It is January 2021, and the Florida-born, Edinburgh-based professor of global public health is looking back on the pandemic year, marveling and despairing at opportunities lost. “We must race to make up for the time lost during two months of passivity,” Sridhar concluded. When it mattered most, no nation in what was once grandly called “the West” even really bothered to try. I don’t think it was ever on the table, and it’s certainly not on the table now. By the time we get to the spring, I don’t think anybody was thinking about it in any real terms.
