28. Why the pandemic is only really over when it’s over for everyone and how the mass incarceration system continues as slavery’s grandchild.
It’s the second Christmas since COVID-19 pandemic erupted, swallowing the world in lockdowns, distancing and omnipresent masking. Many people are, perhaps understandably, simply tired of all the restrictions, missing basic human interactions. While during different lows of the virus we have often seen societies starting to act as if the pandemic was never there, every time it came back with vengeance. We had high hopes when vaccines started rolling out in rich countries late in 2020, but returned to nervousness when Delta had proven to push people into hospitals once more. As more and more shots were delivered, still mostly in rich countries, Omicron came around, spreading much faster than any variant before, casting many nations into lockdowns again. While some of us try to accept living with COVID and just do their best to stay safe, many others ask “will this ever end?” Research suggests it might, but not until we can come together as humans.
Vaccine nationalism and the dynamics and control of SARS-CoV-2 — easy read. C. E. Wagner et al. revisited modelling of SARS-CoV-2 spread, but this time taking into account the drastically uneven vaccine distribution around the globe and how it affects the course of the pandemic. The research was published in mid-August this year, but unfortunately the proportions stay largely the same; at the time of writing, 113 and 137 doses had been administered per 100 people in the US and UK respectively, while only 51 and 8.5 doses were delivered per 100 people in India and Africa. Take a second to digest it: UK bought and supplied more than 16 times more shots per 100 residents than all African countries combined. Before the vaccines actually arrived there were some hopes that this time we will do it right — that humans will come together, weighing the interest of our shared species higher than inter-national bickering. Programs for equal distributions were proposed (see #20) and COVAX agreement been created by the UN. But all of those beautiful thoughts basically disappeared the moment vaccines become available for order. US, UK and Europe basically purchased almost all vaccines available for months from Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and Astra-Zenecca, giving COVAX next to nothing. Even after vaccinating large amounts of our populations, and literally starting to pay people to come get their shots for free, our countries still hesitated before sharing any doses. We started merely promising a few million here or there — and if that sounds like a lot, remember that Africa alone has more than 1.2 billion people, needing over 2.5 billion shots. Not to mention numbers of others less privileged countries around the globe. Now, perhaps this is unethical, but is is scientifically illiterate, one may ask? This paper answers that basically yes. Our intuitions are correct — poorer countries with less vaccines get more people ill, leading to sustained transmission chains and more dead people. Moreover, with sustained transmission comes plenty of opportunities for the virus to mutate, developing immunity-evading connections or deadlier features. And we got Delta and now Omicron. Even though some preliminary data suggests Omicron may be less deadly than previous variants, it’s worth emphasising: we do it to ourselves. We let national interests weigh higher than human lives around the world, and ultimately everybody loses. The virus does not care about borders, cultures or what language we speak. It evolves to spread fast, to attack us better and, unfortunately, to kill as many of us as it can. Hence until we figure to collectively fight the pathogen and truly share our tools against it, this pandemic will not be over. Perhaps we will learn to live with it, and be OK with a few hundreds of thousands of people dying from it every year, but just how devastating that thought is. Do not let my tired self’s perspective build your opinion; read the paper, read the news and decide for yourself.
Theres a separate subject I am equally passionate about, where human divisions generate suffering that is simply cruel and unnecessary: racial inequity. The atrocities of enslavement of Black people in the United States and around the world are somehow generally known, although the extent and viciousness of the system that created it is often denied. Many if not most people believe slavery in the US has ended with the conclusion of the Ciivil War in 1865. This alone is somewhat surprising, since also almost everybody is aware of Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement a 100 years later — a clear indication that XXIII amendment may have theoretically abolished slavery, but done nothing to address its roots and effects. What is currently heavily disputed by conservative commentators is the connection between slavery and the mass incarceration in the US, which disproportionately impacts Black Americans. Christopher Muller’s paper provides a wealth of context on the subject.
Exclusion and exploitation: The incarceration of Black Americans from slavery to the present — easy read. The paper begins with a brief introduction on US incarceration system, which currently holds 2.1 million people, with Black Americans being more at a rate more than 6x higher than their white nationals. The number of people in the US prison system started growing rapidly in the 70s, going up more than 5-fold in the past 5 decades. But to understand the roots of this situation, Muller takes us through historical statistics and explanations. The stark differences between incarceration rates of Black Americans in the north vs south, patterns of imprisonment over time up to today’s numbers all get presented in the context of how racial exploitation and rejection drove the fates of countless lives through the past 200 years. If like me you believe that to fix something we must first accept and understand it, read it. This article is a must for anybody considering themselves open minded. The text is accessible, the figures are clear, the limitations are stated, the information is ready to digest. The official publication text is paywalled, but available with open access thanks to UC Berkeley.
