More than two years on, it is hard to imagine there could be someone who is not sick of the pandemic. Although we can point to multiple reasons for the inability to bring Covid-19 under control, a prominent factor is corporate greed.
The elevation of the private profit of a few over the welfare of the many is, sadly, the ordinary course of events in a capitalist world. This is brightly illustrated by the failure of the world’s governments to prioritize health care over money as exemplified by the ongoing failure to make vaccines available to the Global South.
Business as usual, yes, and it would be easy enough to lament the standards of the United States and its wildly expensive health care system being exported to the rest of the world. The U.S. does play a role here, but this time the U.S. is not the biggest villain. The European Union, with its obstinate refusal to waive any intellectual property rule because of fealty to Covid-19 vaccine makers, has been the biggest roadblock.