But the fact is that we are losing the war against Covid because it was put in the hands of capitalism. Let me remind you of a few simple facts. Covid vaccines — all of them — were developed at public institutions, by public officials. That means they are public goods. Public goods are for everyone. Not just “people who can afford them.” Not even “our citizens.” Because the entire point of a “public good” is that I benefit when you consume it. Like…you know… a vaccine.
But we didn’t treat vaccines like that. We privatised them. Or at least our Presidents and Prime Ministers did. Consider this. When they made the Oxford vaccine — at Oxford — the researchers pledged to give it away. But instead, a license was given to AstraZeneca, in perpetuity. The exact same thing happened in America, with the “Pfizer” vaccine, which was really invented by a woman who was a researcher.
Big Pharma was handed vaccine patents. Without even the obligation to share the profits with the public. It’s one of the biggest cons, scams, and crimes in human history. Yes, really, it’s going to earn them trillions over the next few decades.
Why was Big Pharma handed vaccine patents? Because, in a sinister and weird turn of events, billionaires like Bill Gates seemed to intervene on their behalf, and told Presidents and Prime Ministers to give them the patents. So here we are. Billionaires literally set the health policy of the world during a pandemic — and unsurprisingly, that health policy was more capitalism. The fact is that we are losing the war against Covid because it was put in the hands of capitalism. Let me remind you of a few simple facts. Covid vaccines — all of them — were developed at public institutions, by public officials. That means they are public goods. Public goods are for everyone. Not just “people who can afford them.” Not even “our citizens.” Because the entire point of a “public good” is that I benefit when you consume it. Like…you know… a vaccine.
But we didn’t treat vaccines like that. We privatised them. Or at least our Presidents and Prime Ministers did. Consider this. When they made the Oxford vaccine — at Oxford — the researchers pledged to give it away. But instead, a license was given to AstraZeneca, in perpetuity. The exact same thing happened in America, with the “Pfizer” vaccine, which was really invented by a woman who was a researcher.
Big Pharma was handed vaccine patents. Without even the obligation to share the profits with the public. It’s one of the biggest cons, scams, and crimes in human history. Yes, really, it’s going to earn them trillions over the next few decades.
Why was Big Pharma handed vaccine patents? Because, in a sinister and weird turn of events, billionaires like Bill Gates seemed to intervene on their behalf, and told Presidents and Prime Ministers to give them the patents. So here we are. Billionaires literally set the health policy of the world during a pandemic — and unsurprisingly, that health policy was more capitalism.”
Winter 2020, Alpha. Winter 2021, Delta. Winter 2022, Omicron.
Winter 2023, Epsilon. 2024, Tau. 2025, Omega.
By now, you can easily see the dismal trend I just highlighted.
Right one cue, just as winter arrives, a new variant — a more infectious one, a vaccine resistant one, by all appearances — is poised to explode around the globe.
We are losing the war against Covid. Why? I’m going to give you the simple answer, the complicated answer, and the real answer. You’re not going to like it, especially if you’re American. I mull over restraining my anger in favour of deliberate patience as I write posts like this. So forgive me if I sound a little angry, because I’m going to fail at restraint, and you should be angry too. Because the simple answer to why we’re losing the war against Covid is: greed, indifference, and, most of all, ass-backwards, jaw-dropping stupidity.
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Since then? Our progress at fighting Covid has been abysmal, shameful, disgraceful, and ruinous. Don’t take it from me — take it from the World Bank. How bad is it for me to speak so angrily? “So worldwide, almost 4 billion vaccine doses have been administered globally. And 27.6% of the world’s population has received at least one dose of a vaccine at this point. So that sounds pretty good. But then if you break it down by country income groups, 1.1% Of people living in low income countries have received even one dose of a vaccine.”
Hence, “the situation that we see right now is absolutely unacceptable, because a large part of the world remains unvaccinated and this is a danger for all of us,” says Mamta Murthi, the World Bank’s Vice President for Human Development. “And what has become painfully clear is that the main story when it comes to vaccines is inequality,” says Raka Banerjee, the Project Coordinator.
Just 1% of people in poor countries have been vaccinated with even one dose. Words fail. Idiotic? Mind-numbing? Horrific? A moral disgrace? The only thing I can come up with is, really, is abjectly stupid.
Think about that statistic for a moment. Just 1% . That figures rises to, on average, 25% for lower middle income countries. South Africa, where the Omicron variant’s emerging, has a vaccination rate of 23%, whereas the rich West is 70% full vaccinated. That adds up to severe vaccine inequality.
How bad is it? Low income countries have a vaccination rate of… 1%.
Lower middle income countries have a vaccination rate of about 25%.
Upper middle income countries have a vaccination rate of about 70%.
High income countries have a vaccination rate of about 70%.
See how stark these vaccinate inequalities really are? But even this data severely, severely understates the problem.
People in China and India have been vaccinated — India’s “lower middle income,” and China’s “upper middle income” — but not very well, and not nearly as much as official figures probably suggest. Those two countries alone severely skew the data and make it even more lopsided. Begin to put a discount of maybe 50% on their official statistics — which is what the numbers above rely on — and the picture suddenly looks way more unequal, lower middle income countries at around maybe 15% fully vaccinated, and upper middle income countries closer to 40%, which is where the world really appears to be.
That is all why what Dr Tedros said about a year ago now has come true. We really are losing the war against Covid because we are losing the race between vaccines and variants. And we are losing the race been vaccines and variants for a very simple reason. We are not vaccinating the world nearly fast enough — or seriously enough — to prevent new variants emerging.
Let’s go back to the example of South Africa. It’s an “upper middle income country” — and yet it struggled to hit even 25% of its population vaccinated. It’s a relatively rich country in global terms. And it couldn’t get close to 50%. So what did we expect? Of course new variants were going to emerge. And those variants were going to obey the laws of epidemiology — they were going to be more infectious, and more vaccine resistant, just like Omicron is.
Now we’re in deep sh*t. Because the worst case scenario is beginning to come true.
The vaccines we have are dropping in efficacy sharply and swiftly. After six months, our existing vaccines show an insignificant effect on viral loads. Translation: they stop working. You can and should take a booster, but there’s a problem, there, too. Boosters don’t boost efficacy back up to the levels of the original vaccine — they only boost it to about half as much efficacy as the initial two doses had. That is, you’re left about 50% protected.
That is vaccine resistance in action.
What has happened this year is a predictable, depressing sequence of events. This variant, Delta, grew more and more vaccine resistant. That is what dwindling efficacy means in the real world — the virus is out there breeding, mutating, and so vaccines lose efficacy. The ones we have — or maybe I should say had. Because the fact is that unless these vaccines are not now updated every year or so to fight new mutations of existing variants, they will not continue to be much good. Hence, the need for boosters. The obvious implication of all that is that against new variants, we are probably going to need whole new vaccines.
Let me try and express all that a little more clearly and succinctly. This year, we lost the war against Delta — it was growing resistant enough to make vaccines lose efficacy in less than a year, because, of course, it was still growing and spreading and thus mutating. And that was pretty good indication that there was going to be a whole new variant. Because the endgame of “a virus is still spreading and mutating” is “a new variant is going to emerge.”
See how all that works? You should. This is a pattern by now. Every winter, a new variant arrives, just as the vaccines for the old one are dwindling in efficacy, anyways. Bang. The world goes into lockdown. Borders are closed, quarantines issued, and so forth. The last two or three years turn into forever. This cycle of disease and mutation and variation simply just keeps on going — every winter, a new big bang.
It never stops. Because, if you’ve followed all the above by now, even vaccinating the whole world with the shot that worked for the last variant probably isn’t going to work very well — and we’re nowhere close to even being able to do that.
That brings me to the part of the answer you’re not going to like, especially if you’re American. When I say the word “capitalism,” something happens to Americans. Their eyes glaze over. Their minds stop working. They’ve been conditioned, like Soviets, not to be able to think critically about the system which rules them — not even to be able to see it, in fact. They’ve been conditioned to make excuses for it, and to get angry when anyone tries to get them to think about it, in a kind of insane Stockholm Syndrome.
But the fact is that we are losing the war against Covid because it was put in the hands of capitalism. Let me remind you of a few simple facts. Covid vaccines — all of them — were developed at public institutions, by public officials. That means they are public goods. Public goods are for everyone. Not just “people who can afford them.” Not even “our citizens.” Because the entire point of a “public good” is that I benefit when you consume it. Like…you know… a vaccine.
But we didn’t treat vaccines like that. We privatised them. Or at least our Presidents and Prime Ministers did. Consider this. When they made the Oxford vaccine — at Oxford — the researchers pledged to give it away. But instead, a license was given to AstraZeneca, in perpetuity. The exact same thing happened in America, with the “Pfizer” vaccine, which was really invented by a woman who was a researcher.
Big Pharma was handed vaccine patents. Without even the obligation to share the profits with the public. It’s one of the biggest cons, scams, and crimes in human history. Yes, really, it’s going to earn them trillions over the next few decades.
Why was Big Pharma handed vaccine patents? Because, in a sinister and weird turn of events, billionaires like Bill Gates seemed to intervene on their behalf, and told Presidents and Prime Ministers to give them the patents. So here we are. Billionaires literally set the health policy of the world during a pandemic — and unsurprisingly, that health policy was more capitalism.
That’s not just a scam, it’s a scam because it’s bad economics. In this case, the optimal outcome, the “Pareto efficient” one, is for vaccines to have been a public good — as in, we share them freely with everyone across the globe.
“Oh my God! You communist! But how much would that even cost!” This is the kind of thing I get from Americans. The answer to that is around $50 billion. Sound like a lot?
Do you know how much richer Zuck and Bezos and the rest of the billionaires got during the pandemic? 62%, or $1.8 trillion.
That is, we could have vaccinated the world for a fraction of the riches billionaires gained…during the pandemic.
Bad economics.
And abject stupidity. Because when I try to explain all this to Americans, like I say, their eyes glaze over. Maybe they’re daydreaming about “influencers” or designer sneakers or whatever else helps them cope with living in a cultural wasteland in which they’re constantly exploited. So they end up ignorant and indifferent. To what? To Joe Biden’s weird double game. He keeps on “calling for an end to vaccine patents”…while his team is the one busy officially defending them at the WTO.
So because Americans can’t seem to understand this simple principle, and America is the most powerful country in the world, which sets the agenda for the West, it’s become OK to…hoard vaccines…while being happily oblivious of the most obvious facts a sane person should be aware of, like if we don’t vaccinate everyone, new variants are going to hit us too, and our vaccines are going to become useless, too.
There is little to no criticism of the shameful and disgraceful situation which has come to pass. We are losing the war against Covid. We’re not losing it in an honourable way, either — trying, and failing. We’re losing it in a humiliating way, one which history will look at with bewilderment and bafflement and shame.
We’re losing the war against Covid because of greed, indifference, and stupidity.
And that’s not changing anytime soon, because, well…take a hard look around. Do you see anyone apart from you and me and a tiny handful of people who actually care about the above? Even enough to learn the most basic facts about it? LOL. Give them their influencers, my friend. They’re too ignorant — or traumatized, or both — to give a damn about anything remotely real. The rest of us? We’ll be wearing N95 masks for the rest of our adult lives.
Umair
November 2021
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