A just-released report has found the Covid-19 pandemic could lead to growing inequalities, going beyond the health sector to all parts of society, unless countries cooperate.
The International Science Council report forecasts deepening global inequalities and the possible collapse of some health systems over the next half decade.
It also warns the UN's sustainable development goals will be set back by a decade and blames governments for prolonging the pandemic by protecting their own patch rather than having an international view.
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The report authors want to see a new UN Science Advisory Board to coordinate more scientific expertise and collaboration across different sectors, in the event of future global emergencies.
The impact of Covid on societies is likely to be with us for years yet, president of the International Science Council Sir Peter Gluckman told Kathryn Ryan.
“What the report has really done by working with several hundred experts from around the world over the last year is point out the broad span of impacts of the pandemic well beyond health, to social sectors, economic, diplomatic and broader aspects of our life on this planet,” he says.
Covid will also keep spreading and evolve, he says.
“Large percentages of people in the world are not immunised, some of the vaccines are not particularly effective, and therefore, we're going to see a long grinding episode of viral episodes compiled combined with economic and social impacts, which extend for perhaps even a decade.”
We may be tired of the pandemic, but the pandemic is not done with us, Gluckman says.
“At best we're only going to get perhaps 60 percent to 70 percent of the global population vaccinated. And we may need to keep on vaccinating as the virus mutates to more effective vaccines. And that's going to be a giant issue for the developing world, particularly given the state of global cooperation.
“And so we're going to see a number of countries in which inequalities get worse, those who are disadvantaged are going to be even more disadvantaged, we're going to see more mental health problems, further educational disruption, social care issues, economic issues in many, many ways.”
There will be a “long echo” in terms of educational consequences from the pandemic, he says.
“There's both the loss of education, the absolute loss of teacher-student time. And we all know that for many people, the digital divide made the ability for online learning harder, and particularly within the families where there are also mothers trying to work from home as well as parents trying to work from home as well. It was very hard for them.
“On top of that, we know that mental health issues for young people have been compounded in this episode, and I suspect that will last for a long, long time.”
This educational disruption will have long term consequences, he says.
“We know from other studies, that when a year of education is lost, it has long term consequences on those children's abilities to earn, to get good jobs, their levels of income across life. And so if we take that, and extrapolate from New Zealand, across the world, and in many countries, particularly in developing countries, the loss of education was almost total. We can see an enormous impact on human capital across the world, which will last for decades.”
Governments tend not to take scientific advice on risk as seriously as they should, Gluckman says.
“There's quite a lot in the report about how to improve risk assessment, and what I call risk listening. That is how the policy makers listen to the expert advice on risk assessments,
“We see that most countries assume that any zoonotic pandemic would look just like influenza. And it clearly didn't. We saw that many of them acted very slowly on advice.”
Many governments drew on narrow sources of advice too, he says.
“One of the key things that we point to is the importance of pluralistic advice, advice not just from epidemiologists and modelers, but from those who understand social aspects, economic aspects, educational aspects, throughout the pandemic but particularly as the pandemic moved from its early stages to latter stages, to increase the diversity of advice that was received.”
Otherwise Covid will continue to be framed as a health crisis, he says.
“It's a much broader crisis, it's a social crisis, in reality, a socio-economic crisis, a diplomatic crisis, an environmental crisis.
“If we don't think of it in those terms, then the decisions made will be very narrow indeed.”
The report points to multilateral failings, he says.
“The WHO was slow to respond, it was likely influenced by political considerations, it continues to perform much better, but other aspects of the UN system have been rather inchoate.
“And there's no real system by which science and evidence informs the holistic, multilateral system. There are other specific issues that occurred around trade restraints on aspects of the vaccine, and PPE, and so forth”.
Fundamentally the world is ill prepared to deal with existential crises, he says.
“This was demonstrated enormously here. And I fear that the next existential crisis, whether it's a resurgence of a severe variant, or another pandemic, or the small slowly burning, but equally important crisis of climate change.
“The world has yet to learn how evidence, policy need to be better aligned, both at national levels and at the multi-lateral level. This was never going to be a national level only crisis, and yet it's been treated by most countries as such.”
