How would a post-pandemic world look like? One year after COVID-19 appeared, the contours of a global order reshaped by the pandemic are starting to emerge. The virus has shattered lives, disrupted economies, and changed election outcomes. This will lead to permanent political and economic power shifts both within and among countries. We are going to share with you an interview with the author of “The Coming Plague: Newly Emerged Diseases in a World Out of Balance” Laurie Garrett:

“What do you think, Laurie, the future might look like in the post-pandemic world?”

               Firstly, we have to begin with: what is going to be left of our world after covid. What would be the nature of how we all function? I believe a couple of things would have changed. In my many years of struggling to have the issue taken seriously in national security circles will no longer fall on “deaf ears”. Now everybody gets it. However, do they understand the appropriate measures to take, that’s a different story?

“Does everyone get it? Furthermore, if they do, especially political leaders, do they understand it well enough to be able to do the right decisions”?

             “I think right now that conversation cannot be had, at least not in a useful way. However in 2 or 3 years, after CoVid had swept around the world multiple times, then perhaps this will be a very different conversation. Also, the level of sophistication or understanding will be higher. The costs will be huge, not just loss of life but a permanent economic restructuring of everything that we call capitalism. This is going to be so profound that there will not be a single sector of society untouched by this pandemic. There will be not a single activity that goes on as it once did, so will they get it? -Yes and No.

A post-pandemic world

People will get it in the sense that there will be support for early warning systems. There will be a reappraisal of the sort of multilateral system of the UN (united nations). W-h-o and so on there will be a very large restructuring of all the programs related to development out of the World Bank the Bretton Woods agreements and I think every single government. Even auto crating ones, oligarchy is with mass theft and corruption, we’ll see that it’s in their interest to not have another pandemic.

   ” What would be our best hope, and what would be our worst fear for post- Covid world?”

           It’s about economics. It’s really not about if people do have PPE’s, (personal protective equipment). I can see a virus coming. I think that the level of a shake-up in our global economy is going to be the most serious challenge. We have to go all the way back perhaps even to the great mortality of the Black Death of the 14th century to see something of the scale of what we are about to go through. We are at the very beginning of this, so you have to cast your imagination, but here in New York we have 25% unemployment and this was instantaneous, most of those jobs are not coming back.

I don’t care what people think “coming back” is and what re-opening is and as we go through cycle after cycle of the spread of this virus so that it recedes everybody catches their breath, there’s some economic restructuring, businesses re-open, the virus comes back again and again… Until ultimately, we come up with a viable strategy to really stop the virus in its tracks. It is almost in definition going to mean an effective vaccine.

This is why I fear it could lead to an even greater expansion of the wealth gap. In this way, the same small cluster of people that have been getting wealthier since the 2008 financial crisis, will now get even more of the wealth. By shorting in the stock market, by investing, basically against the economy. This could result in a kind of a world, that would almost seem to stifle opportunity for the average person.

“What else worries you?”

So, my fear is that we end up in an economic place after all this worsens all the attributes of the 2008 financial crisis. It has proven so horrible that affects populism and nationalism and the retreat from globalism. My hope – that more and more of the public will organize. More of the middle class or what once was the middle class will say “Hey, you know, we have professional skills. We have the education we’re not the unwashed masses of the French revolution. We are the educated masses upon which your wealth depends. Therefore, we demand a new kind of structuring of the economy. A new kind of structuring of the WORLD”.

A post-pandemic world

 This is an interview with Laurie Garrett about the world after CoVid, recorded almost 1 year from nowadays. And as we see the world now, she was right for the economy. That it is not building the way it is meant to be. The rich and wealthy people become even more rich depending on the middle class and their skills. While they, in fact, stay in the same place on the economic ladder.