Deja Vu

I suppose we should not be surprised to discover that:

As wealthy governments race to lock in supplies of Covid-19 vaccines, nearly a quarter of the world's population - mostly in low and middle-income countries - will not have access to a shot until 2022, according to a new analysis.

The detail is all there.  It's more of the same depressing unbalanced equations:  

Japan, Australia, and Canada reserved more than one billion doses*, though these three countries combined did not account for even 1% of all current cases.

There is some good news - the WHO has established an initiative it calls COVAX, which, among other things, will attempt to purchase and pool billions of doses and make them available to poorer countries.  The bad news is that they are not meeting their goals at this point; they are short $5 billion.  The US - whose expenditures on the pandemic are measured in trillions - announced in September that it would not participate in COVAX.

Surely someone could find $5 billion in the couch cushions.  Not just because it's not fair or just for people to continue to die because the country they happened to be born in got passed by.  But also because we all live on the same world, and the virus doesn't care what country you live in.  Meaning that this pandemic will not be over until enough people have been vaccinated to achieve herd immunity worldwide.  

Which means none of us gets to the new world until everybody does.  And when we get there, will the inequality that so characterized the before be even more pronounced, as poor countries (and, for similar reasons, poor neighborhoods and poor states) struggle to recover from horrifically spectacular economic and public health devastation that richer countries either bounced back from, or didn't experience at all?

It looks like the new world could easily be even more unequal and unjust than the old world. But we've seen that before, haven't we? 

 * - Out of a total of 7.5 billion doses available worldwide at the time of  publication.

UPDATE - 12/22/20:  Good news, apparently.  Somebody's searching the couch cushions.