If the measure of a society is in how it treats its weakest members, then surely it is also in how it responds to human tragedy.
But in this past week we’ve seen two events dominate the news that we not might be comfortable to judge our civilisation by, and the interest in the stories has proved a poignant reminder of our underlying hypocrisies.
On Monday a boat went down in the Mediterranean, with a terrible loss of life, including a girl who was just 18, and a horrible trauma for all those onboard.
But, as some of the Italian rescuers trying to recover the lost bodies for their mourning families pointed out to reporters, this is the same sea in which 3,041 people drowned last year, thrown from flimsy, overcrowded and unseaworthy vessels. Few of those deaths attracted much notice.
The loss of the poor souls on the luxury yacht was no less a tragedy than the deaths of thousands of migrants making the Mediterranean crossing over the past few years. The question is why it should be treated as more of a tragedy – why do we continue to value lives differently?
It’s a similar thread with mpox, that rare infection formerly known as monkeypox that has killed between 500 and 700 people in the Democratic Republic of the Congo this year. Let’s be clear, mpox isn’t Covid. There is a vaccine, and you can already get one in the UK. It is fatal in fewer than 4% of cases. The immunocompromised – babies, people living in poverty, those with conditions such as HIV – are most at risk of complications.
But the DRC has been experiencing mpox outbreaks for more than 10 years. Only now that a new strain is proving more transmissible – so it might just travel beyond African shores – are there efforts afoot to send some of those vaccines to the people who actually need them.
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