The COVID-19 pandemic was one of the most dramatic examples of what Naomi Klein has dubbed “disaster capitalism.” It might have been expected that the collective trauma, economic insecurity, and precarity that resulted from the pandemic were shared by all. But no, we were clearly not “all in this together.” An Oxfam report published last year estimates that 99 percent of humanity is “worse off because of COVID-19.” While inequality, poverty rates, the loss of livelihood, illnesses and loss of life increased everywhere, the world also emerged from the pandemic with an unprecedented concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the super-rich and monopoly corporations.

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck in 2020, an ill-prepared world had to confront the most devastating public health emergency in a century. The international community scrambled to respond, but the pandemic response was hobbled by corporate greed, nationalism, and narrow self-interest.

The response to the pandemic also followed a very familiar pattern rooted in centuries of colonialism, where the interests of the wealthy capitalist countries in the Global North were blatantly and shamelessly prioritized. Ostensibly advanced countries such as the US, the UK, the European Union, Switzerland and Canada, turned inward, purchasing and hoarding the bulk of the available vaccines, stockpiling medical resources, closing borders, and focusing on their own citizens, who received access to multiple vaccine doses while many people in low- and middle-income countries, predominantly in the Global South, fell victim to vaccine inequality. Canada secured the most doses per capita of any country in the world, more than 10 doses per person, at a time of limited global supply. Many countries, especially in Africa, had to wait until 2023 to obtain vaccines.

The global dashboard for vaccine equity, a joint project of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the World Health Organization (WHO) and the University of Oxford, indicates that, as of November 29, 2023 nearly 80 percent of people living in high-income countries had had at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose, while only roughly 33 percent of people living in low-income countries had had at least one dose.

A sobering 2024 report, “No Time to Gamble: Leaders Must Unite to Prevent Pandemics,” by the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response estimated that there were 28.5 million excess deaths associated with the pandemic. This is four times the official death toll of seven million. The death toll was also four times higher in low-income countries than high-income ones.

In January, 2024, the global anti-poverty group Oxfam released a report entitled “Inequality Inc.” in which we learn that “4.8 billion people are poorer than they were in 2019.” Further, “For the poorest people, who are more likely to be women, racialized peoples, and marginalized groups in every society, daily life has become more brutal still. Global inequality—the gap between Global North and the Global South—has grown for the first time in 25 years.”

Those most affected by the pandemic were already the world’s most vulnerable and marginalized. On many levels, women bore the brunt of the crisis. The pandemic led to terrible suffering, grief and the loss of millions of lives, and the inequitable access to life-saving COVID-19 vaccines, treatments, and health care resources highlighted and magnified the world’s inequities and contradictions.

The “me-first” approach of high-income countries was not only morally bankrupt, it was also self-defeating. Leaving billions of people around the globe lagging behind in the vaccine rollout, allowed the virus to spread and mutate. This prolonged the pandemic with devastating consequences and unnecessary loss of life.

COVID-19 was unprecedented for impacting the whole world at the same time. A global pandemic required a global strategy with universal access to vaccines and treatments. The shared experience of a common virus should have been enough to spur global cooperation, not narrow nationalistic approaches.

The Director-General of the WHO, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, called this vaccine inequity “a catastrophic moral failure.” Others called it vaccine nationalism or vaccine apartheid.

Archbishop Thabo Cecil Makoba from South Africa put it bluntly: “So, these vaccines that are available to the Global North and the West and available from Moderna reminds me that we are saying, like apartheid, ‘Hey, you guys are not human enough. Wait a bit.’”

For two and a half years, talks took place among the 194-member states of the WHO to bridge this gap. An ambitious plan was devised to negotiate a pandemic treaty to be better prepared for the next health crisis. The proposed treaty would have facilitated equitable access to vaccines, treatments and data sharing. The treaty was to be presented for approval to the 77th gathering of the World Health Organization in Geneva on May 27, 2024.

After ten rounds of negotiations, these talks collapsed one week before the May assembly. The proposed treaty faced fierce opposition from the wealthy countries of the Global North who were reluctant to agree to terms that would affect corporate interests and especially the protection of intellectual property, or their own narrow national interests (for more on this story, see this May 2024 Al Jazeera article).

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It was actually the collaboration of scientists and researchers across borders that led to the rapid development of vaccines in the first place. This inspired optimism about the prospect of a speedy end to the pandemic and nourished the hope that this intellectual commons could be built upon in future to allow for a science and technology transfer, which would allow vaccines to be produced without regard for profits or intellectual property rights. The COVID-19 pandemic could have been an opportunity to demonstrate the value of global cooperation.

But this spirit of cooperation was short lived once Big Pharma took over. With the active support of states, the technology and know-how, which had been publicly funded, were then privately appropriated. The emphasis shifted to monopoly control and maximizing profit. And the same wealthy states guaranteed Big Pharma massive profits by purchasing the bulk of available vaccines at highly inflated prices.

Breakthroughs in modern medicine are often made in labs, institutions, and universities that receive substantial public funding. Public funding is crucial at these riskiest stages of research and development. But that research is often privatized when it reaches the production phase, as Linda McQuaig argued in connection with Canada’s contribution to COVID-19 vaccine development. The pharmaceutical sector is given extensive powers to decide what medicines are produced, for whom they are produced, and at what price.

Big Pharma was lured and coaxed into COVID vaccine production with massive amounts of public funds and little oversight to ensure ethical contracting procedures. The exclusive rights to manufacture COVID-19 vaccines were held by a handful of pharmaceutical companies that controlled supply and price. Big Pharma prioritized profit over people’s needs and sold to those who could pay.

The COVID vaccines have proven to be the most lucrative pharmaceutical products ever. Pfizer alone is estimated to have made close to $100 billion in profit—an amount greater than the GDP of many nations. The COVID-19 vaccines have created nine new billionaires.

It’s hard to fathom that life-saving vaccines, which were largely produced by public funds, then faced the barriers of intellectual property rights, patents, monopolies and profits. It is also shocking how many world leaders continued to operate with a racist and colonialist framework.

More than 100 countries representing close to 80 percent of the global population, pressed for a suspension of intellectual property rights in the case of technologies crucial to ending the pandemic. A vaccine waiver would have made it easier for other countries to produce vaccines. Big Pharma refused to share the know-how behind the vaccines with countries that could have produced them. The campaign for a vaccine waiver was led by South Africa and India, and was opposed by US, UK, EU countries and Canada.

In a must-read November 2022 report by Politico entitled: “Who Killed the COVID Waiver,” the authors write: “Big Pharma used its vast lobbying and influencing efforts to try to kill a proposal that threatened the very tenets of the industry. Top industry executives enjoyed direct access to senior officials within the EU, which was opposed to the proposal from the very start and encouraged potentially rogue member countries, including Italy and France, to fall into line.”

The consequences of the failure of the international community to respond to this global health crisis in a manner that was fair and equitable were devastating, including innumerable preventable deaths and pushing people around the world further into poverty.

The failures in the pandemic response have also undermined the effectiveness of bodies such as the WHO, undermined international cooperation, and left the world unprepared for future public health crises, several of which are now looming.

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On August 14, 2024, the WHO declared a “global health emergency of international concern” for a new variant of mpox (previously known as monkeypox) after an outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo spread rapidly into the 13 neighbouring African countries, in addition to cases appearing in Sweden, Thailand, Pakistan and the Philippines.

We are already seeing the same patterns of vaccine inequity, hoarding, profiteering, and racism with the response to mpox. Mpox has been present in Central and West Africa for years, first detected in 1958, yet the continent is only now being included in international efforts to contain the spread. Children are at greatest risk from mpox, accounting for 70 percent of cases and 85 percent of deaths in Central Africa.

Vaccines were widely available and stockpiled in the US and Europe for several years, but those countries are being reluctant and slow to share. Vaccines that do reach Africa are very limited in number and are dependent upon charity.

As Jake Johnson of Common Dreams reported, the Danish pharma giant, Bavarian Nordic, one of the few companies with an approved vaccine for mpox, is being accused by Peter Maybarduk, the director of the Public Citizen’s Global Access to Medicines program, of taking a “profiteering approach.” The company’s current prices place the vaccine out of reach for many low-income and middle-income countries where mpox is now spreading. As the Globe and Mail’s health reporter Andre Picard wrote on August 15, 2024: “During the COVID vaccine rollout, we saw Western countries buy up supplies and hoard vaccines. We’re seeing that ugly reflex once again with mpox.” He noted that while Canada initially said it had no plans to donate any of its stockpile, the Public Health Agency was now considering possible vaccine donations.

This brings us back to the failure of the pandemic treaty. Had it not been torpedoed by corporate interests and the wealthy countries who wanted the treaty to exist only in an “advisory” capacity, the treaty would have amended global health regulations that are binding on all WHO member states. These regulations were last revisited in 1995. The goal was to be better prepared for the next pandemic by learning the lessons from the devastation caused by COVID-19.

Right-wing conspiracy theories and misinformation also undermined the talks. It was falsely claimed that countries that ratified the treaty would sacrifice their national interests. In an editorial entitled “The Pandemic Treaty: Shameful and Unjust,” the medical journal The Lancet wrote: “ultimately it is the politicians of G7 countries who must put aside vested industry interests and finally understand that in a pandemic it is not possible to protect only your own citizens: the health of one depends on the health of all. Millions of lives that could have been saved during the COVID-19 pandemic were not. Far from making amends, a handful of powerful countries are sabotaging the best chance to translate the lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic into legally binding commitments that will protect us all.”

On average, there have been three pandemics per century over the past 500 years. Depending upon definition, there have been at least four during the past century. Scientists have been warning that more and more frequent pandemics are almost a certainty, with another likely within the next 25 years.

The report referred to earlier, “No Time to Gamble: Leaders Must Unite to Prevent Pandemics,” made the point that “while pandemic threats are inevitable, pandemics are a political choice.”

To avoid another deadly pandemic, the report invokes the need for better political as well as public-health leadership, improved preparedness, greater independence for the WHO as well as adequate financing, a robust surveillance and alert system, and, crucially, equitable access to vaccines and treatments. It warns that “pathogens have ample opportunity to spill over, slip through and spread fast.” Consider the worrisome spread of the H5N1 bird flu outbreak and the emergence of a new deadly strain of mpox in African countries.

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Despite their hoarding of vaccines and me-first approach, many so-called advanced countries proved totally inept at handling this crisis. While the US and the UK were initially thought to be the best prepared to handle a pandemic, they ended up being two of the world’s biggest failures. Both had right-wing leaders at the helm—Donald Trump and Boris Johnson—who rejected science and multilateralism. Both were more concerned about the economic disruptions created by COVID than the health of their citizens. Trump made it a priority to whip up xenophobia, in particular anti-China sentiment.

A recent report published by Reuters, on June 14, 2024, revealed the mindset of the top leadership of the US at the height of the pandemic. According to this startling investigation, the US military ran a covert anti-vaccination campaign in the Philippines and other nations in Southeast Asia to sow distrust in vaccines made by China. This Pentagon campaign began in 2020 under Trump and continued after Biden took office. It used fake social media accounts on multiple platforms to discredit masks and testing at a time when the Chinese-made vaccines were the only ones available in Southeast Asia and elsewhere.

Trump’s blustering, missteps and failure of leadership were criminal, and the COVID-19 pandemic became the deadliest disaster in US history. The loss of life in the US was staggering. At 1.2 million deaths, the US had the highest COVID-19 fatality rate of any country, and it disproportionately affected Blacks, Latinos, other ethnic minorities, and Indigenous peoples. Life expectancy in the US actually dropped by an average of three years for Blacks and Latinos.

Trump was a main driver of misinformation and conspiracy theories. He dismissed the COVID-19 virus as a “very small problem,” “no worse than the flu.” He would spout nonsense: “One day—it’s like a miracle—it will disappear.”

The writer Nicholas Kristof described the pandemic response in the US as “the greatest failure of governance in the United States since the Vietnam War.” Dr. William Foege, a legendary epidemiologist who is credited with devising a global strategy that led to the eradication of smallpox, called it “a slaughter.”

Canada earned its own distinction during the pandemic as a heartless hoarder. An article in the National Post reported the harsh condemnation Canada received in the prestigious British Medical Journal (BMJ). In a series of seven articles written by Canadian pandemic peers—nurses, doctors, researchers, humanitarian workers—Canada was described as “judiciously ungenerous and unsavvy in its global behaviour, despite repeated pledges by its prime minister to deliver global solidarity during COVID-19” and charged with contributing to “devastating COVID losses by not sharing enough COVID vaccine and disrupting global supply.” The Canadian government even dipped into the COVAX vaccine supply. COVAX was the vaccine-sharing initiative coordinated by the WHO.

Canada was able to achieve a high vaccination rate due to what the BMJ somewhat amusingly called “a largely willing and conforming populace.” Still, as the BMJ noted, the death rate from COVID-19 in Canada exceeded global averages. This was attributed to a variety of factors including poor public-health coordination, underfunded and under-staffed health facilities, outdated data systems, and a failure to protect the most vulnerable. Shamefully, Canada had the worst record for COVID related deaths in long-term care or retirement homes, despite more than 100 reports which had foreshadowed and predicted this crisis.

While a handful of nations were relatively effective at containing the virus, the vast majority failed to protect their most vulnerable and marginalized people— seniors, racialized people, newcomers, essential service workers, those living in poverty, and those living in larger, crowded households. The pandemic response in many countries also suffered from decades of austerity, cutbacks, privatization, and decimated social-safety nets.

In May 2023, the WHO declared that “COVID-19 is no longer a public health emergency of international concern.” By that date, not even one-third of people living in low-income countries had received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine.

Most governments, including Canada’s, were eager to move on and ignore the repeated calls for enquiries. There were few attempts to really learn the lessons of the pandemic or to prepare for the next.

The world readily turned to other pressing matters—regional conflicts, wars and militarism, a global housing and affordability crisis, the scapegoating of newcomers and refugees, a rising far-right and ethnic nationalism, and genocide in Gaza. Even though COVID was still present, most countries stopped testing, stopped counting cases and deaths, and stopped taking preventative measures.

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During the first year of COVID-19, Arundhati Roy wrote a hopeful essay titled “The pandemic is a portal.” She wrote, “Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. … We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world.”

There was a relatively short period during the pandemic when such optimism was warranted. Despite the inadequacies of the response, the world did see a lot of good. Scientists and researchers, working together and collaborating across borders, rapidly developed effective vaccines. Front-line workers were universally praised. Health care workers, nurses, doctors, essential care workers, educators were all beyond heroic. Workers in transportation, factories, distribution, agriculture, food processing, stores, and warehouses—who are low-waged and often taken for granted—were rightly deemed as “essential” to life maintenance.

There was a generalized outpouring of kindness, empathy and solidarity shown at a community level. Local mutual aid networks sprang up, with people voluntarily caring for and helping others. Community-based agencies and non-profits were extraordinary in their efforts to provide programs and services. Community ambassadors helped to reach the most vulnerable and isolated. Government income-support programs like the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) led to talk about universal income programs. After the police murder of George Floyd (who was found to have COVID on autopsy), millions of people took to the streets, night after night, in a powerful uprising for racial justice.

All of this inspired hope. A public discourse emerged that we could “build back better,” by fostering more sustainable, resilient and inclusive societies. The systemic gaps and inequities were visible to all, which led to a period of profound reflection and re-evaluation.

After pandemic fatigue set in and the withdrawal of state-funded supports, much of that sentiment dissipated. Calls emerged from the usual quarters for austerity and spending restraint. Many wanted to simply move on and get back to ‘normal.’ The far-right took full advantage of people’s anxieties and frustrations to spread misinformation, division and conspiracy theories. They achieved some success promoting anti-vaccine and anti-lockdown views. Even mainstream media now frequently reference pandemic measures, such as mask mandates and restrictions, as being an overreaction.

The left was surprisingly quiet about pandemic measures. In Crisis and Contagion: Conversations on Capitalism & COVID-19, the editor Ian McKay wrote that “many leftists seem to echo a just-trust-the-experts line which I would not expect to hear from them.”

In 2022, a scathing report was published, titled “Pandemic of Greed: A wake-up call for vaccine equity at a grim milestone.” It was circulated by Oxfam on behalf of the People’s Vaccine Alliance, a broad-based coalition of organizations and activists, who campaigned relentlessly for a patent-free and fairly distributed vaccine available to all. They called for a people’s vaccine, not a profit vaccine.

The wealthy capitalist nations, representing about 15 percent of the global population, fought at every turn to guard corporate interests and their own privileged state interests. They tried unsuccessfully to insulate themselves from the pandemics. They also undermined or sabotaged nearly all the attempts at global cooperation as well as the effectiveness of bodies such as the WHO. The cost of that approach was deadly and devastating, a toll which could have been avoided.

The pandemic preyed upon and aggravated inequities, vulnerabilities and systemic racism. It forced the world to confront its many contradictions, including the dominant systems and values that we live under. The neoliberal global order proved itself incapable of protecting people or the natural world.

Capitalism has fundamentally disrupted our relationship with nature. It commodifies what is essential for human life and prioritizes corporate interests over the needs of all life forms. Fueled by environmental degradation, climate change, profiteering, and conflicts, the world will be faced with many more public health crises.

Few on the left have researched pandemics as much as the renowned scholar and activist Mike Davis. Through his writings, he explored the links between agribusiness, deforestation, overfishing, the climate crisis, crowded slums, extreme poverty, and pandemics, which he styled “the monster at the door.” Davis, who died in 2022, was often critical of what he saw as the parochial worldview of the left in the US. In Crisis and Contagion, he is quoted as saying “We suffer from a deficit of internationalism.”

We have entered the age of “monsters at the door.” We are already seeing a global health emergency with mpox and as well as a polio outbreak in Gaza, and the world is seeing the same pattern of inequity in the response. Furthermore, COVID, as well as long COVID, is still with us and pervasive.

The world urgently needs to decolonize. That will to disrupt and change the power dynamics was demonstrated by the countless organizations, networks and NGOs—the vast majority in the Global South—who campaigned for and practiced a people-first approach to the pandemic. These advocates included the People’s Vaccine Alliance, Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN), the People’s Health Movement, No Profit on Pandemic, the Third World Network, and Global Justice Now.

A world where the wealthy, so-called advanced, capitalist nations can dominate is abhorrent. We need a new world order focused on global solidarity, mutuality, and international cooperation. We need science-based praxis where the needs of humans, animals and nature are prioritized. We do not need a repeat of pandemic profiteering and the shameful “me-first” posture of the rich and powerful.

Ken Theobald is an activist and community worker in Toronto. He previously worked in the global education/international cooperation sector and was a board member with the Canadian Council for International Co-operation (CCIC), now called Co-operation Canada.