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Happy Friday.

I'm taking my wife for her first dose of Covid vaccine this morning. She's clinically vulnerable and shielding so this is a first step towards a safer world. The second dose will be in May. I don't know when I'll be offered it not being in a priority group but all English adults are supposed to be offered at least the first dose by 31st July.

I was listening to a segment on the radio the other day detailing how rich nations were stockpiling vaccines and the manufacturer's were deliberately selling something like 95% of their output to those rich nations – I suppose it's a guaranteed payday especially when one company is making up to 80% profit.

It's disgusting.

There is a call for mass manufacturing on a global scale but this would require open sourcing the vaccine recipes. Not only are the companies themselves unwilling to do this but a number of governments of said rich nations are also blocking it. Big pharma holds such sway in political circles.

The World Health Organisation has an initiative called Covax which aims to grant more -"global equitable access to Covid vaccines"_ but, due to the above, will fall far short of anything even remotely resembling equitable. An example given during the above radio piece was that even with Covax's help only 2 in 10 adults in Ghana will be offered a vaccine by the end of this year.

The longer it takes to vaccinate the higher the chance of mutations which will be immune to the current crop of vaccinations and even the rich nations could find themselves back at square one.

A global pandemic is an ideal opportunity to reassess and put right some of the things wrong with our world – "what kind of normal [do] we want? – but it's sadly business as usual or worse. The divisions and inequalities are only going to grow, whole sections of the world could potentially become "no go" zones. It sounds melodramatic but you can see it happening. We've had our "travel corridors" during lockdown but with Covid passports being a possible way forward things could only get worse.

Well, that became the opposite of "happy Friday" pretty quickly.