i love that the title is basically "china does aid as a way to get diplomatic influence" as this is not the most normal thing in diplomacy
Bill Gates needs someone following him around yelling about how he personally prevented the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine formula from being made freely available. 24/7, every day of the rest of his life.
Diplomacy is bad. If you want to exert foreign influence, you're supposed to bomb people, not give them health care. Has two centuries of Monroe Doctrine taught Beijing nothing?!
You have to understand how confusing it is. American diplomacy is typically done with the tip of a missile, so altruism is a wholly foreign concept vis a vis diplomacy.
That actually makes a lot of sense, if china was drone striking iran or similar with vaccines american support would rise
"What the fuck?! Saving peoples' lives makes them think well of you? Why the fuck was I not informed of this before now?"
- America
How hard is it to find articles about how Cuban doctors are bad, somehow? I'm guessing it's extremely easy.
EDIT: it's extremely easy.
Late 2018 Bolsonaro kicked a lot of Cuban doctors out of Brazil, which immediately meant a lot of rural/poor/peripheral regions lost all medical services, because he didn't want to pay them "because Cuba". A decision that definitely killed and harmed a lot of people all by itself.
The funniest bit on that was people believing that Brazilian doctors would go away from their luxuries and wealth in the urban centers to go fix this instead of the more sensible thought “i am pretty sure we have got these doctors from cuba because they did not want to do that”
Even when you look up specific terms about their medical system (I was looking for purposes of enrollment down there) in a positive light, you get hit with so many of the 'giving everyone access to medical care is bad, actually' articles.
The worst part is despite Canada over ordering vaccines by several orders of magnitude we still aren’t making any progress, in fact Canada is far behind even america in vaccine progress
It’s fucked, literally the worst of both worlds. Fucking other countries out of their vaccine doses while we also fuck our own citizens out of them
I actually commented this on a post about american vaccines a couple months back and got way less upvotes compared to the replies, which is pretty much downvotes. So even though I hate america to the core at least in retrospect I wasn't being optimistic about their vaccine rate
Jokes on you, Canada hasn't been able to get any of the vaccines they've ordered into the country at all.
Worth mentioning: the only reason why the feds made deals for such an obscene amount of jabs is because we have no domestic vax production anymore, after previous Tory governments dismantled all the facilities. By wild coincidence they're now the same people bitching that we aren't rolling anything out.
You mean you haven't got your nanobots yet?
I'm likely gonna get my second dose in march/april
Wait why would anyone ever order more than 2x the population? Besides cruelty of course
Redundancy, I assume. If one provider says they can deliver in two months, and one says they can deliver in four months, they order from both, in case something goes wrong with the first batch. Or maybe they ordered from the 4-month people first, then were contacted by the 2-month people.
Figuring the loss will be worth it to get people back to working and buying shit.
Or inefficiency. Ordering anything they can get their hands on, thinking they won't get enough, then ending up with way more than they need. Like when people did a run on stores for toilet paper in the beginning, but on a national level.
Then there's the fallacy of lumping the EU together as one organized entity, when we're more of a squabbling mob of nations shouting over each other and amplifying each other's mistakes.
the fallacy of lumping the EU together
At least some of those vaccines were ordered as a collective EU plan, although there's other vaccines ordered separately per nation.
EDIT: in fact, I think this graphic is outdated, this article says the EU collective order totals 2.3 billion doses, more than the 1.8 billion listed above. It also says surplus jabs will be distributed to neighbor countries, without mentioning what the timeline will be for those overflow shots.
No, you're not that wrong, Hungary and Germany, of all countries, are also ordering vaccines outside of the collective plan.
Because a donor to your political party is on the board of the company that makes the vaccines.
If you ever have to ask "why would a politician do this thing that makes no sense" the answer is corruption and cronyism 90% of the time.
Canada plans to use excess vaccines to immunize other countries
It'll more than 4 years before Canada vaccinates the indigenous people there lol
TIL the US has a population of 600 million (it doesn’t, but according to this graphic it does)
I would assume the US is solely relying on vaccines that need 2 doses, so that way the graph does make sense.
Ahhhhhhh yes that does make sense if that’s how they’re being counted. my mistake
Yeah, Saudi Arabia is also using a double-population estimate.
Yea it's the two shots and the estimated portion of the population that would be able to receive.
As some people would be ineligible (on medical grounds or personal beliefs or whatever)
THE CANADIAN CORONAVIRUS GOD DEMANDS A SACRIFICE! WE MUST FEED HIM 330 MILLION VACCINES!
the fun fact on brazil is that we probably could have bought enough but the president was anti vaccination until a governor was able to out do him and start to roll out a vaccination plan before the federal government so bolsonaro rejected pfizer sending emails to him like "homie ARE YOU SURE YOU ARE NOT GONNA BUY SOME OF THESE"
How does Israel compare? seen as the west sees them as the gold standard in all of this
They probably ordered 10x the amount needed to give everybody double doses, and then they set 95% of them on fire so the palestinians couldn't have any
This is the source for the graphic above which says Israel has a confirmed number of 18 million doses purchased.
Although they, according to this, aim to purchase more in the near future:
“There are plans for a very large additional purchase spanning tens of millions of vaccine doses,” said Katz.
Thus far, close to four million Israelis have received at least one dose of the coronavirus vaccine, according to data released by the Ministry of Health Tuesday morning.
More than half of those, or roughly 2.3 million people, have received both the first and second dose of the vaccine.
Israel's been interesting in all of this.
They handled it poorly at first, then imposed strict lockdowns, which lead to protests. Different communities have responded differently. Religious groups ignoring lockdown, but also living in larger households, lead to higher rates of infection there, leading to stricter and longer lockdowns. This was seen as discrimination, leading to more protests and non-compliance in these communities. Surveilance and checkpoint systems originally designed for the occupation were repurposed to impliment the lockdown, leading to privacy and rights violation concerns. Lockdowns also came at a convenient time for the government, amidst protests over corrution.
Their response has mainly been shit, swinging back and forth between the most and least extreme options because the government didn't know what they were doing. They don't want to inconvenience people because they can't afford to alienate voters, but also can't afford to be seen as failing.
Vaccines are their off-ramp to the crisis, eliminating Covid as a political issue. They have the resources and the international political capital to make it happen, while most others don't.
There's also rumours they had to buy a bunch of vaccines to give to Syria as part of a prisoner exchange last weekend.
I know Saudi Arabia is not run in the interests of the wider population, but damn that’s a small percentage. They have $USD for days is my understanding, are they really such a propped-up autocracy that they can just give the population less than scraps?
How nice of them to maybe do some charity later on, maybe.
Maybe the criticism is that the whole management of the global vaccine rollout was from the get-go going to disadvantage poorer nations?Plus, without a steady global vaccine rollout, these hoarder nations are effectively kneecapping themselves, since these other nations who will have only a partial vaccination of the population have a greater chance at producing mutated strains that the vaccines aren't effective against.
Hate to put on the tinfoil, but it is obviously in the interest of vaccine producers/patent owners for a messy rollout, vaccine hoarding, and basically the creation of a permanent industry of COVID vaccines.
This article I read yesterday put it pretty well I think:
In a globally intertwined economy vitally dependent on the movement of workers and complex supply chains, the lack of vaccine coverage for significant parts of the global population means the virus will have ample room to mutate, evade any newly created immunity, and travel far. New vaccines will continue to be developed, but given the delayed and uneven deployment, COVID-19 will always be one step ahead.
This does not bode well for the future of billions of ordinary people whose lives will be disrupted by the virus, but it seems to sit well with the wealthy who are currently making a windfall out of COVID-19 outbreak.
If we are to end the pandemic, save human lives, and prevent economic catastrophe for the most vulnerable, we urgently need to overhaul the mechanisms of disaster capitalism and ensure that vaccines are equitably distributed and anti-COVID measures effectively implemented across the world.
I missed that. Great article, and great post. Godspeed to China and Cuba.. I wonder if it'd be looking a little less bleak if that Oxford vaccine ended up being open source...
