The Bahamas Prime Minister, Philip Davis addresses The Community of Latin American and Caribbean States - CELAC on the growing challenges which threaten the safety, security and undermine the pursuit for economic dignity in the region

The economic and security challenges we face are great, and we welcome CELAC’s initiatives to strengthen cooperation in facing them.  Collaboration makes us stronger, and leads to faster and more durable solutions

Buenos Aires, Argentina - January 24, 2023 - Colleagues: Over the past several years, the Covid-19 pandemic compounded the complex problems we already faced, including climate change, economic inequality, and increasing threats to democratic values and human rights. 

These growing challenges threaten our safety and security and undermine our pursuit for economic dignity. 

Every one of our citizens deserves the right to experience the joys of family life, to do meaningful work, and to live lives full of purpose.

When we gather in regional meetings like this one, we must make sure that our debates and agreements concerning infrastructure and institutions always prioritize results that make a difference at the level of individual families.  People must come first.  And until doors of opportunity are open for all, we cannot rest. 

Climate Change 

Colleagues: Rising sea levels pose an existential threat to my country.  In 2019, a Category 5 storm devastated two of our main islands. 

We are not and have never been the polluters, yet we suffer from the greatest vulnerabilities caused by carbon emissions. 

Our debt burden remains high, in significant part due to these climate risks, including the need to regularly rebuild homes, businesses and infrastructure after devasting hurricanes.  Our cost of borrowing also prices in the risk of future hurricanes; we are already paying a high price for the intensifying weather patterns of tomorrow.

We urgently need the developed countries to honour their commitments to compensate for the Loss and Damage associated with climate change.  And in order to build resiliency, we urgently need finance and access to technology. 

Each of our countries must keep the pledges we’ve made, in this and other settings, to reduce our own emissions.  We have seen glimpses of a future we cannot survive; we must change course, or perish. It is that simple. 

Regional Peace and Security

Colleagues: Democracy cannot be taken for granted; it is a commitment that must be continually renewed.  Just over two weeks ago, a violent mob stormed government buildings in Brazil in an effort to overturn the outcome of free and fair elections. 

I reiterate the solidarity of The Bahamas, and CARICOM, with President Lula de Silva and the Government of Brazil, and our unwavering commitment to democracy and rule of law. 

The scenes in Brasilia uncomfortably echoed those just a few years ago in Washington, DC.  Political violence, in all its forms, must be condemned anywhere in the Americas. 

Haiti 

Colleagues: The crisis in Haiti is getting worse.  The tragic situation there continues to pose a substantial threat not only to Haitians, but also to The Bahamas and neighbouring countries, all of whom are experiencing a significant increase in irregular and often dangerous migration. 

With the support and leadership of Haiti, collectively, we can, through CELAC and other regional organizations, help Haitians build a path out of crisis.

We commend Haitian-led efforts to hold elections before the end of 2023, to arrest the threat to public security posed by violent gangs, to relieve hunger and malnutrition, and to alleviate the political crisis. 

Enhanced regional partnership can especially help to scale up capacity-building for the local police, and tackle trafficking, particularly in people, contraband and guns. 

These Haiti-led solutions provide promising alternatives to the usual inclination to carry out activities in Haiti without Haitian direction, and the preference for investing in the strengthening of the NGOs in Haiti, as opposed strengthening her public institutions. 

Extra-Regional Partnerships 

In terms of the wider region, the economic and security challenges we face are great, and we welcome CELAC’s initiatives to strengthen cooperation in facing them.  Collaboration makes us stronger, and leads to faster and more durable solutions.

International Obstacles to National Development 

And even while we pursue national development, other international partners pursue policies which harm our progress.  The Bahamas will continue to voice its displeasure with the discriminatory practice of the blacklisting of countries.  I invite you to join us. 

We will also continue to advocate against the unfair use of GDP per capita to determine how or if developing countries, in vulnerable developing regions, qualify for reasonable concessionary financing or grants.

The use of the Multi-Vulnerability Index in assessing eligibility for help, rather than the blunt, outdated measurement of GDP per capita is a fairer measurement.  I invite you to join us in advocating for mutual agreement of alternative eligibility criteria for international financing and Overseas Development Assistance.

Summit Declaration 

Colleagues: Dialogue is important; collaborative solutions cannot be built without it.  But talk is not sufficient.  The work we do here must translate into tangible benefits for our citizens.  Let us share a determination to make each meeting, and each conversation, a stepping stone to real progress for people.

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ENDGAME: WHAT’S THE COVID 19 EXIT STRATEGY?

By Professor Gilbert Morris

 

Covid 19’ patterning follows the Bubonic Plague of 1347. Therefore, I reject the notion that Covid 19 will “Peter out”. 

If the vaccinated can still be infected and transmit, mutations are likely and petering out is a hope rather than a scientific extrapolation. 

This means several things: 

1. These vaccines ought never to be compared to previous vaccines - like Polio for instance - those vaccines ended infection and transmission. 

And continued infection and transmission is the anomalous problem of the Covid 19 vaccine regime. 

2. What is missing that is obvious from the facts, is if the vaccinated can become infected and transmit, logically, there will never be “herd immunity”. 

The benefits of being vaccinated are two: 

1. It makes it less likely that a vaccinated person will be sick (within a statistically dense frame) 

2. Therefore, hospitalisation is less likely; as the data shows, only a statically significant, but generally insignificant number of an aggregate of vaccinated persons are hospitalised post-vaccinated infections. 

It is a lively nonsense, oft repeated, that unvaccinated persons pose a threat…because both vaccinated and unvaccinated persons pose the same threat if both can be infected and transmit; without further evidence of any distinctions in the relative infection patterns. 

What is clear is that vaccination is only one tool and it’s foolhardy to assert that with vaccinations, economies can “return to normal”: again it’s perfidious nonsense since infections and spread are still possible. 

The solution is the method which the 7 best performing countries deployed - all of which propose but none of which mandates vaccination: 

1. The 7 best performing nations in the pandemic succeed by mass, spot and randomised testing. 

Why?

1. To gain epistemological coverage of their entire countries: Multimodal testing (eDiagnostics, Bluetooth Thermometers, eTesting and home testing generate DATA!

2. That data then characterises general and interstitial demographics; discrete insular dynamic demographics within a general demographic pool. 

3. That produces granular DATA!

NEXT: 

1. Bluetooth contact tracing links the patterns and the multimodal tests, discovering alignments and positing options for coordination 

2. This produces a national digital “fever map”!

The 7 best performing nations in the pandemic all erected this mechanism, which I lectured about in the SpaceNex Global  ROUNDTABLE Lectures on “The History of Economic Consequences of Pandemics”.

NEXT:

1. Once the ‘fever maps’ are functional, the data produces deep patterns that are at first descriptive; then the data becomes diagnosticative; then the link between data-patterns and policy outcomes error-corrects toward self-evidence…and becomes prognosticative. 

This equilibrium is called generally a “proportionality constant”.

2. At this stage, you can see the effects of social protocols (mask wearing, hand sanitation, social fumigation) immediately.

This multimodal platform is necessary because vaccination and even walk-in testing are arithmetical, but the disease - particularly accounting for superspreaders - is infecting exponentially. 

So its actually counterproductive to depend on vaccinations or walk-in tests alone. One needs dynamic readable datasets. If a country hasn’t done this and merely harps on vaccinations, it will fail!

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WHAT’s WRONG WITH PUBLIC HEALTH NARRATIVE

MODERNA’s ANNOUNCEMENT THAT ITS VACCINE IS “94% EFFECTIVE” IS WHAT’s WRONG WITH PUBLIC HEALTH NARRATIVE...!

By Gilbert Morris

In my recent SPACENEX Global ROUNDTABLE Lectures, I paraphrased Dr Martin Luther King Jr. saying: “CoViD-19 infections anywhere is a threat of CoViD-19 out breaks everywhere”.

Any government official or policy expert engaged in hoarding treatments or implementing partial solutions, is a champion of idiocy. That’s because, IF (AND ONLY IFF) vaccines are the strategy, THEN that requires global herd immunity.

This has set into force a race for market share, which is too little discussed - not to mention that the not only undemocratic but ANTI-democratic measures we have seen emerge in Britain, Canada the US and Israel; all western democracies; whilst non-Christian non-western nations have pursued rational policies based upon transparency and citizen participation.

Given the growing loss of transparency, the growing conspiracy theories, the reported fascistic despotic behaviours of some pharmaceutical companies, information and data about vaccines should be issued by independent bodies, not the pharmacy companies themselves.

You may say that the CDC is such a body. But that’s lunacy: they have shown themselves under the Trump administration to be willing handmaidens to convenient goat-barking, prepared to gong along with the former President’s donkeyfication of science to save their jobs rather than act to fulfil their calling.

Moderna cannot simply announce its vaccines “increased efficacy” in this environment...without confirmation from an independent source; which is the essence of the scientific process. The idea that pharmaceutical corporations - who are the most rapacious and corrupt corporate entities - following banks and before the mafia - lack the credibility, merely to announce such claims, to be seconded by state American agencies, which have already compromised themselves, resulting in hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths.

To gain perspective on this scandal, take a gander at the European/UK conflagration over the AstraZeneca vaccine. It’s was banned in at least 5 nations, owing to statistically nebulous findings of severe clotting; a prospect which could have been captured through pre-screening.

It was an example of risking public health over a spectacle of political shaming, with citizen’s lives hanging in the balance, attenuated to a vaccine regime authorised only for emergency deployment; a means - most people don’t seem to understand - of limiting the liability of pharmaceutical giants.

It would seem to me, that less arrogance and greater caution ought to have been exercises in every particular in deploying these vaccines, given the rushed circumstances of their issuance.

The conspiracy crazies will always be with us, but their lunacy is exacerbated by idiot governments and institutions insulting fearful citizens, who are watching the European charade referred to above, the flagrant stupidity of some pharmaceutical companies, the emergency use protocol that’s evolving towards a mandatory rule and the increasingly anti-democratic measures premised in vaccination.

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WHY HAS AFRICA FARED SO MUCH BETTER THAN THE REST OF THE WORLD WITH COVID-19?

 AFRICA IS BEST:

MY BROTHER Ntong Victor Sunday HAS PUT ME TO THE QUESTION: WHY HAS AFRICA FARED SO MUCH BETTER THAN THE REST OF THAT WORLD WITH COVID 19?

By:

Gilbert Morris

The African region is the best performing region in the pandemic.  Africa’s total deaths are less than 10% of the United State’s daily deaths.

But what are the structural reasons for Africa’s superb performance?

1. SWIFT ACTION: In February 2020, a number of African nations - like Lesotho - shut down public institutions immediately, whilst implementing social protocols.  Students of strategy should not see this as merely a decision to act quickly.  Instead, it must also be seen as a tactical understanding of the implications of low facilities capacity and financial resources.  Understanding these facts about their status, led African governments to act to prevent even the “best case scenarios”.

2. YOUNG POPULATION - I have written that the future belongs to Africa because its the youngest of all regions of the world.  It turns out that this is also crucial for Covid 19 infections, since (at least initially), Covid 19 attacked the elderly disproportionately to younger persons.  Africa has an added benefit: it does not “warehouse” its elderly.  Africa and Japan - followed by the Caribbean - are the zones in which the elderly enjoy a near sacred deference; though in the Caribbean, we are beginning to copy American and European models of parking the elderly in ‘death barns’.

3. POPULATION DISTRIBUTION - Most African nations are arranged and operate on the “city-village” dynamic.  As such, the elderly tend to live in the village, whilst younger people crowd to cities.  This means the most vulnerable demographic were largely outside the hotspots for Covid 19 infections.

4. COMMUNITY vs. COMMERCIAL HEALTHCARE: Africa - for the most part - does not have large commercial healthcare systems, as in the US and Europe.  It turns out that these commercial systems are not very flexible and could not react swiftly to the onslaught of the virus spread.  They were limited in capacity, manpower and resources.  In Africa, 90% of healthcare is delivered by small clusters of community clinics and a large volunteer sector.  This produces a complex local information ecology, but one which can metabolise the best in formation quickly and adjust immediately at the community prevention and treatment levels.

5. EXPERTISE: Africa has a growing number of experienced medical personnel, (like Dr. Denis Mukwege, Dr. Stella Immanuel and beloved Dr. Evan Atar Adaha), who worked (suffered) through AIDS, Ebola, West Nile, Malaria, Dengue and a host of other maladies.  Those physicians - as in Senegal - are amongst the most seasoned medical professionals in the world.  In fact, they face a conundrum: come together to collect those skills and knowledge or remain in their communities where they are most effective.  What is more important, they must not try to adopt Western Institutional models, which failed miserably in this pandemic.  Even in countries like Taiwan, Japan, South Korea or New Zealand, which have the best performance records outside of Africa, those nations followed the same decentralised script as African nations.

6. LOCAL KNOWLEDGES: My favourite aspect of the Africa pandemic story is the local knowledge.  In Liberia in 2013-15 International Organisations found themselves not only defeated, but found their medical professionals dying in droves in Liberia in the heat of the Ebola outbreak, which spread to Guinea and Sierra Leone.  THEN CAME THE GRANDMOTHERS: quietly, they put the men and boys outdoors on cots under trees and in tents, sanitised the entire homesteads, open the little hovels in which people lived to fresh air, and made everyone stay off the streets, such as they were and cooked soups.  This broke the spread to nearly nil. (I THOUGHT THESE WARRIOR GRANNIES DESERVED THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR 2014 and 2015, but they are forever in my heart).  This exhibition of local knowledge particularly in places like Monrovia and Bensonville, Liberia (one of my favourites), demonstrated a high degree of “social trust”, the same social trust exhibited in Taiwan, Japan, Singapore and South Korea for their nationals governments.

7. CLIMATE: It is now well-established that SAR-CoV2 - the Coronavirus that caused the pandemic Covid 19 retreats in heat and expands in cooler temperatures.  It is also interesting to note that in larger segments of Africa, Covid 19 emerged near the end of their Summer and into the Fall.  As such, by time as Winter fell, in South Africa for example, three months ago - social practices had hardened already and populations had been well-schooled in the proper protocols, which they followed reinforced by local systems.

These are the major reasons for the low count in Africa of both infections and deaths compared to the rest of the world.  I do not doubt there are anomalies in record keeping, categorisation and other statistical integral systems.   However, its been 11 months and likely those anomalies would have collapsed by now.  I am concerned about the new strains in Britain and South Africa - an unusual distribution pattern - because a virulent strain that replicates the ‘superspreader’ would be deadly, not only in Africa, but worldwide.

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Covid 19 will be with us forever

COVID 19 HAS EVOLVED AND NOW CHILDREN ARE DYING IN ITALY!

There are new spikes in cases with children!

COVID 19 WILL BE WITH US FOREVER!

“A pandemic is not about ideas or even medicine. Speculative approaches won’t do: Every habit of hubris, decision-stupidity or presumption ends in tragedy.

The best national responses have been Taiwan, New Zealand, Senegal, South Korea, Iceland, Japan, Dubai, Estonia and Singapore. Their approaches confirmed the need for mathematical skills, a game theoretical sensibility and empathy.

A pandemic is about interstitial demographics; dynamics of cascading, data gathering and analytics; exponentiality statistics and avoiding utilitarian triage.

Bubonic plague rose in 1347. We know now it was just the Justinian Plague of the 5th century AD. It killed 50% of known civilisation, wrecked the feudal system and invented the “Job” (yes I mean employment.  So many people died, peasants were able to bargain for compensation).

The pestilence terrorised Europe for 200 years, evolving into the “Black Death”.

There were 1000 Bubonic Plague cases in the 20th century - that we know of - nearly 700 years later. There were 3 Bubonic deaths in the US in 2019!

Covid 19 will be with us forever.” -

Professor Gilbert Morris on ZNS TV Bahamas

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