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Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good

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November 17, 2021

The New Pandemic Question: Are We There Yet?

Though the developing world still lacks Covid-19 vaccine doses, observers of wealthy countries like the US are beginning to ask: How will we know when the pandemic is over?

 
Johns Hopkins University epidemiologist Jennifer Nuzzo gave a telling answer, when asked recently by The Washington Post's Joel Achenbach and Yasmeen Abutaleb: "It doesn't end. We just stop caring. Or we care a lot less," Nuzzo said. "I think for most people, it just fades into the background of their lives."
 
For some, it already has.
 
Experts and science journalists concluded months ago that the future of Covid-19 was all but certain: The virus would become endemic, simmering at low levels while posing less of a threat. For many, vaccine- or illness-and-recovery-induced immunity might make Covid-19 as dangerous as a bad cold or a seasonal flu, barring a new and more-deadly variant.
 
At The New York Times, David Leonhardt writes that for some—including one university medical chair—loosening up has begun to seem worth it. Low-cost measures like wearing masks in supermarkets and on airplanes may endure, "long Covid" may remain a legitimate concern, and boosters may be needed, but "organizing our lives around" the virus may no longer be necessary for everyone, Leonhardt writes. As for how public policy might evolve, Sarah Zhang writes for The Atlantic that we should start focusing more on hospitalizations than on recorded Covid-19 cases, loosening and tightening restrictions accordingly, while defining a risk level we "can live with" long term. 

That said, others warn there's a difference between easing up and abandoning caution entirely. As University of Edinburgh public-health Prof. Devi Sridhar tweets, "We're in a better place than last year in terms of scientific progress, tools and understanding. But we need to use this progress to make COVID a manageable problem instead of pretending it's not an issue at all."

Limited Goals and a Worrisome Moment for Biden and Xi

As the Global Briefing noted yesterday after US President Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping completed a three-and-a-half-hour virtual meeting, some have argued there's great value in the two leaders talking directly, even if they neither seek nor achieve any diplomatic breakthroughs.

Reacting to the meeting, The Economist concurs to a degree while adding notes of caution: "In this low-trust moment, Mr Biden and Mr Xi are arguably the only American and Chinese officials able to have substantive discussions. Their video chat was better than nothing, but worryingly limited. When it comes to co-existing sustainably, the two sides are far apart. Mr Biden says that America and China are locked in an intense competition, which must be managed responsibly. Chinese officials call that framing too negative. They prefer talk of relations based on mutual respect and mutual interests: code for a realist America realising it has no choice but to accommodate China's autocratic, statist ways. ... One video call cannot begin to fix a relationship in crisis."

Xenophobia, Historical Revisionism Surge in France

Right-wing, nativist French pundit Éric Zemmour has drawn a wave of attention, as speculation swirls around whether he'll run for President next year and as polls show him surging. At Persuasion, Celestine Bohlen notes with concern some of Zemmour's provocations—including his apologia for France's Nazi-collaborating Vichy regime during World War II.
 
Zemmour's claims are of dubious historicity, Bohlen writes, but they stand "[i]n contrast to recent apologies and recriminations about painful French historical moments from Vichy to Algeria." (French President Emmanuel Macron recently apologized for a 1961 massacre in Algeria, for instance.) As such, Bohlen writes, Zemmour "offers a reassuring narrative—a nostalgic view of France as a great power, with a great history, and nothing to be ashamed of."
 
As Zemmour rises to rival the right-wing star Marine Le Pen, Adam Shatz argues in the London Review of Books that he has proved some voters "want their racism and rage served up straight," rather than in dog whistles or laundered into mainstream palatability.

Privatizing the Planet

After the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, Adam Tooze concludes in a Guardian essay that the message from world leaders is clear: "There isn't going to be a big green Marshall plan." Rather, Tooze laments, it will be left to private companies and investors to execute the needed clean-energy revolution, possibly with governments and taxpayers absorbing the risk.
 
Then again, not everyone is so bearish on that basic idea: At The New York Times, columnist Thomas Friedman writes hopefully of clean-energy moonshots in the private sector.