From cheques bearing the signature of the market-loving president of the United States to mountains of state money being used around the world to help businesses and individuals – the era of big government is back. That may have seemed impossible in some countries in December, but the economic devastation of the pandemic has turned decades’ worth of economic orthodoxies on their head. This, argues world affairs editor Julian Borger in this week’s cover story, could be a moment of transformation on a par with the New Deal in 1930s America.
Elsewhere in our latest extended look at the impact of the pandemic, Justin McCurry reports on how well the South Korean government handled the country’s initially daunting outbreak. What lessons can other countries learn?
Other nations that have been widely praised for their handling of the outbreak include Germany, New Zealand, Taiwan, Finland and Denmark. What connects them? Well, for one – write Jon Henley and Eleanor Ainge Roy – they all have female leaders, whose grown-up responses to containing the virus have contrasted markedly to some more bombastic male counterparts, such as Jair Bolsonaro, Rodrigo Duterte and the bleach-pushing commander-in-chief himself, Donald Trump. Simon Tisdall wraps up the responses of the planet’s toxic male leaders to the crisis.
Despite the success of some countries, the scientific and political consensus is that we cannot return to anything like normality until a vaccine is found. So how far are we away from one?
This week, science correspondent Hannah Devlin goes on the trail of a working vaccine – from recently announced human trials at Oxford University to other labs around the world working to beat the virus.
The World Health Organization is following more than 70 candidate vaccines, some already at the trial stage, so there’s plenty of hope – but still a chance that none will work. And, even if they do, tricky questions remain: how can they be scaled up at speed and who will get them first?
Watching that process closely will be virologist Christian Drosten, the German government’s go-to expert on the virus. In a fascinating interview with Laura Spinney, he gives his take on how best to beat Covid-19. And why he’d be interested to study China’s population of raccoon dogs …
We also have more great reads later in the magazine. You’ll enjoy Zoe Williams’s baffling sit-down with 60s folk pop star Donovan, Sonia Sodha on the limits of nudge theory and a fascinating essay from Sapiens author Yuval Noah Harari on dealing with death.
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