Stephen Collinson and Caitlin Hu
'An
international embarrassment'
April
9, 2021
There’s
light at the end of the Covid-19 tunnel in the US and UK. Israel may be already out the other side, while Australia and New Zealand
never left daylight. But everywhere else, the pandemic is worse than ever, with
the virus scything through nations and widespread vaccination still months
away.
In just
the last few days, Poland has smashed its daily Covid death toll. Brazil, mired in disaster largely because of President Jair
Bolsonaro’s preening negligence, recorded its deadliest day and deadliest month
since the start of the pandemic. Peru, afflicted with a variant first discovered in Brazil,
just saw its worst daily death toll.
India
on Thursday tallied a record high of 126,000 new cases in a single day. Iraq,
Turkey, Cuba, Argentina and Chile are putting up new peaks in Covid-19
infections. Even in the US, where 3 million vaccines are administered every
day, a surge of new cases is underway, as younger people fall prey to new variants.
Even
countries that are succeeding in driving back the virus will be threatened if
Covid-19 keeps raging everywhere else. New mutations could emerge that sidestep
the existing vaccines. And full economic recovery will never be possible with
half the world’s borders closed to commerce and tourism. That’s why global
health experts have called for available vaccines to be more equitably shared
between rich and poor nations.
The
pandemic made a mockery of globalization as nations retreated behind their
borders. It’s hard to imagine a political leader looking after foreign
populations before taking care of residents at home. President Joe Biden has
made tentative steps and promises to help out needy nations, but that’s only
once the US has satisfied domestic demand for vaccines.
The
global leadership that has been lacking throughout the last year needs to kick
in soon, or the pandemic will drag on for many more months, or even years.
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