Economic Health

Mere experts are complaining that the world's response to future pandemics may be compromised by, of all things, a tendency to prioritise corporate welfare over that of the lesser breeds. The growing mpox outbreak in Africa has prompted warnings that the virus could spread to less expendable populations alongside a repeat of the discrepancies in the availability of testing, vaccination and protective equipment that occurred during the Covid pandemic. Apparently some people still consider such discrepancies undesirable despite their being a natural and predictable consequence of global inequity and master-race money-grubbing. Certainly Wideboy Wes Streeting, the Secretary of State for Profitable Medicine, is unlikely to have much truck with anything that smacks of socialised healthcare; and the USA, home of the model for public health towards which Britain has been working for the past several decades, has responded to the mpox outbreak with the customary paternal handout.