Comparing the history of the Covid-19 pandemic in Asia and Europe (as well as between Asian and European countries) aids discussion of the choices and means of a health policy. The answers to some questions may be obvious, or prove much more complex. The history of any epidemic (and a fortiori any pandemic) combines many areas: biological and ecological, medical and scientific, political, social or cultural and so on. Hence it puts health systems (in the broad sense), solidarities (intergenerational, male-female, social and international), and states very much to the test. When the conditions are right, an epidemic today internationalizes much faster than in the past as a result of capitalist globalization. The 1957 flu took 6 months to make Europe the heart of the pandemic, two months was enough for Covid-19. So, there was less time to prepare for its arrival, but there was still enough time to do so - it was lost, with the dramatic consequences that we all know. As we will see, this was not just a lack of responsiveness caused by bureaucratic dysfunctions. We don’t have to deal with a simple lack of preparation in the temporal sense of the term. It has class (bourgeois) roots.