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    Is India’s Vaccine Diplomacy a Good Idea?

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    In terms of numbers, India ranks the third worst after the US and Brazil when it comes to COVID-19 infections. At the time of publishing, the country has recorded over 12.3 million confirmed cases and more than 163,000 deaths. The BBC reports that India is facing a “severe, intensive” second wave of the pandemic. The situation in states like Maharashtra, Gujarat and Punjab has reached alarming proportions.

    How Did India Combat COVID-19 in 2020?

    Last year, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi imposed a stringent lockdown that brought economic activity to a shuddering halt. This lockdown led to a dramatic contraction of India’s GDP by 23.9% in the April-June 2020 quarter. The economy recovered somewhat in later quarters, but it experienced a recession in the 2020-21 financial year for the first time in 25 years.

    Arguably, the lockdown was a success in preventing a rapid spread of COVID-19 last year. In percentage terms, India did not do too badly. After all, it has nearly 1.4 billion people in contrast to the US population of 330 million. The daily new cases in India dramatically declined until recently when the second wave hit the country. Thanks to a young population and public health measures, India experienced a remarkably low mortality rate.

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    India has low per capita income and poor health care facilities. So, its achievement in controlling the COVID-19 outbreak has been hailed by many public health experts, including the World Health Organization (WHO). In January, India launched a massive vaccination program to fight the pandemic. This was possible because the country has a track record of mass vaccination and massive vaccine production.

    Indian manufacturers supply more than 60% of the world’s vaccines against diseases like polio and measles. Early on, the country began mass production of two COVID-19 vaccines: Covishield and Covaxin. The Serum Institute of India (SII), which partnered with the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca, had already produced and stocked approximately 70 million Covishield doses even before India granted emergency approval to their vaccine. 

    On January 16, India launched an ambitious plan to vaccinate around 300 million people by June. The world’s largest vaccination program focused first on those with high vulnerability to the coronavirus. First on the list were health care workers. They were followed by those who were 65 years or older. This ensured that the vaccine was not monopolized by the richest sections of Indian society. 

    As vaccinations have increased, the Modi government has eased restrictions in the country. Crowds have gathered at large weddings, sporting events and festival celebrations. The government lifted restrictions to stimulate economic activity. A poor country like India with a large population could not afford a lockdown for too long. However, the easing of restrictions has not only led to increased economic growth, but also rising cases of COVID-19 infections. India faces a tough balancing act between stimulating economic activity and curtailing a pandemic.

    India’s Vaccine Diplomacy

    During the pandemic, India has embarked on an ambitious foreign policy initiative. Modi announced the Vaccine Maitri initiative to supply COVID-19 vaccines to other nations only four days after India began domestic vaccinations. With the world’s largest manufacturer of vaccines, India has shipped approximately 61 million doses to 84 countries, which have included free batches. It has pledged 200 million doses for the WHO’s COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access (COVAX) initiative to ensure vaccines for 92 low and middle-income countries.

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    India began its vaccine diplomacy by distributing doses to its immediate neighbors: Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and the Maldives. The country has also exported vaccines to faraway places such as the Caribbean, where the likes of Barbados, Dominica and Jamaica have benefited from Indian aid. Leaders of countries such as Brazil and Antigua and Barbuda have publicly thanked Modi for his country’s generosity.

    As per some foreign policy experts, India’s vaccine distribution is a diplomatic masterstroke. It helps the country gain goodwill and increase its soft power. It could lead to a more peaceful neighborhood. In the future, India might win much support, strengthen its claim to a permanent seat at the UN Security Council and emerge as a great world power.

    Vaccine diplomacy might be giving a rare chance to counter China, which has launched the Belt and Road Initiative to increase its global footprint. For decades, China has backed Pakistan and, for the last few years, has increased its presence in Myanmar, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal. With Chinese influence growing in India’s closest neighbors, the country has understandably become anxious.

    In June 2020, Chinese and Indian troops engaged in a bloody hand-to-hand combat with many dying in the process. Since that clash, relations between India and China have been fraught. India has banned over 200 Chinese apps and restricted Chinese investment into the country. COVID-19 has given a unique opportunity to India — the “pharmacy of the world” — to compete with China. By shipping vaccines to low and middle-income countries, India is gaining influence at the Chinese expense whose vaccines have been questioned by Western media.

    Rich countries have failed poorer ones because they have focused on domestic programs. Unlike India, the United States, the European Union and the United Kingdom are focused completely on vaccinating their domestic populations. India’s generosity is unique and might lead to long-term gains.

    Masterstroke or Distraction?

    However, there is a counterargument that India has been premature in kicking off vaccine diplomacy. It did so before setting its own house in order. According to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, as of April 2, India has administered nearly 69 million doses, fully inoculating only 9.6 million people. That is just 0.71% of its population. India’s focus should have been getting every one of its citizens vaccinated instead of basking in complimentary tweets from foreign leaders. Such goodwill might turn out to be very transient. 

    Recently, India has slowed down its vaccine exports and speeded up its vaccination program. The government has now enrolled private hospitals in its vaccination drive, and everyone above the age of 45 is now eligible for the vaccine. Modi himself got vaccinated on March 1, boosting public faith in COVID-19 vaccines and increasing their uptake nearly four-fold. It seems that the government is paying attention to its critics.

    Time will tell whether India’s vaccine diplomacy was a bold masterstroke or an unwise distraction. It reveals that there are no easy choices for any nation during a raging pandemic.

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Wealth Inequality Breeds Health Inequality

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      In an AP article last December, Maria Cheng and Aniruddha Ghosal noted that, despite official optimism concerning the capacity of emerging vaccines to provoke the definitive decline of the COVID-19 pandemic, “the chances that coronavirus shots will be shared fairly between rich nations and the rest are fading fast.” Their fears have been confirmed.

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      Natasha Frost at The New York Times reports on how wealth inequality has led to vaccine inequality, with the potentially disastrous effect of prolonging an already year-old global pandemic. She blames the various political establishments that have allowed this to happen. “It didn’t have to be like this,” she writes. “Western governments have resisted the call from global health officials to use rarely employed aggressive powers that could have forced companies to publish vaccine recipes, share their knowledge and ramp up manufacturing, in turn leading to broader vaccine access.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Aggressive powers:

      Special tools of government designed to address real, serious and urgent problems, sometimes mobilized to prosecute wars, but never employed to modify practices that might compromise the prospect of profit by private companies

      Contextual Note

      Military aggression (invasion, war, bombing campaigns) and economic aggression (sanctions, embargoes, boycotts) are the two policy instruments contemporary governments privilege to defend what they deem to be their “national interest.” Democratic nations continue to claim, against all evidence, that aggressive and fundamentally destructive actions taken against other peoples or nations — to kill, maim or simply create economic deprivation — are efficient means designed to protect their own people’s interest. Since commercial media never question this logic, discussion of what “national interest” implies never even enters the public’s field of awareness. War and sanctions sound virile and so must be good. 

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      Whereas the English language has easily accepted “military aggression” and “economic aggression” as useful descriptive terms, the idea of “health aggression” has no place in anyone’s vocabulary. Health is not something the political infrastructure believes it can or should do anything “aggressive” about. It is both too personal and too profitable. In the US in particular, health is not considered to be something to strive for, but simply as a marketplace in which, as Cole Porter once said, anything goes (to make a profit).

      In an AP article by Cheng and Lori Hinnant that appeared earlier this month, the authors explain that the marketing policies of pharmaceutical companies are the source of what is quickly becoming a desperate situation for the majority of humankind. Companies “that took taxpayer money from the U.S. or Europe to develop inoculations at unprecedented speed say they are negotiating contracts and exclusive licensing deals with producers on a case-by-case basis because they need to protect their intellectual property and ensure safety.”

      Any rational human being with a basic understanding of language should be shocked by two words in the concluding phrase of that sentence. The first is “their.” The companies believe they exclusively own what a community built and paid for. Analyzing the logic of a supply chain and production line makes it clear that the areas they have invested in turn out to be testing, redesign, packaging and delivery. These are important features of any product. But they do not justify the claim of exclusive ownership.

      The second shocking term is “safety.” The firms deem themselves protectors of their customers’ “safety.” Their role in the process of combating the virus consists of refining the product and testing it to meet public safety standards. But the marketing attitude that guides their actions continues to privilege the idea of hoarding, seeking monopolistic advantage and exploiting scarcity in a marketplace. This poses a serious risk of undermining public safety and preventing the coordinated action that alone could lead to the elimination of a global pandemic.

      Historical Note

      During the discussions to fund the vaccines, the private companies selected for the honor of producing the vaccines destined to save the world in all probability declined to take on the burden without the assurance that the research would be fully funded and the intellectual property (IP) would be assigned to them as a guarantee of future profit. The politicians who accepted those terms were undoubtedly guided by the wisdom of the economics 101 course they attended decades ago in their youth that taught them how the focus on profit is the key to economic efficiency. The higher the profit, the greater the efficiency, they were told.

      In the past four decades, this logic has even been applied to the universities that offered those courses. They have become profit-focused institutions, dedicated to supporting the bloated salaries of the administration that “ensures” efficiency rather than the educational vocation of the institution.

      Today’s drama could stand as a model lesson for a future economics 101 course, though few would imagine that profit-driven universities will be very keen on the update. If the universities refuse, it should be taught in every high-school civics class on earth. Economics 101.1 would emphasize the perversity of an economic system that forces ordinary citizens in wealthy countries to finance through taxes the research that their government will then donate to private companies that, in turn, will inevitably claim the IP without ever investing a penny of their own money.

      This pattern of socializing private companies and endowing them with product lines that ensure massive future profits through monopolistic exploitation is not limited to the pharmaceutical sector. The giants of Silicon Valley have grown into mastodons who control not just their highly-profitable marketplace, but also people’s lives (their behavior) and minds (their thoughts), thanks to the same process.

      How did we get to this point? To answer that question would require an encyclopedia delving into questions of finance, technology, politics and culture. One obvious factor is the triumph of the idea of globalization that became an article of faith for all “serious thinkers” and most politicians in recent decades. Thomas Friedman famously summed it up with the idea that “the world is flat.” It turns out that when the only recognized motivator of any kind of action concerning human health and safety — or indeed anything else — is money and profit, any other of the needs we expect the economy to address become secondary. In classic economics, a situation of needs not being met will create the demand that a new enterprise will seek to fulfil.

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      Our pundits and economic thinkers imagine that, in a global economy, the process will be even more efficient because competition can come from any direction and supply chains can be easily reconfigured. In no time at all, the needs will be effectively and efficiently addressed. But the conditions for any new competitor to realize such a scenario require three largely unattainable conditions: extravagant funding to attain a scale of credible performance, recognition by public authorities (which often requires prior contributions to their political campaigns), and the belief in the possibility of a monopolistic position. 

      Guaranteed monopoly is the hardest to achieve for a newcomer, which is why over the past two decades, pundits have highlighted the necessity of disruptive innovation. This generally means focusing on a specific market opportunity rather than addressing a fundamental need. It also means that if the need is global, there is absolutely no chance of a newcomer having an impact. The major players are safe from new competition. Disruptive innovation is a wonderful way to spawn new gadgets or convenience products. Unfortunately, global societal needs require global societal reflection, research, coordination and concerted action.

      During the wars of the 20th century, democratic nations mobilized the “aggressive powers” provided by their laws to respond to the emergency of global conflict. This posed no challenge to the principles of democracy, where all shared the idea that such measures were required for the safety of the national population. War profiteering existed, since any intense effort creates new areas of economic opportunity, but governments were guided by the collective needs of the nation. They refused to allow policy to be dictated by the profiteers.

      With the first of what may become a series of pandemics converging with an impending global climate crisis, it might just be time for politicians to show their aggression by putting public safety ahead of private profit, even if it means revising the syllabus of economics 101.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      The Privileged Path in America

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      It is hard to figure out how anything as important as access to COVID-19 vaccines could be left to chance and uncertainty. Welcome to America’s vaccine rollout, where privilege only works some of the time. And some of the privileged just can’t seem to get it to work for them like it almost always has. Very frustrating.

      Equity, in the sense of fairness and impartiality, has never been an American strength. Rather, the nation’s history glorifies those who grab what they can get, even when what they can get is at the expense of others. “Success” itself is prized above a fair and impartial process for achieving it that has equality of opportunity at its core. While there is nothing new about this observation, its application to both the COVID-19 vaccine distribution issues and the more general drive to confront societal inequities that the coronavirus pandemic has dramatized is worthy of discussion.

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      After failing at every turn to create a national urgency to adopt and implement recognizable public health measures to address the pandemic, and amid a dizzying array of inadequate state and local solutions, it became apparent that most Americans were in it for themselves. This provides the oxygen on which privilege thrives. So, for many, making individual decisions has been freed from any collective moral imperative. The Biden administration, with quiet competence, is trying to use a new national response to the pandemic as a foundation for altering this key impediment to a more equitable society.

      People with resources, a good job, a good computer and good internet access have thrived, while many “essential” workers were left to fend for themselves. The privileged know that “essential” was often just shorthand for interchangeable people required to put themselves at risk, frequently for low pay and no benefits. Humanity wasn’t a big consideration. Worse yet, the privileged didn’t seem too troubled to know that these “essential” workers frequently headed home to a crowded apartment or multi-generational substandard housing, increased health risks and limited access to meaningful health care. The joke was clearly on them.

      Those for whom testing and contact tracing would have been paths to some measure of health security seemed less likely to have access to either, while some of those wanting to take a break in Mexico or Disneyland easily found a test and cleverly avoided the rigors of contact tracing. So the beat goes on. But to what end?

      Three Threads

      While there will be a day when masks, social distancing, testing and maybe even COVID-19 vaccines will no longer be a part of daily life for most of us, it is not clear at all that any real lessons will have been learned about how best to engender the collective will necessary to meet critical national societal needs. There are three threads that seem to be coalescing to ensure that a return to “normal” is a return to a stratified society where the privileged almost always win and the underprivileged most often lose.

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      First, there is the power of “normal” itself. The people with the most influence want a return to their normal while those with the least influence generally want something better than a return to their normal. This is understandable, but guess which team is going to win unless good government and good people step in to level the playing field.

      Second, to successfully confront inequity, it is essential to understand the impact of inequity and the value that it brings to privilege and the impediments that it brings to those without privilege. Then, those with privilege have to be willing to part with some of it. (Not necessarily a zero-sum game.) For this to occur at the systemic and institutional levels required for enduring change, some awakening will have to occur. There is a small possibility that when some of those with privilege lose anyway, as with the vaccine distribution, it may engender a deeper empathy for those who seem to lose all the time.

      Third, there is the morally bankrupt Republican Party and its shameful indifference to the suffering of even those who still seem to believe there is something there to admire. The Biden administration, Democrats in Congress and progressives everywhere have gone big and actually gotten important things legislatively accomplished to meet the current pandemic crisis. But that effort demonstrated how tenuous a hold any effort to make America better for all actually has on the nation’s essential legislative process. With all that we have gone through as a nation in the last year, you would think that maybe some moral light would have been lit in some recesses where it had not previously penetrated, yet I don’t see much evidence of that.

      A Big Deal

      For now, President Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan has been signed into law providing the legislative framework and funding for the critical elements of a national plan to confront the coronavirus pandemic and its economic fallout. And, perhaps even more significant for the future of the nation, Biden and congressional Democrats have given legislative gravitas to a progressive and activist agenda for confronting economic and social inequality in America. This is a big deal.

      As with every advance in a deeply divided nation, there will be pushback from those who have for decades cratered meaningful attempts at progressive social and economic legislation. Even the obvious inequities driven by pernicious systems and exposed in big bright lights by the pandemic haven’t broken the stranglehold that the pushback machine has on large segments of public thinking.

      In this context, the national response to every drive for racial justice in America’s history is instructive as progressives strive to use the lessons of the pandemic to inform a full and appropriate response to it and to the underlying inequities that helped fuel America’s pandemic response failures. Every time that racism boils its way to the surface, it readily becomes apparent that it is the systemic racism deniers in our midst who rally together to ensure that systemic change is avoided.

      Think of it in these terms: America wallowed in pandemic response failure not because some idiot didn’t wear a mask, but because coronavirus deniers stood in the way of a collective public health response. To alter this formula, Americans have to be separated from the cherished notion that they are all good people at heart. While it is undeniable that there are many good and decent Americans working every day to serve others at some risk to themselves, it is also shockingly obvious how easy it is for individuals to separate themselves from the common good.

      Unexamined privilege is the vehicle that often allows those who separate themselves from the common good to somehow feel good about themselves. Until this dynamic is changed, it will be hard to see how America can change for the better.

      *[This article was co-published on the author’s blog, Hard Left Turn.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More