I was at a health conference once and I was talking to this bloke about Bill Gates style moonshots in health and eradicating diseases and he said that it didn't matter how many nets you sent if the government didn't care enough about poor people
His main point was that healthcare only works if those that rule care enough about the people they rule, other wise all of the money you tip into a problem just ends up making those on power safer and more comfortable
He said he'd worked in and around big Ebola outbreak and reckoned there were two reasons that moved the science on so quick. 1st was sheer panic and relaxing of some protacols in research but other was that the disease was unknown and rich people feared it as much as poor people
His take was that as soon as you can prove that new a disease is linked to the kinds of lives that are forced on people by poverty, the money stops reaching the people trying to cure it and gets to the people interested in containing it and keeping it away from their lives
I remember at the time feeling like this was a very harsh judgement on how the international world of disease prevention worked, but I've been thinking about it the last couple of weeks for obvious reasons.
In the UK we're seeing experience of Coronavirus crisis begin to split along income lines, with key workers doing vital work without protection with less to catch them and make them safe if they fall ill, wrapped in a beautiful gauze of applauding heroism now to forget it later
There is intense and selfless heroism in doing the right thing when called upon. But applauding that heroism isn't the same as making sure that heroism isn't squandered. I'm intensely worried about the people that will be forgotten, the people who will be put at risk
