How Humanity Gave Itself an Extra Life

How Humanity Gave Itself an Extra Life

...How did this great doubling of the human life span happen? When the history textbooks do touch on the subject of improving health, they often nod to three critical breakthroughs, all of them presented as triumphs of the scientific method: vaccines, germ theory and antibiotics. But the real story is far more complicated. Those breakthroughs might have been initiated by scientists, but it took the work of activists and public intellectuals and legal reformers to bring their benefits to everyday people. From this perspective, the doubling of human life span is an achievement that is closer to something like universal suffrage or the abolition of slavery: progress that required new social movements, new forms of persuasion and new kinds of public institutions to take root. And it required lifestyle changes that ran throughout all echelons of society: washing hands, quitting smoking, getting vaccinated, wearing masks during a pandemic... 

Steven Johnson 

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/27/magazine/global-life-span.html?referringSource=articleShare

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

America is Failing Its Moral Test on Vaccines

Vaccinating the world is possible. The United States should lead the way. 

The United States is well on its way to protecting Americans from the coronavirus. It's time to help the rest of the world. By marshaling this nation's vast resources to produce and distribute enough vaccines to meet global demand, the United States would act in keeping with the nation's best traditions and highest aspirations while advancing its geopolitical and economic interests. It is a moment of both obligation and opportunity.

Unfortunately, instead of a bold, comprehensive strategy to vaccinate the world as quickly as possible, the Biden administration has thus far made a string of tactical decisions: donating millions of doses to countries in need, signaling its support for patent waivers that might expedite vaccine production efforts and nudging two companies — Merck and Johnson & Johnson — to collaborate on increasing supply. These are good steps, but they are not nearly sufficient to meet the moment. The United States and the rest of the world's wealthiest nations are facing a great moral challenge.

Covax, the World Health Organization's initiative to pool vaccine resources, remains profoundly underfunded and has failed to meet even its modest target of vaccinating one-fifth of the population in the Global South. Without a major course correction, the rest of the world will have to wait until 2023 or later for large-scale vaccination initiatives like the one underway in the United States. The consequences of this disparity are expected to be severe. Hundreds of thousands more people will get sick and die from a disease that is now preventable with a vaccine. The global economy will contract by trillions of dollars, according to the International Chamber of Commerce, and tens of millions of people will plummet into extreme poverty as the virus continues to fester and evolve in the world's more vulnerable reaches.

As global hunger rises and global life expectancy falls, instability will prevail. Already, Colombia is mired in deadly protests over the pandemic's economic fallout. India is facing its gravest humanitarian catastrophe in a generation. As the United Nations has warned, a similar crisis in Syria would be catastrophic...

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/14/opinion/biden-covid-vaccines-world-india.html?smid=em-share

"a moral and epidemiological failure"

As Covid Ravages Poorer Countries, Rich Nations Spring Back to Life

Despite early vows, the developed world has done little to promote global vaccination, in what analysts call both a moral and epidemiological failure.

The contrast could hardly be sharper.

In much of the developed world, vaccine orders are soaring into the billions of doses, Covid-19 cases are easing, economies are poised to roar to life and people are busy lining up summer vacations. In many less developed nations, though, the virus is raging on, sometimes out of control, while vaccinations are happening far too slowly to protect even the most vulnerable.

That split screen — clubs and restaurants reopening in the United States and Europe while people gasp for oxygen in India — was never supposed to be so stark. Some 192 countries signed up last year for Covax, a vaccine-sharing partnership, and the Gates Foundation poured $300 million into an Indian factory to make doses for the world's poor. The European Union's top executive told a global summit last June: "Vaccination is a universal human right."

But the virus is spreading more rapidly than ever, driven largely by gains in South America and India, and the campaign to vaccinate the world is floundering.

India, an important source of vaccines in normal times, has halted exports as it fights a record surge in the virus and an expanding humanitarian crisis. That has delayed critical shipments, with India making the majority of Covax supplies... nyt

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/05/world/europe/coronavirus-covax-vaccination.html?smid=em-share