The world order would have been in real trouble without vaccines to fight over. For decades politics has been premised on the theory that scarcity was a thing of the past; that the only problems left to solve involved redistribution. The pandemic showed real scarcity can still exist and demonstrated how dependent the world is on the technology and enterprise generated by scarce human capital.
Most of us are cavemen with technological devices we don’t understand. The real wealth of the 21st century civilization is in the heads of a few million people without whom we would rapidly regress to the 19th century.
Culturally we live in a world of found magical objects where the stash and innovation just are. Most of the world was content to wait for the “rich countries” to develop pharmaceuticals. The truth is no one was sure in the beginning that it could be done at all. Now without skipping a beat politicians are talking about vaccine equity without inquiring how the stash came to be at all.
Comparisons between the Covid pandemic and WW2 fail in one glaring respect. WW2 saw countries mobilize their industries to produce weapons of war. By contrast the global vaccine shortages show how lacking our efforts still are.
Politicians know how to give things away and that is about the extent of their knowledge.
The vaccine wars have come to Europe.
For months now, wealthy countries have been clearing the world’s shelves of coronavirus vaccines, leaving poorer nations with little hope of exiting the pandemic in 2021. But a fresh skirmish this week has pitted the rich against the rich — Britain versus the European Union — in the scramble for vials, opening a new and unabashedly nationalist competition that could poison relations and set back collective efforts to end the pandemic.