Map of life expectancy at birth from Global Education Project.

Saturday, April 10, 2021

Hoarding: Buried Alive

The U.S. and some other wealthy countries are making progress toward vaccinating enough people to achieve herd immunity. Whether we will actually get there depends on whether disinformation promulgated mostly by conservative propagandists stops people from doing what's right for themselves, their families, their community, and their country -- which for example 40% of Marines have refused to do. But even if we can overcome this insanity, we have an even bigger problem.


So far 87% of vaccine doses have gone to high or upper middle income countries, and only 0.2% to people in low income countries. That's because the rich countries bought up all the doses. So what, you say? Those are shithole countries anyway, we're rich because we're better and smarter and whiter and we deserve to get the vaccine first. The problem, Tucker, is that as the virus continues to circulate among the billions of people in Africa, Asia and South America who will not have access to vaccines, it will continue to mutate, and then it will come back and get us and our vaccines won't work any more. Then we'll be right back where we were in November. It is imperative, as a matter of urgency, that the rich countries fund a massive effort to vaccinate the world. It is a small world after all.

1 comment:

mojrim said...

This is really a demonstration that "conservatives" both (a) aren't and (b) have no moral underpinning. Conservatism is placing the community before the individual; this is raw, i've-got-mine-fuck-you libertarianism.