Prioritising health and wellbeing: the hope we cling to in 2021

Abstract

When will the pandemic end? Surely it is a hope worth clinging on to? Hope is important. It has power; possibly the power of placebo.¹ But hope can also be an illusion. For much of the year, we've been encouraged to believe that the pandemic is as good as over. But John Ashton is far from alone in believing that this is political spin.²

The Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response, convened by WHO, has concluded that although the world was indeed unready for a pandemic, political systems and leaders often bent and bowed to the detriment of their people and those of other countries.

2021 was the year of this realisation, that the powerful are no longer serious in their intentions towards the weak. Paying lip service to those responsibilities barely earns a reprimand; being serious about those responsibilities is no longer even expected. Take the example of American Indians/Alaskan Natives, where was the care for marginalised communities as the pandemic raged?³

Yet hope demands something better — an understanding that responsibilities extend not only across humanity but also across species and habitats.⁴ The siren calls of the climate crisis and of COVID-19 sound the same warning: united we stand, divided we fall. This is an ancient truth that we have evolved to take for granted.

The ground reality is that the premature declarations of the end of the pandemic, and the flawed principle of every nation for itself, find the health service under unprecedented stress, death rates running above average, and staff demoralised if not broken. Such pressures leave no headspace for sensible and essential measures to build something better, such as initiatives to reduce medical errors⁵ or to improve research ethics review and governance.⁶

But in its fractured and broken ruins, 2021 presented a more subtle realisation: there is a hope to cling to and it lies in a renewed focus on, and prioritisation of, the health and wellbeing of people and the planet.

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