“Rage, Disgust and Bewilderment”: An Indian Decries Americans’ Covid Self-indulgence

More and more, I’m feeling the same way.

I recently wrote about the incredible irony of Americans spurning Covid vaccines that billions abroad would figuratively die for and that millions are literally dying without.

The fury-filled eloquence of Indian journalist Barkha Dutt, addressing her country’s Covid-fueled agony, illuminates the matter far better.

As she observes, “When I hear about the Biden administration’s call for states to pay $100 to anyone getting a coronavirus vaccine, I feel a surge of rage, disgust and bewilderment that it has come to this…The cash-rich Western countries that have not set vaccine mandates are displaying the worst sort of White privilege and unacceptable self-indulgence.”

She paints a couple of portraits of pain:

I think of Mashkoor Khan, an elderly man who speaks with a tremble, lying almost paralyzed on his cot in a small town of Madhya Pradesh state in central India. He pointed me to an empty spot near his bed where his wife used to sleep before she died of covid-19. A clutch of passport photos is all that remains with him of his son and daughter, both of whom also died of the disease. The family says it mortgaged jewelry, sold land and dipped into life savings to pay the hospital fees. In just 19 days, almost an entire home was wiped out. “I have nothing left to live for,” Khan says.

And when I see some American states go to war against mask mandates, I think of Sherchand, a daily wage worker in the capital city’s municipal administration, who earns a salary of 13,000 rupees a month — less than $180. He sold a plot of land to be able to pay the hefty fees for his wife, Manju. She died when the oxygen supply in an overburdened health system ran short. “I am left with neither wife, nor land,” says Sherchand, now a single father to three children.

Multiply these stories by many millions, and we begin to grasp the reality racking so much of the world while so many Americans cling to their self-absorbed fantasies.

The analytical part of me yearns to calmly grasp the blend of disinformation, misinformation and ignorance that drives our non-vaxxers and anti-vaxxers. I want to perceptively probe their blind faith in the heavens, politicians, quacks and pseudo-journalists, which crowds out confidence in science.

Yet, day by day, I can’t help but agree more and more with Ms. Dhutt’s rage, and reject our indulging the self-indulgent.

Those Americans’ vaccination antipathy is so clearly not about rights or freedom. It’s about ignorance, or fear, or selfishness or all of the above. The same applies to their tolerance for spreading Covid.

But particularly against the backdrop of the global nature of the plague, of what India and so many impoverished peoples are suffering, it’s about something else.

As Ms. Dhutt emphasizes, it’s about privilege.

Originally published at https://apromisedland.org on August 8, 2021.