U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who delivered the Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture Saturday, said about the virus: “It is exposing fallacies and falsehoods everywhere: The lie that free markets can deliver health care for all, the fiction that unpaid care work is not work, the delusion that we live in a post-racist world, the myth that we are all in the same boat.”
He said, “COVID-19 has been likened to an X-ray, revealing fractures in the fragile skeleton of the societies we have built,” adding that developed countries have “failed to deliver the support needed to help the developing world through these dangerous times.”
The speech by the U.N. chief, known as the world’s top diplomat, took aim at the vast inequality of wealth — “The 26 richest people in the world hold as much wealth as half the global population,” Guterres said — and other inequalities involving race, gender, class and place of birth.
These identity politics, he said, are seen in the world’s fragmented response to the pandemic as governments, businesses and even individuals are accused of hoarding badly needed testing, medical and other supplies for themselves.