Lawrence Hall, HSG
We’ll Trade You
One Stealth Fighter for a Billion Vaccine Jabs
A number of sources, including the Guardian (A new Covid variant is no surprise when rich countries are
hoarding vaccines | Gordon Brown | The Guardian) are blaming the new
Covid variants on “rich countries” (that invariably means you and me) for
hoarding vaccines.
Poor countries, you see, can’t get any vaccines because Canada,
the U.S., the U.K., and France are keeping them all, rather like Gollum clutching
that ring while chanting, “My precious! My precious!”
I suppose I’d better dig up those sealed barrels of
vaccines I buried in my back yard and turn them over to Medicins sans
Frontieres (who also blame us) with an abject apology.
And you, good friends, need to check your closets and
cupboards for all those bottles of vaccines you’ve stockpiled next to pallets
of toilet paper, bottled water, and the complete collection of Wheel of
Fortune: The Lost Episodes. Gather all those vaccines and turn them
over to the INTERPOL officers who will land at the nearest intersection in
unmarked UN helicopters.
You can tell they’re UN helicopters because they’re
unmarked.
In truth, I aver that I might be the only man in America
who admits he doesn’t know doodlysquat about the coronavirus. I know only this: I have occasion to sit in
the same room with nurse practitioners, nurses, physicians, and physicians’
assistants, all of whom attended real medical schools, not The University of Google,
not The University of Gossip, and not The University of Some Loudmouth on
Television. I listen to what the nurse practitioners, nurses, physicians, and
physicians’ assistants who are in the room with me tell me about all sorts of
medical topics affecting my brief life on this earth, and I do what they recommend.
They know medicine. I know them. I trust them. As Martin Luther (otherwise not
one of my favorite people) said, “Here I stand; I can do no other.”
The only other medical thing I know is that the full-body
scanner that beamed across me last summer in a room that looked like the bridge
of the starship Enterprise had all sorts of pretty little lights on it
and made soft, susurrant, soporific sounds that almost put me to sleep.
Oh, and I can operate a Band-Aid.
But that’s it.
Given my trust in professionals with whom I can speak
face-to-face rather than screen-to-screen, I tend not to believe the metaphorical
medical mudslides on the InterGossip. The idea that a gang of Snidely
Whiplashes in Washington, Ottawa, London, and Paris are withholding vaccines
from poor nations who don’t seem to be so poor that they can’t afford the
latest weaponry appears to be just another variant on blaming others for one’s
own failings.
Pharmaceuticals are developed and manufactured by
companies interested in their profits. They want to sell drugs, not lock them
away in a variant (so to speak) of Uncle Scrooge’s money vault. The leaders of
companies and countries are not always the most ethical, but it is not in their
interests, whether in profits or philanthropy, to withhold vaccines from other
nations.
Beyond that, those nations who focus on accumulating
weapons and Swiss bank accounts could probably vaccinate all their peoples
against all sorts of diseases by foregoing a single new jet fighter.
But then, prudent budgeting should obtain here too: how
many luxury aircraft and armored limousines does ONE president need?
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