Pandemic: A world-building exercise
First, there was light news of a vaccine against COVID-19 nearing the end of its phase 3 clinical trials with very promising results, accompanied with breezy speculations (often tied to the stock prices of a certain drug-maker) about how it’s going to end the pandemic in six months.
An Indian disease-transmission modeller – of the sort who often purport to be value-free ‘quants’ interested in solving mathematical puzzles that don’t impinge on the real world – reads about the vaccine and begins to tweak his models accordingly. Soon, he has a projection that shines bright in the dense gloom of bad news.
One day, as the world is surely hurtling towards a functional vaccine, it becomes known that some of the world’s richest countries – representing an eighth of the planet’s human population – have secreted more than half of the world’s supply of the vaccine.
Then, a poll finds that over half of all Americans wouldn’t trust a COVID-19 vaccine when it becomes available. The poll hasn’t been conducted in other countries.
A glut of companies around the world have invested heavily in various COVID-19 vaccine candidates, even as the latter are yet to complete phase 3 clinical trials. Should a candidate not clear its trial, a corresponding company could lose its investment without insurance or some form of underwriting by the corresponding government.
Taken together, these scenarios portend a significant delay between a vaccine successfully completing its clinical trials and becoming available to the population, and another delay between general availability and adoption.
The press glosses over these offsets, developing among its readers a distorted impression of the pandemic’s progression – an awkward blend of two images, really: one in which the richer countries are rapidly approaching herd immunity while, in the other, there is a shortage of vaccines.
Sooner or later, a right-wing commentator notices there is a commensurately increasing risk of these poorer countries ‘re-exporting’ the virus around the world. Politicians hear him and further stigmatise these countries, and build support for xenophobic and/or supremacist policies.
Meanwhile, the modeller notices the delays as well. When he revises his model, he finds that as governments relax lockdowns and reopen airports for international travel, differences in screening procedures in different countries could allow the case load to rise and fall around the world in waves – in effect ensuring the pandemic will take longer to end.
His new paper isn’t taken very seriously. It’s near the end of the pandemic, everyone has been told, and he’s being a buzzkill. (It’s also a preprint, and that, a senior scientist in government nearing his retirement remarks, “is all you need to know”.) Distrust of his results morphs slowly into a distrust towards scientists’ predictions, and becomes ground to dismiss most discomfiting findings.
The vaccine is finally available in middle- and low-income countries. But in India, this bigger picture plays out at smaller scales, like a fractal. Neither the modeller nor the head of state included the social realities of Indian society in their plans – but no one noticed because both had conducted science by press release.
As they scratch their heads, they also swat away at people at the outer limits of the country’s caste and class groups clutching at them in desperation. A migrant worker walks past unnoticed. One of them wonders if he needs to privatise healthcare more. The other is examining his paper for arithmetic mistakes.
