Are We Naturally Wasteful?
Georges Bataille, the automation of labour, and the pointless “Hallelujah”
Isn’t it paradoxical that wealthy countries are stockpiling Covid vaccines instead of donating them to poor countries, going as far as to throw away the expired ones rather than help end the pandemic by sending them abroad?
The US threw away fifteen million doses between March and September 2021. Thousands of expired doses were wasted in Canada. Partly, that’s just because of the logistics of persuading enough people in any population to be vaccinated.
But as the BBC points out, there are concerns that over 240 million doses will be wasted because of over-purchasing by rich countries. “According to Human Rights Watch, 75% of Covid vaccines have gone to 10 countries. The Economist Intelligence Unit have calculated that half of all of the vaccines made so far have gone to 15% of the world’s population, the world’s richest countries administering 100 times as many shots as the poorest.”
The evolution of the Omicron variant from South Africa, from a country with only around a 35% vaccination rate (as of Nov 2021), is a predictable outcome of that hoarding.
If the rich countries were as informed, pragmatic, and technocratic as they might like to think they are, surely they’d…
