On 6/19/2021 6:58 PM, Dennis Brasky wrote:
The Summit for Vaccine Internationalism offers a space for governments
of developing countries to broker their own multilateral solutions.
Richer countries have largely failed them....
https://newrepublic.com/article/162787/unequal-distribution-covid-vaccines-preview-coming-climate-apartheid
<https://newrepublic.com/article/162787/unequal-distribution-covid-vaccines-preview-coming-climate-apartheid>
Infuriating, this incredible inequality in vaccine and treatment access.
I am writing an essay on this topic now, but just as urgently seek
opportunities to protest at the Pretoria embassies or Joburg consulates
of the rich countries, especially Germany and the UK. But the third wave
of Covid has just crashed on the South African political and economic
heartland. However, even before, it's been disappointing that Medicins
sans Frontiers and other local activists haven't managed more than
tokenistic, set-piece demos against the U.S. and EU since last October
when this campaigning began.
I must also say that sitting through many of the Progressive
International presentations yesterday felt like hearing a broken record,
with repetitious talking points regarding vaccine apartheid - /but
really nothing I can concretely recall to suggest how to break the power
relations that link imperialist states to WTO TRIPS to Big Pharma. /
This is in contrast to how much progress was made 20 years ago on the
same fight, for a WTO Intellectual Property waiver on AIDS medicines.
The result was a dramatic rise in life expectancy, here in South Africa
from 52 to 65 over the subsequent decade. About seven million people
living with HIV now get the drugs free, generically made in local
factories, from the public sector. Victory at that time relied on much
more intensive street-heat including civil disobedience, and the
activism came from not only South Africa's Treatment Action Campaign but
ACTUP! in the U.S. and other allies. That strikes me as the main
difference between then and now.
The /TNR /reporter, Kate Aronoff, is very good on reporting power
relations so maybe there will indeed be something more substantive on
Monday. Her last two words below are encouraging, but judging by what I
could make time for yesterday, the PI has not started from a position of
activist mobilization - but instead with talking-head bureaucrats and a
few allied academics and experts. All fine people... but changing power
relations through shaming the vaccine imperialists remains to be openly
strategized, so that an anti-imperialist potential in the North can open
up the sort of space we have seen recently in Palestine solidarity, or
in the anti-apartheid movement three decades ago, and other instances of
breaking those power relations. /
/
/After a kick-off Friday, attendees—weighted toward the low- and
middle-income countries still struggling to vaccinate their
populations—will meet privately over the weekend to discuss new
vaccine development and technology pools, sharing manufacturing
capacity, as well as the potential to override intellectual property
protections—what Bolivian foreign minister and summit participant
Rogelio Mayta Mayta has called “collective disobedience.”/
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group.
View/Reply Online (#9315): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/9315
Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/83652932/21656
-=-=-
POSTING RULES & NOTES
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
#4 Do not exceed five posts a day.
-=-=-
Group Owner: [email protected]
Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/21656/1316126222/xyzzy
[[email protected]]
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
