Inside Out | In two pandemic years, how political divisions and policy missteps have failed the world

Since the first outbreak, the coronavirus pandemic has been marked by political failure in the US, the UK, Australia, Japan and China

In Hong Kong, our leaders have been forced into a false choice of opening up to the mainland or the world. Harm to Hong Kong’s economy might be permanent

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Protestors hold placards in Parliament Square as Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson attends the weekly Prime Ministers’ Questions session in parliament in London on January 12. Johnson has apologised for attending a garden party during Britain’s coronavirus lockdown, but brushed aside opposition demands that he resign. Photo: AP

Published: 4:45pm, 16 Jan 2022

If our fate during the Covid-19 pandemic had rested in the hands of scientists and the medical profession, we would have been in good hands. Almost certainly the pandemic would by now be a fading – if painful – memory.

But here we are, two years after the outbreak, reporting 320 million Covid-19 cases worldwide, and five million deaths, with the Omicron variant energetically propelling a fifth viral wave. Communities worldwide are stressed, impatient, panicked and often in despair. Many have lost jobs, careers and income, and face economic hardship, with no prospect of early recovery.

The failure that has brought us to this point is not a failure of science or medicine. It is not due to an absence of knowledge of how to track or treat the virus. The failure is a failure of politics – both domestically and between countries.

The political failure is not just here in Hong Kong, where Carrie Lam’s government has “cancelled” the most important festival in the Chinese calendar in an increasingly desperate and ultimately pointless effort to keep the Omicron tide outside our boundaries.

The failure sits also in Joe Biden’s administration in the United States, in the beleaguered Boris Johnson’s government in Britain, in the Australian government’s embarrassing battle with a shamelessly unvaccinated Novak Djokovic that has the Australian Open Tennis championship on tenterhooks, in Japan’s bumbling mismanagement of public opinion through the summer Olympics, and of course in China’s original sin – procrastination over sharing information about the coronavirus outbreak.

Serbian tennis player Novak Djokovic departs from the Park Hotel government detention facility before attending a court hearing at his lawyers’ office in Melbourne, Australia, on January 16. Photo: EPA-EFE

The pandemic, unconcerned with political or national boundaries, has ruthlessly exploited political and social divisions. In particular, it has taken ruthless advantage of countries that call themselves democracies, exploiting their core principles of freedom of speech and personal privacy to seed dangerous division and hobble effective policymaking, and contorting legal systems ill-designed to adjudicate the right to personal freedom against the imperative of protecting human life.

.css-1m2rp1p{color:#34b8b5;}Inside Out | In two pandemic years, how political divisions and policy missteps have failed the world

Inside Out | In two pandemic years, how political divisions and policy missteps have failed the world