The vaccine rollout makes it clear: the randomness of nationality still determines our lives | Kanishk Tharoor

Not one Covid jab had been administered in 130 of the world's poorer countries by mid-February

After the news in November of the successful trials of the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid vaccine, a curious photo spread online. It showed a Turkish immigrant family of six in Germany in the 1970s. The father stood in the middle, arms stretched around his head-scarfed wife and children. A shoeless boy hung off to the side, his yellow T-shirt tucked into impossibly high and baggy black trousers. Users of every conceivable social media platform shared this image with an addendum: that scrawny, barefoot boy would one day grow up to be Uur ahin, a co-founder of the German pharmaceutical firm, BioNTech, that pioneered the vaccine. This humble, hopeful family would help save the world.

The photograph proved to be of another family altogether (it depicted neither ahin nor his relatives), but it remained happily viral, buoyed up by the feelgood story of the vaccine's development. The husband-and-wife founders of BioNTech - ahin and Ozlem Tureci - came from Turkish families that moved to Germany. Media outlets championed the couple's background as if their achievement was not just scientific but also moral, a vindication of the immigrant experience. An article in the Guardian insisted that BioNTech's Covid vaccine is a triumph of innovation and immigration". Here's to the immigrant heroes behind the BioNTech vaccine," cheered Bloomberg. Like Covid-19 vaccines?" asked the libertarian Reason magazine. Thank globalisation!"