Covid-19: The Monstrosity of the Normal

Our ideology says that millions must die for an economic system that puts public goods in private hands.

As of this writing, 5.2 million people[1] have died of Covid-19. Many, if not most, of these deaths could have been prevented if the formulae for vaccines had been released to developing nations so that they could manufacture their own supply.[2] More could have been saved if wealthy countries had directly them for the rest of the world.[3] And more Americans would be alive if so many of our us weren’t understandably fearful of our profit-driven healthcare “system.”[4]

We have allowed millions to die because we have an ideology of death. Most of us perceive it only dimly, even subliminally, but we live by this ideology just the same. It tells us that millions must die as the byproduct of an economic system that takes public goods – scientific knowledge, and the labor and machinery of drug manufacturing – and places them in private hands for profit-seeking purposes.

It would have been so simple to release the vaccine formulae. It would still be simple. They reside in computer files as a series of 0’s and 1’s, binary data that is translated into text and symbols by universally available programs. That's all. This intellectual “property” is immaterial, evanescent, costless. It could appear on a billion computer screens at once with no labor or cash outlay (except for the cost of powering the servers, which already churn night and day).

But we don’t think twice about denying this knowledge to the world, despite the ever-growing mountain of corpses. Our ideology demands that this information be hidden to enrich a few at the cost of the many. This is the monstrosity of the normal, of our normal, of our age. The death, the disease, the suffering ... to us, that’s just how the world works.

This isn’t what Hannah Arendt described as “the banality of evil,” although there is a relationship between them. Arendt was talking about the willingness of bureaucrats and other functionaries to administer the machinery of evil. This is about the rest of us, people who live their lives outside the system that decides who lives and who dies. The responsibility is ours. How did we convince ourselves that this political economy reflects the world as it should be and that we have no responsibility to change it? How do we wake up, name this ideology, and reject it?

It’s time to put an end to the monstrosity of the normal and take action to affirm the value of life.

Go to Public Citizen or Free the Vaccine to act against vaccine apartheid.  

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[1] BBC Covid Tracker, December 3, 2021 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-51235105

[2] “Vaccine Apartheid,” Zain Rizvi, Public Citizen https://www.citizen.org/article/vaccine-apartheid/

[3] “By the end of November, around 54.2% of the global population had received at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose. For low-income countries, however, the rate was just 5.8%.” Deborah Gleeson, The Conversation https://theconversation.com/wealthy-nations-starved-the-developing-world-of-vaccines-omicron-shows-the-cost-of-this-greed-172763

[4] “Many More Americans Would Be Vaccinated if Our Health Care System Wasn’t So Terrifying,” Natalie Shure, The New Republic https://newrepublic.com/article/162658/vaccine-fear-health-care-surprise-billing