When Hilda Bastian and I first caught up over Skype to talk about Covid-19 vaccines last autumn, she showed me the boxes and unfinished rooms in her new home in Victoria, Australia.

But her obsession with vaccines in this pandemic has been especially fruitful: She’s called the race right at just about every turn.

Last July, she warned that side effects for some Covid-19 vaccines may be more severe than we’re used to with other shots.

She also supported emergency use authorization for Covid-19 vaccines last August, when it was still controversial to do so.

With all her foresight, Bastian has become something of a Zeynep Tufekci on pandemic vaccines.

Her blogs, articles, and Twitter account might also be the most comprehensive look at just about everything published on Covid-19 vaccines anywhere.

But another motivation was frustration: The myopic focus in Western media on Europe’s and America’s vaccine development and rollout missed what was happening in most of the world — in countries like China, Russia, and Cuba, Bastian said.

She talked about the need for health officials to acknowledge that coronavirus vaccines have potentially “big differences in efficacy and adverse events,” a time in the future when we may need Covid-19 vaccine boosters every year, and the problem of people in rich countries like the US shamelessly hogging vaccines.

Early in the pandemic, you pointed out how multiple rich countries, especially in the West, were getting their pandemic responses wrong.

Somebody said that people in many rich countries have got used to thinking that they’ve conquered all infectious disease, and so there’s this hubris about that, and I think that we found that hubris was more profound than we realized.

It’s happening with vaccines, especially thinking it’s all about the vaccines of a few big EuroAmerican multinationals galloping to the world’s rescue.

In Canada [where the vaccine rollout has been slow] there’s a debate about why did they let their capacity to produce vaccines dwindle away to next to nothing.

The first two of their vaccines are looking really quite good.

They’re not going to have any trouble vaccinating their population with home-grown vaccines in 2021.

That just does not look remotely like it’s going to be a problem, and, then, they’re just going to be exporting masses and masses of vaccine.

It was supposed to be the vaccine that saved poor countries, but now there are manufacturing problems, and questions about the quality of their clinical trial data, including whether the vaccine even works in the highest-risk groups, like people over 65.

If the vaccine doesn’t end up being widely distributed in low and middle-income countries, do you think that gap will be filled maybe by the Russian and Chinese vaccines.

The role that people were ascribing to AstraZeneca, I thought always was going to be Johnson & Johnson because [they’re] a huge vaccine company.

It’s a more traditional form of vaccine, so there’s more capacity to manufacture it.

Trying to convince people that the vaccines are all equal isn’t going to work.

We’re going to see the differences in rates of adverse events, for example, pretty quickly for ourselves once we know lots of people getting vaccinated.

[I’m] also watching how the rich countries are cornering vaccines, and those advancing their geopolitics to fill in the gaps — it’s actually quite a horrifying thing.

Very rarely do you see people from one of the rich countries expressing concern that their country may be fully vaccinated within a few months.

It was never 100 percent going to happen that way [that the high priority groups in rich and poor countries got vaccinated at the same levels at the same time, per WHO advice], but I hoped at least for something roughly close, and I’m really quite shocked how comfortable people are with what’s happening.

Some are promoting personal donations to WHO now for vaccines, which just underscores the lack of awareness that the problem is rich countries taking all the doses for ourselves.

And many of the rich countries will have trouble getting enough people vaccinated anyway.

The notion that there can be countries where there’s going to be 40-year-olds and 30-year-olds vaccinated while there are terrible outbreaks in other parts of the world, and even the health care practitioners are unprotected, isn’t okay on any level.

Even rich countries, though, are having manufacturing and supply issues — like Canada, as you mentioned?

I don’t think there’s been a pandemic quite like this because they were either that the thing went through and did its worst and left horrific death in its wake, or the smaller ones in more contained areas that are recent.

To some extent, it’s going to depend on how disabling long Covid turns out to be, and for how many people?