David Stakes

Covid-19 is having a devastating effect around the world. People continue to die, to suffer, to get long covid which will change their lives forever. The effects on economies around the world are devastating. Hundreds of millions of additional people face going into severe poverty.

Vaccines are a way out of this mess. For the sake of billions of people worldwide, governments of the world should agree to suspend intellectual property rights regarding vaccines, as a one-off measure for uniquely important reasons, to allow all available vaccine manufacturing capacity to be used to combat this crisis. The world is far from out of trouble.

Even if you only care about the situation here in the UK, and nothing else, this would still be the right move, because combating covid worldwide is immensely important to the UK, for 3 reasons. Firstly, viruses do not respect international borders. Secondly, the number of new variants, and hence the number of more deadly or more transmissible variants, is roughly proportional to how many people get infected with covid, and any new variants will eventually reach us. And thirdly, the economic effects resulting in other countries will obviously have a knock-on effect in the UK. We live in a global economy and an interconnected world.

We really should do this.

❤

Climate change is real, it is already happening with a lot more locked-in. If we as a species take action to greatly reduce our CO2 emissions we can reduce the negative consequences. No-one knows for sure, yet, what the outcome will be if we do not, but they will be serious with a significant possibility of being catastrophic for all of us (or all of our descendants, anyway). For example, up to a billion people flooded out of their homes by rising oceans. Another example, changes to rainfall patterns throwing hundreds of years of agriculture into turmoil.

It is completely irresponsible for us not to treat this as a high political priority and take concerted action. It is DISGRACEFUL for anyone of influence to spread the myth that climate change is not happening or that it is not driven largely by human activities (chiefly CO2 emissions). Or to spread disinformation such as “increased CO2 levels is good for plant life” (plants do need CO2 to photosynthesise but 250ppm seemed to be perfectly sufficient for thousands of years).

We must win this fight.

Thank you for reading.

Dave