Apollo's Arrow

Apollo's Arrow, The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus On The Way We Live, by Nicholas A. Christakis, Little, Brown Spark 2020

When the young lieutenant visited a local family in Mindoro, the Philippines, he was welcomed.  Three daughters entertained him with songs and conversation.  Later as the afternoon heat descended on the village he left, only to return some four hours later for the funerals of those same family members, all dead from cholera.  Five hundred of the 1200 residents of the town were killed.  That young lieutenant was George Marshall, future US Secretary of State and  the author of the Marshall Plan that rebuilt post WWII Europe.  Marshall, according to Dr. Christakis, spoke movingly of his Philippines' experience, envisioning a planet were infectious diseases were not unbeatable, but where they were "an international problem, and it should be solved by pooling of the genius and the resources of many nations."

But we see that so far, sixteen or more months into the coronavirus pandemic, we do not have George Marshall with us to direct a unified global response, - not in the UN, not in the World Health Organization, and unfortunately not in corporate headquarters of Astra-Zeneca, Moderna, and Pfizer; the creation and distribution of various vaccines is uneven and confusing.  Surprisingly, the 1918 Spanish flu took more victims, and other pandemics such as HIV and the opioid crisis in quantity stand close so far to the corona virus numbers (but not in number of years).  But none of these earlier plagues had the kind of professional power - scientists, doctors, biogenetics experts - that work today, an advantage as we journey forward.  

What does Dr. Christakis see for our short-term future?  "So we will reach herd immunity, or the pathogen will evolve to be less lethal, or (after a very long time) humans will evolve to be resistant.  That is the biological end of the story.  But pandemics are also sociological phenomena, driven by human beliefs and actions, and there is a social end to pandemics, too, when the fear, anxiety, and socioeconomic disruptions have either declined or simply come to be accepted as an ordinary fact of life."  

Unfortunately the author sees the threat of global pandemics as a seemingly unending one.  Figure 17  illustrates his point  -  showing that serious influenza pandemics have recurred every few decades of the past three centuries.  While we may have forgotten the terror of the TB, and polio and HIV hits, it seems that each generation suffers through one more medical threat.  This time, however, on close and very public media examination we have the unique opportunity to observe what our governments and corporate leaders could have handled differently, right from the beginning.  Aside from the unanswered questions about the real source of the virus, it looks like we have miles of opportunities to perfect a real and effective "Marshall Plan" before the next one hits.  

Patricia E. Moody

FORTUNE magazine  "Pioneering Woman in Mfg" 

IndustryWeek IdeaXchange Xpert

A Mill Girl at Blue Heron Journal, on-line resource for business thought-leaders and decision-makers,  patriciaemoody@gmail.com