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Collected Item: “Differing Vaccine Outcomes by Country”

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Differing Vaccine Outcomes by Country

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Text Story

Tell us a story; share your experience. Describe what the object or story you've uploaded says about the pandemic, and/or why what you've submitted is important to you.

For the past few months, vaccines for Covid have been rolling out to Americans despite some setbacks. As of right now, a huge chunk of America has or is in the process of getting vaccinated, hopefully putting an end to this once and for all. Unfortunately, other countries without the same industrial capacity to produce the vaccine have been struggling. My sister, who lives in the Netherlands, won't be able to get a vaccine until May, and even that is tenuous at best. It is even worse for many countries in the global South, which will have to wait until well after richer capitalist countries finish vaccinating their people. The dirty secret here is that each company who developed the vaccine is not sharing for free how they made this life-saving material, forcing almost the entire world to be beholden to companies like Moderna.
There will not be an equitable distribution of the vaccine, that is clear already. When countries like the US and the Netherlands do finish vaccinations by at least the end of this year, the world will still be forced to reckon with Covid still spreading in places like Sub-Saharan Africa and potentially back to the global North. If the world wants to truly deal with Covid and any future disease of a similar nature, it needs to figure out how to get vaccines quickly without a profit motive, something that is nearly impossible within a capitalist structure.

Use one-word hashtags (separated by commas) to describe your story. For example: Where did it originate? How does this object make you feel? How does this object relate to the pandemic?

#502, #Inequality

Who originally created this object? (If you created this object, such as photo, then put "self" here.)

Adam Peretz

Give this story a date.

2021-04-15
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