Vaccine Heist (Part 2): The Quest for Coronavirus Vaccine Begins

Photo from The Guardian

By Chester B Cabalza

Blogger's Notes:
Commentary of an Academic 
(Copyright @ 2020 by Chester B Cabalza. All Rights Reserved).

Caveat! Just like in Part 1, the fiction comes from the figment of my imagination. The story takes off after the professor gathers his gang as they unlock mysteries behind the making of vaccines. Calling the shots of Resistance, the brilliant Sergio Marquina sends them off to major global cities to find the cure and halt the coronavirus pandemic as the WHO launched the coordinated “Solidarity Trial” in 10 countries around five continents.

Part 2

(Outdoor) Across the vastness of the South China Sea, Tokyo and Lisbon scuba dive like mermaids in full battle gear. They survive the marine extremes beneath the ocean. Crossing the threshold of Liaoning’s hull, China’s largest combat aircraft battleship and symbol of naval dominance in the world’s busiest sea lane.

From the weather deck bossing the ship’s forecastle, birds hurl quickly in remote air; gracefully it flap wings to the horizon. The king sun makes way for its dramatic exit in a grotesque sunset shimmer as the warship wallops the salty body of water and keeps buoyancy in the deep blue sea.

Tokyo carefully throws the antiretroviral drug to Lisbon (a survivor of the COVID disease herself in Madrid). 

Tokyo: Inject it in your body! (She whispers to her. Lisbon keeps mum and paranoid).

They run and hide near the aircraft carriers. Sailors from the People’s Liberation Army Navy deploy a drone and force feed radio frequency identification around the missiles.  

A Chengdu J-20 Chinese fighter jet deplanes. Gandia arrives in full personal protective equipment (PPE) in red jumpsuit wearing a realistic Salvador Dali mask, accompanied by three biogenetically cyborg assassins, chemically brainwashed, and genetically immune by a tailored virus. Cyborg assassins can’t be infected by the coronavirus.

Professor: Don’t you shoot Gandia! He’s on our side! (Talking to the combative ladies using satellite phone patch from his distant hollow).

Lisbon: Sergio, how can we trust him? (Worried of treachery).

Professor: Just trust me! (he sighs in deep breath). Bogota and Denver injected convalescent plasma to Gandia after you recovered from COVID. Your blood contains antibodies to fight the virus. Antibodies are found in the plasma.

Tokyo: Very well! How sure are you that your woman Lisbon is safe here? Are we safe here? I’m used to bank robberies and battles, eh! But not like this one. The virus is unseen, professor! (her temperament explodes like the intensity and stealth of a cat fighter).

You told us what happened in the USS Roosevelt; almost all of the American sailors were asymptomatically infected by the virus! It’s contagious! What shall we do now? Did they find a vaccine yet in Washington?

Lisbon: Gandia can get exposed again to the virus, even if we both recovered from COVID (voice cracking).

Professor: Listen (he tries to calm the two). China solely manufactures Carrimycin tablets, a possible cure for COVID-19-2020.

But Gandia will take the clinical trials for favipivar. Billions of doses are now mass-produced in Wuhan and Shenzhen, after the drug had undergone clinical trials.

Come to think of it ladies, there are 58 candidate drugs for antibodies, 22 for antivirals, 14 for cell-based compound, five for RNA-based compounds, 15 for scanning compounds to be repurposed, and various other therapy categories for anti-inflammatory, antimalarial, interferon, protein-based, antibiotics, and receptor-modulating compounds. 

How can you not take the chances if there are other 66 candidate drugs? Imagine all the 249 compounds our scientists and military physicians are doing today. The world is developing 115 vaccine candidates; let’s not lose this momentum, ladies.

Don’t leave Gandia inside the Liaoning! That’s the safest passage to reach Shanghai and Beijing because of the lockdown! Medicines are needed to be shipped across the world. Make sure that the warship carrier is safe and gets the right of passage once you reach the Horn of Africa and Panama Canal.

Tokyo: Where are the other members of the team?

Professor: I sent them to biotechnology firms and universities. Manila and Denver are in India. Helsinki and Palermo went to Germany. Rio just reached Italy while Stockholm has seen the mass grave in Brazil. Arturo talked to the CIA in New York while Marcella is talking to Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand.  

Tokyo: Make sure we’re all safe, professor! I hope no one from the team will die this time! (Staring at Lisbon, agitated and sharp).

Professor: (Listening in silence. Deep thinking. Mind wanders. Afraid...so afraid)

***

(Indoor) The gang seriously listens to the professor as he vividly lectures on smallpox vaccine discovered by British physician Dr. Edward Jenner.

In the flashback, all of the dead characters are alive sharing their thoughts with robber colleagues (Oslo, Berlin, Moscow, and Nairobi are seated while observing physical distancing inside the chamber).

Berlin walks beside the professor and starts discussing about immunization.

Berlin: (always candid and charismatic especially when he sneers to the team). Dr. Jenner’s work is considered as the foundation of immunology (showing his old photo from the screen). His vaccine killed the smallpox, the only infectious disease to have naturally been eradicated in human history.

Professor: But evil nations will always use infectious diseases for its advantage as a bioterror weapon, remember that!

Rio: Professor, how was smallpox treated at that time?

Professor: Quarantine, vaccination, and people burned all infected clothes and bedding. Those interventions helped the world flatten the epidemic curve. It was thought as an airborne contagious disease that governments panicked in controlling the spread of smallpox. Separate wards in hospitals were built solely for the terminal virus, killing an estimated 300 million people.

Stockholm: Oh, that’s a lot! I pray that COVID pandemic will not kill that much, professor.

Nairobi: Ladies, did you know that the term vaccine (vaccinum) was derived from the Latin word for cow (vacca)? That’s how it reflects the origins of smallpox vaccination. Is it right professor? (amused pleasantly as the crowd gives her a round of applause with her trivial opinion).

Professor: You’re right, senora Nairobi! (he returns the sugary smile at her).

But that’s a misnomer for sure. It’s because the vaccine used to prevent smallpox was likely a horsepox, not cowpox.

Dr. Edward Jenner observed that milkmaids who had gotten cowpox did not show any symptoms of smallpox after variolation or inoculation.

Actually, he infected a young boy with cowpox, but later when he injected the child with the deadly smallpox virus, he did not get sick. It was an accidental mistake that cured the boy. That beautiful mistake cured everybody with smallpox around the world!

Nairobi: Our son would be a genius, professor! If only… (she recalls her offer to him of an artificial insemination while Inspector Raquel smiles at them and sobs in sorrow of Nairobi’s loss).

Manila: Eh professor, how much time did they discover the vaccine for smallpox?

Palermo: The history of smallpox extends into pre-history. The disease likely emerged in human populations about 10,000 BC. The earliest credible evidence of smallpox is found in the Egyptian mummies of people who died some 3000 years ago (looking at Helsinki, trying to impress him).

Professor: That’s right, Palermo…and (trying to expound the facts when Berlin rebuts).

Berlin: Yes, smallpox has existed for at least 3,000 years and was one of the world's most feared diseases until it was eradicated by a collaborative global vaccination programme. The last known natural case was in Somalia in 1977.

Moscow: But China and India practiced smallpox inoculation even before the discovery of vaccination?

Professor: Very well, Moscow.  That’s a method for the prevention of smallpox by deliberate introduction of material from smallpox pustules into the skin. This generally produced a less severe infection than naturally-acquired smallpox, but still induced immunity to it.

Just like in COVID now, countries use various kinds of method. States that experienced relative diseases on SARS, MIERS-COV, and Ebola virus are better off in their medical practice and herd immunity compared with nations that have less exposure on the coronavirus. It’s a novel disease. Still, we’re figuring it out whether or not it’s a natural virus…

Manila: Professor, you didn’t answer me. How much time before Dr. Jenner discovered the vaccine?

In the Philippines, the government is giving away 50 million pesos as a bounty to the discoverer of the vaccine - they got virgin coconut oil and other alternative medicine. Other countries are doing the same thing, giving away prizes to bright ideas. We don’t need to rob banks anymore if we happen to discover the vaccine.

Professor: There’s no vaccine yet for COVID, Manila! (his voice sounds in anguish).  

Dr. Jenner’s method underwent medical and technological changes over the next 200 years, and eventually resulted in the eradication of smallpox.

Everyone’s racing for the vaccine. This isn’t about the Nobel Peace Prize for science and medicine. Scientists and physicians need different stages of clinical trial to do that. The experiment has to undergo phases of test from small, to medium to large clinical testing. Once approved then the drug gets certified to be used by everyone. It should be feasible and mass produced to kill enough the coronavirus. 

It took the world two centuries before the smallpox disease was naturally eradicated through a vaccine!

If our generation won’t survive the plague, perhaps the next generation will outlive it. We see herd immunity with rising recoveries. That’s good! Scientific data would show us that with strict quarantine and lockdown, we flatten and squash the virus, though the contagion keeps on mutating.  

Just like in a flu that can be healed but can’t be cured! Recurring as we see it. There's no cure for the flu, but there are available natural ways to ease the symptoms. It can’t because there are drugs that inhibit one of the enzymes that the virus uses to get into and out of cells.

Right now, there are potential post-infection therapies for COVID-19-20. These are favipiravir, lopinavir, hydroxychoroquine or chloroquine. All are in final stage of human testing before it reaches the fourth phase of manufacturing! Although there are also individual or combined drugs such as lopinavir-ritonavir combined, lopinavir-ritonavir combined with interferon-beta, remdesivir, and hydroxychloroquine done in separate trials.

We’re running out of time ladies and gents! This quest for vaccine can become our exit strategy. Making sure that the vaccine is safe by undergoing rigorous testing that should result to harmless consequences. It takes 10 years to do clinical trials for a vaccine but scientists are racing to discover it for months, unless hundreds of millions of people will die if we don’t do something now! It took two centuries to perfect smallpox vaccine.

***

(Outdoor) Denver and Manila arrive in Mumbai in spite of a national lockdown around India, the largest sub-continent nation to do so. Inside one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world.

Manila: Hydroxychloroquine, they say this anti-malarial drugs is a game-changer drug in the fight against coronavirus. The miracle drug? By the way, how can we convince India to make a surplus when the rest of the world is still suffering from the pandemic?

Denver: Let’s do what professor has told us to do. Just prepare billions of Indian rupees! I trust your negotiation skills, Manila!

Professor: Denver, do you hear me? (He’s calling them from the satellite network).

Inspector Sierra is arriving shortly to help you negotiate and get the drugs manufactured! Do you copy?

TO BE CONTINUED>>>

Beijing draws flak in launching Ideational Power campaign in the Philippines

Photo from Manila Standard

By Chester B Cabalza

Blogger's Notes:
Commentary of an Academic 
(Copyright @ 2020 by Chester B Cabalza. All Rights Reserved).

The viral song of friendship entitled ‘Iisang Dagat’ (One Sea) launched last April 24 in social media by the Chinese embassy in Manila as a dedication to COVID-19 workers in the frontlines in Beijing and Manila drew flak from netizens in a bid to control an escalating political squabbling amidst the coronavirus pandemic.

The almost four-minute music video penned by Chinese Ambassador to the Philippines Huang Xilian gained collective dislike from Filipinos firing clash of opinions and hate messages than drawing mutual empathy between the two neighbouring nations pitted at each other to patch up diplomatic differences on its naval operability in disputed maritime domains.    

China’s foray into ideational underpinnings, an apex of the current geo-strategic commanding heights struggle to reduce health and medical liabilities from Beijing meant at flattening the plateau of the plague. China’s Communist Party builds a gargantuan aid network that runs a reciprocated soft approach to friendly countries, a possible heed of exemplary action to Xi Jinping’s commandments of exporting equipment and expertise on COVID-19. 

The arrival of Chinese specialists on respiratory and infectious diseases last April 5, led by Weng Shangeng, while on medical mission diplomatically applauded the Philippines’ positive, proactive, and effective measures in containing the deadly virus that originated from Hubei province. It complimented Filipino medics’ professionalism and dedication in high rescue success rate, however, maintained further attention in refining detection capacity and epidemic prevention supplies during the exchange of medical experiences.  

Filipinos’ distrust in Beijing rose last November 2019, a month before the coronavirus pandemic spread out of Wuhan, relative to the opposing stand of PLAN in the contested islands claimed by the Philippines. The recently uploaded propaganda music video that promotes co-existence and good neighbourliness stirred another heavy sentiment among Filipinos in dealing with China’s perceived intimidation and collateral damage as the Philippines grieves for the loss of frontline medical workers and other patients who succumbed from COVID-19.  

Confusion on Chinese schizophrenic behaviour over kind clinical extension program on COVID-19 and aggressive military expansion outlook in the South China Sea overlaps the ideational power campaign launched by China in a capacity to champion the Philippines and submit into a condescending cognitive validity or normative value that strongly adheres to Chinese worldview.  

The assertive solidarity expression made by the Philippines and Vietnam last April 8 against China’s standard operating procedures in virtually patrolling all the claimed maritime domains in the South China Sea led to the recent tactical ramming and sinking of Vietnamese fishing boat by Chinese white ship amid the pandemic. Both Southeast Asian nations experienced similar intimidation and coercion by a major naval power in the region.        

On April 23, a warship from the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) threatened a gun-fire at Philippine Navy (PN) ship near Commodore reef in the Philippine-occupied West Philippine Sea. Another maritime commotion occurred last February 17 between the PLAN and PN in a routine maritime patrol when a Chinese corvette relayed an obstinate response transmitted through radio waves about China’s sovereignty rights in the contested waters.

POGOs: A Trojan horse locked in Manila’s rich ghettos

Photo from ABS-CBN News

By Chester B Cabalza

Blogger's Notes:
Commentary of an Academic 
(Copyright @ 2020 by Chester B Cabalza. All Rights Reserved).

As the Philippine Offshore Gaming Operators (POGOs) now placed under the category of Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), it deals with online gaming for mainland Chinese gamblers, still considered an illicit operation in China, the golden goose industry employs more than a hundred thousand foreign workers deployed in the country’s major cities, leaving one-third of the workforce to Filipino locals.

Philippine enforcement agencies on public safety and national security quietly work in silo, avoiding a stronger unified command, indulging every bit of compartmentalized strategy in cracking down POGO-related crimes and espionage, skewed to deficiency against organized crimes committed by Chinese nationals, occupying burgeoning cities of Metro Manila construed as a Trojan horse.

POGOs vividly recreate ghettos stirring an imagery of patriarchal hegemony of transnational enterprises imagined in a confluent stringent mafia culture. Unrestricted gambling may extend beyond the glorification of ‘godfathers’ and ratifies trafficking of drugs, humans and weapons.

The popular amusement and leisure offshore gaming magnifies social inequalities and economic injustices that capriciously levels off the playing field of escorting modus that leads to bribery scheme locally dubbed as ‘pastillas’, cyber fraud, contract killing, emerging economic crimes and prostitution. The (re)making of a Chinese ghetto in Metro Manila’s financial districts look auspiciously odd, strategically located in loci that accidentally reconstruct a landscape of cultural acrimony and financial insecurity.   

The influx of Chinese workers attached to diversified businesses opens up to a variety of needs that exclusively cater to their kind and the rest of Filipinos. General precautions on the reverse economic impacts of POGOs subsume greater consideration to the country’s macroeconomic interest.

Economic gray zone

The legitimacy of Chinese offshore gaming’s resumption of operation under the guidelines of the general community quarantine obscured by the coronavirus pandemic is undeniably questioned in spite of the clamour to open up the ailing business. The spike in higher rentals, salaries, and fees for support it unconventionally adds to the country’s gross domestic product has temporarily discredited the momentum of cash flows during the plague. But the Philippine government claims that it could become a milking cow or good source of financial resources to replenish the national coffer to sustain public needs in this trying times. 

Mushrooming online gambling weaves a fabric of major sourpoint amalgamation for the Philippine government and its volatile bilateral relationship with China. Apparently professed as economic gray zone but ambiguously deceived as influence operations swelling to acts of money laundering and tax evasion.

Optimizing the robust trade relations of the Philippines and China, the rise of Chinese companies operating in the archipelago marks proximity in distance and affordability of labor. The real score in booming realty demand and retail spending for Chinese nationals shaped rapid ventures of various sunrise industries and start-ups in the country yet the social backlash that POGOs brought in banes latitude of unpopular policy for its transitional economic gains and explosive liquid assets.

Contrary to China’s total ban of the illegal gambling operation, it constructively appealed to the Philippines to halt any POGO-related activities, a credence that rescinds Chinese moral and social fabric. A successful persuasion of the same economic restriction to cement a strong social cohesion was addressed by Phnom Penh when it banned last year Chinese-owned online gambling in Cambodia. 

Island chain strategy and Trojan virus

On August 2019, the Chinese embassy in Manila raised grave concern for Chinese citizens working in offshore gaming businesses as Philippine authority proposed self-contained POGO boroughs to limit the interaction of local and foreign workers, a prepared blueprint preferably outside of the metropolis to the dismay of Chinese officials that it infringes the rights of foreign operators.   

The most controversial investment eyed for POGO economic hubs raised a red flag on the country’s national security when Chinese investors strategically pointed out Fuga Island in Cagayan province, and adjacent Grande and Chiquita islands in Subic Bay, Zambales province, in a bid to build a Chinese smart city in the northern frontier of Luzon.

A fruition of the Philippines’ bilateral trade relations repackaged under China’s Belt Road Initiative, the planned mega-project would accelerate the value of yuan denomination, advantageously aimed at supporting the giant neighbour’s geopolitical agenda. If approved at that time, the conversion of the three islands into affluent Chinese ghettos makes a gateway of opportunity for China’s naval coordinates as it widens access to the first island chain that connects with Taiwan, a lucid vision for possible reunification with mainland China’s renegade province and lost territory.

The dynamic presence of POGO centres sprouting near military headquarters have conceivably heightened alarms and trepidations on espionage, partly blamed for poor urban-planning and conversion of military bases into commercial spaces. Chinese workers playing chameleon role as spy is not far-fetched from reality. The dangers lurking behind the sophistication of disruptive technology used by offshore gaming operators can invade and pervade critical infrastructures of the country.

Perceived as a Trojan horse, currently imbedded in the Philippines’ vector of economic security, the controversial online gaming industry’s multi-dimensional implications and domino-effect could impinge on public safety and national security. Like a Trojan malware infecting users’ devices or attacking routers of wireless networks, the offshore gaming operations have temporarily propelled economic stimulus to reach projected financial output, birthing to social malady and cyber vulnerability.      

Vaccine Heist: The World Needs Vaccine to Combat the Coronavirus Pandemic

Photo from The Buzz Paper

By Chester B Cabalza

Blogger's Notes:
Commentary of an Academic 
(Copyright @ 2020 by Chester B Cabalza. All Rights Reserved).

Caveat! This story is just a figment of my imagination inspired by the worldwide phenomenon series La Casa de Papel (taking off from their successful heist in the Royal Mint of Spain and cliffhanging end at the Bank of Spain). The fiction follows the story on how to find the vaccine for COViD-19! 

PART 1

(Indoor) The professor lectures the gang about the trends on coronavirus pandemic using data science showing to them the number of infections, recoveries and deaths. 

Inside the dark room of an Antonio Gaudi’s look-a-like abode in Barcelona, standing elegantly in his nerdy-looking yet charismatic composure, he holds a laser pointer, directly looking at Lisbon.

Flashes of images of beautiful and ugly scenes on how he has intimately bonded with Oslo, Moscow, Berlin, and Nairobi (all dead) run through his thoughts.

Distracted. Annoyed. Perspiring.

Lisbon: Sergio, what’s going on? (Baffled and concerned).

Professor: China has won the game! (Serious as usual as he pointed on the screen showing the origin of the virus in Wuhan).

He steals a look at Toyko. In her stylish attire, intently eavesdropping to him, her curious mind walks fast through the pandemic events – the Chinese whistle blower physicians who died of the COVID-19 and how they were silenced by the politburo. Different outbreaks that hit the world from 1720 Great Plaque of Marseille, 1820 Cholera, 1920 Spanish Flu, to the 2020 Coronavirus.

There’s a slow sounds of chants of Bella Ciao playing on air while imageries of people wearing of masks, physical distancing, and news reportage on major hit countries from South Korea, Italy, Spain, Iran, Nigeria, Australia, Peru, and the United States are fast forwardly shown on the screen.

The gang’s intense guise upsets neither Manila nor Stockholm. Both of them are listening conscientiously to the professor while he explains the uptrend death toll in the Western World compared to the downtrend in Southeast Asia. 

Manila: Indonesia and the Philippines have more than 200 deaths each and less than a hundred each in Malaysia and Singapore. But the rest of the countries in Southeast Asia have zero fatalities.

Professor: Exactly! Mainly because they are friends with China, or they may have known about the outbreak, beforehand!

Looking at epidemiologic history, Southeast Asians are immune from Chinese, Indian, and Arab diseases through early trading before Portuguese and Spaniards arrived to colonize the region. They may have also shared the same DNA with the people in the Pacific and Madagascar in Africa because of the navigation drive of Austronesians southward!

Denver: That’s absurd, eh! How can you say that in an epidemic? The elderly and adults get infected and are dying! You may get killed on streets in Metro Manila if you disobey the quarantine orders, there’s a lockdown, professor! (Berated wearing a poker face minus his choking laughter).

Professor: I know Denver! 2.6 billion Citizens of planet Earth or one third of the world’s population is living on a global lockdown! Can you imagine India doing that? (He removes his glasses and wipes his teary-eyes).

Stockholm: Italy has more than 16,000 deaths, Spain has more than 13,000, France has more than 8,000, and UK has more than 5,000 as of April 6! These are first world countries. Many of the hard-working health workers in Western and Mediterranean European states are Asians; some of them are from the Philippines!

Denver: And the United States have more than 10,000 death tolls. Can you explain that, professor!? Is it about the presidential election and the Mexican wall?

Bogota: How did that happen? I thought the western world boasts of their sophisticated social medical system? Aren’t they prepared for a pandemic?

Professor: No! Because there’s no vaccine yet!

And the western world may have zero immunity to this novel coronavirus disease!

Angela Merkel pleads the Germans to think of it seriously. The killer enemy is unseen unlike what Europe saw in the two world wars and the Cold War! Boris Johnson suffered the virus and was placed in the ICU, even Prince Charles is positive! Giuseppe Conte, out of disenchantment, welcomed the help of Cuba and China! These are fucking Communist countries!

Bogota: We’re bank robbers and not scientists, professor?!

Helsinki: We may have operated Nairobi inside the Bank of Spain (sad and disgusted), but we’re neither surgeons nor virologists!

Palermo: Professor, ask Marsella he’s an animal rights activist! Right, Marsella? (Everyone laughs in concert while looking at Marsella at the back).

Marcella smirks at Palermo and ignores the joke.

Tokyo: We’re thieves for a cause, professor!

Lisbon: We’re not even experts on a pandemic! (Standing meters away from Sergio to observe physical distancing. The couple are staring at each other, consciously wearing face masks, to contain the transmission of the virus).

Professor: First wave of the outbreak occurred when the novel coronavirus went out from Wuhan and infected many overseas Chinese! The first case of Chinese death happened in the Philippines last February 9.  

Second wave deals on local transmissions in all corners of the world! That’s why we see around the world on how different national governments imposed interventions using enhanced community quarantine! 

Saudi authorities are using heat-sensing drones to monitor people on the streets. Tropical countries are praying that heat wave during the summer season will kill the virus, that's why they extended the quarantine. 

The minimum should be 40 days just like what Venice did during the bubonic plaque. London has the longest lockdown in six months in earlier plaques. Singapore may extend the lockdown until December this year for the survival of the Singaporean gene pool.

It’s still a lockdown just like a martial law! Military and the police will enforce it! Ordinances and emergency laws will be enacted following any typical lockdown!

Look, there are only four countries, mostly islands that are not affected yet by the pandemic!

North Korea shot down their first COVID patient to halt a local transmission against human rights violation. Mongolia isolated the French patient from the rest of the society to stop the spread of the virus and strictly closed borders.

The third wave happens when workers and students who are lockdown for many weeks and more than a month will go back to offices and schools! Many countries will neither flatten the curve nor squash the virus!

Japan and Sweden tried flexible interventions by giving freedom and compromises to their citizens but the virus bounced back even with strict cultural norms on washing of hands, wearing of masks, and physical or social distancing were observed!

Taiwan and New Zealand are doing well but WHO ignored their good practices!

The UN Security Council will call for unity and understanding coz even the organization is vulnerable to save its ass!

Member-countries will stop trusting each other and will wait for further cooperation. That’s a classic Waltzian scenario on anarchic world!

The five permanent members of the Council will ally differently with each other. China and Russia will have a stronger alliance, while the rest of the members will weaken their strengths until autocratic members will disrupt the world order into their favour forming a multipolar or bipolar world!

This is about political leadership!

Irregardless if a government is autocratic or democratic, the virus is merciless, unforgiving and deadly!

Leaders will have to flex responsibly their powers!

National coffers will be drained due to lockdown. It will create a global recession that only well-prepared great powers will dominate the economy in the near future!

Front line workers, mostly from the health sectors will be heralded heroes for their courageous will to combat the disease but politicians will seize every opportunity to show off their leadership style!

Most of them will get sick of the virus! Others will get sick of power!

The world will maintain an organized chaotic system as we will see a gargantuan landscape of power rivalry.

Poor families will go hungry!

The middle class will have the privilege of staying at home, working from home, become obese and bored, but once the lockdown will not be sustained, they will revolt online against abusive leaders!

Few rich families will become philanthropic but most of them will preserve selfishness to save their own interests!

Now, the fourth wave will occur when all the ports around the world will be opened up again. Tourists, diplomats and businessmen will freely travel the world and become carriers of COVID, either they become symptomatic or asymptomatic.

Traditional media will suffer large-scale and will use a pint size warm-bodied courageous personnel to cover the pandemic! They will largely focus on the survival of their own patients and how will local governments respond to the basic needs of their citizens. Without them knowing that an autocratic great power will seize international media; and information warfare will begin to disrupt the system. 

Video conferencing systems will get malwares or electronic viruses and cybersecurity will become a global threat.

Great power rivals will flex muscles and will use the virus as leverage! It will happen, it’s happening now!

Tokyo: What’s the point of all this fuzz, professor? (Recklessly exasperated and bored!)

Is there a World War 3?! Will there be zombies just like in movies?! Is it the Armageddon?!

Should we call the Pope and Dalai Lama?!

How do we solve it professor? (Agitated).

Rio: Many frontline health workers are dying… (Distressed and dismayed).

Lisbon: We need to find the vaccine! Right, professor!

Professor: Eighty percent of tested with mild COVID infections recover. They need self-quarantine, medications, and they can isolate themselves at home. Fifteen percent suffer severe cases where they need to be hospitalized. The doctors will tell them if they need to be confined in the hospital or recuperate at home. Only five percent will be placed in the Intensive Care Units – they will fight for their lives. But most of them will die!

Many of the dying patients are elderly and men. It’s gender-biased. Women will survive well in a pandemic (Looking at directly to the eyes of Lisbon, Tokyo, Stockholm, and Manila. While Palermo and Helsinki meet eye-to-eye to question it).

Everyone will be vulnerable. Our bodies will need this immunity. It’s like herd immunity for evolutionary process! The world is biologically and socially evolving! Our human species is best challenged at the moment to rule the world while Mother Nature regenerates! Even mammals will have to evolve!

Manila: It’s the survival of the fittest! Stronger gene pool wins over those with weaker immunity!  

Tokyo: So, where are we going to steal the vaccine?

Professor: Scientists from China, South Korea, Australia, the US and Europe have already copied blood samples and swabs from coronavirus patients, mild and severe, symptomatic and asymptomatic, just to produce the vaccine!

Scientists are choosing which of the four retroviral medicines for anti-HIV and anti-malaria will be used for the COVID-19! WHO will do sampling test cases and will prescribe the most efficient and affordable drug to become the standard vaccine for all the patients worldwide!

This pandemic will certainly show us a plethora of perspectives on how to solve this doomsday riddle!

We have to look at all the angles in geopolitics, world security, economy, technology, religion, medicine and science!

We will use science!

Lisbon: Science! (and she moves her hands to do a sign of the cross and prays silently).

Professor: We are the Resistance! We need to find the vaccine! Mass produce it to save humanity! 

(TO BE CONTINUED)…

Multipolarity demands a world leader, and it’s not China

Photo from Shanghaiist

By Chester B Cabalza and Mark Payumo

Blogger's Notes:
Commentary of Academics 
(Copyright @ 2020 by Chester B Cabalza and Mark Payumo. All Rights Reserved).

The global race to combat the new coronavirus pandemic shows a litmus test at how China can become the world’s leader. The emerging great power transforms into a powerhouse that hypes philanthropic acts in many ill-stricken global cities, endowing soft power that backfires into soulless information warfare and untrustworthy COVID-19 testing kits, amidst the open-ended Armageddon. 

In December 2019, Chinese physicians breached China’s firewall, twitting messages in micro-blogging WeChat about the virus from Wuhan City. The whistle-blower doctor Li Wenliang, raised the red flag of the possible outbreak but ignored by the Chinese politburo, even before the World Health Organization declared the epidemic as a ‘global health emergency’ before it was elevated in the shortest span of time as a pandemic.  

Neither the world faults nor discriminates the Chinese people of the blame-game and racism borne out of universal abhorrence or rancour to China on COVID-19. The absence of Xi Jinping’s transparency on the early spread of the unforgiving virus has led to the large scale mutation of the coronavirus, crippling global economy in lockdown, yet resulting to unstoppable transmissions infecting more than a million people and killed over 50,000 patients worldwide, accelerating on its third and fourth wave devastations. 

Orchestrated bandwagon

Despite Washington’s flexed global military power, the United States’ overconfidence and Donald Trump’s complacence to quell the virus fell out to indispensability by politicizing and weaponizing the Chinese virus. The massive spike of American confirmed cases, the planet’s highest caseload, roll out at the veins of its financial district becoming the new epicentre that succumbs to hundreds of death, recalling the identical soreness New York has experienced since 9/11.

Distressed G7 economies in Europe topped by Italy, Spain, United Kingdom, France and Germany temporarily surrendered its woes. It proclaimed the battle against the unseen evil as the worst catastrophe since the continent hit by two world wars. The great Chinese stage of spreading the virus orchestrated a bandwagon of the Old World to the rising phoenix, a contender to derive a multipolar world system.

Netizens in a borderless world have seen anarchy from their homes. It challenged western medical system’s advancement in curing the new strain of virus. In a contagion, not only social distancing has been required but a call for economic and political distancing from China. The Waltzian neorealist approach of ensuring affected nations’ survival from coronavirus pandemic re-enacts a security dilemma to derail China’s ascent in the theatrical stage.  

The bouncing effect of the novel coronavirus strikes concurrently that it contaminates again China, the world’s original epicentre, as nations follow various interventions and responses in surviving the pandemic. Ailing developed West frightens now recovering developing East as hubs of infection. While the U.S., Italy and Spain are hardly hit by the pandemic, grieving from unprecedented death tolls, the question of social mobility and economic inequality divides the world as it faces unprecedented economic recession.

The fatigue it brought to China’s balancing act limits cooperation created by fear and mistrust on relative gains and the possibility of dependence on China’s predicted primary role over the virus it has accidentally spread out to the world. The high cost of conflict and paranoia this pandemic may take undervalues the military prowess of any major powers, as this whole flux on non-traditional security on health, it still dispenses authority from major powers, as it may resist assistance from the lone superpower as it strives for its own survival.

China’s dismay of the global order

Long dissatisfied with the international order that the U.S. has set up since its ascension by becoming a superpower after the Second World War. China when it opened up as a sleeping economy in 1978 long appealed for multipolarity to achieve its own national strategic aims. While this might play well for other nations’ desire to have an equal voice in international fora, the diffusion of geopolitical leverage has an accompanying effect of eroding U.S. influence on the world stage, the major condition Beijing needs to advance its own interests.

But what these interests might mean for the world is gradually unravelling especially in the middle of the current pandemic. To be sure, Beijing intends to fill the vacuum that America failed to act as the world’s foremost superpower or at least to have an equal footing on its hard and soft powers.

The U.S. climbed as the world’s most ready of nations on the Global Health Security Index, but it failed its position during the COVID-19, becoming the new global epicentre of the coronavirus pandemic. As a respected global leader over the past seven decades, the U.S. wilfully acted on its benevolent principle of preparing and coordinating conscientiously for a global response crisis by championing a coalition among its allies to counter any disease outbreaks. 

Nonetheless the current tide of interventions and responses on the pandemic will apparently present a realistic China-centric one-act show in a globalized world capping a forceful diplomatic campaign in combating the virus. The medical pandemonium has generally altered the global macroeconomic directions that set plurality of supervision of the world’s economy and trade in a presumptive post-COVID-19 scenario.   

Beijing’s success lies not on the spread of the microscopic lethal virus that it has spread around the world but as to what may happen to Washington and its western counterparts now bend on cooperation with China’s gradual recovery.

Multipolarity demands a new leader, but definitely it’s not China but a concert of great powers. This sobbing challenge is only an upgraded version of an interconnected world where the pandemic demonstrates resilience of our interdependence. It will somehow brighten the U.S. that it will need a new strategy to maintain its global position.