I do not particularly care how much money changed hands, which ministers took their cut, or how many investors in Merck and the Serum Institute of India are laughing all the way to the bank. If you have a teenage daughter, give her the goddamned HPV vaccine. Cervical cancer remains one of the most common cancers affecting women in India, and the government has begun rolling out programmes to vaccinate adolescent girls through public health systems. That alone should settle the matter for most parents. Take the protection where you can get it.
Many of us remember why the Congress governments were voted out. Corruption was not an abstract accusation. It was a lived frustration. But history has an ironic habit of rearranging our judgments. The Congress, people now say with a mixture of nostalgia and bitterness, was like a thief who picked your pocket but left enough money for bus fare and a meal so that he could rob you again tomorrow. The BJP, in contrast, behaves like a mugger who takes your wallet, your watch, your shoes, your clothes…and then murders you if you are circumcised. When the choice is between a thief and a murderer, most rational people will reluctantly choose the thief.
Which brings us to the present. If the state is distributing a vaccine that prevents a deadly but largely preventable cancer in our mothers, sisters, daughters, wives, and girlfriends, do not waste time asking whether someone somewhere made money along the way. They almost certainly did. In a country like ours, the pound of flesh has already been collected many times over, and a few billionaires may become multi-billionaires in the process. That is beside the point. Your child’s health is not the battlefield on which to fight that war. Just take what you are getting. In this case, what you are getting is something genuinely good.
Naturally, if you happen to be among those who question whether vaccines work at all, or suspect them of harbouring toxins, causing autism, or believe, with admirable conviction, that the State is deploying them as a delivery mechanism for nanobots or some manner of cerebral remote-control, then allow me, once again, to draw your attention to a rather attractive investment opportunity.
I have on offer, at an entirely reasonable price, a lightly pre-owned riverside mausoleum in the plains of northern India. Mid-17th century. Pristine white marble. Commissioned by a devoted but enthusiastically fratricidal billionaire, a man of refined architectural tastes who displayed a notable fondness for tall, tapering, erect structures and generously proportioned and firm domes. He built it in loving memory of his second wife, one of at least six, who departed this world whilst delivering her fourteenth child in nineteen years of what we must, in all charity, presume to have been a lovely marriage full of intimacy and kindness.
Motivated seller. Serious enquiries only. Sceptics and hard bargainers, with the greatest of respect, need not apply.
