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A health worker administers a dose of Covid-19 vaccine on August 3, 2021 in Greater Noida, India. (Photo: Sunil Ghosh/Hindustan Times via Getty Images)
Why We Must Vaccinate the World
If we believe in democracy, economic success or basic survival, the world's media must send the message loud and clear.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/vaccinate-the-world/
Dec 29, 2021
Never in the history of humankind has the blindingly obvious been ignored with such obviously high risk. Never have the cautious and persistent warnings of medical and biological scientists been so spectacularly and swiftly vindicated.
Unless the world is vaccinated, the likelihood is there will be another variant that will be far more lethal.
It is genuinely weird. In the next few days an immensely sophisticated piece of technological kit that has taken years of ingenuity and sophistication to conceive and manufacture--the James Webb Space Telescope--will be rocketed into space to peer into the depths of the universe to examine the nature of its origins. Meanwhile, staring us all in the face, is the obvious fact that the human species is playing roulette with its own viability.
We are not now talking about the global environment, where the refusal to invest sufficiently in measures to lower the rate of climate warming is exasperating. At least we can all agree it won't be easy.
We are talking about the need to vaccinate the world against COVID-19. The moment credible vaccines were developed we were informed that for them to work, everyone needed to have them. Leave the poor and the crowded unvaccinated, we were told, and new variants would mutate that would find their way around the protections against the old ones.
So it has proved.
A great gathering of leaders took place around COP26, which should have been the venue to agree to fund immediate global vaccination as an exercise in the necessary cooperation. The opportunity was passed over.
Joe Biden brought the world's 'democracies' together this month at a summit meeting to discuss the need to defend democracy. No one seems to have thought that the need to ensure the health of the poor and the wealthy equally was a democratic issue.
The US has just passed a budget of $576bn to spend on its military in a year. China is doubling its nuclear weapons programme. Russia is massing its armies on the Ukraine border. The European Union is debating how to prevent Poland from becoming a dictatorship. The government of the UK is putting its head up its bottom to see if it can find a silver lining in Brexit.
Meanwhile up pops Omicron to say: "Told you so," and it proves itself to be vertically contagious.
The WHO had warned that worldwide vaccination was vital to ward off new variants, yet here we are. Blame the latest crisis on the Global North
Universal vaccination could have prevented the viral reproduction of COVID that generates such variations. Now, unless the world is vaccinated, the likelihood is there will be another variant that will be far more lethal.
It isn't certain--we are talking about probability. It isn't expensive to do our best to prevent it, if you measure the cost as a percentage of military expenditure. It isn't difficult and it does not need a telescope to see it makes sense.
Twenty years ago a group of editors and contributors cooperated to start openDemocracy in the belief that there was a need for a free and open space to discuss the globalisation of the world, in the face of the arrogance of the co-called Washington consensus. Today, after the financial crash, military disasters and the rise of authoritarianism, we have changed our tune and are committed to investigating what is going wrong and the corruptions that are driving the threats to democracy.
The most immediate threat of all is the possibility, however remote, of a more lethal variant of COVID. The obvious precautionary step is to vaccinate the world population in a single, cooperative effort. We are the editors who oversaw openDemocracy at its start and oversee it now. We call on every publication in the world to call on every government to do the obvious and work together to vaccinate us all now, in 2022.
An Urgent Message From Our Co-Founder
Dear Common Dreams reader, It’s been nearly 30 years since I co-founded Common Dreams with my late wife, Lina Newhouser. We had the radical notion that journalism should serve the public good, not corporate profits. It was clear to us from the outset what it would take to build such a project. No paid advertisements. No corporate sponsors. No millionaire publisher telling us what to think or do. Many people said we wouldn't last a year, but we proved those doubters wrong. Together with a tremendous team of journalists and dedicated staff, we built an independent media outlet free from the constraints of profits and corporate control. Our mission has always been simple: To inform. To inspire. To ignite change for the common good. Building Common Dreams was not easy. Our survival was never guaranteed. When you take on the most powerful forces—Wall Street greed, fossil fuel industry destruction, Big Tech lobbyists, and uber-rich oligarchs who have spent billions upon billions rigging the economy and democracy in their favor—the only bulwark you have is supporters who believe in your work. But here’s the urgent message from me today. It's never been this bad out there. And it's never been this hard to keep us going. At the very moment Common Dreams is most needed, the threats we face are intensifying. We need your support now more than ever. We don't accept corporate advertising and never will. We don't have a paywall because we don't think people should be blocked from critical news based on their ability to pay. Everything we do is funded by the donations of readers like you. When everyone does the little they can afford, we are strong. But if that support retreats or dries up, so do we. Will you donate now to make sure Common Dreams not only survives but thrives? —Craig Brown, Co-founder |
This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 licence.
Anthony Barnett
Anthony Barnett is the founder of OpenDemocracy. Follow him on Twitter: @AnthonyBarnett
Peter Geoghegan
Peter Geoghegan is editor-in-chief of openDemocracy and author of 'Democracy for Sale'. He can be found on Twitter @PeterKGeoghegan.
Never in the history of humankind has the blindingly obvious been ignored with such obviously high risk. Never have the cautious and persistent warnings of medical and biological scientists been so spectacularly and swiftly vindicated.
Unless the world is vaccinated, the likelihood is there will be another variant that will be far more lethal.
It is genuinely weird. In the next few days an immensely sophisticated piece of technological kit that has taken years of ingenuity and sophistication to conceive and manufacture--the James Webb Space Telescope--will be rocketed into space to peer into the depths of the universe to examine the nature of its origins. Meanwhile, staring us all in the face, is the obvious fact that the human species is playing roulette with its own viability.
We are not now talking about the global environment, where the refusal to invest sufficiently in measures to lower the rate of climate warming is exasperating. At least we can all agree it won't be easy.
We are talking about the need to vaccinate the world against COVID-19. The moment credible vaccines were developed we were informed that for them to work, everyone needed to have them. Leave the poor and the crowded unvaccinated, we were told, and new variants would mutate that would find their way around the protections against the old ones.
So it has proved.
A great gathering of leaders took place around COP26, which should have been the venue to agree to fund immediate global vaccination as an exercise in the necessary cooperation. The opportunity was passed over.
Joe Biden brought the world's 'democracies' together this month at a summit meeting to discuss the need to defend democracy. No one seems to have thought that the need to ensure the health of the poor and the wealthy equally was a democratic issue.
The US has just passed a budget of $576bn to spend on its military in a year. China is doubling its nuclear weapons programme. Russia is massing its armies on the Ukraine border. The European Union is debating how to prevent Poland from becoming a dictatorship. The government of the UK is putting its head up its bottom to see if it can find a silver lining in Brexit.
Meanwhile up pops Omicron to say: "Told you so," and it proves itself to be vertically contagious.
The WHO had warned that worldwide vaccination was vital to ward off new variants, yet here we are. Blame the latest crisis on the Global North
Universal vaccination could have prevented the viral reproduction of COVID that generates such variations. Now, unless the world is vaccinated, the likelihood is there will be another variant that will be far more lethal.
It isn't certain--we are talking about probability. It isn't expensive to do our best to prevent it, if you measure the cost as a percentage of military expenditure. It isn't difficult and it does not need a telescope to see it makes sense.
Twenty years ago a group of editors and contributors cooperated to start openDemocracy in the belief that there was a need for a free and open space to discuss the globalisation of the world, in the face of the arrogance of the co-called Washington consensus. Today, after the financial crash, military disasters and the rise of authoritarianism, we have changed our tune and are committed to investigating what is going wrong and the corruptions that are driving the threats to democracy.
The most immediate threat of all is the possibility, however remote, of a more lethal variant of COVID. The obvious precautionary step is to vaccinate the world population in a single, cooperative effort. We are the editors who oversaw openDemocracy at its start and oversee it now. We call on every publication in the world to call on every government to do the obvious and work together to vaccinate us all now, in 2022.
Anthony Barnett
Anthony Barnett is the founder of OpenDemocracy. Follow him on Twitter: @AnthonyBarnett
Peter Geoghegan
Peter Geoghegan is editor-in-chief of openDemocracy and author of 'Democracy for Sale'. He can be found on Twitter @PeterKGeoghegan.
Never in the history of humankind has the blindingly obvious been ignored with such obviously high risk. Never have the cautious and persistent warnings of medical and biological scientists been so spectacularly and swiftly vindicated.
Unless the world is vaccinated, the likelihood is there will be another variant that will be far more lethal.
It is genuinely weird. In the next few days an immensely sophisticated piece of technological kit that has taken years of ingenuity and sophistication to conceive and manufacture--the James Webb Space Telescope--will be rocketed into space to peer into the depths of the universe to examine the nature of its origins. Meanwhile, staring us all in the face, is the obvious fact that the human species is playing roulette with its own viability.
We are not now talking about the global environment, where the refusal to invest sufficiently in measures to lower the rate of climate warming is exasperating. At least we can all agree it won't be easy.
We are talking about the need to vaccinate the world against COVID-19. The moment credible vaccines were developed we were informed that for them to work, everyone needed to have them. Leave the poor and the crowded unvaccinated, we were told, and new variants would mutate that would find their way around the protections against the old ones.
So it has proved.
A great gathering of leaders took place around COP26, which should have been the venue to agree to fund immediate global vaccination as an exercise in the necessary cooperation. The opportunity was passed over.
Joe Biden brought the world's 'democracies' together this month at a summit meeting to discuss the need to defend democracy. No one seems to have thought that the need to ensure the health of the poor and the wealthy equally was a democratic issue.
The US has just passed a budget of $576bn to spend on its military in a year. China is doubling its nuclear weapons programme. Russia is massing its armies on the Ukraine border. The European Union is debating how to prevent Poland from becoming a dictatorship. The government of the UK is putting its head up its bottom to see if it can find a silver lining in Brexit.
Meanwhile up pops Omicron to say: "Told you so," and it proves itself to be vertically contagious.
The WHO had warned that worldwide vaccination was vital to ward off new variants, yet here we are. Blame the latest crisis on the Global North
Universal vaccination could have prevented the viral reproduction of COVID that generates such variations. Now, unless the world is vaccinated, the likelihood is there will be another variant that will be far more lethal.
It isn't certain--we are talking about probability. It isn't expensive to do our best to prevent it, if you measure the cost as a percentage of military expenditure. It isn't difficult and it does not need a telescope to see it makes sense.
Twenty years ago a group of editors and contributors cooperated to start openDemocracy in the belief that there was a need for a free and open space to discuss the globalisation of the world, in the face of the arrogance of the co-called Washington consensus. Today, after the financial crash, military disasters and the rise of authoritarianism, we have changed our tune and are committed to investigating what is going wrong and the corruptions that are driving the threats to democracy.
The most immediate threat of all is the possibility, however remote, of a more lethal variant of COVID. The obvious precautionary step is to vaccinate the world population in a single, cooperative effort. We are the editors who oversaw openDemocracy at its start and oversee it now. We call on every publication in the world to call on every government to do the obvious and work together to vaccinate us all now, in 2022.
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