Having had COVID-19 myself–however mild a variant– I think about a subject that I think should concern all of us. Covid-19, though we have a vaccine, still is a major killer in America and abroad. We should encourage those who know us to get their first doses or any boosters which they haven’t gotten… but we should also worry, for moral and self-interested reasons, about the disease striking the people of the 3rd World–Brazil, Mexico and India being top of the list for places where COVID-19 has hit in a big way. Really, what happens there is sadder than even the deaths in America, because during the height of the pandemic–though it is not really over even yet–they had no way of protecting people from COVID-19: they could not isolate themselves and they had little access to the vaccine. That is why the United States and other rich countries should send the vaccine to Mexico, Brazil and India…
Though we should all bear in mind that even though it lingers, COVID-19 is a temporary thing, particularly if the vaccine is spread across the world. A similar virus in many ways, Influenza hit the world in 1918 and 1919 and during it’s height it felled 25 million people including 650,000 Americans. More, it was not until years after it hit that the cure was discovered. As with COVID-19, more people died because of misinformation containing a false optimism. Yet to quote the old saying, “This too shall pass” and eventually the disease disappeared…Yet as suddenly as it hit, it disappeared, leaving memories in places like Katherine Anne Porter’s novella Pale Death, Pale Rider.
Yet though “this too shall pass” we must not wait passively while people die…bearing in mind that “no man is an island unto himself” and that the sooner COVID-19 is dead in these countries the sooner the whole world is safe. More, though, there is a moral imperative that transcends national boundaries: we must all make sure that the fight against COVID-19 continues until the last case of COVID-19 is cured. And we must write letters to our representatives telling them that “we do not want to let those with little access to medicine who live abroad to be allowed to suffer and die.”