 42 years later, some of his examples of youthful collaboration seem debateable—Singapore in the years when Lee Kuan Yew exercised firm control—but the point was that governments should trust youth with more responsibility for positive social change, and that youth should take advantage of the responsibility they have now.

Twice, then, I was inspired by McClure to think of issues in their global dimensions. In subsequent years, I learned more about him and about China and about the role of Canadian missionaries there. 

Dr. McClure is sometimes held in tension with the life and witness of Canadian supporters of the Chinese Revolution, including Rev. James Endicott, a United Church missionary, and Dr. Norman Bethune (son of a Presbyterian minister) who died in 1939 while serving as a battlefield surgeon with one of Mao Zedong’s revolutionary armies. 

While I tend to the Endicott and Bethune sides of those political and theological reflections, I also celebrate McClure’s choice to live most of his life among the impoverished and marginalized peoples of the Earth, and his challenge to the rest of us to use our blessings to care for each other and the planet.

As I was putting together these notes about my memories of Dr. McClure, I was invited by a friend to see actors in a Zoom reading of a new play, China 1938, by Diane Forrest held March 8. Forrest is a writer and editor long involved in Alumnae Theatre’s new play development group and is also co-author with McClure of a 1988 volume, Vintage McClure. The play tells the story of the single encounter between McClure and Bethune in China in 1938, and is told from the perspective of the one woman who knows what happened: McClure’s widow, Amy. This play is also an inspiration, and I hope that (after the pandemic), it gets a full stage treatment.

After UN Security Council calls for vaccine equity, WHO pushes for action on patents

In a rare show of unanimity, the UN Security Council approved a resolution Feb. 26 that encouraged Covid-19 vaccine equity and called for a “sustained humanitarian pause” to local conflicts.

Speaking with journalists afterwards, World Health Organization (WHO) chief Tedros Ghebreyesus argued that more could be done.

“I understand full well that all governments have an obligation to protect their own people. But the best way to do that is by suppressing the virus everywhere at the same time,” said Ghebreyesus.

“Now is the time to use every tool to scale up production, including licensing and technology transfer, and where necessary, intellectual property waivers. If not now, then when?”

The WHO leader’s words add weight to calls inside the World Trade Organisation (WTO)—calls that are already supported by about 100 countries—for a waiver from certain provisions of patent rules to allow greater production of vaccines. 

Given that Canada is not yet among the countries supporting the waivers, Canadians are invited to sign a petition to the House of Commons in support of the proposal.

Together with calls within the G20 nations and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to release $3 trillion of global reserve funds (“Special Drawing Rights”) to support crisis response and recovery efforts in developing countries, action in the WTO on patents represent the two largest challenges to “standard operating procedures” in the IMF and WTO seen in many years.

We’ve done this before

These systems have been challenged before. In the IMF’s case, it was the demand for debt relief by so-called “highly-indebted poor countries” in the 1980s and 1990s that inspired massive Jubilee campaigns in many countries, including Canada. Now, more than 215 groups from around the world have sent an open letter to G20 Finance Ministers and the IMF calling for a quick allocation of global reserve funds – Special Drawing Rights – to support developing countries’ global coronavirus crisis responses and recovery efforts.

“Stop AIDS! Keep The Promise!” was the cry outside the International AIDS Conference in Toronto in 2006. (Jim Hodgson photo)

With the WTO, it was the need to ease patent protection so as to produce less costly generic versions of medicines used to treat HIV and AIDS. Again, efforts were broadly supported by churches and NGOs around the world. Eventually, in at least partial responses, less-costly generics and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria helped save lives in many countries.

Vaccine Equity

The WHO has long called upon rich countries to ensure that vaccines are shared equitably. The global organisation is one of the leaders of COVAX, a program that aims to supply 1.3 billion vaccine doses to low- and middle-income countries this year. But so far, COVAX has had a slow roll-out.

The British-drafted resolution in the Security Council, co-sponsored by 112 countries, recognized the importance of extensive use of vaccines in this pandemic time as a “global public good for health.” It emphasised the need to develop international partnerships to scale-up manufacturing and distribution capacities.

Further, the Council requested the Secretary-General to provide a full assessment of the impediments to vaccine access in the pandemic response. It said it would review situations brought to its attention by the Secretary-General where hostilities and armed group activities are impeding COVID‑19 vaccination and to consider what further measures may be necessary to ensure such impediments are removed, and hostilities paused to enable vaccination.

It emphasized the urgent need for “solidarity, equity and efficacy,” inviting donation of vaccine doses from developed economies and all those in a position to do so to low- and middle-income countries and other countries in need, particularly through the COVAX facility.

These are complex initiatives but they—together with action for patent and debt relief, and additional funds for vaccines and other public health need—are essential for overcoming the global pandemic and for the reconstruction that will follow.

People in Canada are also invited to sign a petition to ensure full access to Covid-19 vaccines by all migrants regardless of immigration status. See the Vaccines For All petition here.

Systemic issues that pandemic recovery efforts fail to address

“Always drink treated water” (Haiti, 2011)

In September 2015, without so much as a look over their shoulders at past development successes and failures, 193 world leaders committed themselves to 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs) that were intended to achieve three great things over the next 15 years:

  • End extreme poverty
  • Fight inequality and injustice
  • Fix climate change

I support the goals. Who but the most reactionary would not? And I believe that the United Nations is vital for nation-states to work out common approaches to global problems. 

But my experience tells me that governments usually fail to cough up the money required for effective Official Development Assistance (ODA). It also seems to me that extreme poverty, inequality and injustice cannot be eliminated, or climate change fixed, without significant systemic changes to the global economy: the power of transnational corporations and their investors must be curbed.

A bit more than five years later—and a year into the global Covid-19 pandemic—the SDGs are in peril. Worse: good will is evaporating as the wealth gap spreads wider and rich countries grab the vaccines.

By Feb. 10, more than three-quarters of vaccinations had occurred in 10 of the world’s richest countries, while nearly 130 countries had yet to administer a single dose. In January, Oxfam reported the world’s 10 richest men had seen their wealth increase by US$540 billion during the pandemic, “while billions of people are struggling amid the worst job crisis in over 90 years”—a situation, Oxfam said, that seems poised to get worse. “Unless rising inequality is tackled, half a billion more people could be living in poverty on less than $5.50 a day in 2030, than at the start of the pandemic.”

In this context—even while critics like me might argue over details of the SDGs—it was heartening this International Development Week (ending today) to see that Cooperation Canada and its members (development and humanitarian relief agencies) are calling on Canada to increase ODA commitments to ensure a global recovery from the pandemic.

“This is an absolutely critical time. It’s not a time for Canada to be withdrawing from the world. It’s quite the opposite,” said Nicolas Moyer, CEO of Cooperation Canada. Speaking to Radio Canada International, he added: “There are huge pressures not only on global progress but our own values. Democratic values are under threat, human rights are under threat as they haven’t been before.”

Canada should invest at least one per cent of its domestic Covid-19 response in additional international assistance funds in its upcoming 2021 federal budget and years to come, Moyer said. Cooperation Canada’s recent report, In This Together: A Case for Canada’s Global Engagement, details the impact of Covid-19 on vulnerable people around the world.

Canada’s contribution to international assistance of $6.2 billion in 2018-19 is equivalent to just 0.27 per cent of the gross national income (GNI), well below international commitment of 0.7 per cent—and below the contributions of peer countries.

Last year, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced $865 million for vaccine purchases and Covid-19 treatments in low- and middle-income countries. He also gave International Development Minister Karina Gould a renewed mandate to do more to support developing countries “on their economic recoveries and resilience.”

In December, Gould announced a $485-million increase in Canada’s $5.9-billion overseas development assistance budget. The money was earmarked for new international efforts to ensure the equitable distribution of Covid-19 vaccines to poor countries.

She added that Canada “would absolutely be donating any excess capacity” of vaccines to poorer countries. But vaccines alone won’t heal the damages of the pandemic which, in less than a year, erased a decade of progress in improving the livelihoods of the world’s most impoverished people, especially children.

“What we’re talking about in international development is a decade of lost gains,” Gould said in an interview with The Canadian Press.

Canada is also one of the top donors to the COVAX Advance Market Commitment (AMC) Facility. The COVAX program is aiming to provide 1.3 billion vaccine doses to 92 lower-income countries by the end of this year. But it remains underfunded and is still seeking billions of dollars to meet its goals, the Globe and Mail reported Feb. 3.

Canada is also supporting the Global Fund work to overcome Covid-19 with testing kits and reinforced health systems, while sustaining gains made against HIV-AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria.

But here’s where we come to those tough, systemic issues that SDGs and current pandemic efforts fail to address. Patent rules need to be relaxed. Most of the new vaccines were developed and produced after heavy infusions of public subsidies, and those big companies are holding tight to their patents.

This happened too in the struggle to provide HIV and AIDS treatments globally. After years of pressure (including the Beads of Hope advocacy campaign of The United Church of Canada in the early 2000s), less-costly generics and the Global Fund eventually helped save lives.

Dr. Anthony Fauci is among those who are calling for “cooperation from the pharmaceutical companies” to allow “relaxation” of their patents. 

About 100 countries are supporting a proposal at the World Trade Organization (WTO), led by South Africa and India, to allow a temporary waiver of intellectual property rules for vaccines and other COVID-19 products during the pandemic. The African Union has joined the calls.

But Canada and other wealthy countries have so far refused to support the plan, the Globe and Mail reported on Feb. 12. Canadian officials say they “will continue to engage” with supporters of the waiver plan ahead of a Feb. 23 meeting of the WTO.

Meanwhile, vaccines from China, Russia and Cuba are gaining credibility and will become more broadly available in developing countries. In a time when the United States wants to recover influence lost during the relatively-isolationist years of Donald Trump’s administration, it would seem some opportunities are being missed here—for the sake of globalized corporate capitalism. The Anglican archbishop of Cape Town, Thabo Cecil Makgoba, argues that President Joe Biden should use the wealth and power of the United States to see that South Africa and other countries that desperately need an effective coronavirus vaccine have access to it.

Another approach—The People’s Vaccine—is proposed by  a coalition of organisations including Amnesty International, Oxfam, Public Citizen and UNAIDS, among others.