COVID-19 Shows World Ill-Prepared For Preventing Pandemics- Nicaragua Presidential Adviser

LONDON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 06th August, 2020) American by birth and Sandinista by adoption, Nicaragua's presidential adviser and economist Paul Oquist told Sputnik that the COVID-19 pandemic revealed that the global community is not prepared enough to manage such disasters, neither politically nor economically.

"It is very symptomatic that the coronavirus pandemic has shown us how little prepared we are to face such high risks, how little we have invested politically and economically to prevent them," Oquist told Sputnik in an online interview ahead of the London presentation of his new book, Equilibra.

The expert, who is currently Minister Secretary of Presidency and Private Secretary for National Policies of President Daniel Ortega, warned, however, that in spite of its huge economic and social impact, COVID-19 is "small, transitory and recoverable," compared to a nuclear war or climate change.

"In the case of climate change we could reach a point of no return because it has been proven that the human being cannot withstand temperatures above 50 degrees Celsius [122 degrees Fahrenheit]," he noted.

Oquist's first recommendation in this regard is for the United States to adopt binding commitments to reduce carbon emissions by 45 percent by 2030, and reducing them to zero across the world by 2050.

"If we do this, we have a chance of lowering the temperature by 1.5 �C, and in doing this avoid fatal consequences," he said.

He recalled that Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega in 2015 suggested that the most polluting countries since the Industrial Revolution should compensate those that are now paying the consequences.

"Some people might think that this is a very radical proposition, but all the world's legal systems, from the Napoleonic Code to the Common Law [Anglo-Saxon law] have established that whoever causes the damage must pay compensation," the expert said.

In regard to the nuclear threat, Oquist thinks that the end of the so-called Cold War in the 1990s has brought about the demobilization of the anti-nuclear movement that used to be very strong in the 1960s.

It looks as though we have grown accustomed to living with nuclear weapons in a world where there are now more than 4,000 nuclear warheads, he said.

Oquist, whose book gives a detailed account of various political incidents that have placed the world on the edge of extinction by a nuclear attack, thinks that the solution starts with nuclear disarmament.

We should not be playing Russian roulette with nuclear arms, the author warned, after suggesting that a fair solution would be to start with gradual disarmament by both the countries that have admitted being in possession of nuclear warheads and those that keep them in secrecy.

The economist explained that the second volume of his book discusses Imperialism and its different stages, as he believes it is necessary reading for understanding the unilateral coercive measures currently used by the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union against other nations, organizations and individuals.

"They imposed themselves as police officers, attorneys, judges and wardens over the rest of the world, even though no one has bestowed such titles upon them, or given the right to judge everyone else," he noted.

According to Oquist, these coercive measures with an extra-territorial focus that are being enforced against countries like Nicaragua, Cuba and Venezuela, even during the COVID-19 pandemic, also count as a crime against humanity, according to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.