Umair, calm down. This pandemic is ridiculously mild - at its worst, with no modern medicine, covid seems to have a 1% kill rate. This is just a starter pandemic. There'll be another one along in a few years with a much bigger R number and a truly terrifying kill rate if we don't get our act together. But at the moment covid19 is not a massive threat to us as a species.

Our reactions to covid are.

Yes Big Pharma are trying to make a killing (?!) out of covid 19. They have to maximise their stock holder benefit, it's in the rules of the game that makes a company an immortal individual.

What will happen? If there's a big enough demand for something and the present producers are creating artificial scarcity, what happens? You get people cheating. Countries who can will just start making new vaccines and pretty soon the price will come down, for all Pfizer and Moderna's efforts at branding.

What we need is a WHO that encourages this very capitalist process, until the Big Pharma companies are left holding millions of doses that nobody wants because the Kenyan or Bolivian vaccine is better and cheaper anyway.

By the way, if you're wondering why AstraZeneca got accused of so many bad things - 1 in a million clot problems! - the answer is that probably Pfizer, Moderna et al were spreading nasty rumours to stop people taking up the cheap AZ vaccines and prefer the Pfizer one at $15 a shot. That's what you do if some rotter is undercutting you with vaccines sold at cost.

It's a game. It's all a game, and nobody cares about the bloodshed.

Which is why we need a truly independent World Health Organisation, paid for by crowdfunding in every country, ideally with teeth. An organisation with the power not only to tell people some virus or germ is now a pandemic, but also to tell them what to do about it so that there are consistent universal rules that everybody has to obey on pain of being last in the queue for the next vaccines.

As for covid 19 - take a look at the history of the Russian flu in 1891 which was almost certainly a coronavirus. It was a deadly pandemic in which a million people died. Now it's just an ordinary cold.

Parasites don't want to kill their hosts. Mostly the variants will get more infectious and even milder until they become a part of our normal microbiome.

By which time something else (mutated measles? a new form of smallpox?) will be terrifying us.

We had a 70 year holiday from major infectious diseases thanks to hygiene, vaccination and antibiotics.

The holiday is over.