People in Britain with little chance of dying are being vaccinated despite continued suffering in the developing world
The idea that nobody is protected until everyone’s protected has become something of a pandemic cliche lately.
Yet that doesn’t make it any less true, clinically or morally. As long as the virus is rife in any country, it could always mutate and spread again. What is only now becoming obvious, however, is that as long as others are experiencing horrors on the scale of India, consciences everywhere will be troubled. The harrowing scenes unfolding nightly on our television screens are what Britain feared but ultimately did not have to suffer: hospitals running out of oxygen, people dying in the street for lack of a bed, families forced to bury the dead in their gardens as crematoriums were overwhelmed. India’s tragedy is a stark reminder of Britain’s own relative good fortune, hard as this year has been for many. But to be lucky is a morally queasy, guilty thing.
