In this long Wall Street Journal article about how a utopian idea to distribute vaccines to the world’s healthcare workers failed miserable I found this gem of a paragraph. It’s highlighted in bold because I included paragraphs preceding and following the key text.
Like Operation Warp Speed, the multibillion-dollar initiative the U.S. government would eventually form, this program would make it possible for governments to secure vaccines in advance, said Richard Hatchett, chief executive of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, or CEPI, who had hashed out the idea with the Berkleys in Davos. That would make it easier for countries to manage the risk of investing in medicines while they were still in testing.
Gavi, founded two decades ago with financing from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, teamed up with CEPI, also a Gates-funded organization, which invests in vaccine development for emerging infectious diseases.
The WHO backed the idea. Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus rallied European leaders into joining an April 24 videoconference, during which French President Emmanuel Macron extolled what would eventually be called the Covid-19 Vaccines Global Access Facility, or Covax.
“This will make evident whether we can really work together, for the benefit of many millions of people,” said German Chancellor Angela Merkel, as heads of state from across Africa, Latin America and Asia listened in.
Not on the call: Russia, which was developing its Sputnik V vaccine; China, which was working on its own shots; or the U.S., which didn’t join until early 2021.
Wall Street Journal
Maybe… just maybe… if such panic and hysteria wasn’t created surrounding the virus with lockdowns and such countries like the U.S., China, Russia, and later the EU (not a country) wouldn’t have rushed to secure all the vaccine for themselves. Populations wanted desperately to get back to normal and demanded their governments get vaccines at any cost.
There was no reason for all this panic.