Well the moral (or also that of the imagination?) failures in India (more or less pure capitalism with a growing private hospital industry) are getting clearer by the day. [1] But here in the US, now that Trump is gone, we still have people refusing the vaccine. Plenty of them. And for the repubs that are refusing it, they have a good point that Trump brought the vaccine but they still don't trust it. Fair point. And I do think/wonder how much of it is people in places that were burned by the opiate pandemic, learned not to trust Big Pharma (specific companies, but people probably see it as all medicine) then see this vaccine as a product of the "same" system.
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It's not, of course, but most people don't dig that deep. So how much can you blame them. Still, the main thing is that the much of their reaction reminds me of how Defoe (plague in the 17th century) said he thought Europe fared better than Islamic countries that had more fatalism. Assuming that's true, it would appear that's the case nowadays for many parts of the US:
That view is bolstered by a religious, near-joyous fatalism. People say that if they haven’t caught Covid a year into the pandemic, they will take their chances. True, they might get Covid and die. But either way, a win-win: longer life on Earth or, for the faithful, eternal life in Heaven.
“There’s a time appointed for every person to die,” said Reuben Smucker, a Mennonite pastor in Greeneville who works as a garage-door installer. “We should take care of our bodies physically, emotionally and spiritually, but if it’s my time to go and it’s by Covid, well then, it’s my time to go.”
[1] Also why does it seem that the right wing populists have, for the most part, failed. I'd say it's mainly the ones that rode to power on the back of social media (Bibi, in Israel, for example, and for whatever you think of that old bastard, well they've done well there) that seem to be useless. Maybe social media has made them think in terms of a bubble of their followers? Might be something to look into, tbf.
Note: this is the same in Mexico where a left winger rose to power in a similar fashion.
