COVID at the UN: One topic, used to make many points

Unsurprisingly, the coronavirus pandemic was THE talking point at the United Nations General Assembly this week — serving as projection, promotional tool and proxy for other pressing issues put forward by world leaders in their signature annual addresses

For the United States, COVID-19 was about leadership and “a dose of hope.” For Iran, it was about the inhumanity of sanctions. Tiny Palau, largely virus-free, used its precious speech minutes to praise Taiwan for its support during the pandemic — and, not incidentally, to urge the United Nations to re-admit the island as a member state.

Unsurprisingly, the coronavirus pandemic was THE talking point at the United Nations General Assembly this week — serving as projection, promotional tool and proxy for other pressing issues put forward by world leaders in their signature annual addresses.

Through the lenses of vaccine inequality, economic disaster, scientific misinformation and social isolation, just about every president, king, foreign minister and head of state talked about the pandemic as a sweeping global catastrophe. Yet each made it into a distinctive political message that said as much about a nation and its leader as it did about the virus itself.

As the world at large has done for many months now, leaders struggled to connect the pandemic with the ways they wish to govern — and with the threats that face their attempts to do so.