Hello, and happy Friday. If there is one story that you should be paying attention to this week, it’s the devastating crisis in India. The country, which a month ago considered itself to be in “the endgame” of the pandemic, has since become the global epicenter. What is taking place in India isn’t so much a COVID-19 wave as it is a wall: Charts showing the country’s daily case counts and death tolls depict curves that have sloped up into vertical lines.
If the numbers don’t communicate the severity of the situation, the images coming out of the country do: Doctors have run out of oxygen, morgues have run out of space, and patients are being forced to share hospital beds, if indeed they can get into a hospital at all.
The world can’t ignore what is happening in India, nor has it. The United States was among several countries that pledged to urgently send oxygen and other medical supplies to Delhi this week. The Biden administration also announced that, in addition to heeding requests to send India the raw materials required to make vaccines, it would share up to 60 million doses of its AstraZeneca stockpile with other countries. Though it’s not yet known which countries will be among the recipients, India is widely anticipated to be one of them.
Regular readers of this correspondence will know that this is a major shift from the “America First” approach to vaccines that we’ve seen from the United States so far. But if Washington is serious about addressing unequal vaccine distribution around the world, this can’t be a one-off donation. With the country projected to have hundreds of millions of surplus doses at its disposal by this summer, the Biden administration will face pressure to share its excess supply, lest more crises like India’s emerge. You can also expect to hear more calls for the World Trade Organization to temporarily relax patent rights related to COVID-19 vaccines and treatments so that countries without either can manufacture them themselves.
In podcast news: I joined The Atlantic’s Social Distance podcast this week to discuss the COVID-19 surge in India and the very real consequences of vaccine nationalism. Tune in here.
I also joined last week’s panel episode of The Bunker to chat about the dark revenge thriller Promising Young Women, which nabbed the Academy Award for best original screenplay this week. You can hear my verdict on the film here (no spoilers, I promise).
What I’ve written
India’s outbreak is an enormous tragedy for its own people, but it’s also a catastrophe for the rest of the world. Beyond the obvious moral reasons that vaccine-rich countries such as the United States should help, I wrote about the practical ones too—and the consequences if they don’t.
Though mass vaccination has provided an off-ramp from the pandemic for some countries, India is a stark reminder that, for many others, a long road lies ahead. The world is on track to record more COVID-19 deaths this year than it did in 2020. The risks of allowing current outbreaks to ravage places such as India aren’t limited to those countries alone. Emerging variants and further delays to more equitable vaccine distribution stand to affect everyone, including vaccinated populations. India’s problem is the world’s problem. Keep reading here
Last week, the United States opened vaccine eligibility to all stateside adults. But some Americans are still at the back of the queue. I spoke with American expats who have traveled back to the U.S. to get their jab, and those who believe that they shouldn’t have to.
It comes down to what responsibility, if any, the U.S. government has to its overseas citizens. The U.S. is unusual among most countries in that its citizens must still file annual tax returns even if they don’t live in America. All of its citizens, regardless of where they live, are also eligible to vote. So as taxpayers and voters, don’t these citizens have a legitimate claim to the U.S. government’s aid in a public-health crisis? Keep reading here
What I’ve read
This masterful essay about the life and work of the late, and great, Edward Said (The London Review of Books)
Said’s Palestinianism exemplified the qualities he admired: open-ended and exploratory, resistant to the doctrinal and racial fixity – the dark historical fatalism and exclusionary fear of the other – that Zionism embodied. If Zionism was the song of a single people, Palestinianism held out the hope of a non-sectarian future for both peoples. Palestinian freedom, whether in the form of a sovereign state neighbouring Israel or – the position he defended after Oslo – a binational state, represented ‘a beginning’, a dynamic intervention in history, rather than a return to origin. And yet his vision also looked to the past, betraying a wistful attachment to his childhood memories of colonial Cairo, where Arabs and Jews, Muslims and Christians had lived beside one another.
This wonderful profile of the Hungarian scientist who laid the groundwork for the coronavirus vaccine (The New York Times)
On Nov. 8, the first results of the Pfizer-BioNTech study came in, showing that the mRNA vaccine offered powerful immunity to the new virus. Dr. Kariko turned to her husband. “Oh, it works,” she said. “I thought so.”
To celebrate, she ate an entire box of Goobers chocolate-covered peanuts. By herself.
This deep dive into the food delivery app Deliveroo and how it’s changing restaurant culture (The Guardian)
Most people currently think of Deliveroo as an app that connects local restaurants with delivery drivers. But standing in West Green Road, with dark kitchens rapidly closing in, it’s hard not to suspect that the ultimate aim of the venture-capitalist subsidised food tech industry might be to do away with both.
What I’m thinking about
Ramadan is already halfway done! And the TikToks keep getting better and better.
Until next time,
Yasmeen
P.S. If you’re looking for ways to help India, this is a useful resource.