From a Swiss perspective it would be easy to think that the COVID-19 crisis is reaching its end. That’s a rather myopic point of view; the truth is that many places in the world are going through the worst patches at this point.
Take for example my place of birth, Argentina. If you follow the news, you know that at the moment it is one of the countries in the world with the highest numbers of new daily cases and deaths.
The vaccination situation is patchy, at best. My father has not received his first dosis yet; even though many younger people are reporting on social media that they got it. The organization of the whole campaign is an absolute joke; but we knew that already. It is the Argentine style of organization. No surprises here, sadly.
On the other side of the equation, I write these lines from the confort of a Swiss home; my wife is fully vaccinated, I have had my first injection last week, and the weather is finally worthy of a Summer season.
It would be foolish to see the typical Swiss landscape of organization and peacefulness and to believe that the worst is behind us.
I am saddened by the fact that this very country is systematically voting against releasing the intellectual property required to fabricate vaccines in other parts of the world, albeit temporarily. It’s infuriating as hell. This crisis will not be over until this virus is eradicated from everywhere in the world.
And then there’s the political gambling. China and Russia are donating vaccines only to countries who choose to avoid commenting on their (abysmal) human rights record. The USA is barely planning about exporting vaccines, instead of following Prof. Galloway’s advice to create a new “Marshall Plan” for the whole world.
The elites of the world are pure junk. But again, no surprises here, either. In the meanwhile, big pharma is grinning. Business as usual.
But not all is bad news. Today I am very proud of writing these lines on a Linux kernel, as I see Linus Torvalds openly take position against stupidity and ignorance. And I am hopeful that the same technology that brought us the COVID vaccine could be used to fight AIDS, a pandemic that started exactly 40 years ago last Saturday.