Successful Stockholm BRIX Webinar about the Health Silk Road

STOCKHOLM, April 30, 2020 (EIRNS)—An extraordinary webinar was held in Sweden on April 29, on the “The Health Silk Road—Key to the Global Fight against COVID-19,” sponsored by the Belt and Road Institute in Sweden (BRIX). The webinar pulled together ambassadors, healthcare specialists, economists, and think tankers from 12 countries, to discuss the role of the Health Silk Road, and Belt and Road, on building a global healthcare front line against the COVID-19 pandemic and other epidemics and diseases.

The speakers included Helga Zepp-LaRouche and ambassadors to Sweden from China, Serbia, and Malaysia. The Deputy Head of Mission from Pakistan also spoke. One of the most prominent Chinese virologists spoke, Prof. Dr. Wang Gui-Qiang, Director of Infectious Diseases from Peking University First Hospital; as did Prof. Goran Tomsom, Professor of International Health Systems Research, Karolinska Institute, the major health research institution in Sweden. Other speakers were co-founder of the ICHI Foundation in Norway Thore Vestby (a former member of parliament); the Director of the OBOR Italian Institute, Michele De Gasperis; Ulf Sandmark, Chairman of the BRIX; and Ms. Isabelle Hannouche, a young entrepreneur from Senegal working in Shanghai. BRIX board member Hussein Askary introduced the webinar and was the moderator. Forty-nine attended the webinar, including diplomats from 11 countries. The video of both panels will soon be available on the BRIX website.

The diplomats gave comprehensive reports from their nations about their actions against the coronavirus and the international cooperation with China in line with the Health Silk Road. The first speaker was the Ambassador of the People’s Republic of China Gui Congyou, who thanked “BRIX for providing this online platform where we join each other for timely communication on battling COVID-19 and improving cooperation.” He emphasized that “from a historical angle, a pandemic could happen at any corner of the world, and the history of humanity is a history of battles against various plagues and prevailing over them. We are confident that COVID-19 is another that will be defeated.” He said, “The Chinese government, despite facing a challenging situation itself, has been providing assistance in medical supplies to over 150 countries and international organizations, including the World Health Organization and the African Union.”

The second panel, “The Role of the Belt and Road in Building a Global Health Front Line,” was keynoted by Mrs. Helga Zepp-LaRouche, founder and president of the international Schiller Institute, who took up the background to the threat of global pandemics and how to turn around the situation and establish a new paradigm for relations among nations. She pointed to the need to implement the economic policy of the “Four Laws” of Lyndon LaRouche and a New Bretton Woods. She called for a summit meeting of the four major powers—United States, Russia, China, and India—to challenge the power of the old system of Wall Street and the City of London in order to implement that. She also referred to the April 25-26 Schiller Institute conference and invited all young people to join the Youth Call on May 9th to form a mass movement among youth for a New Paradigm. Mrs. Zepp-LaRouche was especially eager to invite the young Senegalese businesswoman Isabelle Hannouche, who also addressed the webinar, to join the Youth Call. Working as a China-Africa trade expert out of Shanghai, Hannouche had been active to direct Chinese aid for the coronavirus fight in her homeland.

Michele De Gasperis presented the impressive activities of the OBOR Italian Institute to involve Italian and Chinese business in international cooperation along the One Belt, One Road, as the Belt and Road was first called. With seven offices, two in Italy and five in China, the OBOR Italian Institute is coordinating an international network of think tanks and chambers of commerce to develop the business opportunities of the Belt and Road Initiative.

The final speaker was Ulf Sandmark, who reported on the cooperation between China and Sweden in the very advanced research in diagnostics and testing of the coronavirus. Robots for automated analysis of mass testing have been brought on a special cargo plane from China to Sweden’s Karolinska Institute/SciLifeLab.