There has to be a better way out of the rubble of the past two years. What would it mean to move into a future in which a common fate mattered as much as our own? It would mean no one was disposable.
The lesson of the AIDS pandemic is that it’s easy to leave people behind, even if it is at the cost of our collective peril. Coronavirus variants can develop in people with weakened immune systems who struggle to clear infections on their own, like those with untreated H.I.V. Think of the home we’ve then made for viruses like SARS-CoV-2 by impeding access to vaccines and by allowing millions to go without AIDS treatment even now. Variants can emerge because of our desire to put it all behind us. No one is truly safe until we all are. Yet might we act to save millions of people not just in the interest of self-preservation but also simply because it’s the right thing to do? That would be a signal that this pandemic has changed us. For good.
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