Big Pharma’s Profiteering Led to the Omicron Variant
For months, medical experts warned that leaving large areas of the world unvaccinated would make new variants inevitable. But for Big Pharma, profits come before public health.
Fewer than one in ten health workers have been vaccinated, while more people have received a booster in the UK, per head of population, than have had their first shot in Africa. (Daniel Schludi / Unsplash)
A dangerous new COVID-19 variant has been predicted for many months. Experts told us repeatedly that leaving large areas of the world unvaccinated and unprotected makes new variants almost inevitable. But Big Business was put in charge of who got vaccines and who didn’t, so the rich got more than they needed, while the poor got nothing.
The global vaccine rollout has not been so different to how one of Britain’s imperial governments would have handled such a crisis two hundred years ago: a heavy dose of racism, combined with the idea that the market should decide who lives and who dies in the world.
Boris Johnson fits the role perfectly. While those at the sharp end of vaccine inequality have been demanding a different way of doing things for well over a year, an incompetent British prime minister, educated at the country’s most exclusive school, tells them that they really don’t understand what’s in their own best interests. Then, as now, people may die in their millions, but nothing can shake the arrogance of our rulers that their way is best.
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