The word pandemic

It is not strange that we are as we are: we have lived, for more than a year, in a word that we had never used.

Unfortunately, it is consistent: we live in a situation that we have never experienced - and never even imagined.

Life is made up of very different events - extraordinary, sad, boring - but imaginable;

This is the first time that something that we did not fear has happened to millions and millions.

Not even in our worst nightmares did we find ourselves locked up, masked, subjected to confused whims, so ignorant, terrified: those grotesques that are now the norm.

And the word is up to the task. The word

is a punishment: it is from the line of hecatomb, catastrophe, apocalypse, those Greek compounds that announce the terrible.

Hecatombe comes from

hundred - and

oxen - because it was the tumultuous sacrifice of a hundred oxen; catastrophe,

— downward — and

— to say that luck was sunk; apocalypse, milder, is only

—outside— and

—hiding— to say revelation. They are words made of two words, dangerous crosses. Pandemic follows the same model with scraping:

is everyone,

is people. A pandemic is what happens to all people, to all peoples.

(It was another of those moments that we only understand when they have passed: on March 11, 2020, that Chinese virus had killed 4,921 people and the World Health Organization, amid its usual confusion, decreed that the situation deserved the qualification of pandemic. It seemed silly, pure nominalism: what difference did it make if it was a pandemic or an academy or an infodemic. We didn't know then).

Now, a year later, we are getting used to it: we live there. And yet it would seem that in this also we have lived wrong. If a pandemic is what happens to all peoples, it happens to them in such different ways that it is abusive to postulate that the same happens to everyone. The vaccine is a rough example: what is the similarity, say, between what happens to the Israelis or the Emiratis or the Americans, vaccinated to the full, and the Spanish or the Italians or the Uruguayans, vaccinated a little, and the Gabonese or the Paraguayans or Thais, vaccinated nothing?

In a world where saying everyone is an abuse of language, vaccines show that difference like few known events. The richest countries concentrate them as they concentrate all the rest: wealth, resources, weapons, knowledge, food — and that concentration makes so many others lack. In these three or four months of campaigns, North America and Europe used almost half of the vaccines that were administered in the world - with a tenth of their population. And yet they cannot be cured and they lack doses and the rest of the planet is degraded and it becomes clear, increasingly clear, that saving yourself is only brutally unfair and, worse, that it does not work: that saving yourself alone is not saving yourself. The pandemic is a catastrophe, a hecatomb, and so on. The pandemic belongs to everyone.

Now we do know: if there was ever a time when it seemed necessary to change norms and customs, this is the time. That is why I am surprised that, even so, governments and international organizations have not decided to apostatize - for a little while - from the sacrosanct private property: recover and distribute the patents of these vaccines so that the more the better are produced in all the laboratories that can do so. . It surprises me even more than the left? of the world do not turn it into a clamor, unstoppable movement, claims in the streets of the planet: Vaccines for All. We can do it; it is only prevented by the same norms that always prevent almost everything.

We do not do it. It must be, surely, the secondary effects of the covid: that, in addition to being fragile, we became even dumber, more subdued, more insignificant. For that pandemic, as far as it is known, there is still no vaccine.