Everyone deserves health care

I got my second COVID booster shot Wednesday, and spent yesterday feeling a bit like this branch.

Every time I get a reaction from a vaccine - COVID, shingles, the common flu, whatever - it tells me my immune-system is working and I feel deeply grateful. Grateful to be generally healthy. Grateful for medical science that has helped me get and stay healthy throughout my life. And in this case, particularly grateful to be living in a place where there is easy access to vaccines, including against this insanely infectious and damaging disease.

This last piece of gratefulness is tinged with guilt and anger, however. Vaccines, like pretty most all other benefits of medical science, have not been equitably distributed. Or perhaps I should say this in the active voice to make myself clear: we, countries of the global north, have gone out of our way to hoard COVID vaccines for our own citizens. We have done this before. With treatment for AIDS. With responses to the H1N1 flu epidemic. In fact, we do this all the time: asserting through our actions that we believe we are more deserving of care, of life, than other humans.

This is not just “unfair” and “unequal” (though it is also that). It is part of the same stubborn misconception of separateness that gives rise to climate disaster, police violence, and deep and damaging income disparity. It harms us all, whether you are a person who hoards resources or who lacks them.

What to do, you ask? Awareness is the first step. Awareness of privilege, of interconnectedness, of abundance and scarcity, of love. Next is dreaming of the world we want and seeing little germs of that world in the present for us to nurture and grow. None of this is inevitable. We can decide to do different and better.

Next up: virtual vinyasa flow Saturday April 23, 13:00 UTC (9am EDT).