To Promote Social Democracy Globally, Export Vaccines

WITH COVID-19 VACCINATIONS well underway in the United States, national attention has largely shifted away from supply concerns. On a global scale, however, vaccine access remains a massive problem. As of September 2021, only 2% of adults in low-income countries had been fully vaccinated, compared with 50% in high-income countries. Only about 4 in 100 Africans had received all required doses.

The deplorable character of this state of affairs, which many have labeled as vaccine apartheid, need not be repeated. It does not make sense from a public health perspective; it is bad for US foreign policy goals; and it implicates American society into yet another chapter of human suffering worldwide. There is also something genuinely sinister about how quickly vaccinated countries have normalized other countries’ lack of access to vaccines.

Annoyed with right-wing comments on the Daily? Then revolutionize college admissions

WHO ARE college newspapers’ most avid readers? Judging by their comment sections, it’s not college students. From the Stanford Daily to the Harvard Crimson, from the Daily Californian to the Yale Daily News, we see comments from off-campus right-wingers all over. They range from the informal to the erudite; from the funny jab to the disgusting insult; from the cliché of the young troll to the diatribe of the concerned boomer—and there are a lot of them.

Editor’s Opening Statement, Vol. 3

THE LUXURIOUS quinceañera after a field trip to the slums. The bus packed just with women—all domestic workers—heading back from the rich part of town. The school employees who called us children “doctors” out of deference. You didn’t have to be particularly disadvantaged to find social injustice in Brazil. It was everywhere.

My leftism was born out of moral indignation. It felt immoral that I could get a tech internship at age 16 and make more money than half the country. It felt immoral that I was guaranteed a spot in college, while many paulistanos didn’t even know that the University of São Paulo existed. At some point, I realized that Brazilian society demanded radical wealth redistribution. And so, I became a socialist.

How Stanford Hides Conflicts of Interest

THERANOS’ DOWNFALL was perhaps the first time that Stanford’s ties with Silicon Valley received some much-needed criticism—the company’s disgraced founder, its first board member, many of its employees, and a good deal of its prestige had all come from Stanford. The whole affair became a testament to the scale and importance of our community’s involvement with the corporate world, and it inspired the Sphere to take a closer look at Stanford’s ties to the biotech industry. But we didn’t just discover the scale of these ties: we found ourselves before an alarming lack of accountability when it comes to keeping research and financial interests separate.

How D’Souza Conned Stanford

WHEN THE Sphere arrived at the GSB for Dinesh D’Souza’s talk last quarter, it took us a while to find the line for Stanford students. In contrast with the 120 or so non-students who crowded one line with their Trump shirts and MAGA caps, we counted only fifteen undergraduates in the other. These acolytes of the right continued to pour in after the doors opened, and as the room filled up, finding seats proved hard even for some members of the Stanford College Republicans. This was just the kind of audience that craved the vitriolic anti-Democrat spiel that made D’Souza a star among the alt-right—not really what you’d expect from a Stanford crowd.