Not since the grotesquerie of 2008’s global financial crisis has the irrationality and incompetence of the system that governs us been so manifest. It didn’t have to be this way.

And yet some insist there is nothing to see here, arguing that because South Africa, which first alerted the world to the threat of the Omicron variant of COVID-19, now has a surfeit of vaccine doses but a growing problem with vaccine hesitancy, vaccine apartheid cannot be responsible. Instead of there being insufficient export or local production of vaccines, there has been too much of an export and local production of anti-vax misinformation, they charge. It’s not capitalism, but the “COVIDiots” that are the real problem.

Meanwhile, in the face of fresh efforts to increase vaccine uptake like sectoral vaccine mandates or vaccine passports, and more coercive measures, particularly in some European Union states considering population-wide compulsory vaccination, cities such as Brussels, Amsterdam, and Vienna have experienced violent clashes between police and protesters in their thousands, sometimes tens of thousands. And even those broadly supportive of some level of restrictions in a public health emergency to achieve greater vaccination rates find themselves uncomfortable with the scale of infringement of civil liberties embedded in more radical measures adopted in recent weeks in places such as Austria, where the unvaccinated may no longer leave the house, or Australia, which has established remote quarantine camps.