If This Post Makes You Angry, It Should.
Apr 30, 2021
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By now, you might have heard about the catastrophe Covid’s becoming in India. Or maybe you haven’t. Then there’s Peru. South Africa. Mexico. Argentina. Indonesia.
Covid is now at the stage — if it wasn’t already — of becoming a colossal, terrible global tragedy, a catastrophe of epic proportions.
But one of a special kind. One that teaches us how ill-prepared we are, really, for an age of catastrophe.
The grim, bitter truth — one that nobody much in the West will want to hear — is that the world is suffering a Covid catastrophe because the Western approach to Covid hascreated a global catastrophe. What do I mean by that?
Poorer countries can’t get vaccines.So a second and or third wave is simply ripping through them. They’re countries like India, for example, or Mexico. These countries have made many mistakes, to be sure — India’s ultra-nationalist, Trumpist leader, Modi, just like Trump, declared victory over Covid, and then resisted doing much about it. Nations like Mexico have incredibly dense population centres through which pandemic is all but guaranteed to spread. Poverty is not just about money.
But there’s a larger truth at work here. Poorer countries can’t get vaccines.
Why is that?Becausethe West didn’t let them—and still won’t.That’s not just morally offensive, because it’s literally going to cause millions of needless deaths. It’s stupid, because new variants will come back to infect the West, too.
Why can’t poor countries get vaccines?Because the rich West hasliterally made it impossible for them to.Canada and Americablocked drugs rights waiversat the WTO for Covid vaccines. So now there is very, very limited production — instead of vaccines being open-source that can be produced across the world in many locations.
How limited are we talking? The West left the poor world to basically be supplied by one place: the Serum Institute of India. That’s one major producer for something likehalf the globe. That’s about4 billion people, in case you were wondering.
How did the Serum Institute of India end up producing a vaccine?It got lucky. It signed a deal with Oxford University. That wasback when the researchers at Oxford saidthey wanted to make vaccines free or very low cost — not just as in financially free, but donating the rights to any pharmaceutical company.
And then something dark, weird, and strange happened. According to everything I’ve read,on the advice of the Bill Gates Foundation,Oxford changed its mind.It sold its rights to AstraZeneca. Who, of course, created a giant monopoly.
That’s howhalf the worldended up in the impossible predicament of hoping for one institute in India to make all its vaccines.
That hope was always too much. Because when India’s second wave hit, thanks to Modi’s nationalist folly, it spread like wildfire. And India then basically said: “We’re keeping all these doses meant for you guys, because now there’s not even enough forus.”
Do you understand how wicked and gruesome this story really is?
Let me try to sum it up as plainly as I can.More than half the world doesn’t have enough vaccines. Not because it had to be that way. But because the West wanted it that way.Powerful institutions and figures in the West. All those “negotiators” who blocked access to vaccine patents at the WTO, on the behalf of big Pharma companies, with the assent of their Presidents and Prime Ministers. The bizarre scandal of Oxfordprivatising its vaccine after pledging not toand selling it to AstraZeneca.
What is the lesson here?
Vaccine capitalism has failed the world.In an epic, astonishing, nightmarish fashion. Why is it that one Western institution appears to have been capable of blocking the entire world from getting vastly more vaccines faster?
Becausecapitalism. Why is it that Western nations have repeatedly blocked opening vaccine patents? Because capitalism.
Think Joe Biden’s such a great guy? What about Justin Trudeau? Wonderful folks, right? Then why are they letting a massive, massive human catastrophe unfold across the world? That’s going to cause death on an horrific scale? WhichArundhati Roy has already described as a crime against humanity?
My feeling, and my bet, is that the average Westerner couldn’t give a hoot about the story above. They’ve become selfish, materialistic, individualistic, vain, stupid, ignorant — at least Anglo nations, like America and Britain have been. And so there’s no outcry in the West to vaccinate the world.
Wait, why should we do that anyways?Are you an idiot?
Sorry to sound confrontational, I guess. But you should know the answer to this question.
One, we should vaccinate the world becauseit’s the decent thing to do.That is how we prove our own moral fiber, and keep ourselves morally healthy. Otherwise, we degenerate into nations of Nietzschean narcissists, like America, beyond good and evil, where nothing matters. We lose our souls by letting atrocities persist.
Two, we should vaccine the world for an eminently pragmatic reason.The longer we wait and the longer it takes, the more new variants will mutate and spread, which will “escape” the vaccines that even we rich Westerners have, and cause havoc all over again. Want to spend another winter like the last one, because of Covid-20? I didn’t think so. It’s going to happen, though, at this rate.
Third, we should vaccinate the world because capitalism has privatised a public good. Let’s be totally clear: Covid vaccines are public goods.All of them. They werefinanced and developed with public funds, atpublic institutions,on the public dime, for public purposes. The “Oxford AstraZeneca” vaccine? It’s just theOxfordvaccine: it was imagined, created, and made in research labs — AstraZeneca just manufactures it. The mRNA vaccines? All created with public funds, in research labs, at universities.
The West, in other words, created vaccines as a public good. And then it let capitalism come along and privatise the gains.That’s why poor countries arepaying vastly higher prices than rich ones, by the way — a gruesome fact which Pharma companies explain away with corporate jargon like “vaccine prices will vary by location.”It’s just profiteering. Of the most obscene and immoral kind. Profiteering on a human tragedy, an historic catastrophe, on death of epic proportions.
Vaccines were a public good created by the West, andpublic goods are created to be shared. Why is that? Because they have “positive externalities,” aka good spillovers for all of us. Take a public park. I’m better off whenyou’re fitter, saner, kinder, because you go to the park every day. We invest in public goods preciselybecause they benefit all of us together more than they benefit each of us individually.
Put another way, how are you best off?When everyone in the world has a vaccine, fastest and cheapest. That’s when your chances of getting Covid-20 are minimised. But we are now living in the opposite world. The world is not getting vaccines fastest and cheapest — but slowest and most expensive. Why?
Because capitalism profits most when there’s artificial scarcity.That’s why more than half of humanity is now in the horrific position of relying on one institute —one— to make all their vaccines. The one institute that got lucky and struck a deal before the profiteering began. And yet one institute can’t provide all the vaccines the world needs. So the world now must pay the ransom the Pharma companies demand. But most of it can’t do that, and so it’s looking desperately, to China.
What a story. It fills me with anger, rage, disgust, of a certain white-hot kind.Vaccine capitalism is a massive, massive failure. Didn’t anyone with a working brain know it was always going to be?
This approach — destined to fail — exposes the moral hypocrisy and intellectual stupidity of the West, both. It is making itself worse off in the end, too — but I suppose that’s OK, as long as the rest of the world suffers immensely.
What a tragedy. But you know what burns me up the most? The fact that the average Westerner will never know. Never give a hoot. Never educate themselves.About the simple, damning facts above. They’ll go on living in their bubbles of self-satisfied delusion, never asking: “Howcome the world doesn’t have vaccines?” And so they’ll never hear the answer, either.
Because,for money’s sake —the money of thealreadysuper ultra mega rich, mostly — the West didn’tlet the worldhave vaccines, the very ones itcreated for the public interest reasonof giving them to an entire world,only to backtrackonce the choice had to be made. The Westchose deathon shocking, astounding global scale instead. And that, my friends, makes me wish there was a hell.
UmairApril 2021
