What prospects for 2021? Social Share
After the tumultuous year of 2020, what prospects are there for the peoples of this planet for 2021? Certainly if we look at this question primarily from economic and social angles, the answers will not be very encouraging, at least at this stage.
After the ravages of the COVID -19 pandemic, it is tempting to dub the new year as “The year of the Vaccines”, with mass immunisation programmes already being put in motion in several countries.
However, even in relation to this preventative measure there are still formidable challenges. Access to the vaccines has exposed the inequality in the world with those countries which can afford the vaccines gobbling up supplies leading to what the World Health Organisation (WHO) calls the emergence of “vaccine nationalism”. Poorer underdeveloped countries and their massive populations have to wait, hamstrung by the lack of financial resources and logistical capabilities.
Christmas among ravages of Covid Social Share
First of all let me extend Season’s greetings to all our readers, customers, supporters, well-wishers and the people of our beloved St Vincent and the Grenadines.
It is certainly a Christmas season the likes of which we have not experienced before. We have had difficult Christmases before, following natural disasters and even under a State of Emergency but the effects have not quite been like this one under the global COVID-19 pandemic.
Even as the vaccines so frantically developed are being administered in some of the rich nations which have been able to afford them, the virus seems to be posing new challenges. Out of the UK and Europe there are reports of the virus mutating into new, more infectious strains.
Who will guard the guards? Social Share
In just over one month’s time, there is supposed to be a changing of the guard in Washington DC, USA with the
inauguration of a new administration. There, the defeated Donald Trump presidency is due to expire following its decisive defeat in last month’s elections and the president-elect Joseph Biden will be sworn in to assume the reins of power in the US capital.
Normally this is a smooth operation and indeed there are constitutional provisions providing for a peaceful transition and handover. After all, the United States of America is the self-appointed “guardian of democracy” not only in this hemisphere but in the entire world. It monitors elections worldwide, either directly or through instruments such as the Organisation of American States (OAS), grades and decides of the quality of democracy in other countries and even hands out sanctions to those who do not meet its own standards.
Governance at the local level: Empowerment and Involvement Social Share
As we approach the Christmas season and the New Year, the impact of the COVID -19 pandemic is still the biggest challenge facing countries big and small, rich and poor, developed and underdeveloped. Currently the focus is still very much on the ravages of the disease and consequently, the desperate, almost indecent haste to deploy vaccines to combat it, with many questioning whether all the necessary safety precautions are being observed.
A new concern, about accessibility of poorer countries, and within countries, the poorer people, to the vaccine has been raised quite validly. A small group of rich nations are already cornering supplies of those vaccines being given approval for delivery to their own populations. Fortunately, not only has an international coalition, aimed at securing supplies for the less fortunate, come into being, but aside from the ‘Big Three’- Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZe