by Jayden van Leeuwen | Sep 25, 2020 | Board
There is no denying that the COVID-19 pandemic has had a profound impact across the globe, causing sickness, death, economic downturn and invariable other forms of suffering as the virus has spread internationally.
At present in late-September, we approach the eye-watering total of 31.5 million cases, and the saddening total of 1 million deaths[1] – and those are merely the figures of which we’re aware.
For all the successes and failings that we have seen since COVID-19 first emerged, it is critical that the global community, international organisations and individual states learn from the past 10 months to develop policies, processes, structures and institutions to manage future health emergencies as effectively and efficiently as possible.
This was not lost on the World Health Assembly when it met in May 2020, and passed a resolution calling for the WHO Director-General to:[2]
…initiate, at the earliest appropriate moment, and in consultation with Member States, a stepwise process of impartial, independent and comprehensive evaluation, including using existing mechanisms, as appropriate, to review experience gained and lessons learned from the WHO–coordinated international health response to COVID-19…
Given that between May and September the pandemic has been accelerating in many ways, one might be forgiven for assuming that a review of actions taken, opportunities missed, and areas for improvement would still be a long way off. But in early July, the Director-General announced the establishment of the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response (IPPR).
Headed by two respected international figures, former NZ Prime Minister Helen Clark and former President of Liberia Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the IPPR is tasked with reviewing and evaluating the international response to COVID-19. Its mission is to provide a ‘comprehensive evidence-based assessment of the COVID-19 response as well as lessons for the future’. The Panel is fully impartial and independent.
That impartiality and independence will be crucial to the credibility of the IPPR and its report. The Director-General has, no doubt, sought to boost that credibility through his appointment of two well-respected and experienced international civil servants as Co-Chairs, and providing them with wide autonomy, including to appoint the other members of the Panel, and the dedicated secretariat who will support its operations.
This independence is also reinforced in the IPPR’s Terms of Reference, hopefully providing a strong foundation for the review.[3] Given the criticism that the WHO has faced (notably from the USA which formally announced on 7 July that it will withdraw from WHO, effective 6 July 2021) for the its role in the international response to the pandemic, the IPPR and the report it is set to produce will be crucial.
The remaining IPPR members, announced on 3 September, represent a diversity of experience, perspective, nationality and expertise. They include a former Minister of Finance, former President of Médecins Sans Frontières, and a former President, and a distinguished medical professor.
The IPPR’s first meeting (17 September) began to formulate its key themes, methods of gathering evidence, and ways of undertaking its work. The Panel also undertook a mapping exercise of previous reviews into the functioning of the global health apparatus, and its response to previous pandemics and health emergencies. It intends to draw on previously gathered evidence where it can, and it will not be re-litigating the past or duplicating previous work.[4]
In her opening remarks, Ms Sirleaf emphasised that the IPPR would “pursue an evidence-based quest to protect human health”, because “the world could have done better,” while Helen Clark emphasised that the Panel is not engaging in “a blame game”, but is instead “truth seeking, distilling lessons learned, and making recommendations…”[5]
The Co-Chairs reiterated that their Panel would operate independently and impartially, no doubt seeking to reinforce IPPR’s credibility.
Now that the Panel’s work has begun, it will provide progress updates to the WHO’s governing bodies, including the Executive Committee, and will present its report to the World Health Assembly in March 2021. This relatively quick turnaround means the IPPR should hopefully avoid becoming mired in bureaucracy, and can produce a report while the impetus for improvement remains high.
The IPPR presents an opportunity for what will hopefully be meaningful critical analysis of WHO and the international community’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Provided that the WHO, and member states themselves, contribute freely to the review and do not seek to impinge on the Panel’s independence and mandate, the IPPR may well present the best opportunity for finding international lessons for the future.
Whether the recommendations the Panel produces are ultimately acknowledged and given credence is another question. But if nothing else, the WHO should utilise the IPPR’s review as a chance to rebuild or enhance its credibility – depending, perhaps, on one’s perspective.
It is doubtful whether the IPPR’s report will be enough, in itself, to bring the US back into the fold. That more likely depends on the outcome of November’s presidential election. But regardless, the report should hopefully contribute to the discourse on how the international community responds to pandemics and other health emergencies in the future.
As Ms Sirleaf remarked, “COVID-19 is not the first pandemic, [and] it will not be the last…no one wants to repeat the experiences of COVID-19.”
[1] https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html, as at 22 September 2020.
[2] https://apps.who.int/gb/ebwha/pdf_files/WHA73/A73_R1-en.pdf.
[3] https://www.dropbox.com/s/5hx5oprdg3c2aaq/TheIndependentPanel_TermsofReference.pdf?dl=0.
[4] https://www.dropbox.com/s/5hx5oprdg3c2aaq/TheIndependentPanel_TermsofReference.pdf?dl=0.
[5] https://www.dropbox.com/s/tpcx8yp8rbhbjzw/IndependentPanel_Co-ChairWelcomeRemarks.pdf?dl=0.
by Joanna Tao | Sep 24, 2020 | Board
Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a recognition of the reality that the virus and ensuing protective measures have had a profound impact on peace and security across the globe.
With worldwide lockdowns pushing youth out of schools and entry-level positions, skilled practitioners out of work, and small businesses out of pocket, not only are we projected to have 135 m. people facing starvation by the end of 2020, but we are dealing with an international legal system ill-equipped to provide urgent and united solutions.
The scope of any solution is also limited by ongoing regional conflicts and, without doubt, those impacted by regional conflicts will face compounded impacts of the pandemic.
On 1 July 2020, the UN Security Council (UNSC) adopted res. 2532 – the result of Secretary General Guterres’ appeal since March for a global ceasefire. Ultimately, this resolution is a significant indicator of the link between the pandemic and global security, and the relevance of this link in the UN’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Res. 2532 demands a ‘general and immediate cessation of hostilities in all situations on its agenda’. In unanimously adopting this long-stalled resolution, the UNSC recognised the critical role of peace and security in efforts to combat the pandemic.
– It calls for all state parties engaged in armed conflicts to ‘engage immediately in a durable humanitarian pause for at least 90 consecutive days’.
– It draws on the UNSC’s primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security while expressing grave concern about the unprecedented impact of COVID-19.
– It recognises that conditions of instability due to conflict can exacerbate the impacts of the pandemic and vice versa; and jeopardises an inclusive and coordinated response required for a long-term solution.
– And in recognising the afore-mentioned, the UNSC could not ignore the disproportionate negative socioeconomic impact on women, children, refugees, internally displaced persons and persons with disabilities.
So what does the substance of this resolution call for? While it expressly excludes military operations against Council-designated terrorist groups, the humanitarian pause on conflict aims to enable safe, unhindered and sustained humanitarian assistance by impartial humanitarian actors in line with the humanitarian principles of neutrality and independence.
This ‘humanitarian pause’ is coupled with a request to the UNSG to ensure an acceleration in the UN’s COVID-19 response, with an emphasis on those states embroiled in conflict. Additionally, the SG is to provide updates on the response, and the impact of COVID-19 on mandated peacekeeping operations.
The resolution is hailed as a strong signal of unity within the Council and a sign of hope to the world. But this is by no means the first time a global ceasefire has been called in response to a humanitarian crisis. The preventative measure alone helps the Council to generate momentum and additional political, operational and financial commitment from the international community. However, without concrete economic sanctions, stalemates in further negotiations on WHO and some degree of binding authority, UNSC calls through res. 2532 will almost inescapably be undermined.
Without binding authority, and with states questioning what role (if any) the Security Council should play in a global health crisis, res. 2532 acknowledges that the Council has (and in my personal opinion should have) a role when a global pandemic affects the maintenance of peace and security.
The UNSC draws a unique strength from the ability to mobilise the global community around global problems, from the authority to issue binding decisions, and the authority it holds from acting on behalf of UN membership.
Relevant to the times, the additional humanitarian obligation in res. 2532 shows the Council as acting in parallel with the General Assembly, deemed the actor on broader topics which include humanitarian ones.
An example of this type of action in the past can be drawn from the Council’s involvement in urging states to implement temporary recommendations issued by the WHO during the Ebola outbreak, creating a legal commitment which would have otherwise rested on unstable grounds. Unfortunately though, owing to a growing mistrust in the WHO and an attempt to urgently pass the resolution, the Council in res. 2532 did not go as far, in terms of legal commitment, for the COVID-19 pandemic as it did for the Ebola outbreak.
Given the multilateral stalemate that pre-dates the COVID-19 pandemic, the difficulty in coordinated response and the late passage of res. 2532, we can expect some limited benefits of a long awaited agreement which attempts to place humanitarian needs at the forefront in a global pandemic that affects peace and security.
More work on this has been, and is still to be, done. Nonetheless, res. 2532 gave mediators in conflict areas an important impetus to halt offensive operations. The 90-day pause set an achievable temporary goal which is easier to achieve than past aspirational goals that have failed to permanently stop these types of crises.
The resolution also creates a monitoring framework, through the SG’s updates on cease-fire operations, for documenting any violators of the resolution. International scrutiny and political pressure have proven to be a major deterrent to and resumption of violence. And finally, the resolution opens access for humanitarian assistance in conflict areas that need it the most.
Like most international solutions, the success of res. 2532 depends on the grit of diplomats and what extent member states are willing to go to, in order to make global ceasefires a reality. While not impossible, it will require significant coordination between international, regional and local mediators.
Notwithstanding its delay and seemingly limited reach, res. 2532 is a step in the right direction for multilateral negotiations. Any step to improve access amid escalating and compounding humanitarian crises merits full support from the international community.
by Ramesh Thakur | Sep 11, 2020 | Board
As the UN General Assembly opens its annual session for 2020/21 this month, delegates should introspect on the transformations in world affairs in the 75 years since the Charter was signed.
In 1945, Britain and France were ‘victorious’ Allied powers but in economic ruins; the Soviet Union was ruled by Stalin and had suffered massive loss of human life in the war; China was wracked by civil war between Mao Zedong’s communists and Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists; and the United States bestrode the world like a colossus.
Elsewhere, Germany and Japan were defeated enemy powers; India was still a British colony; and South Africa was an apartheid state but not yet an international pariah. Today the last four are major claimants to permanent membership of the U.N. Security Council (UNSC).
The world has changed in other major respects too.
- Military power is no longer easily converted into currencies of power and influence.
- Threat perceptions have broadened from hard to human security issues like climate change and pandemics.
- Democracy has been de-consolidated with dwindling trust and faith in democratic institutions and governments, even in Western societies.
Based more on performance than values and process, wealth, power and legitimacy of existing national political institutions have drifted eastward. Of most relevance to the UN, the emerging international order is not unipolar, bipolar or even multipolar, but polycentric, with a resulting ‘pluralization of diplomacy’ where countries do not coalesce around rigid blocs.
With such big structural transformations, there is zero reason for expectations of continued effectiveness of mandated multilateral machinery that reflected the particular distribution of power, the security threats, and other structural-contextual factors of 1945.
Moreover, in today’s world, no country has the leverage to set the rules largely on its own and as an externalization of its organizing political principles as the US was able to do in 1945.
If the UNSC is to be made fit-for-purpose far beyond 2020, the first and most urgent task is to add more permanent members. The key actors making and enforcing coercive decisions in the name and on behalf of the international community have to be the major powers of the day.
On this criterion, the UNSC fails the test comprehensively. Whether newer members of an enlarged UNSC should be ‘permanent’ will be contentious. Introducing a third category of ten-year veto-less members eligible for re-election will add to the complexity while also leaving the new members dissatisfied. That means the choice should be either to downsize the existing P5 also to ten-year renewable terms with no veto power, or else to enlarge the P5 to P10 with the same veto rights as the existing five.
Second, the elected membership of the UNSC should also be reformed with respect to numbers (increased from 10 to 18), terms (expanded from two to three years) and roles. Their potential utility in revitalizing the Council as an effective executive body has been unfairly relegated. Increasing the size of the UNSC and extending the term of the elected members would increase its capacity to fulfil its responsibilities for maintaining international peace and security. Those who contribute the most to the UN’s regular budget, specialized agencies, and peace operations should have a commensurate say in making decisions; those who make the decisions should contribute commensurately.
Third, there should be a more equal division of responsibility between the UNSC and the General Assembly. The Council has vastly expanded its powers and reach in recent years, including with respect to the use of military force, coercive economic sanctions, and directing member states on the terms of domestic legislation. The growth of the Council’s reach has been accompanied by a curtailment of the Assembly’s power, prestige and authority. A reset is required to restore the balance between the normative power of the Assembly deriving from universal membership and the geopolitical clout of the UNSC based on military weight.
Opponents of UNSC reform are in denial about the critical importance and urgency of the subject. It is central to other much needed reforms, including management and personnel, not peripheral to or a distraction from them. The brutal reality is that resistance to UNSC reform has held up progress on much of the rest of the U.N. reform agenda. Obsession with the latter without confronting the UNSC deadlock is akin to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic as it sank.
Nothing in the history of UN reform efforts gives cause for optimism and gathering rosebuds of consolation of a trickle of management reform achievements will not rescue multilateralism nor save the organization. It seems to have become reform-proof. Yet without major reform of the UNSC, the United Nations will continue its slide into diminished credibility, legitimacy and effectiveness, and reduced capacity to act in defence of the common peace.
The G4 (Brazil, Germany, India and Japan) have long had a compelling case for permanent membership based on the UN’s foundational values, objective material criteria and the logic of collective action. Despite broad support, their efforts have been stymied by the obstreperous actions of a few determined rivals and opponents. In the process one additional criterion of permanent membership has become apparent and which none of the four seems to possess: the ability to conduct hardball diplomacy.
The last big push for major reform petered out in 2005. The G4 are even further away from their goal now.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that all four since then had refused to contest for UNSC elections, to pay a single dollar in voluntary contributions, to accept the writ of an illegitimate UNSC even under compulsory Chapter VII resolutions, and to contribute personnel and money to U.N. peace operations. Might this have concentrated the minds of the rest of the UN members to the gravity of the crisis and brought them any nearer to permanent membership?
Or, would it have alienated them from the UN community?
Alternatively, with reasoned arguments falling on deaf years for decades, do the candidate countries have any other realistic leverage to advance their case to fruition?
I guess they could continue to demonstrate the validity of Einstein’s definition of insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result each time.
by David Minton | Sep 9, 2020 | Guests
In Part I, I commented on the state of individual fitness at the national level, focusing on the UK and the USA. In short, levels of physical activity need to increase.
But what about at the global level – through genuine global cooperation, across all countries? And who should be responsible?
The current international organizational system
The UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (2015) currently form the central focus of the global community’s primary aspirations for a better quality of human (and other) life. SDG 3 concerns ‘Good Health and Wellbeing’. Its nine targets understandably focus on broad components: child health, maternal health, disease prevention. It’s left to the World Health Organization to explore natural ways of attaining good health and wellbeing, beyond medical and technological means.
For its part of course, WHO is currently at the centre of global attention, and has experienced more than its fair share of criticism, particularly for its early handling of the outbreak in and outside China.
There is no point commenting here on the US reflexive spasm towards the WHO under its current Administration; other than noting that the EU and UK took an entirely different approach – fix it; don’t spurn it. The independent review team of Helen Clark and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf has already indicated that they will be looking for improvement, not retribution. But, what of the WHO right now, regarding ‘fitness’?
World Health Organization
In fact, the WHO has a reasonably extensive exploration of the question of individual fitness. It offers six key facts as its departing point:
- Insufficient physical activity is one of the leading risk factors for death worldwide.
- Insufficient physical activity is a key risk factor for non-communicable diseases (NCDs) such as cardiovascular diseases, cancer and diabetes.
- Physical activity has significant health benefits and contributes to prevent NCDs.
- Globally, 1 in 4 adults is not active enough.
- More than 80% of the world’s adolescent population is insufficiently physically active.
- Policies to address insufficient physical activity are operational in 56% of WHO Member States.
- WHO Member States have agreed to reduce insufficient physical activity by 10% by 2025.
What is physical activity?
WHO defines physical activity as:
”any bodily movement produced by skeletal muscles that requires energy expenditure, including activities undertaken while working, playing, carrying out household chores, travelling, and engaging in recreational pursuits.”
Exercise’ is a sub-category of physical activity that is:
“ planned, structured, repetitive, and aims to improve or maintain one or more components of physical fitness. Beyond exercise, any other physical activity that is done during leisure time, for transport to get to and from places, or as part of a person’s work, has a health benefit.”[1]
It is intriguing that the WHO does not precisely define ‘fitness’ as such; the nearest it approaches is an observation that: “Fitness assessments involve aerobic capacity, flexibility, muscular endurance, and muscular strength and body composition.”[2]
Perhaps the most rigorous definition of ‘fitness, with a three-fold component (physiological, health-related, skill-related) was advanced in 2000 by the US President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports.[3]
Regular physical activity helps prevent obesity, heart disease, hypertension, diabetes and premature mortality.
These lifestyle diseases are an economic burden on all health services and a major public health burden worldwide. Fifteen years ago the WHO estimated that 61% of all deaths (35 m. people) were attributable to these chronic diseases. It is estimated that if the British people were 5% fitter, with an equivalent weight loss, this could save the NHS £5 b. annually.
All well and good; it is thus ‘exercise’ I am addressing when I speak of ‘fitness’, at least in the sense of the process (activity) designed to achieve individual fitness, and the above assessment of the components will suffice. And, my own interest is in achieving fitness through leisure exercise.
WHO promotion of physical activity
WHO conveys, methodically, what is clearly apparent to us intuitively: namely, that levels of physical activity around the word are inadequate:
- Globally, 23% of adults were not active enough in 2020 (20% men; 27% women);
- In high-income countries, the stats are worse (26% men; 35% women);
- In low-income countries, the stats are better (12% men; 24% women).
Global Action Plan for Physical Activity
What to do? WHO identifies a set of (nine) NCD targets, with the aim of reducing ‘premature deaths’ around the world by 25% by 2025.[4] Goal 3 is a 10% relative reduction in the prevalence of insufficient physical activity by 2025.[5] As the WHO puts it: “achieving these targets is feasible through high-level political commitment, whole-of-government action, and support and engagement from everyone to create the healthy environments needed to beat NCDs.”
Again, well and good. But, as we know only too well with the coronavirus, the WHO is empowered only to set guidelines and encourage national action on the targets. It runs a ‘campaign’ to that effect.[6] But, it seems palpably obvious that we need something more.
A ‘Global Exercise Council’
I propose a new Global Exercise Council, GEC, to encourage governments to improve the health of their nations.
Such a body could produce the exercise equivalent of GDP per capita. Each country would have an ‘E-rating’ (as opposed to the Covid R rating) where E equals the overall exercise and an indicator of the health of a nation.
The GEC could operate as an integral part of WHO. Or it could act independently. There would be competing reasons for either one.
Either way. there is no time to waste. The new body needs to prepare for future pandemics, not to mention natural disasters and the annual flu virus. Governments concentrate on the sickness of health and the existing international bodies have proved largely inadequate in encouraging activity. The GEC would have more powers of persuasion than is currently the case with international organizations.
[1] https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/physical-activity
[2] Guidelines on Improving the Physical Fitness of Employees (WHO European Centre for Environment and Health; 1999), p. 38 https://www.who.int/occupational_health/publications/eurfitness/en/
[3] Definitions: Health, Fitness and Physical Activity: http://www.fitness.gov/digest_mar2000.htm
[4] Non-Communicable Disease Targets: https://www.who.int/beat-ncds/take-action/targets/en/
[5] Goal 3: Reduce Physical inactivity: https://www.who.int/beat-ncds/take-action/policy-brief-reduce-physical-inactivity.pdf?ua=1
[6] https://www.who.int/beat-ncds/countries/en/
by David Minton | Sep 7, 2020 | Guests
The current Covid pandemic has swiped the human species like few events before. In early September, we have 25 m. cases and are heading for 1 m. fatalities. It is an historic challenge to the international community of states. And it is an existential threat to the global community of peoples.
Overwhelmingly, our attention is focused on containment and eradication, through collective response – through both political action (lockdown; tracing) and medical (vaccine development).
For its part, herd immunity is rightly critiqued, over the short-term for triage of the elderly, and over the long-term for the unlikelihood of getting to the required threshold (50% to 83% of the population).
But, what might be the collective outcome of our total individual responses to Covid through a different medium? What might be the implications of individual fitness for the pandemic – which is a global phenomenon? This is the area I happen to work in, and have experience across a wide variety of countries.
In this first part of my column, then, I address what is occurring in a few specific countries. In Part II, I explore what might be a genuine ‘global fitness response’.
‘Survival of the fittest’
… is a phrase first used by Herbert Spencer, after reading Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, Principles of Biology (1859). It was too late for Darwin to use the phrase in the 4th edition which was already being printed, but it appeared in the 5th in 1869. By ‘fittest’, Darwin meant ‘better adapted for the immediate local environment’, not the more common meaning of ‘in the best physical shape’.
Yet, 156 years on, I suggest the word ‘fittest’, in this common catchphrase, needs to be linked to the health of the individual, the nation and global community. For definitions in the standard terminology, I shall leave to Part II.
Historically, sedentary behaviour is not new. In the 6th c. BCE, Pythagoras was advocating daily exercise for health reasons. Two centuries later, Hippocrates opined that ‘walking is the best medicine’. In our current time, the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges has reported that ‘exercise really is a miracle cure’, while Prof Chris Whitty (Chief Medical Officer for England) has noted that health advice, such as exercising more, has not changed since the Greek philosophers conveyed this, over two millennia ago.
United Kingdom
In the UK we have public health protection powers. Besides the expected measure of removal of causes of ill health, this also includes education to promote health and encouragement of individual responsibility for health.
There has been further regulation, notably The Public Health (Control of Diseases) Act 1984, giving powers to control disease. The emphasis, as in most countries, is on control rather than prevention. If selection of diseases for eradication is based on rigorous criteria, should we not be developing accurate diagnostic tools to improve the ‘fitness’ of individuals, particularly given the lessons from the current pandemic?
The Nutrition Society, based in London and advancing nutritional science since 1941, is now one of the largest learned societies for nutrition in the world. During lockdown, one of its journals published data showing how your Body Mass Index (BMI) goes up (as does your chance of going onto a ventilator) if you are admitted to hospital with Covid-19.
This data has been used by health authorities around the world to highlight the immediate dangers of being overweight. The World Obesity Federation (WOF) states that two-thirds of those falling seriously ill with coronavirus were overweight or obese. The PM, Boris Johnson, knows only too well, having been admitted to hospital with the virus whilst overweight himself. The WHO’s information on ‘prevalence of obesity’ shows the UK, as with all countries in Europe, to be both overweight and obese.
The aftermath of World War II was the beginning of a new era. The shared suffering and sacrifice of the war years pushed governments into developing basic care for their citizens as a right – and obligation. The new British Labour Government at the time moved rapidly to establish the welfare state. The National Health Service (NHS) has been funded out of general taxation since 1948.
Thursday evenings during lockdown at 20.00 BST, the nation applauded the NHS frontline staff, key workers plus the many new heroes helping meet the challenge from the global pandemic. The ‘Stay Home; Protect the NHS; Save Lives’ campaign was the backbone of the lockdown restrictions. The applause has stopped, but this impromptu movement could morph into ‘Stay fit; Protect the NHS’. The aftermath of the first global pandemic in our lifetime needs a substantial new response if individuals and governments are to improve levels of health.
For the first time since the 1940s, exercise became one of the few defined reasons that people in the UK could leave their home during the coronavirus pandemic. The PM encouraged people to take ‘one form of exercise a day’, understanding how important it is for people’s mental and physical health during lockdown. Improved individual fitness levels in turn will alleviate pressure on the NHS from the so-called lifestyle diseases.
So, now that we have got through lockdown – just, thanks to the Chancellor’s job retention scheme – we need to build on the Government’s lockdown message of daily exercise. Post-lockdown, the Chancellor has spent around £600m in August encouraging us to ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ the hospitality sector.
Now we need a campaign for exercise. One of the Government’s priorities should be to encourage the population to continue with daily exercise.
In the past 50 years little has been done to improve the ‘fitness’ of the nation. Two Prime Ministers, Major and Blair, encouraged sport more than any others. In 2012 the UK hosted the Summer Olympic Games and can be proud of the physical legacy but these events do little to encourage ongoing participation in sport or improving the health of the host nation. The British Olympic Association and UK Sport methodically work out the business plan for medals very successfully. In 2012 the British team won 65 medals and then, four years later in Rio, secured a record haul of 67. The 2016 Olympics was the most successful overseas tournament in Team GB’s history, with 27 golds, 23 silvers and 17 bronzes. The ‘price-per-medal’ was £4,096,500. There was no parallel budget or planning to increase mass participation, daily exercise or fitness levels.
Our Prime Minister has been ‘working out’ in the grounds of Buckingham Palace, playing tennis at the American Ambassador’s residence and jogging around Lambeth Palace, home of Archbishop of Canterbury. In the process he has discovered that the sacred and profane of exercise fails to achieve desired results. A celebrity personal trainer (PT) has now been employed.
Perhaps a way of ‘levelling up’ the health inequalities across the country is to offer a PT to everyone. Singer songwriter Adele, with fifteen Grammy Awards, transformed her fitness level and weight with a PT – one of many celebrity ambassadors improving the level of fitness by leadership and design. What if the Prime Minister of the UK took on a similar public ambassador role for personal fitness? The third largest public health campaign, after car seat belts and anti-smoking, could be improving personal fitness levels for the entire population. Backed by personal trainers on the NHS, helping everyone get in the best physical shape, so healthy individuals contribute to the health of the nation and the wider global community.
The Government has an aim of ‘levelling up’ the nation which needs to include closing the health gap. Post Covid-19 the Government is already reshaping the public health strategy by abolishing Public Health England and creating a new body charged with preventing future outbreaks.
If the Government has a moral duty to improve the health of the nation, should we not take the chance to reshape the myriad of organizations responsible for sport, recreation and fitness and move the focus onto daily movement, exercise and health improvement?
United States
As we all know, the US has the highest number of cases and deaths in the world. But some leaders are getting the message.
In the US, Michelle Obama’s ‘Let’s Move’ public health campaign was part of the effort to tackle their public health crisis. The US Centre for Disease Control publishes obesity rates, broken down by age-group. Its report found that, between 2009 and 2012, rates dropped for those 2-5 and 6-11 years old. The campaign enlisted a wide range of support including, in 2011, the superstar Beyonce’s ‘Flash Workout’.
For her part, Oprah Winfrey, North America’s first black multi-billionaire and the richest African American of the 20th century, decided to do something about her weight after being told she was at risk of developing diabetes.
Survival of the fittest — revisited
We should not underestimate the profound change that simple shifts in habits and attitude can have. Whoever would have thought that the simple bar of soap would take on a starring role in preventing the spread of Covid-19?
Exercise for the masses could be the legacy of this global pandemic. Activity can be done without any expense or equipment; lockdown proved this. Promotion can also be done without any major expense thanks to influencers, social media and philanthropic organizations. This pandemic is proving to be the mother of exercise invention.
Yet little is known about ‘exercise’. We are scratching the surface in terms of knowledge, research and data compared to public health. One organization is worthy of note. The Bloomberg School of Public Health (Johns Hopkins University; Baltimore) has frequently been quoted by the global media during the pandemic, It is the largest public health school in the world, with over 1,800 courses, eighty plus research centres and institutes, and over 800 full-time and 400 part-time academics. This one institution has more budget, staff and students than all sports and exercise science departments in the UK combined.
The world
So much for the ‘advanced nations’; governments, like individuals, need guidance, leadership, science and knowledge. What, then, of the world – the global response to the global pandemic, that might reflect the above thoughts on ‘fitness’? Let me explore this in Part II.
