A YEARNING for instant gratification is usually associated with young children. They cannot think in the long term and have yet to develop impulse control. Postponement is unknown to them; they want to get everything as soon as possible.

We see the same tendency painfully at work in dealing with the Covid crisis in the West. Sanitary measures cannot be undone soon enough. Every now and then the end of the pandemic is announced. Last year premature easing in the fall and Christmas season inevitably led to new waves of contagion, resulting in tens of thousands of preventable deaths.

The explanation probably lies in the fact that our democracies are based on electoral success. A politician’s horizon does not extend beyond the next ballot, not a long-term goal.

That same short-term thinking is also reflected in the failure to prevent the current Covid crisis. Since the outbreaks of two other coronaviruses, SARS in 2002 and MERS in 2012, scientists have repeatedly warned us about a new pandemic.

A package of measures was needed to prevent this. It was estimated to cost about £14.7 billion, or 800 times less than what the Covid crisis has cost us so far. Not to mention the human tragedy of at least 10 million additional deaths from Covid-19. Yet governments have so far done nothing.

The other tendency children display is that they want to keep everything to themselves. The global vaccination campaign is another wry illustration of this. So far, 84 per cent of vaccines have been administered in rich countries. The low-income countries have to make do with 0.3 per cent of the doses.

While rich countries have a combined surplus of 2.5 billion vaccines and are planning booster campaigns, only 1 in 10 people will be vaccinated in the 70 poorest countries by the end of 2021.

Access to Covid-19 Tools Accelerator (ACT) is the global partnership set up in 2020 by the World Health Organisation (WHO) to deliver treatments and vaccines to countries in the global South. At the end of June, its funding gap was £14.4 billion, which is 0.1 per cent of the resources deployed to combat the Covid crisis.

The hoarding behaviour of Western countries is not only childish but also short-sighted. The virus knows no borders; herd immunity in one country is an illusion. In our highly connected world, the pandemic will not be overcome anywhere until it is overcome everywhere.

Experts warn that we are only a few mutations away from a virus that is resistant to vaccines. If that were to happen, we’d be back to square one. Edward Luce of the Financial Times puts it this way: “The test of the West is whether it will act on the knowledge that this virus knows no borders.”

The childish tendencies of Western democracies bode ill for tackling climate change or the next pandemic. The World Weather Attribution initiative (WWA), a collaboration between climate scientists from many countries, has been investigating the links between greenhouse gas emissions and impactful extreme weather events since 2015. Did you know that this initiative has not been funded for years?

How many devastating floods, wildfires and droughts are yet to come before we wake up and act? Ditto for fighting deadly viruses. There are already more than 10 million Covid deaths worldwide, but still there are no plans to prevent new pandemics.

Apparently, our democracies are incapable of addressing the major challenges of this century. Our social system is in need of a thorough overhaul. Time to make it work. There isn’t much time left.