India, with a population of almost 1.4 billion people, is a country that is currently the epicentre of Covid-19 hysteria.
India’s outbreak is an enormous tragedy for its own people, but it’s also a catastrophe for the rest of the world. Ninety-two developing nations rely on India, home to the Serum Institute, the world’s largest vaccine maker, for the doses to protect their own populations, a supply now constrained by India’s domestic obligations. Meanwhile, the coronavirus is mutating. Reports of double- and even triple-mutant strains of the virus, which experts fear could be driving the country’s latest surge, have prompted concerns that what has started in India won’t end there. Despite efforts to restrict the spread of India’s new COVID-19 variant, called B.1.617, it has already been identified in at least 10 countries, including the United States and Britain.
In another Atlantic article by the same writer on December 8th 2020, we hear the term "vaccine nationalism":
This “vaccine nationalism,” in which countries prioritize their domestic needs at the expense of others, may have helped accelerate efforts to develop such drugs, but it is already showing its limits. With wealthy countries claiming the lion’s share of prospective doses for themselves, and with global efforts to equalize vaccine distribution facing enduring unilateralism and limited resources, a coronavirus vaccine returning the world to something resembling “normal” could take considerable time—perhaps even longer than it needs to. (Many of the governments warning against the unilateral approach are striking their own bilateral deals with vaccine manufacturers, in an apparent effort to have it both ways.) Without equal vaccine distribution, public-health experts warn, the pandemic could continue to live on residually for years, bringing with it even more death and further economic collapse. If the virus remains endemic anywhere, it will continue to pose a threat everywhere.
I wonder if so-called journalists like Yasmeen Serhan believe the rubbish they are writing. Probably not but they need to earn a living and when writing for a mainstream rag like The Atlantic they know the tone expected and they deliver. To understand the pandemic and what's driving it, the key word is PSYOP, defined by the bastion of all wisdom as:
Psychological operations (PSYOPs) are operations to convey selected information and indicators to audiences to influence their emotions, motives, and objective reasoning.
The audience this time is all of humanity and the PSYOP's message is simple: a deadly virus is ravaging the world and only the newly developed vaccines can stop it. To the global elite, who are driving this pandemic, "nationalism" is a dirty word and "vaccine nationalism" even more so. There are not enough vaccine doses to go around and "vaccine-rich" countries like the USA need to share their largesse. The double and triple variant strains are coming and there's no time to lose. Vaccine-rich countries are to be envied while vaccine-poor countries are to be pitied. The global dimension of the pandemic is being emphasised.
Celebrities continue to push for vaccinations:
How did India, which merely a month ago thought it had seen the worst of the pandemic, get to this point? Michael Kugelman, the deputy director of the Asia program at the Washington, D.C.–based Wilson Center, told me the answer comes down to a “perfect storm” of factors that includes new and existing variants (and a lack of robust genomic sequencing to track them), a continuous stream of widely attended political rallies and religious gatherings (with no social distancing or mask wearing), and a general complacency on the part of the Indian government, which was slow to respond to a crisis in which it had prematurely claimed victory.
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