There are billions of dollars available for warfare and mass destruction but a pittance available for medical research and nothing for those who cannot afford health care. What a lovely world we live in.

@David1955 A good, if sad, analysis. In the UK I feel that the Health service was unknowingly designed to cope with a pandemic such as now. It has been underfunded massively by people who can cope. Without wealth people cannot cope with such massive drains on resources so it is no surprise that the vision sprang from labour. The way in which the UK NHS and researchers coped has vindicated the efforts of labour politicians keeping it going under resourced.

I personally do not see how any country can justify NOT establishing a future National Health service in their country since it was the lowest paid who kept the country mostly alive, well resourced and fed. Each individual in return needs to do anything the NHS and research teams require . Governments have been surplus to requirements in this fieldl. Any chance of it being OUTSIDE politics?

Well our health system in Australia isn't socialised medicine, but what we older types remember is that we had no national health system in Australia until the first one in the 1970s by a Labor Government, opposed bitterly by the Right and by most doctors, then scrapped by the Right when they won government, reintroduced by another Labor government a few years later opposed by the Right, who have attempted to abolish it and cut it back at every opportunity since then, but now it's so popular they sort of can't, though given half a chance they still would. Moral of story? Right Wingers hate national health systems with an irrational hatred matched only by their adoration of billions wasted on the military and corporate handouts. Same the world over. It's in their brain dead ideological DNA.