Weekend Quotables
Weekend Quotables
'Excellent science should be applauded and not punished.' --- S.A. Foreign Ministry
From Belgium to Switzerland, often violent anti-vaxer protests are destabilizing much of Europe and feeding right-wing and neo-fascist Trumpian political movements here in the U.S. This, despite the emergence of a new covid variant, Omicron, which incubates and spreads through the bodies of the world’s unvaccinated and threatens to destroy the lives of millions and drive another global economic collapse.
While the new variant appears to have originated in South Africa, it is really the bi-product of mainly white, western, wealthy countries’ policies of vaccine inequity and apartheid operating alongside big-pharma’s profit-driven unwillingness to share vaccine patents with those poorer countries in the greatest need.
As a friend pointed out to me this weekend,
If vaccine rich countries shared their resources like South Africa does with their data, the world would be in a much different and much better place right now.
Many of the world's richest countries have spent the past year hoarding coronavirus vaccines, buying up enough doses to vaccinate their populations several times over and consistently failing to deliver on their promises to share doses with the developing world. The World Health Organization said the approach was "self-defeating" and "immoral."
WEEKEND QUOTABLES
South African foreign ministry
“Excellent science should be applauded and not punished.” — Statement
David Fickling
So far, scarcely more than half of the world’s population has had a dose of a Covid vaccine. That means there are still more than 3.4 billion people out there whose bodies the virus can treat as laboratories in which to develop new mutations. — Bloomberg
Gordon Brown, former British PM
“Despite the repeated warnings of health leaders, our failure to put vaccines into the arms of people in the developing world is now coming back to haunt us.” — Guardian
Robert Reich
There are some obvious reasons why Trump voters have been hesitant to get vaccinated. Trump politicized the issue – making the jab a hallmark of his peculiar form of rightwing populism.
This trait is found among Democrats and independents in blue America as well as Republicans in Trumpland. In fact, I think it’s been near the core of the American personality since before the founding of the nation – a stubborn, selfish, me-first individualism. — Guardian
Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust
"New variants are a reminder, if we needed it, that the pandemic is far from over," he said on Twitter. "Inequity is what will extend the pandemic."— ABC 7 News
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