In my ongoing campaign for multi-stakeholder collaboration, I have had a strong reaction to the film “Don’t Look Up” and the media attention it has attracted. I understand why Leonardo di Caprio’s well-known activism regarding climate change makes it an obvious comparison to the apparent failure of the Glasgow Summit on Climate Change (COP 26) to avoid the looming catastrophe of global warming. But it inspires me to share my somewhat contrary views about climate change. I do agree that climate change is happening and that much more needs to be done to avoid a catastrophe. But I also believe that the political will to do more depends on our building popular support for action through multistakeholder collaboration. Here is my commentary on what this means for us. Continue reading “Step by Step toward Resilience: A Commentary on Climate Change”
Obituaries 2021
What is most striking, as we end this dreadful year of 2021, is the transitional nature of things but also the appallingly non-transformational nature of things. I am struck by the passing of a number of transitional figures who made their mark on current versions of history and, what is more important to me, in this particular commentary, is that they made a mark on me personally. Here, in no particular order, I reflect on the impact of Vernon Jordan, Walter Mondale, Colin Powell, Bob Dole, John Sweeney, Richard Trumka, John Ruggie and Desmond Tutu. Quite a collection! Only one of them, as far as I know, was a loss attributable to the coronavirus itself (Colin Powell), but their losses have simply added to making this a year of sadness and melancholy for me. Continue reading “Obituaries 2021”
Pandemic Musings Chapter 8: OMICRON and Christmas Disruptions (updated 31 December 2021)
How can the personal story keep changing? The tiresomeness of cyclical ups and downs with no apparent pattern to them is wearing thin on all of us. Here in France, the delta variant was driving what was described as the fifth wave in this November/December 2021 timeframe, while the US or even the UK were measuring it as a fourth wave. Our personal relationship to the pandemic, nonetheless, was settling down to a gradual phasing out of COVID-related restraints, especially when we both got our boosters for extra-certain protection. But then the omicron variant suddenly burst onto the global scene. And even more disrupting for us personally, our long-awaited visit from our son and his fiancée was turned upside down by his testing positive for COVID shortly after his arrival here – and the rest of us only days later! Instead of spending an early Christmas with them and sending them home to Richmond for the main event, we were all in mandatory isolation through the holiday right here at Villa Ndio. Continue reading “Pandemic Musings Chapter 8: OMICRON and Christmas Disruptions (updated 31 December 2021)”
Holiday Greetings in December 2021, Wishing Safety and Health for All in 2022!
In our holiday/new year’s letter from 2020, we reflected on the effects of the pandemic of COVID-19 on our lives – adjusting to the initial shock in March, adapting to a longer than expected lockdown, experiencing a cautious opening up in the summer before going through a second wave in late October, and closing the year with the good news of a Biden victory in the US. That was in 2020! At the close of our 2020 letter, we wrote: “We’re OK, after all. We expect that 2021 will be better for all of us – as long as we stay safe and healthy. So that is our wish to all for 2021 – safety and health!” And here we are with another holiday and end of year reflections! Before rattling on about this strange year of 2021, let us repeat that our wish to all for 2022 is the same as it was last year: We wish you “safety and health” – and hope, once again, that we will achieve a world in which there is “safety and health” for all! Continue reading “Holiday Greetings in December 2021, Wishing Safety and Health for All in 2022!”
Proposals and Commentaries for a Global Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Compendium (updated 17.03.2022
The COVID-19 pandemic continues to feature a lively debate on the balancing of scientific and policy perspectives. From the beginning of the pandemic, I have been writing commentaries on the importance of applying both a political lens and a scientific lens to the management of the pandemic. At the time, we were all understandably concerned about the risk of political actions that were clearly contrary to the scientific evidence. But that should not have led us away from the value of incorporating the science into a workable political framework for collaborative action. I still embrace the need for balance – combining the scientific guidance on who needs to wear a mask, for example, with political guidance on how this should be implemented in specific circumstances.
A second interest of mine has been to write about the remarkable flowering of global and multi-stakeholder collaboration that the pandemic has inspired – in vaccine development most strikingly but also in the efforts to ensure global sharing of vaccines and therapeutic needs. In fact, the multi-stakeholder nature of this collaboration has been a particular focus of my ongoing commentaries.
With these themes in mind, I started a compendium here of the proposals and actions since January 2021 that continue to inspire me to write about the global and multi-stakeholder response to the pandemic. This list had been regularly updated until March of this year (2022). It seems that I lost interest at that time – recognizing, perhaps, that the promise of better things to come just didn’t deliver the transformation in global collaboration that I believed was in the offing. So I stopped adding items to the list – even as new promises were dangled before us so temptingly – at the Second Global Pandemic Summit, at the World Health Assembly, at the G7 Elmau Summit, at the 12th Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organization….The list goes on. But the enthusiasm does not. So I have put a pause to the exercise and am preparing a wrapping-up commentary to boot. Stay tuned.
Returning to the Pandemic with Renewed Inspiration for a Global Response
Moving beyond the “subterranean machinations” of Franco-American rivalries, I revert back to my preoccupations with the prospects for global and multi-stakeholder collaboration on the COVID-19 pandemic. And I do so with renewed inspiration, perhaps reinforced by the very sudden global panic about the Omicron variant, which the World Health Organization has identified as a new “variant of concern”. My inspiration, however, had already been reviving as a result of my personal tracking of the interviews and personal appearances of key “pandemic players” in the past couple of months. Most strikingly, we all saw the signs in October of more collaboration between the WHO and WTO Directors-General but also their further collaboration with the heads of the IMF and World Bank, I was also encouraged anew by the opportunity also in October to sit in on interviews with two major American figures, Dr. Rochelle Wilensky at the US Centers for Disease Control and Dr. Anthony Fauci at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. And then, through the past few weeks, I have found additional hopefulness in the health-related outcomes of both the G20 Leaders Summit in Rome and and the Conference of the Parties (i.e. “COP 26”) in Glasgow – yes, even there!
Continue reading “Returning to the Pandemic with Renewed Inspiration for a Global Response”
Subterranean Machinations and Franco-American Relations
Living through the latest “bump in the road” in Franco-American relations has stirred me to venture into writing a commentary with a different twist than has been my usual pattern. I don’t mean to ignore my ongoing preoccupation with advocating vaccine equity. – nor my longer lasting and well established preoccupation in support of multi-stakeholder collaboration. In the context of this latest “bump”, however, the commentary has to start with some wishful thinking about broader geopolitical issues like military alliances or trade agreements or peace treaties – issues that are less conducive to a multi-stakeholder approach. That is to say, they are more in the realm of traditional inter-governmental relations in the control of national governments, whether the policy deliberations are conducted multilaterally or unilaterally. And thus, we start here, not so coincidentally, with the commemoration of a military battle and segue from that to a commentary on the strategic positioning of major countries – nation-states, governments and all that – before it gets back to vaccine equity or multi-stakeholderism. Bear with me on this journey in search of renewed hope for these two preoccupations of mine. Continue reading “Subterranean Machinations and Franco-American Relations”
The Importance of the Battle of the Capes to the Sharing of a Franco-American History in Grasse
As Americans living in France since the 1990s, we have long had an interest in observing where the parallel histories of the two countries converge, and especially where they have a distinctly local connection. We have become acquainted with two annual events – one of which occurs just down the street from Villa Ndio in August, and the other of which is a September event called “Grasse Naval Day”. This is a photo essay on the September event, but first a few words about the August event. Continue reading “The Importance of the Battle of the Capes to the Sharing of a Franco-American History in Grasse”
Pandemic Musings: Chapter 7 on the First Trip Back to the USA Since Before the Pandemic (combining a series of progress reports)
Chapter 7 on Pandemic Living started with travel anxieties in anticipation of my first trans-Atlantic flight since the pandemic began. The draft was initially written on 30 and 31 July 2021. Progress reports on 10, 20 27 and 31 August have continued the saga with various mid-travel reflections, and a final piece dated 12 September incorporates my post-travel reflections. During this same period, the delta variant was rampant but quixotic in its own travels around the world. We are still living with bated breath even as we try to go about a return to “normal” living, but this chapter tracks the ups and downs of uncertainty as we try to understand and adjust to a pandemic that keeps changing.
Whither COVAX? A Progress Report on the Vision of Global and Multi-stakeholder Collaboration
The fluidity in the ebb and flow of the COVID-19 pandemic continues to take us through uncharted waters as we gradually absorb the signs urging us to just “live with it” somehow. Even the modified springtime message from the epidemiologists that we might at least manage to get past the “acute” phase of this pandemic by the end of 2021 seems to have lost its resonance. Here we are in mid-July 2021 with a global death toll passing the 4 million mark, and alarming reports about the highly contagious delta variant, the looming epsilon variant, urgent pleas (and even mandates) from the French president and the Italian prime minister to get vaccinated, crazy mixed messages in the UK, confusion about mask-wearing in the US, and dramatic upsurges in countries (like Indonesia this time) with low vaccination rates and limited access to available vaccine doses. At least there is a renewed effort to work things through the COVAX Facility, both with regard to the more equitable distribution of available vaccine doses and, quite encouragingly, to increasing and diversifying the manufacturing capacity for vaccines but also for therapeutics and diagnostics. Here are my personal impressions of what this means for global and multi-stakeholder collaboration. Continue reading “Whither COVAX? A Progress Report on the Vision of Global and Multi-stakeholder Collaboration”