Opinion

Martin O'Brien: The triumph of science gives us hope for the year ahead

The challenge for the leaders of the world’s rich countries is to ensure that science is properly funded and that vaccines are speedily distributed across the world
The challenge for the leaders of the world’s rich countries is to ensure that science is properly funded and that vaccines are speedily distributed across the world The challenge for the leaders of the world’s rich countries is to ensure that science is properly funded and that vaccines are speedily distributed across the world

As we take leave of another year and reach another milestone on the journey to our ultimate destiny, let’s reflect on what has transpired since a reportedly mysterious outbreak of pneumonia made its appearance in Wuhan, China before engulfing the globe in a pandemic that’s changed our world as we knew it.

Ask people how they are feeling as they grapple with Omicron, the latest variant, (God alone knows how many more variants are coming in the absence of vaccine equity) and the responses will be informed by how the pandemic has impacted on people in different situations, from those who have lost loved ones or livelihoods or had their career hopes dashed, and so on.

The general feeling is of natural fed-upness with the endemic uncertainty and the apparently bewildering array of regulation and guidance and chopping and changing by policymakers and governments worldwide who, to be fair, just can’t be certain about what is coming next.

A feeling contributed to here by the infuriating failure of the executive to enforce compliance in regard to face coverings and the scandal of an uncoordinated approach by the respective authorities in as small an island as Ireland where the virus doesn’t recognise any border.

Both Sinn Féin and Deputy First Minister Michelle O’Neill, and the DUP and First Minister Paul Givan, bear a heavy responsibility for undermining our Covid-19 public health protection measures.

O’Neill, under pressure, belatedly acknowledged what all and sundry knew from the start, that what happened at the Bobby Storey funeral undermined the very public health message that she was proclaiming. Givan’s public renunciation of his own executive’s decision on the enforcement of Covid-19 vaccination certificates not only undermined public health protection but also the case that Northern Ireland can be made to work in the interests of the common good.

Not a very sensible stance for a professed unionist.

More generally, there is an uncomfortable reality around this pandemic that has not got enough attention. The libertarian loonies and others who oppose restrictions and misguidedly call for normality in the middle of the worst public health crisis in 100 years overlook the truth that this or any generation of humankind has no special entitlement to a pestilence free world.

We have been lucky to have avoided something of this scale for more than a century.

Dame Sarah Gilbert of the University of Oxford, who played a central role in developing the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, revealed in her Richard Dimbleby Lecture this month that one of the reasons that her team “were able to move so fast in 2020” was the work they and others had already done “on planning for Disease X… No one knew what it would be, or when it would emerge, but experts agreed that the emergence of something, sometime soon, was inevitable.”

Dame Sarah, in words that have not received sufficient attention, went on to warn of “a Disease Y”.

She said: “This will not be the last time a virus threatens our lives and our livelihoods. And I’d like to finish on a high note, but the truth is, the next one could be worse. It could be more contagious, or more lethal, or both.”

Sobering words. But there are grounds for hope at the cusp of this New Year as we enter the third year of the pandemic. Hope in the triumph of science as evidenced in the development of effective vaccines at unprecedented speed by scientists such as Professor Gilbert in so many countries.

The challenge for the leaders of the world’s rich countries is to ensure that science is properly funded and that vaccines are speedily distributed worldwide and not just to the wealthy West. The failure to deliver vaccine equity should haunt the consciences of world leaders from the White House, to the Elysée to Downing Street.

As Pope Francis said on December 17, it is a matter “of justice” that the vaccines are made accessible to all.