by Helen Ramscar In March 2020, when Dr Aylward, Senior Advisor to the WHO Director-General, cut short a video interview rather than comment on, or even mention, Taiwan’s impressive response to the Covid-19 crisis, it appeared that offending China was too great a risk to countenance. His lack of candour appeared a sinister indication of …
Continue reading China and the WHO’s ‘Health Silk Road’ (健康丝绸之路)
The UK's Integrated Review of foreign, defence, security and international development policy cannot be undertaken meaningfully during Phase 1 of the Covid-19 crisis and it has been paused until sometime next year. In the meantime, the Securing Strategic Integration report published by the D Group this week offers the best outline defining how to create something 'strategic' from …
Helen Ramscar It’s almost 20 years since I stepped into a Chinese ‘wet market’. As a ‘lǎowài’ (‘foreigner’), it was certainly an eye-opener. So, when in January 2020 news started to trickle out of China of a new SARS-like coronavirus spreading from the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, the assumption that the heaving wet market …
Continue reading Wuhan is Ground Zero: We Still Need to Know What Happened
Michael Clarke Within the rich world, the COVID-19 pandemic is expected to pass its peak over the next month. But then the ‘COVID phase 2’ period begins, and it will be brutal. It will be brutal because the pandemic will then be approaching a peak in the emergent economies and the developing world, and whatever …
Michael Clarke on Monocle 24 Radio's The Globalist, analysing how global security and the concept of civil liberty might have to adapt after Covid-19, can be heard here: https://monocle.com/radio/shows/the-globalist/2208/how-will-intelligence-change/
Helen Ramscar The COVID-19 crisis is certainly not all about ventilators*, but their availability is emerging as a revealing index of preparedness for a pandemic crisis. As the UK scrambles to get another 8,000 ventilators this week, aiming to have 18,000 in place for the projected peak of the UK’s first Covid-19 crisis, it’s worth …
Continue reading Ventilators for Covid-19: A Scramble for Africa
Helen Ramscar As all countries grapple with mathematical models, limited or inaccurate statistics and try to flatten exponential curves, citizens’ hopes are pinned on governments having an exit strategy to the Covid-19 crisis and the arrival of a safe vaccine. But some very challenging questions combining medical ethics and public policy remain to be answered …
Continue reading ‘Vaccine Diplomacy’ in Phase 2 of the Covid-19 Crisis
Professor Michael Clarke discusses the geopolitical implications of Covid-19 in this podcast produced by The D Group: https://tippingpoint2020s.files.wordpress.com/2020/04/the-d-group-podcast-e28093-prof-m-clarke-e28093-geopolitics-of-cv19-2.mp3
Michael Clarke After more than a month of manifest global crisis, it is apparent that COVID-19 will have a major effect on the global economic system and thereby create unpredictable geopolitical changes. No one can yet reliably predict how events may play out, but we can at least set out the questions that events themselves …
Continue reading The Geopolitical Effects of the COVID-19 Crisis
Tipping Point 