The disunifying effect of Vaccine Wars Across the Atlantic

We are all cleaning out our closets in this lockdown period. One of my neighbors found a Special Edition of The New York Times from Sunday the 16th of September 2001, which had been lovingly saved over the years. Still unable to throw it away, he passed it on to me. Reading it these nineteen years later, painted stark pictures of two different global crisis responses. In the days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States a real sense of “we are in this together” unity infused the Western world. This accord sits in direct contrast with the disunity affecting Transatlantic relations today. This disparity led me to ask, how the current state of affairs emerged, which includes an international blame game, interstate fights over personal protective equipment (PPE) and vaccine battles? And, in general, why hasn’t this global crisis brought the world together like crises in the past?