Lithuania Cancels Covid Vaccine Donation To Bangladesh

Say you are at home. An earnest young woman knocks on your door. She has a petition for you to sign. The woman is also taking donations; a $50 minimum is suggested. Perhaps she wants to stop Evil Megacorp Inc. from committing environmental crimes. Maybe she's concerned about sexual, gender, or racial politics. Or maybe this is about a local recall election.

But you have no money to donate. You can't support the cause publicly. Maybe your spouse or parent(s) work(s) for Evil Megacorp Inc. Maybe your local representative has threatened police harassment of petition signers. Maybe you prefer avoiding politics. You don't sign the petition or give money. Angered, this canvasser produces a Molotov cocktail, lights it, and tosses it thru your open door, yelling that "You're either with us or against us!!" 

Or say the canvasser leaves. But the canvasser's husband runs the local sanitation service. No one will pick up your garbage--unless you sign the petition. Are you and your children surviving on church charity? The canvasser's brother-in-law is the church preacher. The preacher tells you that church charity is for petition signers. So you and yours can starve--unless you sign the petition.

Now even if the petition is for a good cause, are those moral tactics to use? Are they likely to increase or decrease your support for the cause? 

Now, with the world taking sides in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, vaccine access is being used to retaliate against countries that aren’t expressing full opposition to Russia’s actions. This is what happened in the case of Lithuania, which decided to cancel its donation of nearly half a million Pfizer covid-19 vaccine doses to Bangladesh, after Bangladesh abstained in the UN General Assembly’s vote condemning the invasion.

Lithuania had decided to send the donation only last week, but backtracked once Bangladesh joined the 35 countries that abstained from voting on the UN resolution against Russia (while Eritrea, Syria, North Korea, Belarus, and of course Russia itself, were the only countries to vote against it).

While some have celebrated Lithuania’s decision as a means of holding Bangladesh accountable for its actions (or lack thereof, as this was an abstention), others have noted that withholding a vaccine from a vulnerable population isn’t an action to praise. “I do not celebrate the cancellation of life saving vaccines to people,” tweeted Alexandra Phelan, an assistant professor at the Center for Global Health Science & Security at Georgetown University.

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So let me get this straight. If Bangladeshis die because their government didn't bend the knee to a foreign government and do exactly what that foreign government wanted then that's too bad. Stuff happens, you know.

But if Ukrainians die because their government didn't bend the knee to a foreign government and do exactly what that foreign government wanted then that is something that is horrible and must be stopped, even if we must risk WWIII. 

The Ukraine situation is something that requires 24-7 media coverage with know-nothing pundits trying to sound sober, smart, and sympathetic. Other conflicts or situations, not so much. Media and diplomatic double standards are very interesting, very interesting indeed.