Pandemic of the Unvaccinated
The real vaccine denial is coming from inside the house
Has the omicron variant — and the prospect of more variants to come, with attendant lockdowns, shutdowns, cancellations and, of course, mass deaths — got you furious?
Yeah, me too.
And like the saying goes, this is a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” Every time a virus reproduces in a human body, it has a small chance of mutating. Given enough mutations, even very rare outcomes — like those that confer vaccine resistance, increased transmissibility, and/or increased lethality — have a chance of cropping up.
Any policy or choice that leads to preventable infections is the epidemiological equivalent of showering Covid-19 with free tickets to a lotto whose grand prize is the end of our civilization and possibly our species.
Given all that, it’s easy to get angry at the people who choose not to get vaccinated, and even angrier at the grifters who sell them on vaccine denial, while pushing bizarre mix of quack remedies from the weirdest corners of the Paltrow-Industrial Complex. The former have allowed themselves to be frightened and confused into risking all our lives, the latter are profiting handsomely from it.
But you know where you’ll find the lion’s share of viral mutation opportunities? The Global South, among the 2.5 billion people of the 125 poorest countries on Earth, where the vaccination rate is 2.6% and where vaccines will not be universally available until as late as 2024.
That’s the true meaning of the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” — the infections that race through populations that we have chosen to leave unvaccinated.
And it was a choice. As Moderna has quietly admitted, new mRNA factories could be stood up throughout the Global South in 3–4 months. Why not? The world’s largest vaccine factories are already located in the world’s poorest countries.
The decision not to allow poor people to make their own vaccines was grounded in a greedy ideology and plain old greed. Bill Gates’s personal intervention to stop the Cambridge vaccine from being put in the public domain was derived from his burning ideological insistence that all knowledge should be in private hands.
But Gates alone couldn’t keep vaccines away from the world’s poorest people. The shills for Big Pharma — sellouts like Howard Dean — have swarmed DC and Geneva to block the WTO patent waiver that the rich world promised the poor world 20 years ago. Despite Biden’s initial (and seismic) support for a waiver, the process has been halted by profit-seeking pharma bros who literally don’t care how many variants their greed gives rise to.
At Matt Taibbi and Katie Halper point out in this week’s installment of their Useful Idiots podcast, anyone who’s pissed off at Americans who refuse to get vaccinated and conspiracy mongers who prey on them should be in a thermonuclear rage over the 2.5 billion unvaccinated people in the world’s poorest 125 nations, and the pharma execs whose pursuit of billions of dollars trump the preservation of those billions of lives.
We don’t know whether omicron emerged from the Global South. Early first reports of the variant came from South Africa, yes, but that’s not because South Africa is a backwards place where variants fester due to poor public health, but rather because South Africa has such a sophisticated public health system.
Why is South Africa’s public health system so sophisticated? The hard lessons of history. South Africa’s HIV epidemic brought the nation to its knees, prompting waves of deaths that were amplified by the Gates Foundation’s meddling at the WTO to prevent a patent waiver that would allow the country to make its own anti-retroviral medicines (sound familiar?).
The legacy of Big Pharma’s obstructions during the HIV crisis in sub-Saharan Africa is a huge population of immunocompromised people — people who are not only at heightened risk from Covid-19, but who will also take longer to recover from infections. The longer an infection lingers, the more chances it has to mutate into a harmful variant.
Pharma shills from Howard Dean on down like to peddle the racist lie that brown people are too primitive to make their own vaccines. The reality is that the post-colonial nations of the Global South have been kneecapped by global pharma policy that gave precedence to pharma shareholders over human lives.
You can’t separate the profiteering from the racism. As this week’s On the Media podcast recounts, vaccine hesitancy is alive and well in Zambia, where people mistrust American health science because they know all about the Tuskegee Airmen experiments and correctly believe that US authorities are willing to collude in the destruction of Black bodies.
That’s why Anthony Fauci’s insistence — on this week’s Science Vs. podcast — that African nations are calling for a halt to vaccine donations rings so hollow. The world’s poorest countries may not want our charity, but they assuredly do want what’s due to them, as part of the WTO agreement: the right to make their own medicine, as part of their own public health systems.
Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction author, activist, and blogger. He has a podcast, a newsletter, a Twitter feed, a Mastodon feed, and a Tumblr feed. He was born in Canada, became a British citizen and now lives in Burbank, California. His latest nonfiction book is How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism. His latest novel for adults is Attack Surface. His latest short story collection is Radicalized. His latest picture book is Poesy the Monster Slayer. His latest YA novel is Pirate Cinema. His latest graphic novel is In Real Life. His forthcoming books include The Shakedown (with Rebecca Giblin), a book about artistic labor market and excessive buyer power; Red Team Blues, a noir thriller about cryptocurrency, corruption and money-laundering (Tor, 2023); and The Lost Cause, a utopian post-GND novel about truth and reconciliation with white nationalist militias (Tor, 2023).
