There will be an "after COVID-19" ...

When last month Donald Trump blurted, "It’s something that nobody expected," I almost blew a fuse. Journalist Laurie Garrett knew. She spelled out the threat of a global pandemic in 1994 in her best-selling THE COMING PLAGUE: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance. She'd seen AIDS/HIV spread across our country and the globe. Earlier, she'd seen Legionnaires Disease erupt -- and fortunately be pushed out of sight. She's heard of bizarre illnesses in remote places like the blood curdling Ebola in inaccessible parts of Africa. She understood that new sorts of biological threats to humans, amplified by the speed and scope of world travel and by our complacent confidence that modern medicine had a remedy for illness, was going to break through one day. And here we are. I remember reading the book and wishing I could shove what I'd learned into some dark corner where I never had to think about it again.

Today Garrett is reporting in real time on a plague that is engulfing humans everywhere. She has constructed a clear timeline of COVID-19's emergence in China, the criminal denial from both Xi Jinping and Donald Trump, and scientists' efforts to work around these self-centered political leaders. It turns out it's neither our flawed democracy or Chinese authoritarianism that determines responses; it's powerful men's fixation on their self-interests.

Both Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping instinctively sought to repress news of the true danger of their countries’ outbreaks, and the reach of their infection zones, so as to minimize potential political damage to their regimes.

Okay. We know that and it is important to keep in mind their record of murderous malfeasance. But I'm almost more interested when Garrrett looks ahead toward a time when, after millions of deaths across the world, scientists invent a vaccine that could immunize us against the SARS-CoV-2 virus. And once again, she's drawing on what can be learned from the past.

Going forward, there is one hope for humanity, and for the Sino-American relationship: the development of an effective coronavirus vaccine. Several nations, including China and the United States, are racing to create a vaccine, and to push prototypes of one into large clinical trials. With luck, one of those products can stop Covid-19’s spread, without difficult side effects.

But that may well lay the groundwork for additional high-stakes battles. In past global epidemics, such discoveries have led to two terrible outcomes: patent disputes, and a fully unjust distribution of lifesaving innovations worldwide. In 2009, for example, the H1N1 swine flu spread globally in less than six months, but viable vaccines weren’t available for most countries until the epidemic had passed. Poor countries never did receive supplies of the vaccine that were sufficient to put a dent in their outbreaks. ...

International agencies are now poised to counter such profit-motive failures in the vaccines markets, drawing their funding mostly from the Gates Foundation and the foreign aid budgets of a handful of wealthy countries. The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), which grew out of the World Economic Forum, offers financial support for vaccine invention. Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, makes bulk purchases of childhood vaccines and helps ensure their distribution in poor countries. The Global Fund underwrites some health system costs for poor countries, primarily in sub-Saharan Africa. Together, they represent a fledgling international infrastructure for global immunization

But Covid-19 won’t simply disappear if the wealthy world is left to its own devices, manufacturing costly vaccines that are only affordable to fully insured residents of the 30 richest nations on Earth. What we collectively face is the need to execute the largest mass immunization program in world history, deploying teams of vaccinators to every nook and cranny of the planet, rich or poor.

... If an effective Covid-19 vaccine is developed, its targets will include almost eight billion human beings, with nearly three-quarters of a billion living in conditions of extreme poverty, according to World Bank figures. Eliminating the coronavirus scourge will require mobilization of tens of thousands of immunization teams, armed with affordably priced vaccines. It is likely that both China and the United States, based on their initial human tests of candidate vaccines, will lead global manufacturing—and that both countries will face the moral and economic pressures of balancing global needs against company profits.

Whether we like it or not, we are all citizens of the world. Xenophobia and panic separate us. That's not going to serve.