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    “Freedom” Failed to Set Americans Free

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    A little over a month ago, those who were fully COVID-19 vaccinated in America were feeling pretty good about themselves and their prospects for a summer of wining, dining and a bit of travel. The kiddies, even though unvaccinated, could for some unexplained reason do camp, amusement parks and movies with a return to full in-person schooling to come. And just to show how far we had come in turning back the viral tide, those masks could be washed and stored away to await the next pandemic.

    So, what happened? First, a lot of ignorant and selfish people decided not only to stay that way, but to avoid COVID vaccinations as well. They started getting sick and dying, but not enough of them did so to end the plague. Instead, they just spread the disease, now a highly contagious variant, to other unvaccinated people. Then, something really bad happened: It was soon discovered that those ignorant and selfish people were also spreading the disease to vaccinated people, who just haven’t started dying in large numbers, at least not yet.

    Why the US Will Not Achieve Herd Immunity

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    Meanwhile, the commercial machine and its political allies were ramping up to open everything and let the good times roll. It quickly became hard to find a seat at the bar or a hotel room at the beach. Airports and airplanes were filled again with vacationing families, rental cars were so scarce that it is hard to imagine that turnaround time included a drop of disinfectant, and those ever-popular buffet tables were dusted off for the hungry hoards. Forgetting your mask at home or in the car was deemed to be of little consequence.

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    The US federal government response was to go all in on vaccines as the obvious path to public health and commercial revitalization. The vaccines are now everywhere to be had and free of charge. The only problem with this plan is that it is playing out in America, where freedom is defined by way too many as not having to do anything you don’t want to do that you can get away with. The well-being of others be damned.

    This situation would be easy to ignore if it involved only a fringe group of pock-marked anti-vaccine individualists whose children regularly get the measles and who never go to school. But this time, for some reason, the vaccine-resistant crowd also includes a large percentage of Republicans who are not pock-marked and whose children get a whole raft of vaccines so they can go to school. Then throw in a bunch of members of religious covens whose leaders are chatting with their god about this issue and then let the flock in on the big secret that their god definitely isn’t vaccinated against COVID-19 (even though there seems to be some disagreement about god’s smallpox vaccination status).

    “Freedom”

    There are more ironies here than I can keep up with. Let’s start with “freedom” of choice. Many of those resistant to vaccines resist government “interference” in personal health choices, even though many of those same people are fully engaged in trying to get that same government to prevent women from making their own reproductive choices. Think about that for a moment.

    More ironic yet, many of those in the “freedom” crowd seem untroubled by most government health mandates, yet all of a sudden, putting a vaccine in their bodies to help themselves and others avoid the ravages of a relentless virus has become some political and social litmus test for them. Seatbelt requirements, drinking and driving prohibitions, no smoking in restaurants, a host of required vaccines for employment, travel and schooling all make the good health mandate list. Meanwhile, mindless resistance to life-saving COVID vaccines and masking requirements has become a right-wing badge of honor, generally until the bodies of right-wing family and friends start piling up.

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    However, maybe the grandest irony of all is that the leader of the pack of virus resisters, Donald Trump, is himself fully vaccinated, as are at least his wife and the precious Ivanka. It is bad enough that the Trump clan lied its way to prominence and supposed wealth and that when empowered to do the right thing almost always did the wrong thing. Then, when a pandemic was inserted into the mix, the whole crew conspired to undermine any meaningful national response while over 500,000 people in America died on their watch. While others were gasping for their last breath, Trump got vaccinated just to make sure it wouldn’t be him on that ventilator.

    You would think that as the actions of the Trump clan played out before adoring eyes, those ignorant and selfish acolytes would be pushing others out of the way to get vaccinated. But instead, they can’t wait to parade their “freedom” from vaccine tyranny at every super spreader event they can find, while the vaccinated and protected leader of the pack cheers them on. This seems to work really well until that stairway to heaven leads to a COVID ward in a local hospital surrounded by other ignorant and selfish people, many of whom now use their last breathes to beg for the vaccine.

    Another Wave

    In the face of this insanity, it seems that it is slowly dawning on some public officials that another wave of deadly COVID disease and disorder is closing in. Lots of parents are suddenly worried about their children, some private concerns are worried about something other than their short-term bottom line, and lots of people anticipating a return to crowded workplaces and those already there are staying home. There are even a few people with September travel plans suddenly concerned that playa wherever will be a petri dish when they get there. More importantly, it may be sinking in that there is only one way out of this: mandated vaccines wherever the authority exists to mandate them.

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    To do this, there can be no more coddling of the ignorant and selfish. Get vaccinated or get out. Everywhere that the federal government has the authority to do so should require proof of vaccine for employment and entry. Start with federal buildings, museums and entertainment venues, airplanes and trains, and the military and military bases. Examine every interstate commerce authority for ways to tighten the vise. No vaccine, no entry, period.

    In those pathetic states and localities where resistance overwhelms public health, everything that can be done to isolate those populations from the rest of us needs to be done. No conventions in Atlanta, no cruise ships docking in Miami, interstate highway dead zones, hotel and restaurant chains shuttering their venues, testing and mask mandates for those who knowingly come in contact with the unvaccinated while engaging in interstate commerce, and no event licenses or advertising dollars to sports and entertainment venues that won’t mandate vaccines for entry.

    If this gets done before the viability of today’s vaccines begins to wane or is crushed by new COVID-19 mutations, Americans, at least, have a chance to put the pandemic behind them. We are lucky that we have this opportunity at all, but we can only take advantage of it if we move swiftly and decisively to mandate vaccines and isolate those who won’t comply. If accomplished, America might then have the moral authority, the scientific and manufacturing strength, and the financial resources to lead the rest of the world to the same place.

    *[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

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      The World Needs a People’s Vaccine

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      A recent Yahoo News/YouGov poll found that worries about the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States are at their lowest level since it began. Only half of Americans are either “very worried” (15%) or “somewhat worried” (35%) about the virus, while the other half are “not very worried” (30%) or “not worried at all” (20%). But the news from around the world makes it clear that this pandemic is far from over, and a story from Vietnam highlights the nature of the danger. 

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      Vietnam is a COVID success story, with one of the lowest rates of infection and death in the world. Vietnam’s excellent community-based public health system prevented the coronavirus from spreading beyond isolated cases and localized outbreaks, without a nationwide lockdown. With a population of 98 million people, Vietnam has had only 8,983 confirmed cases and 53 deaths. However, more than half of Vietnam’s cases and deaths have come in the last two months, and three-quarters of the new cases have been infected with a new “hybrid” variant that combines the two mutations detected separately in the Alpha (UK) and Delta (India) variants.

      Vietnam is a canary in the pandemic coal mine. The way this new variant has spread so quickly in a country that has defeated every previous form of the virus suggests that this one is much more infectious.

      COVID-19 Variants

      This variant must surely also be spreading in other countries, where it will be harder to detect among thousands of daily cases, and will therefore be widespread by the time public health officials and governments respond to it. There may also be other highly infectious new variants spreading undetected among the millions of cases in Latin America and other parts of the world.

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      A new study published in The Lancet medical journal has found that the Alpha, Beta (South Africa) and Delta variants are all more resistant to existing vaccines than the original COVID-19 virus, and the Delta variant is still spreading in countries with aggressive vaccination programs, including the United Kingdom. 

      The Delta variant accounts for a two-month high in new cases in Britain and a new wave of infections in Portugal, just as developed countries ease restrictions before the summer vacation season, almost certainly opening the door to the next wave. The UK, which has a slightly higher vaccination rate than the United States, had planned a further relaxation of restrictions on June 21, but that is now in question.    

      China, Vietnam, New Zealand and other countries defeated the pandemic in its early stages by prioritizing public health over business interests. The US and Western Europe instead tried to strike a balance between public health and their neoliberal economic systems, breeding a monster that has now killed millions of people. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 6 to 8 million people have died, about twice as many as have been counted in official figures. 

      Vaccinating the World

      Now, the WHO is recommending that wealthier countries that have good supplies of doses postpone vaccinating healthy young people and instead prioritize sending vaccines to poorer countries where the virus is running wild. President Joe Biden has announced that the US is releasing 25 million doses from its stockpiles, most of which will be distributed through COVAX, the WHO’s global vaccine-sharing program, with another 55 million to follow by the end of June. But this is a tiny fraction of what is needed. 

      Biden has also agreed to waive patent rights on vaccines under the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) TRIPS rules, formally known as the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights. But that has so far been held up at the WTO by Canada and right-wing governments in the UK, Germany, Brazil, Australia, Japan and Colombia. People have taken to the streets in many countries to insist that a TRIPS Council meeting on June 8-9 must agree to waive patent monopolies.

      Since all the countries blocking the TRIPS waiver are US allies, this will be a critical test of the Biden administration’s promised international leadership and diplomacy. So far, Biden’s team has taken a back seat to dangerous saber-rattling against China and Russia, foot-dragging on the nuclear deal with Iran, and war-crime-fueling weapons peddling to Israel and Saudi Arabia.

      Ending international vaccine apartheid is not just a matter of altruism or even justice. It is a question of whether we will end this pandemic before vaccine-resistant, super-spreading and deadlier variants fuel even more toxic new waves. The only way humanity can win this struggle is to act collectively in our common interest.

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      Public Citizen has researched what it would take to vaccinate the world and concluded that it would cost only $25 billion — 3% of the annual US budget for weapons and war — to set up manufacturing plants and distribution hubs across the world and vaccinate all of humanity within a year. Forty-two progressives in Congress have signed a letter addressed to President Biden to urge him to fund such a plan.

      If the world can agree to make and distribute a people’s vaccine, it could be the silver lining in this dark cloud. The ability to act globally and collectively in the public interest is precisely what we need to solve so many of the most serious problems facing humanity. For example, the UN Environment Program (UNEP) warns that we are in the midst of a triple crisis of climate change, mass extinction and pollution. Our neoliberal political and economic system has not just failed to solve these problems. It actively works to undermine efforts to do so, granting people, corporations and countries that profit from destroying the natural world the freedom to do so without constraint. 

      Neoliberalism

      That is the very meaning of laissez-faire — to let the wealthy and powerful do whatever they want, regardless of the consequences for the rest of us or even for life on Earth. As economist John Maynard Keynes reputedly said in the 1930s, laissez-faire capitalism is the absurd idea that the worst people, for the worst reasons, will do what is best for us all. Neoliberalism is the reimposition of 19th-century laissez-faire capitalism, with all its injustices, inequality and oppression, on the people of the 21st century, prioritizing markets, profits and wealth over the common welfare of humanity and the natural world our lives depend on.     

      Berkeley and Princeton political theorist Sheldon Wolin called the US political system, which facilitates this neoliberal economic order, “inverted totalitarianism.” Like classical totalitarianism, it concentrates ever more wealth and power in the hands of a small ruling class, but instead of abolishing parliaments, elections and the superficial trappings of representative government as classical totalitarianism did, it simply coopts them as tools of plutocracy, which has proved to be a more marketable and sustainable strategy.

      But now that neoliberalism has wreaked its chaos for a generation, popular movements are rising up across the world to demand systemic change and to build new systems of politics and economics that can actually solve the huge problems that neoliberalism has produced. 

      In response to the 2019 uprising in Chile, its rulers were forced to agree to an election for a constitutional assembly, to draft a constitution to replace the one written during the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship, one of the vanguards of neoliberalism. That election has now taken place, and the ruling party of President Sebastian Pinera and other traditional parties won less than a third of the seats. So, the constitution will instead be written by a super-majority of citizens committed to radical reform and social, economic and political justice.

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      In Iraq, which was also swept by a popular uprising in 2019, a new government seated in 2020 has launched an investigation to recover $150 billion in Iraqi oil revenues stolen and smuggled out of the country by the corrupt officials of previous governments. In 2003, former exiles flew into Iraq on the heels of the US-led invasion “with empty pockets to fill,” as a Baghdad taxi driver told a Western reporter at the time. While American forces and US-trained Iraqi death squads destroyed their country, they hunkered down in the Green Zone in Baghdad and controlled and looted Iraq’s oil revenues for the next 17 years. Now, maybe Iraq can recover the stolen money its people so desperately need and start using its oil wealth to rebuild that shattered country.

      In Bolivia, also in 2019, a US-backed coup overthrew its popular indigenous president, Evo Morales. But the people of Bolivia rose up in a general strike to demand a new election and Morales’ Movement for Socialism (MAS) party was restored to power. Now, Luis Arce, the economy minister under Morales, is Bolivia’s president.

      Around the world, we are witnessing what can happen when people rise up and act collectively for the common good. That is how we will solve the serious problems we face, from the COVID-19 pandemic to the climate crisis to the terminal danger of nuclear war. Humanity’s survival into the 22nd century and all our hopes for a bright future depend on building new political and economic systems that will simply and genuinely “do what is best for all of us.”

      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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      Why the US Will Not Achieve Herd Immunity

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      The problem with the COVID-19 pandemic is that we don’t know if we’re coming or going. It’s as if we’re swimming far from shore, overwhelmed by one wave after another, and we’re unsure if we’re heading toward land or away from it.

      China was the early face of COVID-19, but it hasn’t faced many infections since spring 2020. Europe, like the United States, has experienced successive outbreaks. Brazil continues to be hit hard, while Turkey is seeing a reduction of cases from a mid-April surge. Thailand and Cambodia are only now dealing with their first major upticks in the disease.

      Where India Went Wrong

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      But the real surprise has been India. Early on in the pandemic, journalists and scientists were trying to figure out why the coronavirus had made so little mark on the subcontinent and left so few deaths in its wake. Now, after a collective sigh of relief following a modest surge in late summer and fall last year, India is now overwhelmed by over 400,000 cases and more than 4,000 deaths a day, which are both likely to be undercounts.

      There are several reasons for India’s current catastrophe. A more infectious variant started to appear in the population, which the World Health Organization this week labeled a global health risk. The Indian government was not only unprepared for the crisis, but it was dangerously cavalier in its approach to the disease. After last year’s surge, it grew lax on testing and contact tracing. Nor did it put resources into the country’s inadequate medical system or in stockpiling key supplies like oxygen.

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      Then there are the errors of commission. The government did nothing, for instance, to prevent Kumbh Mela, a Hindu religious event last month that drew millions of pilgrims to a holy location on the Ganges, from turning into the largest super-spreader event on the planet. Prime Minister Narendra Modi even continued to hold mass political rallies as the COVID numbers began to rise.

      When it comes to vaccines, the government has been slow to order doses, distribute them to the population and secure the raw materials to scale up manufacturing. Although India is the world’s largest producer of COVID vaccines, less than 3% of Indians are fully inoculated against the disease.

      Well, that’s India, you might be saying to yourself. They have a Trump-like fanatic for a leader. Their medical system has long been inadequate. It’s an obvious place for COVID to have a final encore.

      In the United States, meanwhile, the number of cases has fallen dramatically since January. Hospitals no longer face overcrowding. More than a third of the population is fully vaccinated. The Biden administration is expecting that the country will return to some semblance of normality this July. But wasn’t it a similar complacency that proved India’s undoing? So, is India the ghost of America’s past or a taste of things to come.

      Our Herd Problem

      In early 2020, the scientific community went into hyperdrive to develop not one but several vaccines against COVID-19. In the US, the government and the medical community worked overtime to set up the infrastructure to get doses into arms around the country. Clinics and volunteers have jumped into action at a community level to make sure, as of this week, that 58% of adults have gotten at least one shot and over 70% of those older than 65 are fully vaccinated.

      But all this effort is now hitting up against resistance. Or hesitancy. Or barriers to access. States are cutting back on their vaccine orders from the federal authorities. Daily vaccination rates have dropped nearly 20% from last week. Employers are basically bribing people to get their shots. Millions of people aren’t even bothering to show up for their second doses.

      Barriers to access is perhaps the easiest problem to address. According to a recent survey, 72% of African-Americans and Latinos want to get vaccinated, but 63% reported that they didn’t have enough information about where to get a shot.

      While lack of information may well be the reason why some Americans have yet to sign up for their vaccinations, a hard-core resistance has developed to vaccines in this country — and COVID vaccines in particular. According to polling in April, around 45% of Republicans report that they’ll never get the vaccine. In all, as much as 37% of Americans are now saying that they’re going to opt-out. That means that tens of millions of doses are now chasing the remaining 5% of Americans who want to be vaccinated and haven’t yet gotten their first shot.

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      This resistance has nothing to do with a lack of information about how to sign up for a shot. It’s all about misinformation: that the vaccine is unnecessary, that it’s dangerous, that it comes with a microchip that will track you forever.

      Recently, Republican pollster Frank Luntz set up a focus group of vaccination-hesitant, Donald Trump voters to see what it would take to convince them to get shots. It was not an easy crowd. The husband of one of the participants had gotten seriously ill from COVID — and she stilldidn’t want to get vaccinated. In over two hours of discussion, Luntz brought in such vaccine-boosters as a former head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Senator Bill Cassidy, and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy — and still, the participants barely budged.

      Only after several emotional stories from former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and a final round of facts from the CDC official did they start to change their minds. “I would say I was probably 80% against when this started today,” one man said. “Now I’m probably 50-50-ish.”

      Luntz considered that a success. But in this age of Twitter, it’s not a workable model to expect skeptics to sit still for more than two hours while Republican Party grandees and noted doctors barrage one small group after another with stories and facts.

      A more representative reaction to such attempts by Republican Party influencers is what happened when Ivanka Trump posted selfies of her own vaccination. Twitter responses included: “‘Love your family but this is a huge NO for me & my family. Will be praying you do not get any of the horrible [side-effects].’ Others replied, ‘Please stop promoting this nonsense,’ ‘HARD PASS,’ and ‘Sorry, don’t trust it.’”

      Even more concerning, some anti-vaxxers are already planning to use fake vaccination cards to get into public events. Hundreds of sellers have appeared on eBay, Facebook and Twitter to hawk such cards. In this way, “live free or die” is quickly becoming “live free and kill.”

      In a nutshell, the US won’t achieve herd immunity because a significant portion of the herd is suffering from mad cow disease. Whatever the reasons for this obstinacy — anti-government, anti-science, anti-liberal — it will ensure that large pockets of this country will continue to play host to a very infectious disease.

      This resistance potentially puts the US in the same category as the Seychelles. An island nation in the Indian Ocean, the Seychelles has the highest rate of vaccination in the world. More than 60% of the population is fully vaccinated. But that still hasn’t been enough to ward off COVID. The Seychelles is now experiencing its largest outbreak, which, on a per capita basis, is even larger than what has overtaken India.

      The same thing might happen again in America, for instance in states with very low vaccination rates, like Mississippi and Idaho. When it comes to COVID-19, the US is only as strong as its weakest links.

      Perennial Pandemic

      When I lived in New York City, I used to wonder why my apartment was so overheated in the winter. It turns out that the heating systems in old buildings had been designed (or redesigned) to accommodate open windows in winter. During the flu pandemic in 1918-19, open windows and greater circulation of air were supposed to guard against infection.

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      Modern societies were once structured to handle periodic outbreaks of infectious diseases, from the steam heating in buildings to the TB sanatoriums that dotted the landscape. Americans braced for outbreaks with greater frequency than the cyclical reappearance of the cicadas. Three major waves of cholera struck the United States between 1832 and 1866. Typhoid killed 25,000 people in New York in 1906-07. The flu in 1918, diphtheria in the 1920s, polio in the first half of the 20th century: Americans became accustomed to infectious diseases as a way of life.

      COVID-19 isn’t going to disappear completely. It will return, again and again, just like variants of the flu or that other coronavirus, the common cold. If we’re lucky, it will come back in a less virulent form or the antibodies in our systems — those of us who received vaccinations — will render it so. If we’re not lucky, COVID-19 will generate ever more infectious strains that overwhelm us on a periodic basis.

      In the best-case scenario, what’s happening in India today is COVID-19’s last gasp. With the worst-case scenario, India is our future. So, don’t delete your Zoom app or give up your home office. Don’t throw away those masks. When it comes to infectious disease, we are all dependent on the herd.

      That’s great if you’re living in South Korea or New Zealand where compliance is second nature. But in America, the home of the free, the brave and the stupid, the herd may prove to be our collective undoing.

      *[This article was originally published by FPIF.]

      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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      Bill Gates and the Zero-Sum Vaccination Game

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      The debate is raging once again about the true origin of COVID-19. Was it zoonotic, originating in a bat cave and then infecting exotic meat in Wuhan’s wet market as the majority of scientists claimed throughout 2020? At the approach of the November election, US President Donald Trump preferred to believe the pandemic was a plot to destroy his presidency conducted by a man he previously called an intimate “friend,” China’s President Xi Jinping. The virus was already spreading when Trump explained to World Economic Forum in Davos the nature of his relationship with Xi: “He’s for China, I’m for the US, but other than that, we love each other.”

      Four months later, Trump began contradicting scientists and blaming Xi’s China by claiming “that the virus originated in a laboratory and was accidentally released.” In September, he preferred to suggest to his voters that COVID-19 was the result of an Asian conspiracy designed to undermine his presidency. This sparked a wave of anti-Asian attacks in the US that have continued to this day.

      Prominent scientists today recognize that Trump’s initial assessment may have been right. Their colleagues who dismissed the idea of an accidental release of the virus from a Wuhan laboratory were either misled or disingenuously defensive of an equally unproven thesis. The scientists may have been impelled to reject the suspicion of a laboratory accident not only out of a lack of direct evidence, but also out of fear of the political blame game the president was beginning to exploit to distract attention from his own failure to respond appropriately to the crisis.

      Trump obviously preferred to see the war against a virus as a PR opportunity to bolster his image as a fearless leader. Allowing politicians to place blame on China, even for an accident, might have become as dangerous for the world as the virus itself, adding to the reigning misery rather than resolving the mystery of the origin of the disease.

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      Science itself and its public image have taken a hit from this ongoing catastrophe. The honored, if not revered Dr. Anthony Fauci admitted to prioritizing the distribution of masks among the medical community above the general public at a time when little was still known about how contagious COVID-19 was and how it spread. Political leaders across the globe, including Trump, all found themselves in a thankless position as they were required to demonstrate their leadership with insufficient knowledge of the nature of the challenge and a penury of material means to confront it.

      Many deserve to share the blame for a situation that, despite progress with vaccines, is still in many ways worsening. But, as Alexander Zaitchik exposes in an important article in The New Republic, the person perhaps most to blame for our global failure to respond effectively is neither a scientist nor a politician. His name is Bill Gates.

      Most rational people would reason that a global crisis requires a global response. Most realists recognize that in a civilization dominated by sovereign nation-states, summoning a unified response to any global crisis will never be easy. Humanity’s quasi-universal awareness of the problem of global warming over the decades demonstrates the difficulty of mobilizing humankind to implement even a minimalist response.

      In his article, “How Bill Gates Impeded Global Access to Covid Vaccines,” Zaitchik narrates a depressing story that began in February 2020, when the nature of the COVID-19 threat had become clear. In conformity with its mission, the World Health Organization (WHO) coordinated a “research and innovation forum to mobilize international action” aimed at combating the spreading epidemic. It sought to “maintain broad and open channels of communication, since collaboration and information-sharing minimize duplication and accelerate discovery.”

      Collaboration and sharing of science would be critical to any effective response. With most research publicly funded — a point Mariana Mazzucato made this week — it specifically recommended patent pooling. Zaitchik notes that optimism was still possible: “Battle-scarred veterans of the medicines-access and open-science movements hoped the immensity of the pandemic would override a global drug system based on proprietary science and market monopolies.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Proprietary science:

      An oxymoron to the extent that “science” simply means human knowledge and cannot be owned or commodified.

      Contextual Note

      The WHO was thus prepared to play the role assigned to its mission as stated in its constitution: “The health of all peoples is fundamental to the attainment of peace and security and is dependent upon the fullest co-operation of individuals and States.” Aware of the challenge lying ahead of them, the team began to prepare its campaign. Alas, it hadn’t counted on the intervention of the globe’s self-appointed Mr. World Health, Bill Gates, whose title derives from his contributing billions of dollars to the causes he believes in (the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has invested $1.75 billion in the development and distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine). Among them is the most sacred of all causes: intellectual property. 

      Embed from Getty Images

      Zaitchik describes in detail how Gates — a man with no skills in science, security or politics — has positioned himself to dictate to the world how contemporary science will affect every human being’s security. The key, following the logic of all capitalistic projects, is the management of scarcity. Without scarcity, industry cannot survive and prosper. Little does it matter that because of scarcity many humans simply will not survive.

      Before Gates’s intervention, the group sought “to create a voluntary intellectual property pool inside the WHO.” In so doing, they demonstrated their naivety: “That pharmaceutical companies and their allied governments would allow intellectual property concerns to slow things down — from research and development to manufacturing scale-up — does not seem to have occurred to them.” But that is exactly what happened, thanks to Gates’s overpowering voice (measured by billions of dollars rather than decibels) and his “reputation as a wise, beneficent, and prophetic leader.” When the dust cleared, what emerged was “a zero-sum vaccination battle that has left much of the world on the losing side.”

      Zaitchik documents the ensuing catastrophe due largely to “Gates’s dedication to monopoly medicine” and his “unwavering commitment to drug companies’ right to exclusive control over medical science and the markets for its products.” No one other than powerful governments can hope to compete with Gates’s cash reserves. But Gates’s own government, in Washington, DC, — whether under a Democrat or a Republican president — would never compete as a matter of principle. Competition is a private game. No other government in the world has the power to compete. The US government, like Gates himself, appears addicted to “politically constructed and politically imposed monopolies.”

      Historical Note

      The egregious oxymoron “proprietary science” would have seemed strange to the ears of anyone living before the industrial revolution. Were he alive today and imbued with modern economic culture, the 15th-century German printer, Johannes Gutenberg, would be claiming a percentage of every book, journal or magazine produced thanks to his invention of the printing press. Instead, Adolph II of Nassau, Archbishop of Maintz rewarded Gutenburg — the Bill Gates or Elon Musk of his day — for his innovation “with the title of ‘Gentleman of the Court’.” He also received “a court outfit, a stipend and two tonnes of grain and wine, tax-free.” The wine can be explained by the fact that Gutenberg’s inspiration for the printing press came from observing a wine press.

      Gates deserves to be similarly honored for his invention of MS-DOS. Rather than the billions extracted from the Earth’s entire population thanks to his skill at monopoly creation and predatory business practices, he should have received from the governor of the state of Washington an appropriate title (“Gentleman of the coding room”), a flashy suit of clothes with a matching raincoat (for Seattle weather), a generous stipend (a million of two per year would be appropriate) and maybe an unlimited supply of canned foods, since he is a believer in and expert practitioner of canned economic and scientific wisdom.

      As many of the rest of us queue up for one of the competing vaccines that promise to bail us all out — despite their disparities in performance adding to the confusion created by the incompetence of competitive governments — we should reflect on what all this tells us about an economic system whose vaunted efficiency Gates believes in and practices while using his money and clout to impose it on an unwilling world.

      *[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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      2020 Has Shown That We Are Not “Better Than This”

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      I hit 75 years old a little over two weeks ago. All in all, I have been lucky throughout my life to have found much to be thankful for as each birthday rolled around on the shortest day of the year. Early on, I couldn’t understand why my birthday was shorter than everyone else’s and was a little bitter about it until I figured out that it was a daylight issue and nothing more sinister than that.

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      While I also had some rough patches, I got through most of them because I had enough good fortune and the resources to help it along. But I have got to tell you that the year that has now drawn to a close has often seemed like a long winding dark tunnel that might never end. While I am sure that there are those not paying much attention, who aimlessly go through life caring only about their moment, I believe that even that comfort seemed hard to find.

      Assault on the Human Spirit

      It is not just the pandemic that has blighted the landscape for those paying attention. It was a year that assaulted the human spirit. I can imagine that Americans are not the only ones feeling this way, but we sure managed to eviscerate what could have been a national spiritual awakening in the face of adversity. Well over 350,000 Americans have paid with their lives for our national failure, with many more to come.

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      But one thing haunts me more than anything else. It is the reality that there are children in America and elsewhere who do not have enough food to sustain their health and allow them to dream and thrive. I always had enough food to eat when I was a child, sometimes way too much. My son always had enough food too, and he eats a lot. Yet somehow, I have always hoped that you didn’t have to suffer hunger to care a lot about those who are hungry. But here I am, amidst so many still with so much, angry as hell that there can be a projected 18 million children going hungry here and now in America.

      If you are not hungry and your children are not hungry, then you should have the energy to be angry with me about those who are hungry and angry enough to demand that your government do something about this and angry enough to pay more taxes so that it can. Food banks, food charities and individuals buying an extra bag of groceries for someone who is hungry are both part of the problem and part of the solution. But it can only be part of the solution if we do not allow ourselves to be pulled away by our charity from the image of a hungry child.

      So many have said so often (it was an Obama favorite) that “We are better than this.” I hope that we have proven to ourselves — and I know that we have proven to others — that we simply are not better than this. Americans are what they have proven to be. Hungry children in our midst are the easiest barometer of our collective immorality.

      There is much more going on, of course. The unmasked continue to roam our public spaces, food lines and queues for COVID-19 tests continue to grow, health care is being rationed even to those with supposed access to it, systemic racism has not taken a vacation, and our “democratic” institutions are crumbling while the repair crew may not be up to the rebuilding task. For others, there may be even more. This just passed year of assault on the human spirit is likely to continue well into the new year.

      End of This Tunnel

      I know about the vaccines — and we will get to that — and the tunnel that the vaccines are supposed to be the light at the end of. Before that, it is worth noting that the impending Biden presidency and some of his cabinet selections promise a return to some measure of competent governance and the ethics and empathy required to accomplish it. For sure, there will be time to debate specific policies and programs and to sound the alarm if the forgotten remain forgotten in a rush to return to “normal.”

      And we can hope that Joe Biden and his team see the clear need for public accountability for those in the Trump administration, foremost Donald Trump himself, whose corruption and mendacity poisoned our nation and paved the way for disease and death to overwhelm us. There can be no pardoning this if the nation is to move forward.

      Then, before celebrating the light, there will be the challenges posed by the vaccines. First, there will be the simple medical questions with complicated answers: Do the vaccines provide immunity and for how long? Do they prevent the transmission of disease to others? Are they safe? Next up will be the logistical challenges: How do you get enough vaccines from manufacture through delivery to inoculate 330 million people? Most importantly, assuming that the vaccines are effective and safe, and assuming that the logistical challenges are met, who will get which vaccine and when?

      The answers to the safety and efficacy questions likely will emerge in the coming months from scientists given a new lease on integrity by the Biden administration. Meeting the logistical challenges will have to await a national plan that overrides the already-emerging chaos of the present 50-state solution. But the most complex challenge and the one that America has failed time and again is the equity challenge — who will get which vaccine and when.

      Embed from Getty Images

      I have no hope at this moment, after so many failed moments in just the past year, that large swaths of Americans will wake up one morning and start thinking about something beyond themselves. It is most likely our individual selfishness that both propelled Donald Trump to the presidency and gave him a compelling voice that gave so many Americans the space to stand idly by and watch so much suffering of others in their midst. To the unmasked and their ilk, I say screw you. To those who have tried, I say keep trying and keep your distance from those who aren’t.

      Then, when the vaccines come, don’t stand idly by this time, as the selfish find a way to jump the line. To those who every day have provided essential services at great personal risk, you are going to have to fight for those vaccines in this America. If you don’t, your luck will run out and the unmasked will be laughing at you as they party on.

      I am not sure where America is in its dark tunnel nor even the full measure of that tunnel. I am sure that way too many Americans are unwilling to sacrifice much of anything for the well-being of others. There eventually will be a light at the end of this tunnel, but what of the next one?

      *[This article was cross-posted 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

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      China’s Uncertain Recovery From COVID-19

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      A lot has changed since the first cases of COVID-19 were reported in Wuhan, China, in December last year. While much remains unknown about the new coronavirus, COVID-19 has since spread rapidly from its origin in China to every corner of the world except Antarctica. Unlike previous health crises such as SARS (severe acute respiratory […] More