The last rites in New Delhi, India. Credit: Anindito Mukherjee/Getty
If you were walking to work, wearing an expensive suit and shoes, and you saw a child drowning in a shallow pond, and you were easily able to reach them and save them — are you morally obliged to do so, even if it would ruin your outfit?
The answer, most of us would say, is “obviously yes”. The value of your nice clothes is trivial compared to the value of a child’s life.
But as the moral philosopher Peter Singer would argue: we are in this situation every day. We could save children’s lives at relatively trivial cost to ourselves, by donating a few hundred dollars to pay for antimalarial treatments or other low-cost interventions. We would be unable to buy as many nice shoes, but we would save lives, and we have just agreed that that is a morally obligatory tradeoff. The only difference is that in the real, existing scenario, we can’t see the children in sub-Saharan Africa or south Asia; and they’re starving, or dying of malaria, rather than drowning. But they’re still real.
Scott Aaronson, a quantum computing scientist at the University of Texas at Austin, extended that metaphor over the weekend. What if you didn’t even have to ruin your shoes? What if you could just throw a lifebelt which you were carrying but had no intention of using yourself?
That is, he said, what is going on now with Covid. The US has millions of doses of vaccines which it’s simply not using. I’ve seen the exact number estimated as high as 100 million, but I think it’s widely accepted that there are 30 million AstraZeneca vaccine doses sitting, bottled but unused, in a warehouse in Ohio. There seems to be no short-term likelihood that the US FDA will approve it, over (to my mind misguided) fears about blood clotting, so they’re just gathering dust.
Since Aaronson wrote his post, there has been some apparent good news: the US says it will start releasing AstraZeneca doses, a total of 60 million. But there’s no sense of urgency. It’s waiting for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to complete a “safety review”, which could take weeks, before releasing the first 10 million. Meanwhile, in India, at the very least 2,500 people are dying every day from Covid in an unthinkable, ongoing humanitarian catastrophe.
I wanted to remind people of the urgency. Imagine that there are 30 million doses sitting in Ohio; how much good could they do if we could get them into Indian arms straight away? So I thought it would be interesting to attempt a Fermi estimate of that, a sort of first approximation. It won’t be exact, but it might get us to within an order of magnitude, and give us a sense of how much using these vaccines matters.
First: every day in India there are about 300,000 confirmed new cases; that number is growing every day. It does not seem to have ended its exponential growth, despite increasingly stringent social distancing measures.
It is also an enormous undercount. A week ago, Max Roser, of Our World in Data, noted that the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) model estimated that only about one in every 29 cases in India is confirmed with a PCR test.
As you’ve seen in the chart above the latest data from the model is for April 11.
If the ratio between confirmed cases and total cases has stayed at 29, then the 233,074 cases that India confirms now correspond to 6.76 million cases daily.
(233,074*29=6.76M) pic.twitter.com/EeSTAHy9Rs
— Max Roser (@MaxCRoser) April 20, 2021
Back when he pointed this out, there were about 230,000 confirmed daily cases, which he extrapolated to about 6.7 million actual daily cases. Now that it’s well past 300,000, the number is probably more like 10 million. Since then, the IHME has updated its model suggesting that it could be double that, but let’s stick with the 10 million figure.
To reiterate: that’s not the total number of people with the disease. That’s a plausible number of new cases every day.
How many of those people are going to die? Well, the official death toll, as I said, is about 2,500 a day at the moment. But just as with the cases, that is likely to be a severe undercount. As Al Jazeera reports, crematoria seem to be burning far more bodies than the official death toll would suggest: they mention one city that reported 20 deaths, but its Covid-only crematorium has processed 63; another that reported 25 but had cremated 100. The Guardian tells a similar story.
But that’s just the start. Murad Banaji, an Indian mathematician, reports that there were 476 funerals in Kanpur on one day — normally you’d expect about 100 — and yet only three reported deaths from Covid. John Burn-Murdoch of the Financial Times has others: cities are cremating many, many times as many people as have apparently died from Covid (some of his data is taken from Banaji). The IHME model estimates that the number of people dead is about double the reported numbers; Burn-Murdoch thinks it could be much higher, as high as 10 times.
India has a relatively young population, and the risk of death from Covid is hugely affected by age, so the infection fatality rate – the risk of death for someone infected by the virus – was probably quite low, comparatively speaking: perhaps about 0.3%. (This Nature paper says that the IFR in Bangladesh is about that, and since the two countries have a similar age profile, I’m assuming it’s about correct for India.)
But that will all have changed now. The Indian healthcare system is overwhelmed; there isn’t any oxygen to keep patients alive. This news report suggests about 40% of ICU patients in India were dying back in September: if we imagine that all of the 0.3% of infected people who died went through ICU first (which isn’t true, but let’s imagine it), then that means about 0.75% of Indian people infected with Covid ended up in ICU (0.3 is 40% of 0.75).
But if you end up needing ICU in India now, you’ll almost certainly die: the things you’d have gone into ICU for — mechanical ventilation, oxygen, close medical attention — aren’t available. There just isn’t the capacity to treat you. The healthcare system has collapsed. ICU treatment was, in most cases, what was keeping the 60% who didn’t die alive. It’s a good bet that the IFR now is up much closer to 0.75%.
Let’s imagine, now, that we can get those 30 million vaccines into people’s arms as soon as possible. What good might they do 1?
First, to keep things simple, I’m going to assume that the social distancing measures stabilise the Indian outbreak at its current level of about 10 million new cases a day. There was a plausible estimate that about 30% of Indians – 300 million people! – had already had the disease in February, and about 10% have had a vaccine, so it’s reasonable to think that about 40% have some sort of immunity now. At some point that will start slowing down the outbreak significantly, but I’m going to ignore that, again to keep things simple.
Second, I’m going to assume that the vaccine prevents about 90% of deaths. It’s usually more than that, but there are new variants going around India, against which the Ox/AZ vaccine may be a bit less efficacious. Prof Rupert Beale, the head of the Cell Biology of Infection lab at the Crick Institute, thinks 90% is probably a reasonable guess, and Banaji thinks that vaccines are already having an effect.
And I’m going to assume that it takes about three weeks after the first dose for the vaccine to have a full effect.
So if you gave 30 million immunologically naive people the vaccine tomorrow, what would happen? Over the next three weeks, given that 1% of the population is being infected every day, about 20% of them will probably get infected, and 0.75% of them will die. That’s 45,000 deaths.
But after that, things will start to improve. Over the following two months, given our simplified numbers, about 13 million more of them would have caught Covid, and about 100,000 would have died. But, because they’re all vaccinated, all but 10,000 will, in fact, live.
So given these very plausible, or even conservative, estimates, the 30 million AstraZeneca vaccines sitting in an Ohio warehouse could save 90,000 lives in the next three months. Of course, it’s not plausible that they could be put in arms tomorrow – but, then, they also wouldn’t be distributed at random; they would, you’d hope, be given to the most vulnerable people, people with an expected infection fatality rate much higher than 0.75%. The Indian vaccination programme may well not be as well-targeted to at-risk groups as the JCVI-led UK programme, but if it were given entirely to, say, the over-65s, then it might save five times as many people. All of these are estimates, of course, but I think that it’s extremely reasonable to think that it’d be something like this.
And there’s something else to consider. As well as directly protecting people, it will break chains of infection; each infection prevented by vaccination will prevent some number of future cases. Working out even roughly how many would need proper scientific modelling, but as a sort of thought experiment, I checked and saw that the Indian vaccination programme is currently managing about two million doses a day. It was higher, before — about three million — so let’s go with that.
If we naively assume that the 30 million doses simply push the programme on by a proportionate amount, it would mean that the fight against the epidemic is accelerated by 10 days. Again, if I naively think “10 fewer days like today”, then that’s about 25,000 fewer deaths. That’s probably not a very sensible way to think about it — God only knows what the Indian epidemic will be doing in a month or two months’ time — but different models have the daily deaths peaking from 6,000 to 40,000 some time between now and the summer. I don’t think that ballpark figure is unrealistic.
Maybe I’ve got my maths wrong in all of this; maybe I’m wrong by an order of magnitude. Maybe they’ll only save about 10,000 lives. You could still save 10,000 lives for the cost of sending some vaccines you aren’t going to use to another country.
As I said above, there’s been some good news. The USA is going to release 60 million doses as they become available. But it’s not clear that they’re going to go to India – some, at least, are earmarked for Mexico and Canada – and, bafflingly, they have to undergo safety review. Every hour counts, but it will take weeks, at least, for the FDA to carry out this review; weeks in which thousands of Indian people die every day. India has already approved the Ox/AZ vaccine; it has its own experts, and they have assessed the risks and benefits, and they don’t need the FDA to check it for them. This maddening, patronising, counterproductive safety-first approach will cost thousands of lives. Simply get every dose you have on refrigerated aircraft right now and ship them to India as fast as you can.
And it’s not just the USA. Other countries have supplies of vaccines that could do good. Denmark, I think, has about 50,000 unused doses of Ox/AZ which it won’t use. I imagine that lots of other European countries have an oversupply. But the US millions are the overwhelming bulk of the issue.
When Aaronson wrote his blog post, the USA was standing, feet dry, by the pond, refusing to throw their life-belt to save thousands of drowning people. Now, at least, it looks as though they might throw it, after a suitable period of checking that it is adequately buoyant and is painted a regulation shade of orange. But the complete lack of urgency is probably going to cost thousands of lives. For pity’s sake, if you’re not going to use them, get them on a boat and send them somewhere that will.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeThanks to the author, and to Unherd, for this sobering article. Out of curiosity I just googled South Africa and covid and all I got (until I dug way down or used a search string that required me to know exactly what I was looking for) was stories about the omicron variant and the fourth wave of covid currently engulfing South Africa’s hospitals (from what I read in this article, South Africa’s health system is on its knees, so I imagine it doesn’t take a big wave to engulf it).
I really just want to say thank you for this article, for providing a reality check unavailable elsewhere. There is such a surreal air to this pandemic now it’s hard to be shocked by anything anymore.
SA hospitals are certainly NOT being engulfed by Omicron cases. This is the very recent early feedback from the SA Medical Research Council. There is every indication that Omicron is by some magnitude less deadly, requires less hospitalization, less patients require oxygen and average hospital stay has been reduced by more than two thirds. Tshwane in Gauteng is the ‘epicentre’ of Omicron – it has hardly yet taken off in other provinces.
https://www.samrc.ac.za/news/tshwane-district-omicron-variant-patient-profile-early-features
Thanks for info on the ground, Lesley. It is so wrong to punish Africa for discovering omicron with a clever piece of science. I am saddened to see how things are going in a beautiful country scarred by corruption.
The “clever bit of science” is part of the witchcraft which many of us stand back in bemusement with quizzical incomprehension and a large degree of unquestioning acceptance. The corruption appears to have its source within those global institutions and corporations who wish their objectives and ideologies imposed on us all. I think this article is a reality check for us all, a sobering reminder of the immeasurable damage that this global experiment, imposed without precedents and any assessment of future consequences can have on a world of diverse populations.
There was a good video by Dr John Campbell on South Africa, which provides some data from one of the hospitals in the area of the surge in cases. Obviously it’s still early days, however it does appear to contradict was is coming out of the MSM and provides evidence on that Omicron may not be as bad as some of the earlier reports suggested.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1Paq17X6ucQ
Yes, I saw it. He was accessing information from the link I shared…. thanks
Thanks for the info! Very interesting to me.
For any search involving covid, climate change, politics, anything controversial, I strongly suggest you try DuckDuckgo – the first link when searching for “South Africa and covid” is the South Africa .za covid site – unfortunately no links there to hospital data but way better than the pravda quality links google shows 1st
We still have to see the true nature of how Omicron develops. Let’s hope it continues to be mild…. Fingers crossed.
It’s hard not to be optimistic: 402 EU cases none severe
https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/news-events/epidemiological-update-omicron-data-9-december
A great response to a great article. Thanks to both!
There was an article yesterday about Tony Blair’s latest crusade in Africa. This article spells out in some way why Africans are wary of the West – in particular now.
What has been imported from the West during Covid is lockdowns which don’t work and do incalculable harm, leaky vaccines which have fast waning efficacy and questionable safety, masks which are a complete joke for an airborne disease, social distancing which is impossible given the living conditions of the majority and various restrictions and mandates which empower governments to ruthlessly control their citizens.
This has opened the door for a corrupt government to do their worst.
I really know nothing about these issues, but amidst all the “decolonisation” you read about in the west, that article about Tony Blair (just as an example) does strike me as an example of egregious neocolonialism and “white saviour” syndrome.
Hopefully articles like this are waking people up to the realities of what has been transpiring for two years.
The media has mocked, discredited and censored the ”conspiracy theorists’, but the reality is that everything they were saying (and more) is quickly proving to be the case.
Many of us who had grown up trusting our politicians (to some degree), the media such as the BBC, and the doctors and health service, are slowly realising that they cannot (apart from a few brave exceptions) be trusted or relied upon to do what is best for the people.
Anyone who still has any doubts needs to re-read this article and contemplate the motives behind what is going on. And if they still don’t get it read it again, and again, until it becomes clear.
They’re definitely (as this well-researched and well written article shows) not doing all of this for our health.
A fascinating article if deeply depressing. I only wish the following were true of the West in general
“They have followed, like many others in the world, the way the arrogant scientific certainties that locked up the world are dissolving in the face of measured science and empirical fact.”
In my day to day experience very few people are aware of the counter narrative.
Most people these days don’t WANT a counter-narrative, they’ll dismiss it instantly. We’re living through a shockingly creepy age where large numbers of people are relishing bad news and worst-case scenarios and literally demanding their freedoms be taken away
It’s an interesting phenomenon to be sure. At the risk of being overly simplistic I’ve noticed two traits that are predominant amongst those I know who fit your description (far too many unfortunately):
They don’t want life to return to normal for purely psychological reasons. I would have more empathy for them except for the obvious suffering the spolicies they support cause others that they seem to have disregarded entirely. Perhaps part of their life issues stems from this deficit of integrity, but I’m not holding my breath for any self insight anytime soon.
That’s a very interesting comment.
I think you’ve put your finger on it. To the cited characteristics I would add a willingness for many to feel satisfaction knowing they inhabit a moral high ground, from whence they can look down on others considered less prudent, less intelligent and reckless.
They relish being part of a Community of Fear.
Mostly those on a good fixed income and pension.
The reason they’re not aware of this counter narrative is because the govt/media/tech are censoring EVERYONE who has even a slightly different view. Not light-touch censorship or accidental censorship, but heavy handed and 100% intentional.
This alone should wake intelligent people up, because in no time in history has it ended well when doctors, scientists, politicians, and religious leaders have been prevented from speaking out.
Every week hundreds of thousands of people are marching all across the world, but there is almost zero coverage. Why? That is not normal.
The truth is that the kind of censorship of any opinion but the given one, is like something out of North Korea, China or the old USSR. Why are so many good and intelligent people not realising this?
There has been and continues to be a lot of repression of counter narratives, but as this site and many others show, also an increasing awareness and reporting of them. We don’t live in China quite yet.
I chat to middle class pro-lockdown people all the time. I mention Sweden and Florida etc but they just don’t want to hear it, nor that they are among the most privileged people in the world, who have big gardens, like working from home, order their shopping on line and often live in rural areas. I don’t begrudge any of them any of that, but they have had to pay very little of the costs of the policies they want to impose on people living in say, houses in multiple occupancy or large multi-generational families. They talk ‘progressive’ but live in a wealthy bubble.
The Left has, overall, been particularly awful in this pandemic, as it condones and encourages the most socially and economically regressive polices imaginable. They are supposed to be the ‘internationalists’! They aren’t even on the side of the ‘workers’ but only a small minority of them, in the public sector, who have enough industrial muscle to get their way. Shop workers – good job THEY didn’t all decide to ‘work from home’ – not so much!
There are a few people on the Left, not enough, but some, beginning to speak out on this.
Indeed, one wonders whether anyone remembers that there was once a concept called international socialism.
Ah, ‘International Socialism’ is alive and well. There just aren’t any workers in it.
Unfortunately censorship works. When I raise any of these issues people don’t believe me. For example a lot of people still don’t seem to understand how Covid is not a threat to younger people. Anyone who is getting their 5 year old vaccinated is nuts. The demand that we all get the third jab is next.
I have deliberately posted links to various sensible alternatives to the rhetoric on various platforms only to have them removed!….
Agreed 100%
Excellent timing on this article, and the answer is :::::: ‘The IMF’ A couple days ago George Gammon, in his show ‘Rebel Capitalist’ was discussing exactly this:
How the IMF is intentionally putting all developing nations into great insolvency by forcing Lockdowns on them. See it has them at gunpoint. Sort of like this – The Developing nations have great debt, such that they need the IMF to bail them out. The IMF then requires them to do all the insane Lockdown stuff, – or – it May not Bail them out in the coming mess. This makes them even much worse off, as they cannot Print money to overcome the lockdown costs like we can – they have to borrow yet more of it ——. That this is destroying the lives of hundreds of millions of impoverished people is not an issue – the agenda says lockdown, so do it or else…..
See? Global Government forces them to lockdown (or else…) thereby IMF forces them into greater debt to pay for it, and they have to go along as they are already so far in debt they have to obey the IMF. They are like junkies being forced by their dealer to buy more and more heroin…..
Anyway, here it is: “Emerging Markets Will Need Help When A Debt Crisis Comes” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIJPl5SrxNo
George is a conspiracy loon – not quite as much as me perhaps, but this one is great – and explains the Global Elites forcing Lockdowns on rich and poor alike – and it is NOT FOR HEALTH.
WEF, IMF, FED, BIS, BoE, ECB, with their lackeys, and masters, are driving us lemmings to the cliffs….
And just today – JP Sears in his spoof news show (We Lie TO You News) was talking exactly how South Africa refused to buy more Pfizer, and two days later the world locked SA flights from departing (which costs SA a load)…… Bit of Synchronicity… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyY7NmbBz0A JP is fun to watch mostly, like Bret Weinstein, an ex-Liberal, mugged by reality once too often.
Anyone who thinks this vax mandate/Lockdown stuff is for health has their head buried in sand.
The International Monetary Fund might as well be James Bond villains at this point. All they need now are some gun toting goons, a secret island base, and a space laser.
George Gammon, on his ‘White Board’ videos explaining the financial systems has the IMF leader Klaus Schwab drawn with a little cat called ‘Mr Bigglesworth’ at his feet. (named after the ‘Austin Powers’ Super Villain’s cat).
sorry WEF leader Klaus, – but WEF and IMF are two sides of the same coin….Mr Bigglesworth likely has a food bowl in both Schwab’e and Kristiliana Gerogieva’s kitchens.
We don’t need the existence of a bogeyman to explain why these countries are broken. They are quite capable of breaking themselves without external assistance.
On the subject of the IMF etc, you are indistinguishable from the far left.
They most certainly have assistance from the West. They have an imported blueprint to usher in authoritarianism.
Lesley, my point is that South Africa is a mess because of South Africans and not because of some external bogeyman. The sentiment here reminds me of the leftwing nuts who always made excuses for Zimbabwe, saying that “if only the West hadn’t done this or that, then Zimbabwe would be like Switzerland”. It’s nonsense. Zimbabwe is stuffed because of bad governance, as is South Africa.
“They are like junkies being forced by their dealer to buy more and more heroin…” Great analogy, and your comment is spot-on. Thank you.
Thanks for the link to We Lie To You News- I read the serious analysis but it’s great to see a comic,but clever debunking site. I’ve now subscribed and intend to experience some intelligent fun!!
I live in South Africa these days and can verify the general accuracy of this summary. Ramaphosa is widely seen as a tool of ‘white monopoly capitalists’ or the ‘globalists’ and compulsory vaccinations will be seen as him doing their will both for profit and for control. Since when did the government care about people’s health? Hunger, homelessness, AIDS, unemployment, sexual violence, criminal violence, gang warfare, malaria, TB, lack of road safety, poor educational provision… Covid is not widely seen as a threat outside the relatively prosperous. For the rest, there are far worse and far more immediate problems to worry about.
Thank you for the incisive and surgical precision of your article, slicing brilliantly through the bullshit Covid narrative we’ve been fed.
The crisis in South Africa, while culturally different to the one being played out here in the UK, nevertheless mirrors the same shocking realization, that worldwide civilization and society is under massive assault, and that it’s time for us all to wake up and react.
The destruction of small businesses in South Africa has been rolled out across the world, and the same names are laughing all the way to the bank … Amazon, Black Rock, Vanguard, Gates, Pfizer, etc.
Soon, the arch planners of the exaggerated Covid ‘pandemic’ (IMF, World Bank, WEF, UN and corporate players), will be crashing the world economy prior to their ‘Great Reset’, while they double down on puppet national governments to vaccinate/eliminate their non-compliant citizens from society, as Austria, Germany, Australia, New Zealand and others are obediently doing.
To make sense of it all, ultimately, you have to take the ‘Red Pill’ and grapple with the questions: “Why the insane push to vaccinate everyone on the planet against a moderate coronavirus?” and “Why impose a Covid passport that does not guarantee the holder is not infected?” These are questions you can only answer for yourself.
Ultimately, it’s all a heist, a coup, and our pathetic politicians – who undoubtedly have lucrative shares in those corporations – are either complacent, cowardly, in on it, or in fear of their lives and for their families.
We are in serious trouble, and we can’t rely upon or expect our Prime Minister to defend our human rights, or indeed the UN who wrote them (Well, in truth, I’m hoping Boris still has a backbone, but I’m not holding my breath for someone who allows all this destructive, woke nonsense to infiltrate and erode our society).
I didn’t mean to rant on this matter, but I’m deeply worried – and absolutely furious at the same time. There are those who want to foist upon us an insidious technocratic machine world, void of democracy, freedom, creativity, and everything it means to be human – love, kindness, compassion empathy, creativity, diversity, freedom of expression. In short, I believe we are faced with the ‘Enemies of Life’.
A reset of the world is indeed required, but it must be up to the people to decide where the world is to go, not a self-styled elite clique who put their own interests above humanity’s. Those of us who are still awake and can think for ourselves, have to head off and replace their dark vision, with one full of hope, fulfilment and abundance for all; to manifest an alternative for the world that embraces and revitalises all that is human and good – maybe to start off with de-centralization, restoring communities, and re-building family, societal and democratic values. This conversation and planetary debate, must be had, and now.
Get out and meet those who are both ‘the resistance to the technocratic takeover’ and ‘the co-creators of our new society’. They stand in your local park, every Sunday morning, making their stand for freedom. They are those protesting with boards and marching through the streets across all nations of the world, but which the BBC and the media censor.
It’s time to draw our line in the sand. And if you think I’m exaggerating, I truly hope you are right.
You are right – we do have to take a stand against those enemies of life, light, love but that is difficult against the state actors & their resources, as well as the seemingly overwhelming prevailing narrative. There exists small glimmers of hope in such as lowimpact.org and associated luminaries that need an informed populace to start the push-back. Otherwise, like you, I fear for the future.
Yes, I agree, it does seem difficult, because it appears they hold all the cards and resources – banks, corporates, world institutions, the media, and most politicians.
What’s in our favour, however, are numbers – we vastly outnumber them. Also, if the people rise up, the army and the police will have to decide on which side they stand, and I choose to believe that most of them are honourable people and will side with us, arresting the politicians and the corrupted.
Apart from that, we need to start right now, in our own lives, ‘building back much better’ and revision our world, and certainly do what you say, such as sustainable low impact living. We know the world is not right, so really it’s a fantastic and massive opportunity I feel.
Excellent comment – sums up the situation perfectly. Too well-considered to be termed a “rant”!
Thank you. That’s because I’ve been considering it for too long!!!
I was in South Africa for the better part of a month back in 2005 when I was on a year long sabbatical. I fulfilled a long-held dream of visiting the battlefields of iSandlwana and Rorke’s Drift, experiencing the wonderful storytelling of the late David Rattray as well as a host of other wonderful experiences. Even then, I could see it was a country with on-going problems that would not be easily resolved. However, this was completely outshone by the wonderful welcome everywhere and the open friendliness of South Africans from all backgrounds. It is a beautiful country.
So, this article – excellent though it is – saddens me deeply as it seems to present a country close to disintegration; a nation descending into a dark place in large part due to the inevitable tyranny that arises from one party rule, abetted by the chronic self centred, self regarding moralising of elites. We have it here in the UK but not to the same degree.
I was there in 2014. It was fascinating. I actually found the white farmers to be genuinely great people. I met several and was always so fascinated by their experience we talked at great length. They seemed to be amused by an American who didn’t look at them as racist bigot scumbags. I was fascinated because I would often see them at the side of the roads picking up poor black people in their open bed trucks to go to work. I could see them interacting on a daily basis with the poor. You could tell they were not rich either. They were hard working just trying to do what they could to hang onto their land. You wouldn’t find them in Capetown or the beaches. These were populated by mostly financial and real estate workers. The liberal left and new upper class blacks actually look down on both the farmers and the poor. LOL. This is our world.
How about low efficacy and widespread side effects? Or to put it another way, not “scepticism toward science” but scepticism towards science that refuses to be challenged and questioned – i.e. dogma.
Visiting SA recently I was struck by how weak and incompetent the state was. Comparing the response to violence there, with that which I’ve seen in Zimbabwe, I was mystified by how the ANC could run a despotic regime so badly.
The one thing that ZANU PF will tell them is that any malevolent state requires a disciplined and well-equipped army to beat people up. As it happens, it seems like the only thing that stopped South Africa from descending into chaos during the Zuma fiasco was that the taxi union was losing money and unilaterally decided, as a result, to refuse carriage to looters. It was this act, rather than government intervention, that stopped the rioting.
Given how violent the country is and that the army and police are essentially unarmed, fat and useless, the next wave of violence could be rather uglier than the one we’ve already seen.
They are trying to disarm the civilians by amending laws…. hahahaha. That is NOT going to happen, because it was the civilians who held the looters off to some extent – not the army or the police who are in the main fat (yes fat), corrupt and useless. This does not depict all of the police and I guess army, who are desperately trying to do a good job against all odds.
Sounds very similar to the path down which many European countries and parts of the US are going, just with vastly more corruption and inefficiency thrown in for good measure. The pattern world-wide is now more than alarming.
The vaccines are clearly effective at reducing hospitalization and mortality but are useless at stopping the spread of the disease. This has been seen time and again. Why are these governments continuing to double-down on these ridiculous measures?
And all the current evidence to hand shows that Omicron is a far milder form of Covid – perhaps it will in the end be the “kindler, gentler” Covid that we actually want to have, versus the far more dangerous variants.
South Africa is perhaps a model for where the US will be in 10 years–a corrupt, failed state with rampant crime and racial strife. There is a possibility, even a likelihood that there will be a civil war, but it is unclear if it will come before or after this period. The picture of the man in the store with an automatic rifle is not that far removed from the US today.
Corona has certainly been an accelerant to this process, but the corruption and hatred runs deep.
I have never seen a soldier (or police) monitoring a store for face masks, let alone a soldier with a gun. Most people run around with no masks, or masks under their noses or chins. To me this looks like a cynical hyped picture which doesn’t really depict the everyday truth.
Well, if you’re on the ground in SA I’m in no position to dispute this, but in the US, armed guards, often off duty police, are omnipresent and I suspect there will be more and more of them. As government fails massively, people will means will harden the target, while decrying racism, poverty, inequality in theory.
Will be interesting to see how they react when it comes into their neighborhoods, and literally–their homes.
The army was deployed after the riots and looting in South Africa this year – it would seem that this picture was taken then, as generally the army is not deployed amongst civilians, especially iro people wearing masks or not.
I do agree that generally in the world things are getting way out of hand and Western society is more threatened than people realize. Covid lockdowns have escalated many situations and tensions as many of us here warned.
As I commented above, many people here are armed and although there is a move to disarm, almost all people will remain defiant as we do not have a police force (or army) that can defend us.
I agree. I was in SA during all the lockdowns and in no way was mask wearing being enforced by police or soldiers. I suspect this photo was taken in latter days of July looting.
Great article, thank you UnHerd… Wonder how similar the South African situation is to many other African and also South American countries. It probably was terrible in India too, where people live on their small daily incomes.
Thank you for this. I had absolutely NO IDEA.
The liberal luvvies and lefties? Not a smidgin of guilt for leaving an unready Africa to make its own future(s). The Chinese, buying up the place, looking the other way until their bottom line suffers; then we’ll see real trouble.
Great article. Thank you!
Thanks Pottinger for these extraordinary insights. Weeping for South Africa resonated 75 years ago with Paton’s writing. Perhaps revolutions occur when there are no tears left to shed for that Beloved Country? Hope we can learn more from you about how that future unfolds.
So those criticising the UK and other western governments for not sharing their surplus vaccinations with poorer countries have failed to take into account the nature of those countries.
That still leaves us with the point that none of us are safe, until all are safe.
Imperialism, anyone?
“That still leaves us with the point that none of us are safe, until all are safe.”
what does this silly platitude even mean?
Excellent report, thanks Brian.
Thank you for this illuminating article. I also wonder about the history of Western funded vaccines including trials across the continent – and to what extent that contributes to vaccine rejection… This is not a subject I know anything about, or its local/regional history in parts of South Africa which is why I ask the question. But I can see that’s a whole other article/paper/book.
Excellent piece Brian. It persuaded me to subscribe to UnHerd for a year.
Using number of deaths early in the article to start building your case is a problem. The reporting systems and data in South Africa is not good and needs to be considered ahead of such a damning piece.
“the new class of warrior-scientists”
What fresh hell is this?
So it’s basically backwardness, then?