Kathy Sheridan: Beacon-type entitlement evident in vaccine race

It had all the elements of a parody. While the nice, smiley Irish man was virtually sliding that big bowl of shamrock towards the US president, why wouldn’t he grab the opportunity to wheedle a few vaccines out of him?

Sure what’d be the harm – apart from the fact that Ireland is about 7,000km away and is signed up to the communal vaccine programme of the world’s most successful trading bloc with the prospect of ample vaccines in a matter of weeks. Or that the US shares an actual, porous border with Mexico, which has lost more than 200,000 souls to Covid-19 and where five vaccines per 100 people have been delivered. That’s a third of Ireland’s vaccination rate.

How entitled are we?

The Beacon spirit is not the preserve of one Manhattan-sized ego.

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Entitled people operate in group-validating bubbles so that any amount of queue-jumping and mutual digouts can be justified between themselves

For a population happy to blame many of its Covid missteps on a border problem, it was cringeworthy. And yet for many politicians and commentators, it was a no-brainer. They harried the Taoiseach into asking the question and were shocked – SHOCKED – when they heard that Biden had chosen to dispatch a few million to Mexico and Canada instead.

Entitled people are not just lacking in awareness of the world beyond them. They compound it by operating in group-validating bubbles so that any amount of queue-jumping and mutual digouts can be justified between themselves. Public chatter is growing around the definition of “frontline” healthcare worker, which appears to be quite elastic.

Well connected is not the same as wealthy.

Their position can be bolstered by any number of BS variants of whataboutery. “Should the punishment inflicted on the Beacon boss be any greater than the sheepish apology offered by the RTÉ presenters that time?” wonders a high-profile commentator. Is it that hard to distinguish between a bunch of working people rushing to the lobby mid-shift to say farewell to a retiring colleague and a hospital rushing to offer teachers at the school attended by its chief executive’s children a publicly procured, publicly owned, life-saving vaccine currently reserved for deeply vulnerable groups?

Russia has managed to score priceless propaganda and diplomatic coups across the world by offering to sell hundreds of millions of vaccine doses to all-comers

Meanwhile, other entitled folk have been dispatching begging letters to the Russian embassy apparently. “Many Irish citizens” were in touch, “seeking the ways to receive the Russian jab”, the ambassador, Yuriy Filatov, said last week. And Russia would like to help, he said, “if there is an interest on the Irish Government side”.

Perspective: by the end of 2020 Russia had the third-highest number of excess deaths in the world after the United States and Brazil. Its current daily case average is a conservative 10,000 according to Our World in Data and just seven in 100 Russians have received a dose of its efficacious Sputnik V. That’s less than half Ireland’s vaccination rate.

Yet Russia has managed to score priceless propaganda and diplomatic coups across the world by offering to sell hundreds of millions of vaccine doses to all-comers. Supplies for 10,000 Bolivians arrived with the pomp usually reserved for state visits, greeted at the airport by Bolivia’s president and the Russian ambassador.

So what’s the problem with dosing its own people? When two-thirds of Russians said they would refuse the vaccine you could bet the farm on the leader who glories in bare-chested images of himself getting his kit off for a public jab. To raise his people’s trust, you understand. Yet when Putin finally got the vaccine last week, it was delivered far from the cameras.

The notion that the British government was 'planning to offer 3.7 million Covid jabs to the Republic' was straight out of the propaganda manual

The problem is scarcity. Russia has produced a very successful shot but lacks the production capacity, (which has been farmed out to South Korea and India). In fact, the Kremlin has just acknowledged that scarcity of the vaccine was a factor in Putin’s decision to delay his own vaccination, the New York Times reports; they needed to avoid stimulating demand from the wider population.

So the game-playing carries on. While the world desperately tries to ramp up production, the game is to create disruption between the US and South America and between EU member states by offering vaccine “help” to any interested governments.

Our own dear neighbour has also been taking Russian lessons apparently. The notion – delivered via a front-page splash by London reporters in the Sunday Times – that the British government was “planning to offer 3.7 million Covid jabs to the Republic” was straight out of the propaganda manual. Note that wording, “planning to offer”. Note that no bilateral discussion of any kind was mentioned. Note the absence of even a ballpark delivery date. Note that omore than 90 per cent of its own population has yet to receive the second dose (not that this was mentioned).

The only plausible part was a quote from an under-employed juvenile British cabinet minister who described the “plan” as a “poke in the eye for Brussels”. Cringe. A New Yorker cartoon comes to mind. Two besuited, gimlet-eyed dogs are at a cocktail bar and one says, “It is not enough that we succeed. Cats must also fail.”

It is not enough to have the power. You must also be seen to wield the power. Others must also fail. It is stupid and exhausting. In the vaccine games – when the race is to the entitled, the quick, the game-players and the schemers – remember the “losers” and those who have stolen their places.