COVID-19 A Tipping Point For (Implicit) MMT Adoption?

In her apocalyptic work of 1994, The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance, Laurie Garrett, Pulitzer prize-winning journalist and a Fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health, asked: “Why did new viruses and bacteria appear, seemingly out of nowhere? Why couldn’t modern medicine vanquish HIV and other newly emerging microbes? How were scientists battling these diseases? Had hubris put the arrogant biomedical world of the late 20th Century at peril?”

Her training as an immunologist give Garrett’s insights distinctive gravitas, and her predictions of the future emergence of disease outbreaks which would mystify scientists as to their origins and pathways, and in some instances lead to pandemics, have proved tragically portentous. The purpose of this Primary Spotlight is not to add to the already profligate body of available commentary on the current Covid-19 epidemic but to reflect upon consequences now inevitable, how (and whether) policy priorities are to be re-ordered to progress from containment measures alone; if globalisation (already suffering from trade pressures) can recover or will retreat further, and the adaptability of society.