Pandemic Quotes - page 2
While today no foreign invaders threaten our sovereignty, there's another front that is on the line - our economy. Like a pandemic plague, worldwide recession now engulfs all nations. If stable, prosperous democracies are floundering in its wake, what more of developing countries such as ours?
Francis Escudero
We can come through this trying time stronger, and with a renewed sense of purpose and respect for one another. The pandemic has shown us that it is not only our troops who are willing to offer the ultimate sacrifice for the safety of the community. Americans in hospitals, grocery stores, post offices, and elsewhere have put their lives on the line in order to serve their fellow citizens and their country. We know that we are better than the abuse of executive authority that we witnessed in Lafayette Square. We must reject and hold accountable those in office who would make a mockery of our Constitution. At the same time, we must remember Lincoln's "better angels," and listen to them, as we work to unite.
Only by adopting a new path - which means, in truth, returning to the original path of our founding ideals - will we again be a country admired and respected at home and abroad.
James Mattis
Awakening late to the pandemic, authoritarian or authoritarian-minded leaders have turned it into an opportunity both to shore up their power and to conceal their stunning ineptitude. To fail to see through their manufactured fog of war, as many in the media are doing, can only further endanger the long-term moral and political health of their societies.
Pankaj Mishra
Jeff Bezos is getting rich not because of the profits of Amazon, but because of the increase of the share price. You've heard that he made what, $60 billion since the beginning of the pandemic? That's not because of the profits of Amazon... The actual profits are nothing like that. It's maybe one billion altogether, but he made 60! From the share price.
Jeff Bezos
Pacifism simply does not resonate in people's everyday realities, unless those people live in some extravagant bubble of tranquility from which all forms of civilization's pandemic reactive violence have been pushed out by the systemic and less visible violence of police and military forces.
Peter Gelderloos
I believe that, ultimately, the only way to definitively eradicate the pandemic is to have a vaccine that can be administered to all inhabitants of the planet... The effectiveness of the upcoming vaccination campaign will depend on its universality. To ensure the availability of the vaccines to all people on the planet almost at the same time, it has to be free from ownership. To do so we intend to make a global pharmaceutical social business operational as soon as possible. I am looking for partners to help us achieve this goal... It has to be freed from commercial interest. The polio vaccine was declared as a common good, not owned by anybody. Why not (have) the corona vaccine follow the same path?
Muhammad Yunus
Experts say we are "due" for one. When it happens, they tell us, it will probably have a greater impact on humanity than anything else currently happening in the world. And yet, like with most people, it is probably something you haven't spent much time thinking about. After all, it is human nature to avoid being consumed by hypotheticals until they are staring us squarely in the face. Such is the case with a highly lethal flu pandemic. And when it comes, it will affect every human alive today.
Sanjay Gupta
Panˈdemik/: pan means "all"; demic (or demographic) means "people." It is well-named, because pandemic flu spreads easily throughout the world. Unlike seasonal flu, pandemics occur when a completely new or novel virus emerges. This sort of virus can emerge directly from animal reservoirs or be the result of a dramatic series of mutations -- so-called reassortment events -- in previously circulating viruses. In either case, the result is something mankind has never seen before: a pathogen that can spread easily from person to defenseless person, our immune systems never primed to launch any sort of defense.
Sanjay Gupta
Polarization will continue to hamper efforts to address the pandemic. It will encourage and facilitate foreign interference in U.S. domestic politics (or even the mere suspicion of the same)....and it makes other states warier of making long-term agreements with the United States because they cannot be sure that any promises that U.S. officials make will survive the next election cycle.
Stephen Walt
[H]ere in the United States of America, how many times have you seen a mom or a dad drive up to a parking lot outside a McDonald's and - just so they could get connected to the Internet so their kid could do their homework during the pandemic, literally? It's just not right. It's not who we are.
Joe Biden
Even before the pandemic, young people were already hurting. There's a serious youth mental health crisis in this country, and we have to do something about it.
That's why mental health is at the heart of my Unity Agenda that I laid out in the State of the Union Address this year.
We must provide more school counselors, more school nurses, more mental health services for students and for teachers, more people volunteering as mentors to help young people succeed, more privacy protection and resources to keep kids safe from the harms of social media.
This Unity Agenda won't fully heal the wounded souls, but it will help. It matters.
Joe Biden
Covid-19 has revealed glaring failures and monstrous brutalities in the current capitalist system. It represents both a crisis and an opportunity. Contests for controlling the narratives around the meaning of this pandemic will be the terrain of struggle for either a new, more humane common sense and society or a return to the status quo ante. The outcome of those contests is uncertain; everything depends on the actions that people take into their hands.
Noam Chomsky
As hunger and hardship increase, the world may see more than one wave of more than one disease. If and when an influenza pandemic emerges, for instance, many AIDS sufferers will succumb, but people infected with the AIDS precursor, HIV, will still survive influenza and AIDS will march on. India, for example, was among the hardest-hit nations in the 1918 flu pandemic. Today it has among the highest rates of AIDS infection. The age-old human enemies, tuberculosis, malaria, cholera, streptococcus, and other members of the familiar gang will be on hand with new immunity to the old techno-tricks of the [nineteenth and] twentieth centur[ies]. Even after these diseases may have spent themselves for a while, climate change [which in turn could create new diseases] will still be with us. Nobody really knows where that is taking us, though we do know that the human race has endured more than one ice age in the past.
James Howard Kunstler