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“Health is a human right”: How the world can make up progress lost to COVID
The state of public health in the developing world bears some deep scars from the COVID-19 pandemic. Over the past three years, immunization rates have dropped to levels not seen in three decades. 2 billion people are facing "catastrophic or impoverishing" health spending worldwide according to the World Health Organization. And governments in the Global South are taking on more and more debt at the expense of investment in health and social services.
Kate Dodson, the Vice President of Global Health Strategy at the UN Foundation, is on the frontlines of the fight to give the most vulnerable people in the world access to proper healthcare. She works to connect experts and innovators with the UN, and find resources to support their work.
She’s calling on governments to invest in basic elements of public health, including primary care access, and properly remunerating healthcare workers — the majority of whom are women, worldwide. And more fundamentally, she wants leaders to treat health as a human right that all deserve to enjoy.
More from Global Stage: https://www.gzeromedia.com/global-stage/
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A chart comparing life expectancy in the US with the rest of the G-7 countries.
The Graphic Truth: No country for old men
US life expectancy has declined two years in a row, meaning that babies born today are expected to live about 2.5 years less than those born in 2019, according to the CDC. Americans on average will now kick the bucket at 76, the lowest age in the 21st century — and more than six years earlier than the rest of the G-7.
The biggest contributor to Americans’ shortening life spans is drug overdoses, especially from fentanyl. The pandemic — and the mental health crisis that ran alongside it — is also to blame. The US saw more COVID deaths than other G-7 nations, while fatalities from suicide and alcohol-induced liver failure skyrocketed. Many of these deaths were of young people, which has a compounded effect on the national average.
While COVID took a toll on life expectancy across the G-7, all but the US rebounded after the first year. The US knocked off a whopping 1.3 years in life expectancy between 2019 and 2020 and has continued to slide. The speed of America’s decline marks the biggest two-year drop in life expectancy since 1921.
The common wisdom is that wealthier countries should enjoy higher life expectancies than poorer ones, as they have the resources to invest in healthcare and better standards of living. This rings true for the rest of the G-7, which have a combined average life expectancy of 83 years old. But the US — the only G-7 country without free national healthcare — has lagged behind throughout the 21st century, plateauing at 78 in 2008 while fellow G-7 nations continued to climb.
We compare US life expectancy to the G-7 average (minus America) since 2000.
China-US tensions over COVID origins & Russia's war
But a couple of points here. First, this lab-leak concept was one that would get you banned on social media if you came out with it a year ago. And it just goes to show how you can have a dominant narrative that gets picked up politically and suddenly no one's allowed to ask questions anymore. That doesn't make it a conspiracy theory, it means that people are still trying to understand where it is, what's going on. There was so much that was uncertain about this disease in the early days. One of the things that annoyed me about Fauci, who I've interviewed a couple of times myself, gotten to know him a bit, is the fact that he came out feeling like he was so certain in some of his early communications, on things that he obviously wasn't certain about, and ended up undermining and de-legitimizing science and the medical community in the US in a way that we really cannot afford to do so.
Saying you don't know something is okay. I mean, back last May, I published the fact that I had no idea if it came from a lab or if it came from a wet market. What was clear to me is that it was getting politicized. What was clear from the scientific community is that the disease had not been bioengineered, that it was an accident that it came out. What was also clear is the Chinese lied to their own citizens and internationally, about the virus's origins, when they knew that there was human-human transmission. They lied to the WHO, the World Health Organization, and as a consequence, it was much worse for everyone. And they're still not allowing the WHO or others to investigate appropriately the origins. The fact that the country that the virus came from is not willing to be transparent with the global scientific community. I mean, thankfully there were a bunch of doctors and scientists in China that had humanity and said, "We got to get this out no matter what." Or it would've been even worse.
But it's an enormous problem when politics intervenes in what needs to be just a follow-the-science situation. And that's true on climate, it's true on the pandemic, it's true in so many areas of the world. And in that regard, we haven't changed much at all from today through the beginnings of the pandemic. This, of course, is going to make the Americans feel tougher about relations with China. That is also true on the back of China embracing, welcoming Belarus President/Dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, completely illegitimate leader of that country, using all sorts of repression and force against his own domestic opposition. No free press of course. Again, not surprising for the Chinese at all, but one of Russia's key allies, this on the back of Wang Yi visiting Moscow, and what I expect, relatively soon, will be an announcement that Xi Jinping is going to Moscow. There is a greater comfort of these two countries working more closely together.
Does that mean that the Chinese will provide weapons directly for Russia? I don't think so. I think that's indeed why the Americans put the Chinese on notice. They had intelligence that the Chinese were considering sending drones over. The UK, the NATO Secretary General, also making those statements very strongly. The Europeans and the Americans would have a very different reaction if the Chinese decided to go ahead and put those weapons forward. Now diplomatically, what the Chinese have been saying to the Europeans behind closed doors is, "Look, you guys are providing all these weapons. You're escalating. We are showing restraint." Having said that, if you want to call BS on what the Chinese are saying, you say, "Look, a majority of the world's countries recognize, and have recognized for three straight General Assembly resolutions, that this is an illegal invasion that needs to be condemned and ended immediately. The Chinese have decided that they're going to be neutral and abstain. But most of the world's countries, even the Global South, do not agree with China on this.
That's important, because if the Chinese were to provide weapons to the country that actually invaded, illegally, against the will of the General Assembly, the Chinese are putting themselves in the position of supporting a rogue state. And that is not a position China wants to be in. Not a country that needs economic support and integration from all of the world, not just countries they dominate economically. So I believe that the Chinese may have been fooling around with the idea of providing some weapons to Russia, may have been floating that because they wanted more influence with their own 12-point peace deal. But I would be very surprised if they proceed in providing that support. That's a good thing, in the context of US-China news that right now have very few positive headlines that we're talking about.
So that's it for me. Hope everyone's well, I'll talk to you all real soon.
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"We're in this together" — UN Foundation chief
Global development has been going backwards since even before the pandemic, and there's no end in sight.
Extreme poverty is now rising again, and fraught politics at every level is making it harder to fight inequality around the world.
But it's not an irreversible trend, UN Foundation President Elizabeth Cousens tells Ian Bremmer on GZERO World.
“The challenge of our times," she says, is "to re-galvanize that spirit of 'we're in it together' — [that] we have more in common than we have that divides us.“
Watch the GZERO World episode: Inequality isn't inevitable - if global communities cooperate
Our unsustainably unequal world
The past is still very much with us.
It's almost the first anniversary of Russia's war in Ukraine. On March 11, it'll be three years since the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic. And 2022 was the sixth warmest year on record since ... 1880.
We are still dealing with the fallout from all three events. But not equally.
Since 2020, the richest 1% of people has accumulated nearly two-thirds of all the new wealth created in the world. Just 10% of the population owns three-quarters of global wealth — and account for nearly half of carbon emissions.
What can we do to turn this around?
Watch the GZERO World episode: Inequality isn't inevitable - if global communities cooperate
Why China is leading economically: infrastructure, energy, & tech
Most of the global economy is more likely than not headed toward a recession in 2023. But don't only blame it on inflation and Russia's war in Ukraine.
The economic slowdown face this year "is an acceleration of already structural problems around growth, that really started before the pandemic," renowned economist Dambisa Moyo tells Ian Bremmer on GZERO World.
Among the G-20 economies, the only country that has been serious about industrial and strategic policies to address those problems is China. That's why, she says, many Western nations were so shocked by the economic fallout of COVID.
For Moyo, for instance the US didn't have an off-the-shelf plan to respond to the pandemic. Still, she sees an opportunity for a reset in Western capitalism.
Watch the GZERO World episode: Struggling for economic progress as global recession looms in 2023
Kailash Satyarthi: Child labor increased during COVID
The pandemic not only took kids out of school. It also pushed many into the workforce.
COVID raised the demand for children as the cheapest source of labor, Nobel laureate and human rights campaigner Kailash Satyarthi says during a Global Stage livestream conversation. Indeed, it's the first team we're going back on meeting the UN Sustainable Development Goal No. 8 target on ending child labor.
What's more, Satyarthi explains that 160 million child laborers translate to 160 million empty seats in classrooms — and to 160 million jobs that kids will now perform instead of adults.
"It's a waste of human potential in so many ways."
The Graphic Truth: World not yet fully back to work
It’s been almost three years since the COVID pandemic swung a wrecking ball through our societies, our economies, and our workplaces. But even now, with the most acute phase of the crisis behind us, many aspects of life still aren’t back to what they were in the B.C. (Before Coronavirus) era. One great example is the hours worked in our economies. When the pandemic struck, lockdowns and other restrictions caused the number of hours worked on a quarterly basis around the world to plunge by nearly 20% compared to the final quarter of 2019, the baseline for “last moments of pre-pandemic normalcy.” But since then, the world as a whole still hasn’t gotten back to pre-pandemic levels of hours worked — we’re still almost 1.5% below them. Lower-income countries are struggling more than rich ones to get back to where they were, and there is only one region of the world that shows more hours worked now than before the pandemic — can you guess which one it is?