Americans are a parochial lot, I think sometimes. But perhaps it seems so only because I have spent my entire life here. If I had grown up in Germany or Latvia or Ethiopia or just about anywhere else, I might think those cultures similarly parochial. We humans spend a lot of time gazing at our own navels – as if enlightenment might be found there. I will admit that I have spent some time, now and then, gazing at my own. I’ve never found enlightenment there – just a bit of lint, and a small pebble once. I think that the pebble might have been a concretion of desquamated epithelium, but who knows? It was many years ago; it might have been an actual pebble.
I am contemplating navel gazing this afternoon as a form of cultural self-absorption, of our collective inability to look at our own lot as just an instance of the condition of all people in all places. We seem to not understand our interconnectedness all that well – no matter how much we talk, or write, about it. Take the case of the pandemic. Ending the pandemic almost certainly cannot be achieved without world-wide vaccination. Yet, the WTO sides with the pharmaceutical industries in protecting the intellectual property of the vaccine producers in the first world over insisting that they license their technologies to generics manufacturers in the third world. I think Alexis de Tocqueville might have said that we don’t properly understand “self-interest” in this instance.
I read today that India has produced and deployed >100 million doses of its own COVID vaccine. It’s called COVAXIN. It is based on inactivated virus (old vaccine tech), and uses a novel adjuvant that some vaccine critics worry may cause auto-immune conditions although none have been reported yet. The vaccine is highly effective at preventing severe COVID and death, and it is effective against all the known viral variants. There are still breakthrough cases, of course. The company that developed the vaccine in collaboration with Indian government’s medical research institution, thinks that it can produce 300 million doses with its current manufacturing assets. The company is already licensing its vaccine to manufacturers in other sites inside and outside of India. And the WHO has granted COVAXIN an emergency use authorization (EUA).
Vaccines like COVAXIN travel much better than m-RNA vaccines. They don’t require meticulous environmental controls to prevent them from spoiling. This makes them ideal for distribution in rural and other sparsely populated areas. I think this is a major victory for Indian biotech and for the world.
Gazing at one’s own navel isn’t necessarily harmful, but if we do it at the expense of seeing the rest of the world, we risk missing opportunities to help others and ourselves in the process.