NEED A Plan of Action to face pandemic. Not mere lockdowns

The fixation to global free-market profits with COVID-19 pandemic control efforts became more evident with an international call to establish a “Global Health Threats Council” (GHTC) with a high profile senior global political leadership via a UN General Assembly.

- Kusal Perera

This call by a group of ex-heads of States and politicians calling themselves “Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response” proves completely out of tune with national issues due to national politics and social culture. Their main proposal is to establish a decision-making body called the GHTC. Main tasks are to develop a global pandemic framework in 06 months and to overcome “vaccine nationalism” and “vaccine diplomacy” to reach the world population with vaccine in 01 year. Their call to establish all this within the UN system and strengthen the WHO itself says, this would be another major cover-up of mega-profits made by the pharma industry at the expense of the COVID-19 pandemic.

SL government is also caught between medical professionals with a similar one-track mindset who demand a complete lockdown of the country for at least 02 weeks and a corporate sector that do not accept such lockdowns. What is now being played out with numerous restrictions keeping people indoors with adjustments every now and then is a rough compromise with no set plan.

What is crudely wrong is not how these restrictions are haphazardly carried out on the streets but in the whole approach. Physical isolation of the individual as “Social distancing” with a metre or two the WHO insists is central to the whole pandemic control. A face mask and hand sanitizer were included as added economic value.