The pandemic still happening is literally not because of individual anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers, anti-lockdown people, etc. Like, don’t get me wrong, they have definitely killed people (though far, far more culpable are the media personalities who widely perpetuate these ideas), but even if everyone with access to them had worn masks this whole time and gotten the vaccine as soon as it was available to them, we would still have vaccine-resistant strains emerging from places like India and Botswana, because people in those places didn’t have as much of a choice about receiving the vaccine
The variants were directly caused by the exact thing epidemiologists have been warning us about since the beginning: patents on vaccines that were developed with government funding, and inadequate distribution to areas that can’t manufacture their own vaccines because of those patents. That’s what allowed the virus to circulate and mutate in those areas and produce new strains. This is a direct A to B causation that cannot be blamed on anti-vaxxers in the US or Europe - simply put, none of this will end until the vaccine patents are destroyed
And I feel like this should be obvious, but even if everyone in the US and Europe and wherever you live was fully vaccinated and quarantined and we somehow completely eradicated the virus in those places and you were able to go to comic book conventions again, the pandemic still wouldn’t be over, because a pandemic is by definition worldwide. You should care about people in other parts of the world because they’re people who deserve a good life just like you, not because they impact your ability to eat at restaurants
Worth noting: It’s not just the patents on the vaccines that are the issue. It’s patents on the vaccines, the machines to make them, the technology to store them, the machines that make and repair the machines, the testing and documentation processes and software… the entire infrastructure of development and distribution is tied up in complex intellectual property rights.
So you may hear about this-or-that company saying “but we’re not locking down our patents!” and it might even be true. Fixing the vaccine shortage isn’t a matter of legally sharing a handful of lab recipes; it’s waiving profits on an entire sector of medical technology.
And that’s why they’re dragging their feet. The issue isn’t “let them make Covid vaccines.” It’s “give them the machinery to make all vaccines, without paying for overseas manufacture and distribution.”
Medical tech companies aren’t looking at what they’ll do with it this year; they’re looking at lost profits for the next 10-20 years. And they’re saying “why should we care about the lives of few (hundred) million strangers, when we might be looking at a 10% drop in profit over the next decade?”
