It’s sometimes useful to be reminded that, in terms of sheer resentful malignancy, American lefties have nothing on their U.K. comrades.

And writing in Huffington Post on April 23, one Emily Cousens offers a breathtaking example. Cousens teaches at Oxford, and word is a University lab is making good headway developing a Wuhan virus vaccine. It’s one of several research facilities racing to give us a weapon against the disease.

Cousens is rooting against Oxford. Why? Blind ideology, mostly, but also a big dollop of sneering resentment. (Her bio says she “researches vulnerability and gender” and teaches women’s studies, so envy of serious people probably has something to do with it as well.)

You see, if it’s Briton that develops a vaccine, “it will be Britons who are prioritised for protection.” That’s bad because:

If there is enough vaccine to go round, the UK will be the world’s saviour. We’ll quickly forget the devastating delay of the UK government to take action, as Boris Johnson proudly safeguarded British institutions like individual liberty, and the pub, over lives.

So Britain doesn’t deserve a vaccine, or the credit for developing one, because the nation is irredeemably … British. The Brits -- and the Yanks -- could stand to be taken down a peg or two in Cousens’s estimation:

[T]he UK and the US are in fact not exceptions at the global stage. That we are not only vulnerable but can also afford to learn lessons from countries, regardless of whether we have a special relationship with them – such as South Korea. That being white, male and Oxford-educated may not be the only criteria for effective leadership (the countries whose responses have been most widely praised, Germany and New Zealand among others, are all led by women).

There we have it: A pandemic is ravaging the globe, but a vaccine is only worth having if it comes from somebody other than white guys.

It gets worse. “[R]ather than motivating the UK to take a proud role at the global stage,” with all those splendidly multicultural female researchers, “the UK is increasingly resorting to patriotism in response.”

To Cousens, patriotism is nothing more than “war-time rhetoric,” and “this time, the enemy is not a nation. It is a microbe. So why do our collective solidarities end at the border?”

Well, because competition is a far more efficient spur to innovation than singing “Imagine.” And because the world should hope a vaccine comes from the U.K., the U.S. or other open liberal democracies since, if anybody's culpable for the crisis, it's the communist Chinese government. But Cousens is an enthusiastic consumer of Chinese (and WHO) propaganda, and blithely cites Beijing talking points about the Chinese being oh so happy to share their genetic sequencing work.

Useful idiots never change. Cousens’s greatest fear is that the bad guys will look like the bad guys, and the good guys will look like the good guys. “The story will be clear: China, once again, has unleashed a threat to civilisation. But the best brains of the UK have saved the world.”