India, at great expense to itself, is offering a few lessons to politicians and people around the world. Let's take politicians first.
The pandemic has no respect for politics. This, all politicians must know. China, where the coronavirus started, Italy, the United States, the United Kingdom and now, India, have all been humbled. The list is not exhaustive by any means.
In the last few days, India has been reporting more than 300,000 infections and more than 2,000 deaths daily. Hospital beds and oxygen supplies have run out. It is not uncommon to read of people hurrying from hospital to hospital in search of beds and oxygen tanks.
Never mind the national and local leadership, but global leaders should not have just watched India suffer like this from afar. After days of knowing about the devastation being visited on India, the UK is reported to be rushing ventilators and oxygen concentrators to the subcontinent.
The European Union is likewise putting aid together. India is the world's largest producer of vaccines but the raw materials come from the US. If a BBC report is right, the US is lifting an export ban it imposed on the raw materials for the vaccines.
Despite appeals by India in February, the US is only shipping the raw materials now. Yet every country — there are 198 countries — is a member of the so-called United Nations, a body formed to end the scourge of war. The pandemic is a scourge, too. Yet nations do not act united. Or unhesitatingly. If nations can form a speedy alliance to invade a country, why can't they be equally swift in helping a member nation fight a pandemic? If an emergency doesn't qualify, what will?
Are national interests standing in the way? Global politicians must remember this: national interest kills, at times. Nowhere is this most evident than in the supply of vaccines. Some 100 countries are trying to get the World Trade Organisation to temporarily suspend patent rules so that generic vaccines can be produced to achieve global herd immunity.
But a few countries, chief among them the US and the UK, are blocking the move. The few may think Covax, the global vaccine programme, is enough. Not so, says Gabriel Scally, a visiting professor of public health at the University of Bristol in his op-ed piece in The Guardian.
The programme, he says, aims only to vaccinate 20 per cent of the populations of recipient countries this year. By then, the SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, would have turned mutants many times over.
Now for the people. Take India again. Because of overconfidence or brute errancy, people gave health and social protocols a slip. Crowds of people were in places they shouldn't have been. And crowds in a country with 1.3 billion people means mixing and mingling in the thousands or tens of thousands. Superspreaders are made of these.
Knowingly or unknowingly, the people have given the virus a booster. Little wonder, an India-born double-mutant — B1.617 — is on its devastating rounds country-wide. Stop the pandemic, we tell politicians and people alike. It is a serial killer.