Socialist Demands for the COVID-19 Crisis

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Re: Socialist Demands for the COVID-19 Crisis

Post by blindpig » Mon Jan 31, 2022 2:31 pm

Since vaccination of children was completed, no Cuban boy or girl has died

More than 1.6 million children have been vaccinated against COVID-19 in Cuba, and since the conclusion of the campaign, no pediatric deaths have been reported

Author: Yaditza del Sol González | yadidelsol@granma.cu

january 26, 2022 11:01:36

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Photo: Ismael Batista

More than 1.6 million children have been vaccinated against COVID-19 in Cuba, with more than 3.3 million doses administered, and since the conclusion of the campaign, no pediatric deaths have been reported, according to María Eugenia Toledo, PhD, principal investigator leading the Soberana 02 vaccine clinical trials at the Pedro Kourí Institute of Tropical Medicine (IPK).

Referring to the impact of massive immunization with Soberana in children two to 18 years of age, during a recent appearance on Cuban television, she pointed out that an adult who is not vaccinated faces the risk of suffering an asymptomatic case of the disease 2.2 times greater than a vaccinated person. In the case of a child, the risk is 18.2 times higher.

"If we had initially confronted the pandemic with everything we have accomplished in terms of vaccination, 94.8% of the cases in children would have been avoided," she stressed, adding that if anything put Cuba at the forefront internationally, it was the launching of a pediatric vaccination campaign as soon as possible, along with the government decision not to open schools until all children who could be vaccinated completed the full immunization regimen.

Our country was ahead of the curve, she said, noting that children play an important role in transmission, something Cuba has learned over “many years working on vaccines for children."

https://en.granma.cu/cuba/2022-01-26/si ... l-has-died

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Mexico exceeds 165 million vaccines applied against Covid

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"Mexico began epidemiological week number three with a 31 percent decrease in the number of estimated cases compared to the previous week," details the Ministry of Health. | Photo: EFE

Published 30 January 2022

The authorities assert that as a result of the speed in the application of vaccines, the country registers a total of 4,024,981 patients recovered from the virus.

The Mexican Ministry of Health reported this Sunday the application of 373,673 vaccines against Covid-19 on this day, which leads to a total of 165,543,906 drugs applied since the execution of the plan promoted by the Government since December 2020.

According to the health authorities, 83,612,558 people have been immunized against the virus, of which 77,129,336 (representing 93 percent) have a primary scheme and 6,483.22 (seven percent) have received the first dose.

"Mexico began epidemiological week number three with a 31 percent decrease in the number of estimated cases compared to the previous week," details the Ministry of Health.


The Ministry of Health also explained that in the last 14 days, 267,929 patients with signs and symptoms of Covid-19 were registered, regarding hospital occupancy, available beds remain at 55 percentage points and beds with mechanical ventilators reach 71 percent. hundred.

Now, as a result of the accelerated execution of the Vaccination Plan, as well as respect for biosecurity measures, the country has a total of 4,024,981 patients recovered from the pandemic.

"Vaccination continues for lagging people and young people between 15 and 17 years of age, as well as the reinforcement application for people over 50, health personnel and the educational sector," the health authorities point out.

https://www.telesurtv.net/news/Mexico-s ... -0019.html

Google Translator.

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Venezuela receives one million doses of Cuban vaccine against Covid-19

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The Minister of Health, Carlos Alvarado, said that the Sovereign Plus doses will serve “to strengthen the fight against Covid-19.” | Photo: Xinhua

Published January 31, 2022 (6 hours 22 minutes ago)

The president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, has repeatedly urged the population to get vaccinated against Covid-19.

A shipment with 1,000,000 doses of the Cuban Sovereign Plus vaccine arrived in Venezuela this Sunday, to reinforce the vaccination campaign against Covid-19, which already reaches coverage of 96 percent of the population, an official source reported.

The immunological product developed by Cuban scientists arrived early Sunday morning at the Simón Bolívar International Airport, in Maiquetía, in La Guaira.

The Venezuelan Minister of Health, Carlos Alvarado, indicated that the Sovereign Plus doses will serve “to strengthen the fight against Covid-19.”

Last Wednesday, the president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, urged the population to get vaccinated and announced that 96 percent coverage of immunized adults had been reached.


"But we must continue to take care of ourselves, for individual and collective health," said the head of state of the South American country.

Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez called on the entire population this Sunday to take extreme biosecurity measures in the face of the increase in infections of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, which causes Covid-19.


“I call for conscience, let's avoid crowds. We call on Venezuela to continue setting an example to the world in handling the pandemic. Right now we are experiencing an expanded easing, let's take care of ourselves to cut the chains of contagion, ”she said.

This Sunday, the Presidential Commission for the Prevention, Care and Control of Covid-19 reported that in the last few hours 2,646 new infections of Covid-19 were detected in Venezuela, for a total of 484,021 cases.

The South American country also reported four deaths from the coronavirus on the last day, bringing the total to 5,440 deaths since the start of the pandemic.

https://www.telesurtv.net/news/venezuel ... -0001.html

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Re: Socialist Demands for the COVID-19 Crisis

Post by blindpig » Tue Feb 01, 2022 3:38 pm

The pandemic is done. Except for the burials.
Stephen Gowans Capitalism, China, COVID-19 January 25, 2022 18 Minutes

And here it becomes evident that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society. — Karl Marx

January 25, 2022

By Stephen Gowans

In the early days of the pandemic, UCLA economist Andrew Atkeson sat down to forecast what would happen if no measures were taken to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus. Plotting the course of the virus’s spread by day, Atkeson reckoned that in fairly quick order, the number of people infected would climb to 10 percent of the population. One in 10 workers would be off the job. Another set of workers would take time off to care for sick children and relatives. At the same time, a growing number of people would require medical attention, straining hospital capacity. The result would be an unbearable strain on the economy.

Two years later, newspapers are filled with stories of Covid-19-induced employee absenteeism disrupting supply chains, schools plunged into chaos because teachers, staff, and students are out sick, and hospitals groaning under the weight of record-high infections, as burned out doctors and nurses leave their posts.

According to The Wall Street Journal:

*Soaring virus cases have brought the U.S. economy to a near standstill.
*The U.S. food system is under renewed strain as Covid-19’s Omicron variant stretches workforces from processing plants to grocery stores, leaving gaps on supermarket shelves.
*Omicron has left many schools short of the essentials needed to operate, like teachers, substitutes, bus drivers, cafeteria workers—and sometimes students themselves.
*Omicron this month pushed Covid-19 hospital admissions among children to record levels.
*More than 1,000 hospitals have been reporting daily critical staffing shortages.
*The healthcare sector has lost nearly 500,000 workers since February 2020. [In response, the United States, along with Canada and the UK, are now looting the under-resourced health care systems of low-income countries of their doctors and nurses in order to replenish their own Covid-19-depleted health care systems at home.]

In the Canadian province in which I live, Ontario, the trend in the number of Covid-19 patients in the hospital, in an ICU, or on a ventilator, has been increasing almost vertically since Christmas, along with the number of deaths per day. Hospitalizations are at record levels.

It’s as if we’re back to where we were in the early days of the pandemic, under Atkeson’s uncontrolled transmission scenario, despite the fact that vaccines—heralded by Anthony Fauci as a cavalry that would receu humanity from a terrible affliction—arrived more than one year ago.

The rolling seven-day average of daily deaths as of January 23, was higher in the United States than it was in 77% of days since February 29, 2020, higher in Canada than in 89% of days since March 9, 2020, and higher in the UK that 83% of days since March 6, 2020.

No matter how you measure it, whether in number of deaths, infections, hospitalizations, or disruptions to the economy, the pandemic hasn’t been quashed, beaten, overcome, or even tamed into endemicity. Instead, in many respects, it’s worse than ever.

Nor does it seem that an exit is imminent. Despite hopeful prognostications that Omicron represents an “exit wave”, World Health Organization secretary-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus sounds a warning: “It’s dangerous to assume that Omicron will be the last variant or that we are in the endgame. On the contrary, globally, the conditions are ideal for more variants to emerge.”

How is this possible?

In the early days of the pandemic, Bill Gates—who saw himself as the encephalon of the global response to Covid-19—assured a fawning media that “a lot of the work here to stop this epidemic has to do with innovation in diagnostics, therapeutics and vaccines”—areas in which he claimed expertise. Gates’ brainchild, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, or CEPI, which works to advance vaccines as the answer to epidemics, has been at the center of the response to Covid-19 in the West. Gates’ view that vaccines are—and continue to be—the solution to Covid-19, is shared by the White House, Big Pharma, and most journalists.

Joe Biden assured us that vaccines would give us “the upper hand against this virus” and announced in the summer of 2021 that owing to vaccines we “can live our lives, our kids can go back to school, our economy is roaring back.” Monica de Bolle, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, averred that “You can’t have functioning economies without vaccines.” The Wall Street Journal described vaccines “as the only way out of” the pandemic, while Canada’s Globe and Mail announced that “Vaccines are the best weapon in the war on COVID-19” and “the most important tool for fighting the virus.” Jeremy Farrar, director of the drug company-endowed Wellcome Trust, and a scientific adviser to the British government, agreed. Vaccines, he said, have “always been the exit strategy from this horrendous pandemic.” Two officials of the American Civil Liberties Union, David Cole and Daniel Mach, opined that there “is no equally effective alternative [to vaccines] available to protect public health.” The New York Times’ Donald G. McNeil Jr. rhapsodized about US “pharmaceutical prowess” and predicted it would allow the country to “bring the virus to heel.” Nepal’s health secretary, Laxman Aryal, intoned that the only way to control the rate of infection—yes, the only way—was through vaccination. Meanwhile, French president Emmanuel Macron announced that vaccination was “the only path back to a normal life.” France’s “line is simple,” he said. “Vaccination, vaccination, vaccination.”

While Macron’s commitment to “vaccination, vaccination, vaccination” may be emblematic of the thinking in drug company executive suites and the halls of power, in the public health community the thinking has been a good deal more skeptical.

The WHO director-general counselled that “vaccines alone will not get any country out of this crisis” and “vaccines alone cannot solve the pandemic.” He added that “there is no silver bullet at the moment and there might never be. For now, stopping outbreaks comes down to the basics of public health and disease control; testing, isolating and treating patients and tracing and quarantining their contacts.”

Dr. Leana Wen, an emergency physician and public health professor at George Washington University, echoed Tedros. “We should not be thinking of the vaccine as a silver bullet,” she warned.

Emer Cooke, the Executive Director of the European Medicines Agency—the EU’s drug regulatory body—said the same. “Vaccines alone will not be the silver bullet that will allow us to return to normal life.”

Dr. Peter Hotez, the dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, joined the chorus. Vaccines, he said, “are not magic solutions.”

Simon Clarke, a professor of cellular microbiology at the University of Reading observed that “There’s been an attitude in some quarters that a vaccine is our automatic savior.” While vaccines are “really important,” he said, “they’re not a silver bullet.”

Martin McKee, a professor of public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, put it bluntly” “Anyone who says that vaccines alone can end the pandemic is wrong.” Experience has proved him right.

Pundits and world leaders who anointed vaccines as the only solution, the only way out of the pandemic, and the only effective alternative, were dishonest. Even before Pfizer, Moderna, and AstraZeneca sought emergency use authorization for their fast-tracked vaccines, China, along with a handful of other countries, had months earlier taken the exit out of the pandemic. And they had done so by simple, old-school public health measures—measures the World Health Organization kept pointing out were proven and demonstrated to work, but which, unfortunately, much of the world, ensorcelled by vaccines, chose to ignore, with tragic consequences for the lives of millions.

China’s success in using these measures to protect the health of its citizens is perhaps one of the greatest public health achievements in human history. By contrast, the United States’ dismal Covid-19 performance—predicated on the hope that a vaccine would be a silver bullet—is perhaps one of the greatest public health failures of all time.

Despite the fact that the first Covid-19 cases were identified in China, and the country’s population is over four times the size of that of the United States, the number of confirmed Covid-19 cases in the United States surpassed China as early as March 26, 2020, only two weeks after the World Health Organization declared a pandemic. By March 29, US deaths due to Covid-19 had already inched past China’s, and have continued to climb, with the gap between the two countries unremittingly increasing. The disparity between the US and Chinese figures—little mentioned in Western public discourse—is astonishing. By December 31, 2021, some 23 months after Chinese authorities reported a cluster of unusual pneumonia cases in Wuhan, there were nearly 55 million confirmed cases of Covid-19 in the United States, compared to slightly over 100,000 in the far more populous China. The number of people that had tested positive for Covid-19 was over 164,000 per million in the United States compared to only 71 per million in China. Incredibly, deaths per million in the United States were over 770 times greater than in China. Over 800,000 US Americans had died from Covid-19, making the outbreak the greatest death event, measured in absolute numbers of deaths, in US history, exceeding fatalities from World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Great Influenza of 1918-1920, and even the Civil War. Meanwhile, in China, fewer than 5,000 had died, less than six-tenths of one percent of the US figure. At 3.2 people per million, Covid-19 deaths in China were less than two-tenths of one percent of the United States’ 2,480 deaths per million.

Is China the anomaly or is the United States? In fact, both are, though compared to the world at large, China performs anomalously better and the United States anomalously worse. On December 31, 2021, confirmed cases per million were over 500 times better in China than the world average and over four times worse than the world average in the United States. Confirmed deaths per million were over 200 times better in China but over three and a half times worse in the United States. The United States, with only four percent of the world’s population, accounted for 19 percent of cases and 15 percent of deaths, while China, comprising 18 percent of the world’s population, accounted for less than one-tenth of one percent of the world’s cases and a similarly infinitesimal fraction of the world’s deaths.

What has China done to outperform the United States and the rest of the world? Beijing takes Covid-elimination seriously—perhaps more seriously than any other country, with the possible exception of North Korea. “China,” according to New York Times’ reporters Rebecca Tan and Alicia Chen, “always set zero as their goal.”

There is no particular genius in China’s approach to stamping out Covid-19. Beijing’s strategy is based on an axiom. As author Michael Lewis explained in his book The Premonition, “One thing that is inarguably true is that if you got everyone and locked each of them in their own room and didn’t let them out to talk to anyone, you would not have any disease.” China’s approach is based on this core truth.

Beijing’s initial response to the outbreak was to lock down Wuhan, the city in which the disease was first identified. Only one member of each household was permitted to leave their place of residence every few days to gather provisions. This was a variation on Lewis’s “lock everyone into their room and don’t let them out until the disease is gone” approach. Within a matter of weeks, the city’s 11 million people were tested for SARS-CoV-2. Sixteen temporary hospitals were rapidly built to isolate people with mild to moderate symptoms. Because patients were quarantined in a hospital and not at home, family residences did not become petri dishes for the growth and transmission of the virus. If a patient’s condition worsened, they were transferred to a regular hospital. By March 10, the outbreak had been brought under control, and the temporary hospitals were no longer needed. After 76 days, infections had been driven to zero, and the city was reopened.

At the same time, Beijing rapidly set up a country-wide contact tracing system, eventually developing a highly stringent definition of contact. Anyone who has been in a building four days before or after a person who develops Covid-19 symptoms or tests positive for the disease is deemed a contact and quarantined. While this may appear to be draconian, and a measure guaranteed to gather large numbers of people in its net, it should be remembered that case numbers are exceedingly low. In fact, they’re so low that the odds of encountering an infected person are less than the odds of being struck by lightning. As a result, only a small fraction of the population ever gets caught up in the net.

Having eliminated the disease within its borders by severing the chains of transmission, China implemented additional measures to minimize the chances the virus would seep into the country from outside. Travelers require special government approval to enter the country, and those who receive visas are required to quarantine for weeks. Quarantine is required for all travellers, including those who are fully vaccinated. These controls are not infallible. Occasionally, the virus evades border restrictions and slips into the country. When it does, public health authorities act quickly and decisively. When nine airport cleaners at the Nanjing Lukou International Airport tested positive for Covid-19 during routine testing, the city immediately imposed lockdowns and tested its 9.3 million residents in just two weeks.

Zeng Guang, the former chief epidemiologist of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, describes China’s strategy as on one that doesn’t “simply treat infected patients but cut[s] off the disease infection routes by screening out and quarantining every close contact or potential virus carrier through prompt epidemiological investigations.” In others words, China simply follows the tenets of epidemiology 101. As the British Medical Journal explained:

“China mobilised quickly and within two months had contained the epidemic and eliminated local infections in the country. There were no magic bullets in the tools it used: the methods were old school public health strategies, which are often called non-pharmacological interventions. Other countries also successfully eliminated local infections, showing that elimination of an emerging disease with pandemic potential is possible by using non-pharmaceutical interventions alone. Public health methods such as mask wearing, hand washing, social distancing, and restriction of public events and travel played an important part. Identifying and quarantining people with covid-19 and their close contacts was also critical.”

China’s success, then, has been due, not to vaccines—the lodestone of the West’s pandemic response—but to old school pubic health strategies—strategies the World Health Organization describe as proven and known to work.

Had the world reached for known and proven old school public health methods in early 2020, as China did, it’s likely that the embryonic pandemic would have been aborted, sparing humanity two years (and counting) worth of clogged hospitals, cancelled surgeries, burned out nurses and doctors, supply chain disruptions, closed businesses and schools, millions afflicted by long-Covid and its enduring health impairments, and possibly as many as 20 million deaths to date, according to excess death estimates.

In May 2021, more than a year into the pandemic, the World Health Organization released a report by an independent panel on the performance of the world’s governments in responding to the Covid-19 health emergency. The panel arrived at a stunning conclusion. The pandemic could have been avoided. It wasn’t inevitable, even as late as January 30, 2020, the day the WHO declared a public health emergency of international concern, and two to three months after the virus likely first began to circulate. Even at this late date it was “still possible to interrupt virus spread, provided that countries put in place strong measures to detect disease early, isolate and treat cases, trace contacts and promote social distancing measures commensurate with the risk”—in other words, to do what China did.

But that didn’t happen. By March 11, 2020, the virus had spread far enough that the global health organization declared a pandemic. How had an avoidable pandemic become a catastrophe—and a continuing one—on a world scale?

The answer was simple. Inaction. “On 30 January 2020, it should have been clear to all countries from the declaration of the” public health emergency of international concern “that COVID-19 represented a serious threat,” the panel concluded. “Even so,” it continued, “only a minority of countries set in motion comprehensive and coordinated Covid-19 protection and response measures.” The result was that February 2020, a month “when steps could and should have been taken to” prevent a controllable outbreak from morphing into a pandemic, was lost to history. Governments tarried, and their foot-dragging plunged the world into the dark abyss of a viral nightmare.

Not all governments were content to sit tight until it was absolutely certain they were staring disaster in the face. “China, New Zealand, Republic of Korea, Singapore and Thailand and Viet Nam,” the panel noted, all acted quickly and decisively to contain the emergency, and all with exemplary success. These countries pursued an aggressive containment strategy that involved mass testing, robust contact tracing, and quarantine, with “social and economic support to promote widespread uptake of public health measures.”

Most other countries, by contrast, waited far too long to act. And when they did act, they failed to do enough, never fully implementing the measures needed to bring their outbreaks under control. What’s more, they almost invariably dialed back measures too soon, with catastrophic consequences for the health of their citizens.

So, why did most countries do too little, too late? The panel pointed to cost. Most governments judged concerted public health action—the aggressive test, trace, and isolate measures implemented by China and a handful of other countries—as too expensive. Three costs were central to their concerns:

*The direct expense of testing, contact tracing, the construction of isolation facilities, coordinating quarantine, and providing financial support to the quarantined.
*The indirect cost of business disruptions.
*The impact on the stock market.

Concerning the first cost, the “people inside the American government who would be charged with executing various aspects of any pandemic strategy … believed none of these so-called non-pharmaceutical interventions”—the kind China pursued to great effect—”would contribute anything but economic loss,” according to Michael Lewis.

Concerning the cost of business disruption, the Great Influenza offered an anticipatory model. Studies of how the United States responded to the 1918-1920 flu pandemic found that government decision-makers were under incessant pressure from businesses to lift public health measures. Now, as then, capitalist governments were highly influenced by business communities and finely attuned to their needs. Minimizing the cost to business was the top priority of governments working out how to deal with a global health crisis.

Finally, US president Donald Trump deliberately downplayed the public health emergency, repeatedly declaring that it would magically resolve itself, because he feared that acknowledging the danger would result in untold stock market losses. “Trump grew concerned that any [strong] action by his administration would hurt the economy, and … told advisers that he [did] not want the administration to do or say anything that would … spook the markets,” reported the Washington Post. What the WHO panel perceived as “a wait and see” attitude on the part of many governments was actually a “take no strong action to avoid spooking the markets” attitude. The contrast between China’s aggressive response and the United States’ “see, hear, and speak no evil” approach, is revealingly summarized in the comments of the countries’ respective leaders: China’s Xi Jinping: “Infectious disease control is not merely a matter of public health and hygiene; it’s an all-encompassing issue and a total war.” The United States’ Donald Trump: “One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear.”

Why did the United States, and most countries in its orbit, embrace vaccines as a silver bullet, when the World Health Organization urged countries to adopt the proven public health and social measures that were known to work and that China had confirmed did, indeed, work—and what’s more, worked remarkably well?

One driver of Washington’s predilection for vaccines was the ability of billionaires, such as Bill Gates, to set the public health agenda to favor pharmaceutical solutions. Owing to their great wealth, billionaires, foundations supported by the wealthy and large corporations, and the pharmaceutical industry, were able to strongly influence public discourse on healthcare issues and to set the public policy agenda on matters related to health, including pandemic preparedness. They had long ago used their influence to push vaccines—a potential cornucopia of profits—to the top of the agenda on how to meet the challenge of future pandemics. As a result, when the pandemic hit, governments followed the path capitalist influencers had already set, eschewing the proven public health measures which, though unquestionably effective, offered no opportunities for amassing profits.

Additionally, Washington had long been planning for how to meet the threat of a biological attack, or warfare carried out with germs. Always, the response had been seen to depend mainly on developing and stockpiling two things: vaccines and personal protective equipment, or PPE.

Vaccines and PPE, however, are not the only ways to address germ threats, but the idea is so ingrained in public discourse, that when asked how humanity ought to prepare for another pandemic, the answer is almost invariably: make sure we have enough N-95 masks and build vaccine manufacturing infrastructure. But there is another model of pandemic preparation that is almost always overlooked: develop the infrastructure to trace, test, and isolate. Few people—and no one in senior positions in government—ever talk about developing the infrastructure for an elimination strategy as the means to meet the next pandemic threat. Instead, the chorus only ever has two notes: vaccines and PPE.

This might reflect borrowed thinking from the military. The standard ways of defending military forces from weaponized pathogens are to equip troops with biohazard suits and respirators and to vaccinate them in advance against the bacteria, viruses, and other pathogens the enemy might employ. Test, trace, and isolate is absent from the military doctrine on defense against biological threats because it is ill-suited to the military environment. Blindly importing military anti-biological threat doctrine into public health practice omits an effective technique that, while ill-suited for military purposes, works very well in the civilian realm.

Moreover, vaccines and PPE comport with the United States’ techno-fix culture. “Techno-fixes,” according to the late Howard P. Segal, who was an historian of science and technology at the University of Maine, “are short-term, avowedly practical proposed solutions to hitherto unsolvable economic and social problems” that “reflect an almost blind faith in the power of technology as panacea.” Techno-fix culture biases people enmeshed in its web to overlook social and economic solutions, in favor of what seem like quick technological fixes. Techno-fix culture is a religion based on faith. Its votaries believe that the god of technology will save humanity from all problems, even in cases where the evidence shows that proposed techno-fix solutions have failed. If techno-fix religion has a pope, it is surely Bill Gates.

But the technofix religion has other grand figures, as well. “Google,” wrote historian Jill Lepore,” opened an R&D division called X, whose aim is ‘to solve some of the world’s hardest problems.’” Elon Musk, one of the world’s richest people, if not, the wealthiest, promotes “a capitalism in which companies worry…about all manner of world-ending disasters”—disasters, notes Lepore “from which only techno-billionaires, apparently, can save us.”

Techno-billionaires promote techno-fix faith because the religion stimulates interest in their products. Techno-fix enterprises are the perfect distillation of their view that the combination of technology and private enterprise can save the world. Technology and free enterprise are also the foundations of the techno-billionaires’ fortunes and instruments of their continued expansion.

A number of other mutually reinforcing factors led Washington’s to favor vaccination as “the key to getting the pandemic under control and keeping the economy strong,” as Joe Biden put it.

First, non-pharmaceutical public health measures are contraindicated under capitalism. Rather than spending billions of dollars on vaccines, billions could have been spent on a robust public health response. The Rockefeller Foundation proposed a test-trace-isolate program to the Trump administration, which was immediately rejected. The problem, from a capitalist perspective, is that a public sector program to hire hundreds of thousands of public servants to carry out old-school public health measures, offers few, if any, profit-making opportunities for the private sector. Shoe leather epidemiology—the basic, hard labor of tracking down infected individuals, tracing their contacts, and herding them into quarantine—is the unsung labor of public servants. On the other hand, vaccine production can be quickly and easily made a private sector activity, one offering a rich banquet of profits on which investors—Washington’s principal clients—can gorge.

Additionally, Washington—always a bastion of free enterprise and private sector boosterism—has no desire to promote the public sector. The capitalist class, the US state, and individual billionaires such as Gates, agree that free enterprise must be the main vehicle through which the world’s problems are addressed. There is no room in this view for the public sector, except as a host for private enterprise parasitism and source of the private sector’s new products (such as mRNA vaccines.)

Writer and journalist Nina Burleigh observed that the White House’s focus was “on its conviction that private enterprise was the way out of the disaster.” Not only would vaccines be the exit from the calamity, but vaccines produced by the private sector (generously funded by the public sector) would be presented as the only possible escape.

Burleigh also argued that Washington’s incompetence, evidenced in its failure to prevent hundreds of thousands of US citizens from dying, is deliberate. The White House could seize the levers of public power to bring the pandemic under control by dint of old-school public health measures, following China’s path, but chooses not to in order to avoid giving hope to US citizens that government, unhinged from its service role to the bourgeoisie, can be a force for good.

The vaccine strategy—the notion that vaccines alone can protect public health and return the world to the status quo ante—has failed. Vaccines were approved under emergency use authorization after an unconscionably short period of testing (only two months into planned two-year-long phase 3 clinical trials) because the FDA declared falsely that there were “no adequate, approved, and available alternatives” to address a (self-inflicted) medical emergency, as if China’s success had never occurred. The reality is that there existed then, as there does now, a safe and demonstrably effective alternative to the failed silver bullet vaccine strategy. China has shown the way. Unfortunately, capitalism holds us back.

*The title is adapted from André Picard, “’I’m done with COVID’ is easier said than done,” The Globe and Mail, January 24, 2022.

https://gowans.blog/2022/01/25/the-pand ... e-burials/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Socialist Demands for the COVID-19 Crisis

Post by blindpig » Thu Feb 03, 2022 3:33 pm

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Corporate Media Joins the Anti-Vaxxers When It Comes to Chinese- and Russian-Made Vaccines
February 1, 2022

By Alan Macleod – Jul 27, 2022

“It’s striking how similar the techniques [are] that Fox News uses to frighten people about the U.S. vaccination campaign and those that The New York Times, Reuters and others use to scare people about Chinese vaccines.” — Jim Naureckas, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting

WASHINGTON — “Hundreds of Thai medical workers infected despite Sinovac vaccinations,” ran Reuters’ bombshell headline earlier this month. The report detailed how 618 Thai medical workers inoculated with the Chinese COVID vaccine have become infected anyway, leading to one death. As is common with such an influential newswire, Reuters’ story was picked up across the world by hundreds of publications, including The Washington Post, Yahoo! News and The New York Post.

Yet the article also notes that over 677,000 Thai medical workers have received the dose, meaning that more than 99.9% of those vaccinated have not developed COVID-19 — a fact that flies in the face of the headline’s implications. A large majority of news consumers do not read past the title, meaning that they were given the false impression that Sinovac is ineffective.

Being fully vaccinated does not offer complete protection from COVID-19. In late June, CNBCnoted that well over 4,000 vaccinated Americans had been hospitalized with the virus, including 750 who died. Yet Reuters spun the news into an opportunity to spread distrust of Sinovac in Thailand, which is currently living through a rapid and unprecedented spike in coronavirus cases.

The article also took the opportunity to present the U.S. government and American company Pfizer as saviors, noting that “Thailand is expecting a donation of 1.5 million Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines from the United States later this month.” Yet in a country of 70 million people this contribution is far from a solution. Reuters’ close links to both the U.S. government and to Pfizer make this framing seem particularly questionable. Jim Smith, chairman of the Thomson Reuters Foundation and former president and CEO of Thomson Reuters, is also on Pfizer’s board. Meanwhile, Reuters’ former global business director, Dawn Scalici, spent 33 years in the CIA, working her way up to senior director, overseeing the agency’s operations in Iraq. She left her job as National Intelligence Manager for the Western Hemisphere for the Director of National Intelligence to, in her own words, “advance Thomson Reuters’ ability to meet the disparate needs of the U.S. government.”

This is far from the first time that Reuters has pushed anti-vax paranoia against Chinese vaccines like Sinovac or Sinopharm. In January, they published an article titled “Peru volunteer in Sinopharm vaccine trial dies of COVID-19 pneumonia, university says.” Yet buried in the article is a statement from the university noting that the participant was in the control group, which received only a placebo, meaning that they had died because they didn’t receive the vaccine, not because they did, which was the clear implication of the headline.

In May, Reuters also printed a piece headlined “WHO experts voice ‘very low confidence’ in some Sinopharm COVID-19 vaccine data.” Yet reading the report, the WHO maintained that it had “overall confidence in [the vaccine’s] ability to prevent the disease.” The piece’s only gripe was that the testing phase did not include enough people from certain at-risk groups, such as pregnant women or the elderly, meaning that they had very little confidence that the trialing had categorically demonstrated that the vaccine was indisputably safe for certain people with comorbidities. What, however, would a lay person, unfamiliar with scientific terminology, take from that headline?

Last week, Reuters’ article “Sinovac’s vaccine finds supporters in Singapore despite effectiveness questions elsewhere,” claimed that the reason the island city-state was importing the Chinese vaccine was that “Singapore doesn’t want to upset Beijing,” rather than that it was an effective defense against a deadly virus.

And earlier this week, the influential newswire published an article headlined “Sinopharm’s COVID-19 shot induces weaker antibody responses to Delta — Study,” despite the fact that the university undertaking the experiment declared that, “This vaccine was found very effective for the Delta variant as well.” The doctor overseeing the study concluded that “when it comes to Delta and other variants, the Sinopharm vaccine induces similar levels of antibody responses as people who have naturally been infected, which is very good.” This was reported in Chinese media, but not by Reuters, whose article conveyed exactly the opposite message.

All the fake news that’s fit to print

Reuters is far from the only outlet seemingly on a crusade to discredit Sinopharm and Sinovac, however. Last year, The New York Times published an article titled “Brazil resumes Chinese vaccine trial after a brief suspension following the death of a volunteer.” Only in the penultimate paragraph did it inform readers that the person in question committed suicide. Unless the vaccine was supposed to have triggered this (which it did not assert), then the story’s premise is worthless. “Brazilian Man Commits Suicide” does not make the pages of the Times. Yet this incident proved worthy of two separate articles. It is not easy to see a reason beyond either irresponsible clickbait or active malicious intent behind the choice of headline and topic.

A recent Times exposé also heavily relied on innuendo to discredit China, its headline reading “They Relied on Chinese Vaccines. Now They’re Battling Outbreaks.” The article profiled a trio of countries — Bahrain, Mongolia and the Seychelles — that had bought and administered Sinopharm and Sinovac. “All three put their faith, at least in part, in easily accessible Chinese-made vaccines, which would allow them to roll out ambitious inoculation programs when much of the world was going without,” author Sui-Lee Wee wrote, constantly comparing them unfavorably with American-made ones; “But instead of freedom from the coronavirus, all three countries are now battling a surge in infections.”

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The NYT featured an expose replete with Sinophobic rhetoric and alarming imagery

But what the Times did not inform readers of was that the vast majority of serious or deadly cases in those countries happened to unvaccinated individuals. The Seychelles Ministry of Health confirmed as much and continues to implore people to take the Chinese vaccine, comfortable in the knowledge it is safe. As the Ministry of Health stated on Thursday, “Misinformation is prolonging the COVID-19 pandemic and can put lives in danger by leading people to make misinformed decisions.”

Enkhsaihan Lkhagvasuren, head of Public Health Policy Implementation for the Mongolian Health Ministry, made a similar statement, noting that 96% of recent COVID-19 deaths in his country occurred in individuals who were not fully vaccinated. Meanwhile, daily cases in Bahrain had already been plummeting for a month before Wee’s piece was published and now the country currently averages fewer than 100 new cases per day.

The New York Times has long cast aspersions about the dangers of the Chinese products, producing stories such as:

• “In Coronavirus Vaccine Race, China Strays From the Official Paths” (July 16, 2020);
• “China Gives Unproven Covid-19 Vaccines to Thousands, With Risks Unknown” (September 26);
• “Vaccine Unproven? No Problem in China, Where People Scramble for Shots” (November 17);
• “Chinese Covid-19 Vaccine Gets Key Push, but Doubts Swirl” (December 9);
• “Turkey and Brazil Say Chinese Vaccine Effective, With Sparse Supporting Data” (December 25);
• China Has All It Needs to Vaccinate Millions, Except Any Approved Vaccines” (December 29);
• “Disappointing Chinese Vaccine Results Pose Setback for Developing World” (January 13);
• “China Wanted to Show Off Its Vaccines. It’s Backfiring” (January 25).

All of these were authored or co-authored by Wee, a journalist with no background in science or medicine, according to her bio on LinkedIn. And all relied on innuendos and conjecture to repeat the same overarching message.

The Washington Post has also denigrated what it sees as “China’s subpar shots,” with columnist Josh Rogin consistently pushing the dubious lab-leak hypothesis, even when other outlets were describing it as a baseless conspiracy theory.

Condemning vaccine skepticism at home, promoting it abroad

The New York Times has long condemned vaccine skepticism at home, castigating conservatives for their reluctance to get inoculated. Presenting the far-right as a direct threat to national security, in March the Times warned that “extremist organizations are now bashing the safety and efficacy of coronavirus vaccines in an effort to try to undermine the government.” “Mistrust of a coronavirus vaccine could imperil widespread immunity,” it worried in July 2020, adding that, “billions are being poured into developing a shot, but the rapid timetable and President Trump’s cheerleading are creating a whole new group of vaccine-hesitant patients.”

Reuters, too, has presented itself as a pro-science organization, even running a fact checking department debunking rumors regarding vaccines. Yet an indication of how much care is taken over these can be gleaned from one fact check from June, which starts with the sentence “Refiling to correct typo in paragraph two and headline” — clearly a note from the writer to the editing team. For nearly a month it has stood uncorrected, suggesting that no one at the newswire read it, either before or after publishing.

Covid misinformation

A man receives one of 700,000 Sinopharm vaccines donated by China in Kabul, Afghanistan, June 16, 2021. Rahmat Gul | AP

“It’s striking how similar the techniques [are] that Fox News uses to frighten people about the U.S. vaccination campaign and those that The New York Times, Reuters and others use to scare people about Chinese vaccines,” Jim Naureckas, editor of media watchdog organization Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, told MintPress. “It’s not hard to take advantage of laypeople’s unfamiliarity with probability to make little dangers seem big. In both cases, though, media outlets are putting people’s lives at risk for a political purpose — in effect conducting germ warfare through psychological warfare,” he added.

There is no need for such mistrust. Both Sinopharm and Sinovac are inactivated virus vaccines which use inactivated or killed viral particles that cannot replicate. This method is one of the oldest and most established techniques, used by Jonas Salk to create his famous polio vaccine. The method is still used to make modern Hepatitis A and flu shots. Sinopharm and Sinovac contain proteins that the body’s immune system responds to, stimulating the production of anti-COVID antibodies, preparing it to fight off any real infection later. The vaccines were designed to be more effective against more severe cases of COVID-19, with studies showing both inventions to be sufficiently capable of preventing symptomatic infection and particularly useful in preventing hospitalizations.

A familiar foe

China is not the only foreign source of vaccines towards which Western corporate media have displayed profound hostility; the Russian Sputnik V vaccine has also drawn considerable skepticism. Reuters has published a slew of articles highlighting the supposed shortcomings of Sputnik, including a news brief noting that Brazil had rejected the vaccine. Yet this was published over a month after a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services report boasted that among its best achievements of 2020 was combatting the “malign influence” of Russia in the Western hemisphere by pressuring the Brazilian government to shun Sputnik. When this was picked up by Brasil Wire and other local media, it caused a national scandal.

The Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), which owns the rights to Sputnik, describedReuters as carrying out a disinformation campaign through “false and inaccurate” reporting that is full of anonymous sources from the Western pharmaceutical lobby groups. Worthy of note here is that Reuters was secretly funded by the British government during the Cold War to run anti-Soviet propaganda and that leaked documents show that this close relationship continues to the present day. The U.K.’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office is working with the company on operations designed to “weaken Russia,” in their own words. That a similar deal regarding China could be in place is not out of the question.

The Washington Post has also displayed similar skepticism about vaccines coming from enemy countries. In an article entitled “The Russians and the Chinese are touting their vaccines. Should we trust them?” the newspaper allowed a scientist from rival vaccine maker Moderna to claim that we should take Russian and Chinese results “with two grains of salt,” seemingly confirming the RDIF’s accusations. The same Moderna source claimed that Russia would never allow its vaccine to be subject to an approval process by E.U. regulators, an assertion that was almost immediately disproven.

Like the Chinese vaccines, Sputnik’s effectiveness has been confirmed, with studies showing that it can boast a 92% efficiency rating.

Manufacturing a new enemy

The wave of skepticism over (foreign) vaccines is based not on science but rather on geopolitical considerations. In the last decade, China — and, to a lesser extent, Russia — have become the United States’ top international rivals. In 2011, the Obama administration began what it called the U.S.’ “pivot to Asia” — an attempt to encircle Beijing with military bases. Today, there are more than 400 ringing the People’s Republic.

The 2021 Pentagon budget makes clear that there will be a significant move away from the Middle East and a redeployment of resources to East Asia, which will become America’s “priority theater” in years to come. Another region of conflict will be the Arctic, where warming temperatures will open up valuable sea lanes for exploitation. Already, many in Washington are advocating for the occupation of Norway as a measure to counter a supposed Russian threat.

The constant fear-mongering in the press has had a significant effect: a recent poll found that American public opinion towards China and Russia has collapsed to below Cold War levels, with only 20% and 22% of the U.S. holding positive opinions about those countries, respectively.

This is a far cry from nine years ago, when the same polls showed that public opinion towards China was decidedly positive. And when Mitt Romney attempted to cast Russia as the United States’ number one geopolitical foe during the 2012 presidential debates, his Democratic opponents mocked him relentlessly. “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back…the Cold War’s been over for 20 years,” Barack Obama quipped.

Today, there is little disagreement between the two parties as to who the United States’ two primary enemies are, and the rhetoric and sabre rattling continues to escalate. In February, the Atlantic Council — the semi-official think tank of NATO, staffed by senior military figures from NATO member states — published a 26,000-word report describing China as “the single most important challenge facing the United States” today. The report advised the U.S. to use the power of its military to draw a number of “red lines” around China, beyond which the U.S. would respond. This included essentially any Chinese or North Korean military action in the Asia-Pacific region, or any Chinese cyber attacks on the U.S. or its allies. Failure to do so, they advised President Biden, would result in “national humiliation.”

The report also laid out what a successful China policy would look like by 2050: “[T]he United States and its major allies continue to dominate the regional and global balance of power across all the major indices of power” and head of state Xi Jinping “has been replaced by a more moderate party leadership; and … the Chinese people themselves have come to question and challenge the Communist Party’s century-long proposition that China’s ancient civilization is forever destined to an authoritarian future.” In other words, that U.S. pressure had resulted in regime change in Beijing.

In May, political and military leaders from Western nations met at the Alliance of Democracies Summit, where one of the big talking points was establishing an “Asian NATO” to push back at what they saw as intolerable Chinese aggression in the region. Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster endorsed the plan, describing the Chinese Communist Party as without a doubt the number one threat to democracy in the world.

But while China is not sailing its warships to the coasts of California or Maine, the opposite is happening on the other side of the globe. Throughout 2020 and 2021, the U.S. undertook a series of provocative military actions, surveying Chinese coastal defenses from the sea and the air. In July of last year, the U.S.S. Peralta came within 41 nautical miles from China’s maritime boundary. Meanwhile, American nuclear bombers have flown over Chinese ships near Hainan island.

Economic war

Alongside the military build up, the U.S. is also carrying out an economic war with its foes, attempting to curtail China’s Belt and Road Initiative, a huge economic development plan for Asia, Europe, Africa and Australasia. With a similar lack of success, the U.S. attempted to cajole Germany into abandoning the Nord Stream 2 Pipeline, which will allow up to 110 billion m3 of Russian gas to be pumped into Germany (and much of Europe), forging a deeper economic codependence between the two countries. Both China and Russia are also under a considerable U.S. sanctions regime.

Other economic strong-arming has included the Trump administration attempting to force Chinese-owned social media company TikTok to sell itself to an American rival, trying to block the rollout of global 5G technology under Chinese company Huawei, and leaning on social media platforms to silence Chinese voices. Last year, a U.S.-government-funded think tank convinced Twitter to delete over 170,000 accounts sympathetic to the Chinese government on one day alone.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a convenient tool in ramping up anti-China sentiment among the American public, with both Trump and Biden using the virus’s apparent Chinese origins for political capital. Trump himself consistently referred to it as the “China virus” and, even more derisively, as the “Kung Flu.” Going further, Florida Senator Rick Scott claimed that every Chinese citizen is a Communist spy and should be treated as such. In such a climate, racist attacks on Asian-Americans have soared.

Russia has also been the target of a similar infowar, with Russian public broadcaster RT takenoff the air in some U.S. markets, its staff forced to register as foreign agents under a 1938 law passed to counter Nazi propaganda. Both countries have also been accused of using heretofore unknown microwave weapons against American secret agents and diplomats.

Upside-down world

A number of articles in corporate media suggest that what they fear about the Chinese and Russian vaccines is not that they are ineffective, but that they are indeed effective, and will allow those countries to score diplomatic wins. “China and Russia are using coronavirus vaccines to expand their influence. The U.S. is on the sidelines,” ran one Washington Postheadline. The New York Times seemed to agree: “Brazil Needs Vaccines. China Is Benefiting,” it wrote, worrying that Sinopharm and Sinovac are giving China “enormous leverage in pandemic-ravaged nations,” noting that Brazil has recently softened its hardline stance against Huawei’s 5G network, supposedly in response to help from China. The idea that the U.S. could counter this by using its enormous political and diplomatic power to waive intellectual property rights to vaccine production — meaning that it could be made freely all around the world — was not considered.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the deep inequalities around the globe. In the United States and other rich nations that hoarded them, vaccines are plentiful and freely available to all. But they have been met with enormous skepticism from the public. A Morning Consult pollfound that 30% of Americans are still skeptical of them or categorically refuse to be immunized. In what has become a partisan culture war, more than 97% of Americans recently hospitalized and 99.5% of those dying of COVID-19 are unvaccinated, according to the CDC and the Surgeon General.

Meanwhile, in the Global South, there is a huge desire to be vaccinated, but this is being blocked by U.S. actions. Western nations, who possess far more vaccines than they could ever use themselves, are refusing to waive intellectual property rights, preventing worldwide production. U.S. sanctions, too, are stopping Cuba from importing the raw material it needs to ramp up production of its domestically-produced COVID vaccines. The island also has a shortage of syringes, thanks to the U.S. blockade, meaning it cannot even fully vaccinate its own citizens.


While many Americans see the coronavirus as in the rear-view mirror, across the globe it is still raging, with more than 8,000 people dying daily and more than half a million testing positive, as the world enters a third wave of infections. Many countries have barely started vaccinating their populations, and reports suggest the world’s poor will have to wait until 2024 or longer to receive a shot. For instance, the Democratic Republic of the Congo — Africa’s third largest and second most populous country — has vaccinated only 0.09% of its citizens (fewer than 1 in 1,000).

Vaccines from other countries could help this acute shortage. Yet it is clear that many in Washington do not want this to happen. Corporate media have spent the last 18 months insisting that we “trust science” and condemning domestic conspiracy theories about the trustworthiness of vaccines. Yet when it comes to foreign vaccines, that belief in the scientific method is sacrificed on the altar of politics, putting people’s lives at risk to help advance America’s geopolitical goals.

The consistent message to the world in U.S. media has been “The Chinese (and Russian) vaccines are ineffective or dangerous. Do not take them.” Apart from being factually incorrect, for many in the Global South, Sinovac, Sinopharm or Sputnik are their only choice, meaning this message is endangering millions of people. Others have no access to vaccines whatsoever.

Likewise, domestic vaccine skepticism has been strongly condemned, with individuals and organizations removed from social media and even prevented from using platforms such as Patreon to support their work. But international vaccine skepticism is not only not censored, it is actively encouraged and boosted by many of our largest and most trusted news sources, who, in a feat of extraordinary irresponsibility, are actively putting people’s lives at risk to score political points.



Featured image: A nursing student administers the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine at a vaccination center at UNLV, in Las Vegas. John Locher | AP

(MintPress News)

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Re: Socialist Demands for the COVID-19 Crisis

Post by blindpig » Fri Feb 04, 2022 3:50 pm

ARE THEY JUST "ANTI-VACCINES"? ON THE PROTESTS IN CANADA AND EUROPE

Eder Pena

Feb 3, 2022 , 10:45 a.m.

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The "anti-vaccine" demonstrations are, in reality, a wave of discontent and popular mistrust in the face of fragmented measures and chaotic policies of Western countries (Photo: Lars Hagberg / AFP)

Cities of the Global North such as Nuremberg and Ottawa have been the focus of protests due to the rejection of restrictions related to covid-19, street demonstrations have been happening in other cities such as Helsinki, London, Paris , Athens and Stockholm. On January 22, a network called the World Wide Rally For Freedom convened a day that was also present in the streets of several cities in Canada, Australia and India.

Perhaps the most notorious of the recent protests was the one carried out by truckers from Canada, who arrived last Saturday, February 29, in the country's capital, Ottawa, in the so-called "Freedom Convoy" to protest against Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. and the decision of the Canadian authorities to force truckers to be vaccinated. The organization was attributed to anti-vaccine movements and extremist groups in Canada that have the support of characters such as businessman Elon Musk or Donald Trump Jr.


Truckers have opposed a decision by Canada and the United States to require that 15% of (unvaccinated) commercial drivers crossing the border between the two countries be vaccinated against covid-19 to avoid 14-day quarantines. . In recent days, other groups opposed to the public health measures adopted have joined, ranging from covid passports to public limits in commercial establishments.

The media highlighted that it is a mixture of unions such as carriers, other citizens affected by the restrictions imposed to contain the pandemic, right-wing extremist, anti-Semitic, Islamophobic and supremacist groups.

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Paris was the scene of the demonstrations in which the groped concept of freedom was appealed to, denied by countries like France to poor countries (Photo: AP Photo)

Another curious fact was that the Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, and his family were transferred by the security services from his official residence in Ottawa to a "safe place" in the capital for fear that the protests would provoke unrest. Trudeau described the convoy of truckers as a "small fringe minority" who have "unacceptable views" on the measures.

HOWLS IN THE NEOLIBERAL JUNGLE

Even when they are led by ultra-conservative groups that resort to the idea of ​​defending constitutional freedoms to oppose any decision against the movement of people, the anti-vaccine and anti-restriction protests have gained followers for reasons as diverse as the unions that have been joining.

The anti-vaccine groups, rather than being networks of delusional people, are linked to financial powers that are even accused of promoting the depreciation of life . They have managed to impact and capture a part of the working classes that the system has left adrift in the middle of the pandemic. The reaction of the corporate elites during the first months of confinement (or quarantine) remains memorable when, in order to "save the economy", millions of workers were fired who were already suffering the effects of health systems plagued by austerity and state abandonment, when privatized. In addition, the restrictive measures have been chaotic, when they do not completely exclude the working majorities and take to the extreme the exploitation of everything and everyone in favor of the richest 1%.

The astronomical profit figures of these same elites are well known. The NGO Oxfam reported last January that the total wealth of billionaires jumped from $8.6 trillion in March 2020 to $13.8 trillion in November 2021, a larger increase than in the previous 14 years combined. According to the report called "Inequalities Kill," the world's 10 richest men alone saw their collective wealth more than double, rising by $1.3 billion a day.

The Oxfam report says:

Inequalities between countries are estimated to grow for the first time in a generation. Developing countries, deprived of access to sufficient vaccines due to the protection that wealthy governments give to Big Pharma monopolies, had to cut social spending as their debt levels rose, and now face the possibility of having to adopt austerity measures.

This is how the protests of anti-vaccine sectors, defenders of the status that this model of looting and excessive accumulation facilitates, are confused with the protests of sectors that reject restrictions imposed to the detriment of workers and the activities that allow them to receive the salary of subsistence. These sectors, already overcome with protesting against labor flexibility and the high informality of neoliberal economies, reject that governments do not allow free movement of unvaccinated people (who in many cases are minorities).

In formal labor relations, increasingly on the decline, what predominates are labor laws that facilitate exploitation and dismissal, while what is on the rise is the informal economy, intensified by the discourse of entrepreneurship and uberization. They have no choice but to ask to be allowed to work (under whatever conditions) because they no longer waste time asking for free, quality public healthcare, much less compensatory measures to protect their families from an extraordinary event like which is in process.

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During the pandemic, the working majorities have been the most affected by the unemployment created along with the accumulation of large corporations (Photo: File)

Due to the appearance of the highly contagious omicron variant, many governments have imposed restrictions on traffic and access to public places for those who are not vaccinated, to the point that critics of anticovid vaccines speak of apartheid and persecution. The experience of the same draconian measures put in place at the beginning of the pandemic stimulates rejection due not only to the traumatic nature of confinement and confinement for urban populations, but also to the socioeconomic impacts already described. Deep down, many workers would abide by the restrictions if they could enjoy licenses and sustainable social programs that allowed them to remain confined without seeing their household income at risk.

However, behind the anti-vaccine discourse is the thrashed freedom that the West sells to its self-absorbed herds that have been annulled any hint of awareness of social duty, which is why the cult of a notion of freedom that ignores the risk that it means prevails. for others to refuse to wear a mask or be vaccinated to avoid occupying a hospital bed that might be made available for people with non-communicable health conditions.

VIRUS OF DISAPPOINTMENT AND MISTRUST

We then witness the staging of mobilizations in which crowds demand that the systems of things in which social Darwinism predominates allow them to live the supposed freedom that they have been sold. In this case, freedom of transit is restricted by the obligation to inoculate oneself with anticovid vaccines, the same ones with which these countries have established certain geopolitical control mechanisms, such as those described in a report by the Samuel Robinson Institute.

There is no way to understand that discourse of freedom, moreover, when events such as the World Health Organization (WHO) infinitely postponing the authorization for emergency use of a Russian vaccine manufacturer while Western governments force their populations to use others immersed in both political and clinical controversies.

That same speech of freedom is used to accuse countries like China of being dictatorial for their mechanisms to prevent massive contagion and also to advocate the privatization of vaccines by mega-corporations like Pfizer or AstraZeneca, whose profits have been greater than 100% , even when the research and development (R&D) phases were financed by the respective governments with public funds.

Rather than being hesitant about vaccines, many people are wary of Western governments, which have been improvising alarmingly since the start of the pandemic. Although experts had been warning for years, these governments were not prepared for a pandemic, neither within their countries nor in the global village they intend to lead.

In countries like the United States and the United Kingdom, only 49% of their citizens trust companies, according to a survey carried out in 28 countries during November 2021 and published by the Statista platform . The countries with the greatest confidence in them turned out to be the emerging China (84%) and India (79%); It is possible that it has to do with the way in which corporate sectors have assumed the pandemic, with US pharmaceutical companies being one of the least rejected, by the way.

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How trust in companies varies around the world. Percentage of the public saying they trust companies in selected countries in 2021 (Photo: Statista)

On the other hand, in India, the Serum Institute, the world's leading vaccine manufacturer, stopped exporting vaccines as soon as the delta variant appeared and infections, hospitalizations and deaths increased explosively, in order to serve the internal population. While China, where there was no such increase in cases, ranks first in exports of vaccines against covid-19, with more than 80 million doses sent to 60 countries, followed by the European Union and India with 77 and 64 million. respectively. Furthermore, 91% of Chinese respondents said they had confidence in their government while 74% of Indians said the same.

The spread of misinformation regarding the pandemic and other political issues of global interest has seen the media lead the list of types of companies that have the least credibility globally, followed by social media for the increasingly obvious handling of people's private data to profit from them. Additionally, 23 of the 28 countries distrust government more than corporations, so skepticism and distrust is viral.

They are the same governments that now press for the majority to be inoculated, the same ones that make public health and work precarious, leaving the majority out in the open in the name of the freedom of the rich. Poverty, social marginalization, ignorance, the promotion of ignorance and banality that lead to the loss of historical meaning, the failure of health systems, the privatization of health in some countries, wars, etc., qualify as the veiled contribution of governments and corporations to anti-vaccine and anti-restriction demonstrations.

It is striking how there are no protests against the corporations that have created that kind of "hunger games" around the pandemic, the same ones that have created the conditions for governments to prioritize their profits threatened by confinements and other anticovid measures. These destabilize the functioning of the market economy as a result of the vertiginous fall in the prices of its accumulating machinery, with almost no priority given to the health and life of human beings.

MERCHANDISE OR LIFE? THE PENDING DISCUSSIONS

It is complicated, at this point in history, to force people to be vaccinated and to trust in vaccines that have been used as an instrument of geopolitical and economic control, however mistrust of these drugs is not new, it has been widely reported . Some of the criticisms are encompassed in the rejection of the commodification of health and medicalization as a mechanism that facilitates it.

In his book Medical Nemesis (1975), the Austrian philosopher Iván Illich pointed out the problem of the functioning of the institutions of knowledge and the power of doctors: "The excessive medicalization of society fosters illnesses by reinforcing a sick society that not only preserves its defective limbs, but also exponentially multiplies the demand for the doctor's role.

The powerful industrial medical complex, of which Big Pharma is a part, promotes the consumerism of consultations, medicines, hospitalizations and everything related to health in many social sectors. The patient becomes just one more consumer of the medical industry who, according to Illich, "is reduced to an object to be repaired, he ceases to be a subject who is helped to heal." Thus, medical science has been transformed into a machine where the use of technologies suppresses the old conceptions of medical semiology: speaking, reviewing and examining the patient.

On the other hand, research in health areas goes hand in hand with the profits of Big Pharma, not with the health of the majority. The commodification of knowledge is a debate that should not be discouraged in the scientific community, especially when many scientific agendas of peripheral countries do not correspond to their problems or urgencies but to those of the metropolises.

Health systems have been precarious based on those corporate interests that, rather than promote preventive health, prefer assistance that, when it arrives, usually acts late. This is where distrust is born, not only in vaccines, but in the industrial network that designs, produces, distributes and imposes the prices of medicines.

Big Pharma has committed numerous crimes, among which the opiate crisis that is plaguing the United States stands out. The Janssen company invented fentanyl, a highly addictive painkiller that could be bought and promoted (rewarding doctors who prescribe it) freely in the United States, for which Johnson & Johnson (current owner of Janssen) was condemned.

What has been said does not justify the denial of the use of vaccines; If that were the case, we shouldn't even eat, since food is also a commodity in the hands of large corporations. What must increase is the critical sense regarding the instrumentalization of rights as control mechanisms that commodify social relations and that of societies with the rest of nature.

In fact, many people do not get vaccinated due to difficult access to health systems or accurate information regarding SARS-CoV-2 and its consequences, so a person who is not vaccinated is simply poor and uninformed, not necessarily anti-vaccine. More complex if you have leaders like the Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, who despises vaccines and describes covid-19 as “flu”, which has left a trail of death and social upheaval in the neighboring country.

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The flaws in the health systems of neoliberal economies have been exposed during the pandemic, which has increased popular mistrust in governments and corporations (Photo: File)

In the midst of a global crisis, the medical sciences today are witnessing a debate that includes the epistemic, some sectors recognize and others evade that the time has come to build deliberations on whether they should sell drugs or seek to improve human well-being. If the vaccines go in this last sense, there is no discussion superior to that; That is why the development of new ethical plans based on care, humanized attention and mutual support is required so that health is comprehensive, rewarding as well as free and public as well as collective.

OMICRON AS A TURNING POINT OR A DANGEROUS CURVE?
A single healthy (or asymptomatic) carrier of the virus is enough to make an unvaccinated person, or without the complete schedule, sick. Even when there are treatments that manage to cure some symptoms effectively, there are no highly successful drugs available to the majority. In addition, both health authorities and corporations have made little progress in manufacturing tests that allow a person to know if they have immunity to SARS-Cov-2 (measuring their T cells that provide cellular immunity) and if they need a vaccine dose. booster, which would save vaccines.

The appearance of the omicron variant is attributed to the possibility that the virus had to mutate in African countries where vaccination rates are still relatively low, this is precisely due to the failure of global elites in the fair distribution of vaccines. vaccines. The hoarding of vaccines , in which many of the countries that today witness street actions also participated, left semi-colonial or subordinate countries outside of vaccination.

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An updated map of the administered doses of anticovid vaccines in the world allows us to appreciate the hoarding of rich and emerging countries (Photo: Our world in data)

Ómicron has 32 mutations of protein S (the crown of the virus), twice as many as the delta variant, which would have implied greater transmissibility, severity and less effectiveness of the vaccines to combat it. Over the months it has been determined that it is not so severe and that some vaccinesthey can guarantee sufficient protection against this variant, which has led some European countries to consider the idea of ​​"influenza" covid-19 or treating the pandemic as endemic. This would consist of ceasing to contain the populations to attack the disease itself, ignoring the prevention that has been exercised until now through social confinement, the use of a mask and quarantines. The responsibility for controlling infections would be left to the citizen, which has already been viewed with concern by the WHO.

The debate , which occurs where there are higher rates of vaccinated population, seems to respond to the protests already described; As is known, ómicron has had a much greater impact and has provided a dose of mass immunity that, together with vaccines, has made it possible to reduce overcrowding in emergencies and intensive care units. However, in countries with low rates, the virus continues to thrive, mutating and generating new variants whose characteristics are undetermined.

It has even been said that since omicron causes fewer serious cases, the virus is beginning to "domesticate", but there is no evidence of this, only indications. Mutations are, by definition, random. If omicron or delta mutate to more serious forms, the consequences would also be serious, and detection and containment is one of the most complex problems for the scientific community devoted to their study. By ceasing to monitor case statistics with the necessary genomic surveillance, little can be done in the event of the appearance of another variant such as delta.

HOW TO CREATE MANY ANTI-VACCINE MOVEMENTS?

In a recent article , entitled "Why Cuba does not have an anti-vaccine movement", the economist and philosopher Marc Vandepitte reviews how, between chaotic measures and mistrust, a public perception against anticovid measures in Europe was developing. Many street demonstrations go against the erratic and self-serving handling of crises by European corporatocracies. What the author describes about Cuba is similar to what happened in Venezuela, where this type of mobilization has not taken place due to the timely action of a State that promotes solidarity rather than repression.

Vandepitte also highlights "the bond of trust between the local population and health personnel" as the basis of preventive health as well as the "house to house" to track cases. It also mentions how the effects of the delta variant last July were combined with "the serious economic problems derived from the economic blockade of the United States, the loss of tourism and the increase in the price of food", which did not stop being an opportunity so that Washington sought, as always, to impose a "soft blow".

This has not prevented Cuba from developing five different vaccines, immunizing 90% of its population (this is the second highest percentage in the world, after the United Arab Emirates, and the highest in Latin America), sharing drugs and doctors with more from 10 countries (including Italy) and invest in health sovereignty to the point that 80% of the vaccines used in the country's vaccination programs are nationally manufactured.

If you want to fuel an "anti-vaccine" movement, you should:

*Hoard vaccines so that SARS-CoV-2 mutates indeterminately.
*Deconfigure the State in favor of very, very petty corporations.
*Stigmatize the most vulnerable populations; if they can be left to drown in the sea or turn their territories into hotbeds of war, so much the better.
*Stimulate individualistic competition and discard solidarity as a value.
*Instill in your population the notion that one day you will become part of the richest 1% in the world.

There is more, but we would lack space...

There is no global strategy to combat covid-19 and the West is responsible for it by not releasing patents so that poor countries can access both vaccines and several of the drugs that are relatively effective. In addition, a long time ago he chose to make vaccines and the pandemic itself a global reset in which the state of exception that he has been imposing is exacerbated.

https://misionverdad.com/globalistan/so ... a-y-europa

Google Translator

USAans have many reasons to distrust our government and corporations, many good and some bad. I mistrusted the initial reports until it was clear that socialist countries were taking it very seriously. Likewise I mistrusted the products of BigPharma and waited until a few million got their initial shots and didn't keel over before I got mine.

The capitalist response to Covid-19 has been to extend and aggravate the pandemic because the priority of capitalist society is to profit, not to meet human need.
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Re: Socialist Demands for the COVID-19 Crisis

Post by blindpig » Fri Feb 11, 2022 2:02 pm

There Is Nothing Normal about One Million People Dead from COVID

Mass media and policy makers are pushing for a return to pre‐COVID times while trying to normalize a staggering death toll

February 10, 2022

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A woman watches white flags on the National Mall in September 2021 in Washington, D.C. Over 660,000 white flags were installed here to honor Americans who have lost their lives to COVID-19 epidemic. Credit: Chen Mengtong/China News Service via Getty Images

Sometime in the next few weeks, the official death toll for the two-year COVID pandemic in the U.S. will reach one million. Despite being the wealthiest nation on the planet, the U.S. has continued to have the most COVID infections and deaths per country, by far, and it has the highest per capita death rate of any wealthy nation.

This is an unfathomable number of people dead, yet, mass media are downplaying it. This is despite an empathetic New York Times headline in May 2020 of “U.S. Deaths Near 100,000, an Incalculable Loss,” and using its entire front page to print names of some of the deceased. As Luppe B. Luppen noted on Twitter, the newspaper’s more recent headline was the cruel and callous “900,000 Dead, but Many Americans Move On.”

The Times is not alone; several large mainstream publications, in complicity with politicians of both major political parties, have been beating a death knell of a drum for getting “back to normal” for months. The effect is the manufactured consent to normalize mass death and suffering—to subtly suggest to Americans that they want to move on.

News media are helping to shape public opinion in order for business to return to the very circumstances that have created this ongoing crisis. A return to normal will allow profits to be reaped by people working relatively safely from their homes (the target audience of many news organizations’ advertisers) at the expense of people working or studying in person who are more vulnerable.

A few weeks ago, David Leonhardt, the writer of the Times’ newsletter “The Morning,” asked Michael Barbaro, the host of the company’s podcast “The Daily”: “If [COVID] is starting to look like a regular respiratory virus, is it rational [emphasis by the Times] to treat it like something completely different— to disrupt all our lives in all these big and consequential ways[?]”

I was dismayed. That rhetorical move is a familiar one to me: Two white men frame what they think is rational, deeming any questioning of their stand as irrational.

Meanwhile, some 140,000 children in the U.S. have lost a caregiver—about one in every 500 children. That is a big and consequential loss, and those children are probably not among the many who are ready to “move on” (another nearly one million Americans can’t move on because they’re already dead). During this pandemic, Black people have been disproportionately killed by this virus. About 50,000 people have died each month of COVID, meaning several Black children are being orphaned by SARS-CoV-2 this month, as you read this.

So is it rational? To be calling for the end of life-saving mitigation efforts and saying they harm children when so many have been orphaned here and worldwide?

Is it rational for Democrats, Republicans and much of the news media to press on towards what writer Tom Scocca calls a policy of “unlimited” COVID? The Democratically controlled state governments of California, New Jersey, New York and Connecticut all moved to drop indoor mask mandates just days after a near-record 3,958 people died of COVID on a single day, February 4. Even the White House reportedly has “begun hinting at an impending ‘new normal,’ in a conscious messaging shift meant to get people comfortable with a scenario where the virus remains widespread yet at more manageable levels.”

Is it rational, when as many people who died of AIDS in its worst year (near 50,000 in 1995) are dying every month of COVID, to think of the novel coronavirus as a “regular respiratory virus”—and to think that the big and consequential disruptions to worry about are mask wearing and ventilation, and not death and debilitation?

Is it rational to ignore the high communal viral load in American society and to not do more to lower it so that fewer people are exposed, become sick, transmit onwards and possibly die?

Is it rational for the Times to be advertising an event happening in March hosted by Leonhardt called “The New Normal, a Virtual Event on Life and Love After Omicron,” which might just coincide with the timing of the millionth American officially dying of COVID?

Well, it depends on what it is you are trying to rationalize.

If you’re trying to get people to accept that what the nation is doing right now is okay, and 50,000 deaths per month should be normalized, then it’s rational.

If you don’t want people to wonder why in just two years, the U.S. death toll for COVID is about 130 percent the size of the death toll of four decades of HIV—while global COVID deaths are less than 20 percent of the world’s AIDS deaths—then it’s rational.

If you want to manufacture consent for looser pandemic measures in the U.S. rather than more comprehensive ones as the communal viral rate demands, then making these claims is rational.

But it’s not ethical to manufacture what I call a viral underclass, and it’s incorrect to pretend as though the news media have no role in creating it nor in persuading the public that so many deaths are inevitable.

It’s a shame that major news outlets are talking more about moving on and returning to normal, and not running more pieces calling for an increase in government-funded mitigation efforts (more free high-quality masks and tests, upgraded ventilation in worksites and schools) to stem the tide of death. American norms (rampant incarceration, eviction, homelessness, lack of health care, poor ventilation and economic inequality) are fairly deadly as is.

Rushing for the “urgency of normal” is “wishful thinking,” epidemiologist Gregg Gonsalves wrote in the Nation. Intentionally or unintentionally, “the urgency of normal”—a phrase cropping up a lot lately—is evocative of a phrase Martin Luther King, Jr. used in his 1967 speech “Beyond Vietnam” at Riverside Church, where he preached about “the fierce urgency of now”:

“We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time.”

If he were still alive, do you think King would be fighting for the fierce urgency of the very normal that produced all this death?

https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... om-covid1/

What's irrational is expecting different priorities from the owners of our society. It is irrational to expect a fox not to behave as a fox.

Here we see the blinkers imposed by petty bourgeoisie ideology on a scientific community which has for a while been demoted from that class as they have largely become employees, though perhaps of the 'aristocracy of labor' type. The refusal or inability of the scientific community to recognize that the capitalist organization of society is the primary source of our species' dysfunction makes me suspect that the 'eggheads' ain't really so smart after all.

What was so hot about 'normalcy' anyway? Fine for the capitalist and the top 10% but satisfaction with the status quo declines proportionally by income from that point. The 'great lay-out' or whatever you want to call it shows that a lot of folks no longer wish to keep that normal as their fate.
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Re: Socialist Demands for the COVID-19 Crisis

Post by blindpig » Sat Feb 12, 2022 2:24 pm

Racism + COVID = Death
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on FEBRUARY 11, 2022
Stephen Millies

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In 2020, under-equipped nurses at New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital had to use trash bags for protection.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. declared that “of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.”

The COVID-19 pandemic is more proof Dr. King was right. Death rates from the virus are at least double in Black, Indigenous and Latinx communities.

Zip code 11369, which comprises the East Elmhurst neighborhood in Queens, New York, is a shocking example. Dr. King was a student preacher there at the First Baptist Church at 100-10 Astoria Blvd. Malcolm X and his family lived at 23-11 97th St.

One out of every 119 people in this Black and Latinx neighborhood have died of the coronavirus. That’s over three times the U.S. average. It’s equivalent to 2.8 million people having died of COVID across the United States.

Diseases don’t discriminate, but capitalism does. The capitalist world market was born with the African Holocaust and the holocaust of Indigenous peoples in the Americas. The number-one job of the $4 trillion U.S. medical-industrial complex is producing profits, not healing.

In 2020, nurses at Mount Sinai’s flagship hospital in New York City had to wear Hefty garbage bags to protect themselves against COVID-19. Meanwhile, Mount Sinai’s CEO Kenneth Davis was enjoying his $12 million pay package.

Ten nurses at the Providence St. John’s Medical Center in Santa Monica, California, were initially suspended for refusing to work in COVID wards without personal protective equipment.

Big pharmaceutical outfits like Pfizer don’t foresee vaccinating a billion Africans until 2024. That’s vaccine apartheid, similar to the denial of retroviral therapies for HIV/AIDS to Africans for a decade after they were being used in the U.S.

Millions of people died as a result. Andrew Natsios – head of the U.S. Agency for International Development under President George W. Bush – thought it was useless to provide help to Africa. The drugs were to be taken at certain times of day and Natsios claimed in 2001 that Africans “don’t know what Western time is.”

Poverty and oppression kills

COVID-19 has acted like a killing machine in overcrowded housing and among essential workers. Black, Indigenous and Latinx people are concentrated in both.

High rents force families to live in cramped apartments. Families that are evicted often move in with relatives. Now the bans on evictions have been lifted and landlords want to throw millions of people onto the street.

Who is more crowded than the 2.2 million people in the prisons? As of Feb. 9, 564,451 prisoners have been infected with COVID and 2,814 have died. Why isn’t Donald Trump locked-up?

Prisons are concentration camps for the poor. In Wisconsin, Black people account for around 6% of the population but 46% of the prison inmates. In the same states Black babies are five times more likely to die than white infants.

The entire United States was stolen from Indigenous nations. In the Navajo nation there have been 1,626 deaths from COVID.

Over 59,000 meatpacking workers were infected with COVID. At least 269 workers died. Just at the JBS plant in Greeley, Colorado, six workers died. The vast majority of these workers were Black, Latinx and/or immigrants.

In the New York City area, over 150 transit workers died of the coronavirus. The Metropolitan Transit Authority there at first refused to allow workers to wear masks, claiming it was a violation of dress codes.

Socialism vs. capitalism

While the United States has a little bit more than 4% of the world’s population, it has accounted for almost one-fifth of all COVID-19 cases.

Uncle Sam accounts for about the same percentage of the world’s prison inmates. Both statistics show what U.S. capitalist “democracy” really amounts to.

One of the reasons so many people have died of COVID-19 has been the binge of hospital closings in the U.S. This has gone hand-in-hand with the thousands of factories being shut down.

Twenty thousand of the hospital beds thrown away were in New York state, according to the New York State Nurses Association. Among them was Harlem’s Sydenham Hospital, which was closed in 1980 after a bitter struggle to keep it open.

Some of the closed health facilities, like the Hahnemann University Hospital in Philadelphia, are being turned into luxury housing.

Thousands of nursing home patients died of COVID. A big cause was that elderly hospital patients with the virus were shoved into nursing homes due to the shortage of hospital beds.

Despite the cruel U.S. economic blockade of Cuba, not a single hospital or school has been closed in the socialist country. For every 1.9 hospital beds available in Brooklyn and Queens, there are 5 available in Cuba.

Pfizer and Moderna sold the overwhelming amount of their life-saving vaccines to richer countries. Socialist China and Cuba are sharing their vaccines with the world.

China will distribute 2 billion vaccine doses to Africa, Asia and Latin America. Cuba has already sent 10 million doses to the Socialist Republic of Vietnam and plans to distribute another 100 million doses.

No parents in Cuba have to wait eight hours with their children in crowded emergency rooms before seeing a doctor. No one in that beautiful country is turned away from a clinic because they don’t have insurance.

That’s because health care in Cuba is considered a human right, not something to make a profit from. Cuba has what we need: socialism.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2022/02/ ... vid-death/

**********************************************

Cuba Battles COVID, Defying 60-Year U.S. Blockade
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on FEBRUARY 11, 2022
Struggle – La Lucha

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Presentation by Sharon Black, writer for Struggle-La Lucha and national spokesperson of the Socialist Unity Party, at the Europe for Cuba online forum Feb. 9, 2022.

End the U.S. blockade of Cuba

It has been 60 years this month since U.S. President John Kennedy first proclaimed Executive Order 3447, prohibiting “the importation into the United States of all goods of Cuban origin and all goods imported from or through Cuba.”

Feb. 7, 1962, marked the beginning of the U.S. blockade of Cuba. Its stated purpose was to inflict collective punishment on the Cuban people in an attempt to starve and suffocate the young Cuban Revolution.

Every U.S. administration, regardless of party affiliation, has continued this policy, in one form or another. Not because Cuba represents a security risk for the United States, but because the Cuban socialist project is a beacon for not only Latin America and the Caribbean, but for the world’s people.

Biden, who promised to continue the Obama administration’s loosening of restrictions on Cuba, reversed himself and expanded Trump’s draconian policies.

The changes during the Obama administration were based on pragmatism, not ethics or principle. U.S. policies which included not only the blockade, but invasions and terrorist attacks, had not worked and only served to isolate the U.S.

What hasn’t changed is the motive of U.S. imperialism to continue to strangle the island nation.

The COVID pandemic and its consequent suffering became an opportunity to not only reignite the former course, but to attempt to go further.

It is no secret that National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the CIA and non-profit organizations orchestrated a highly-coordinated destabilization campaign to create chaos and promote demonstrations in the streets against the Cuban government. They were unsuccessful.

U.S.-Cuba Friendshipment Caravan

On Nov. 15, 2021, I and two other Struggle-La Lucha reporters, Ellie McClain and Lars Bertling, traveled to Cuba as part of the 31st IFCO-Pastors for Peace U.S.-Cuba Friendshipment Caravan.

Our group was one of the first delegations to travel to the newly reopened Cuba, which had been closed to international visitors because of the pandemic. Nov. 15 marked the opening of schools and services in Cuba and was also a day celebrating the anniversary of Havana.

We are from Baltimore, Maryland, where the police murder of Freddie Gray sparked a rebellion of the people of our city who were fed up with racist police terror.

Our members also represent the Peoples Power Assembly, which does community work, including setting up weekly free food distributions because our government won’t feed the people, and also a “saving lives campaign” to demand vaccines for our community.

Among our own organizers, six people contracted COVID-19, four were hospitalized, and six other volunteers died. Only 60% of the people of Baltimore are vaccinated.

We know the Cubans like to say, “We are not perfect.” But what we saw is heaven to us in comparison to our conditions under capitalism.

Our participation was as much to learn from the Cuban people as it was to show our solidarity in demanding an end to the blockade.

We stayed close to two weeks in Cuba, spending almost every minute visiting hospitals, clinics, schools, museums and especially participating in discussions with Cuban representatives on almost every aspect of Cuban life, from trade unions, to conditions of African descendents, artists and writers, and especially the deeply-damaging impact of the U.S. blockade. We met with Latin American School of Medicine (ELAM) students and members of the Henry Reeve Brigade for international medical solidarity.

Finlay Vaccine Institute

Given our own experience with the lack of medical care in the U.S. and the sacrifice of so many lives because of the inability of the U.S. capitalist system to provide care, I wanted to underscore our visit to the Finlay Vaccine Institute.

The institute helped to produce three of Cuba’s five COVID-19 vaccines: Soberana, Soberana 2 and Soberana Plus.

Under the most difficult conditions due to the blockade, Cuba was able to produce these three highly effective vaccines, rivaling the effectiveness of U.S. vaccines. The blockade had prevented Cuba from importing the reagents necessary for the production of the vaccine. And international patent restrictions blocked Cuban scientists from sharing important information.

In addition, it was nearly the first time that Cuba had to produce a vaccine aimed at a virus rather than a bacterial infection – and they were able to do it in record time. So you might consider it a miracle.

So how did they do it?

One of the major reasons given was the cooperation between Cuban organizations, the lack of competition and personal profit. In fact, these were some of the same reasons, along with a few others, for the high vaccination rate in Cuba that has now reached an astounding 90% of the population.

The people of Cuba trust the vaccines because the country has a long history of preventative health care that is steeped in education and community implementation. There is no profit motive to block health care in Cuba.

U.S. movement in support of Cuba has grown

In contrast to Biden’s cynical and criminal attempts to choke and destroy Cuba, the sentiment of the people inside the U.S. to end the blockade has grown.

On Sunday, Jan. 30, Miami Cuban-Americans and their supporters gathered at City Hall to caravan with bikes and cars to a rally at the statue of Cuba’s national hero, José Martí.

Over nearly two years, these monthly Miami actions have birthed a caravan movement across the U.S. and internationally on the last Sunday of the month – including in the streets of Cuba. Caravans kicked off the new year in Miami, New York City, Minneapolis, Las Vegas, Albuquerque, Tempe/Phoenix, Portland, Seattle and Los Angeles.

(more...)

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2022/02/ ... -blockade/
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Re: Socialist Demands for the COVID-19 Crisis

Post by blindpig » Thu Feb 24, 2022 3:09 pm

COVID-19 'let loose' in nervy pandemic experiment
By ANGUS McNEICE in London | China Daily | Updated: 2022-02-24 12:30

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People walk on a street in London on Feb 22, 2022. [Photo/IC]

England joins Nordic nations in lifting all restrictions

More than once during the pandemic, United Kingdom Prime Minister Boris Johnson has referred to COVID-19 as the "nation's biggest challenge" since World War II, and hailed the British public for its stoicism.

The country's wartime stereotype of a "stiff upper lip" is a useful one to fall back on in times of crisis.

Johnson is now asking much of the population to "Keep Calm and Carry On", when all COVID-19 restrictions in England are to be lifted.

It really is all restrictions. The government is lifting a law that required infected people to self-isolate for a minimum of five days. People in England will have the choice to test positive and go about their business as normal, shopping, taking trains and visiting pubs and restaurants, while knowingly putting others at risk of infection.

That famous "Keep Calm" propaganda poster of 1939 encouraged Britons to carry on with their lives in the face of adversity. But it was also accompanied by huge amounts of government support and intervention when the bombs began falling on British shores.

Vaccines will effectively be the only line of defense left standing against the novel coronavirus in the UK by the end of next month, with the government announcing on Monday that free symptomatic and asymptomatic testing will end in England from April 1, despite objections from several public health bodies, including the National Health Service.

The removal of the self-isolation law does not appear to have much public support.

A survey from pollster YouGov found that 75 percent of Britons are in favor of current regulations. Just 17 percent support the change, which would see individuals and employers make their own decisions over restricted movements, as is the case with other respiratory ailments, such as colds or flu.

Some say they will continue to isolate following infection, regardless of the law.

Amber Anderson, 29, an actress from London, said: "I don't think I would take these new liberties if I tested positive for COVID-19. I honestly just wouldn't feel comfortable knowing I could be passing it on to someone more vulnerable than myself. I think if I tested positive I would try to avoid going to work, but stay at home."

Others are unsure if they will have much room for personal choice.

Emily Roberts, 44, a school teacher from West Sussex, recently spent 10 days at home recovering from COVID-19. Due to the legal requirement to self-isolate, her classes were covered by a supply teacher paid for by an insurer. Roberts does not know what would happen in the event of asymptomatic infection once the legal requirement for isolation ends.

"Morally, I would want to stay home to protect the population. But would I be obliged to go back to work, as long as I was feeling well enough, because the school would not be getting the financial support? I don't know the answer to that," she said.

"I am not looking forward to catching COVID-19 when restrictions are over and such decisions have to be made by individuals, with no clear-cut rule that says stay home when you are contagious."

Rachel McCloy, associate professor at the University of Reading's School of Psychology, said that from a behavioral science perspective, the shift represents a range of risks.

"Although we know that most people have followed guidance to be responsible … for those who have been more resistant, this change risks signaling they can feel free to take COVID-19 infections less seriously," McCloy said.

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Commuters wearing face masks crowd onto a subway train in London during the evening rush hour on Feb 14. TOLGA AKMEN/AFP

Political move

In justifying its strategy, the UK government said hospitalizations and COVID-19 cases are falling. There is also strong immunity in the population thanks to high vaccination rates and a surge in infections in December brought on by the Omicron variant.

Data support this claim. COVID-19 cases have fallen over the past few weeks, according to the Office of National Statistics. In the week ending Feb 12, just under 2.5 million tested positive in England, or one in 20 people, compared with 1 in 19 the previous week. Meanwhile, more than 82 percent of adults in England have received three or more vaccinations.

However, the timing of the rule change has raised eyebrows. The end to the self-isolation law was originally scheduled for late next month, but Johnson surprised many on Feb 9 when he revealed plans to bring forward the change by four weeks.

Experts asked if the expedited timeline was based on solid evidence, after it emerged that several major health authorities had not been consulted.

British epidemiologist John Edmunds told ITV News the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, or SAGE, which advises the government on COVID-19 policy, had not held discussions about moving changes forward.

Welsh Economy Minister Vaughan Gething told the BBC that there was no meeting between UK chief medical officers before Johnson's surprise announcement.

Some critics say the move is designed to distract from a number of controversies that have embroiled Johnson and also to appease a faction within his Conservative Party that has long lobbied against COVID-19 restrictions.

Johnson has faced calls to stand down following revelations that several parties and gatherings were held on government properties last year, in apparent breach of lockdown rules.

Christina McAnea, general secretary of UNISON, the biggest union in the UK, said, "Ditching COVID-19 rules while the virus rages suggests public health is less important to the prime minister than saving his job."

McAnea said that rushing through rule changes means that employers could find themselves at odds with existing health and safety regulations.

"Health and care staff faced the sack if they weren't double jabbed. Soon, they will have the green light to work, even if they've got COVID-19. Putting a match to sensible safety measures without providing guidance to employers is reckless and will cause confusion and alarm," she said.

Tim Spector, lead scientist on the ZOE COVID Study at King's College London, said the decision to bring forward an end to restrictions was politically motivated, and he encouraged people to continue to isolate if possible.

"Despite the government's hasty decision to end all restrictions this month, and the message this sends, this does not mean the pandemic is over, and we should all try to be good citizens by continuing to self-isolate when ill and protect ourselves and others from what can be a really nasty infection," Spector said.

Simon Clarke, associate professor in cellular microbiology at the University of Reading, said the pandemic remains in an "uncertain period", and lifting all restrictions may prove unwise, given unknown factors over the long-term impact of infection and the risk of new variants emerging.

"It will be an experiment which will either be shown to be very brave or very stupid, but nobody knows for sure what the result will be," Clarke said.

James Gill, a clinical lecturer at Warwick Medical School, is concerned that lifting the law will encourage infected people to push themselves to return to full activities too soon, potentially prolonging their recovery.

"Frankly, I see no justifiable reason for the scrapping of this law, certainly not from the perspective of patients," Gill said.

Some within the scientific community support the government's thinking.

Irene Petersen, a professor of epidemiology and health informatics at University College London, said it has made sense to slow COVID-19 and reduce transmission to ensure most people received vaccines, but now it may be time to change strategy.

"If we want to reduce serious illness and death from COVID-19, we should seek to speed the epidemic up," Petersen said on Twitter. "If we want the epidemic to come to an end in the UK, we need to reach a level where 95 percent have immunity, either from vaccine or infection."

About 38 million people have received third, or booster, vaccines in the UK in recent months, and Petersen said this presents a sensible window to lift restrictions before booster protection begins to wane later in the year and the risk of serious illness increases.

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A street in Cologne, Germany, is packed on Saturday as cases of the Omicron variant were reported in the city. SASCHA SCHUERMANN/GETTY IMAGES
Terminology updated

Claims from some British media that the UK will be the first country to lift all COVID-19 restrictions are somewhat exaggerated.

Denmark dropped all such curbs from Feb 1, with Norway following suit soon after. In both nations, the four-day self-isolation guidance for infected people is a recommendation, not a legal requirement. Sweden scrapped all COVID-19 restrictions on Feb 9, and self-isolation has always been voluntary in the country.

Authorities in the three Nordic nations and the UK are also updating the terminology they use to classify the threat posed by COVID-19.

Denmark's Health Minister Magnus Heunicke said the novel coronavirus will no longer be characterized as a "socially critical disease", while Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson said her country is "moving into a new phase".

Norway's Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store said COVID-19 is "no longer a major health threat" for most citizens, and Johnson has dubbed the end of restrictions the "strategy for living with COVID-19".

To some experts, these phrases are euphemisms for "endemic", the term given to a for which the spread, rates and presence are predictable.

In the United States, Kristian Andersen, an infectious researcher at Scripps Research in California, said it is far too early to redefine COVID-19 in this way.

He said some governments are acting under an "endemic delusion "or "belief that the pandemic is over".

"This is best exemplified by Denmark," Anderson wrote on Twitter. "Denmark effectively declared the pandemic over … despite the fact that cases, hospitalizations and test positivity are higher than ever, with deaths rapidly rising."

This assertion is borne out by the numbers-at the end of last month, when Denmark announced restrictions were to end, daily new cases averaged about 43,000, according to Our World in Data, representing a record high at that time. Daily hospitalizations were also at record levels, and confirmed deaths from COVID-19 were at their highest for a year, and rising.

The World Health Organization has warned countries against complacency, and said the world is not yet close to the end of the pandemic.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters in South Africa on Feb 11 that the "acute phase" of the pandemic could be over by the middle of this year, but that will only be the case if 70 percent of the world is protected by vaccines. Currently, 62 percent of the global population has received at least one dose of vaccine, according to Our World in Data.

Late last month, David Nabarro, WHO special envoy for COVID-19, told Sky News it is "dangerous" to compare the with common and well-known respiratory illnesses.

Nabarro was responding to comments by UK Health Secretary Sajid Javid, who said at a Downing Street news conference, "We must learn to live with COVID, in the same way that we've learned to live with flu", and by Johnson, who told Parliament on Jan 19, "When COVID-19 becomes endemic, we will need to replace legal requirements with advice."

According to Nabarro: " (COVID-19) can mutate and form variants, and we've seen several, but we know there are more not far away. Quite honestly, we are not saying that this should be considered to be like flu or indeed like anything else-it's a new virus, and we must go on treating it as though it is full of surprises, very nasty and rather cunning."

He asked world leaders to "prevent people from getting infected "and "stay focused on the job", and also warned that "further surges "are to come.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20220 ... 88acb.html
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Re: Socialist Demands for the COVID-19 Crisis

Post by blindpig » Fri Feb 25, 2022 3:28 pm

WHO trying to re-engineer Moderna vaccine to share formula with poor countries after Big Pharma declines to disclose knowhow

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The logo and building of the World Health Organization (WHO) headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, 15 April 2020

THE World Health Organisation (WHO) announced today it will establish a global training centre to help poorer countries make vaccines, antibodies and cancer treatments.

Director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the hub would be in South Korea and would use messenger RNA technology being studied by scientists working for the WHO in South Africa, where it is trying to recreate the Moderna mRNA vaccine.

Moderna and fellow pharmaceutical giant Pfizer-Biontech, which also produces an mRNA vaccine, have refused the WHO’s request for access to their vaccine formulas. Moderna’s is believed to be easier to reconstruct.

Mr Tedros said: “Vaccines have helped to change the course of the Covid-19 pandemic, but this scientific triumph has been undermined by vast inequities in access to these life-saving tools.” It is the first time the WHO has tried to re-engineer commercially sold vaccines.

The WHO said the technology being hoarded would not just be useful for Covid vaccines but for making antibodies, insulin and various disease treatments, including for malaria.

https://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/art ... big-pharma

Death to the monopolists, they deserve no less.

Intellectual property is theft from all humanity.
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Re: Socialist Demands for the COVID-19 Crisis

Post by blindpig » Mon Mar 14, 2022 1:21 pm

Latest on COVID-19 pandemic
chinadaily.com.cn | Updated: 2022-03-14 08:50

We provide the latest updates and crucial information on the global COVID-19 pandemic here.

March 14

China

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Latest data released by National Health Commission by midnight, March 13, 2022.

Chinese mainland reports 1,337 new local COVID-19 cases
Xinhua | Updated: 2022-03-14 09:59

A medical worker takes a swab sample from a resident for nucleic acid test at a community in East China's Shanghai, March 13, 2022. [Photo/Xinhua]
BEIJING -- The Chinese mainland on Sunday reported 1,337 locally transmitted COVID-19 cases, the National Health Commission said Monday.

Of the new local infections, 895 were reported in Jilin, 92 in Shandong, 79 in Guangdong, 60 in Shaanxi, 51 in Hebei, 41 in Shanghai, 40 in Tianjin, 16 in Jiangsu, and 12 in Gansu. The rest of the cases were reported in eight other provincial-level regions, the commission said in its daily report.

A total of 100 imported COVID-19 cases were reported Sunday, said the commission.

One new suspected case, arriving from outside the mainland, was reported in Shanghai, said the commission. No deaths from COVID-19 were reported on the day.

Expert: Dynamic zero-COVID strategy key to curbing Omicron spread
By XING YI in Shanghai | chinadaily.com.cn | Updated: 2022-03-14 16:03

In light of the recent surge in COVID-19 infections across the country, China's strategy to achieve zero infection out of the transmission chains must continue along with preparations for more sustainable strategies against the Omicron variant, said epidemiologist Zhang Wenhong on Monday.

Zhang, head of the infectious disease department at Huashan Hospital in Shanghai and also the director of the National Center for Infectious Diseases under China Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), wrote in a Sina Weibo post that the highly transmissible subvariant of Omicron, known as BA.2, is the main cause of current outbreaks sweeping through Hong Kong and the Chinese mainland.

"The infections in the mainland are still in the early stage of an exponential rise," said Zhang, who noted that it took only 11 days for the daily infection numbers in the Chinese mainland to rise from 119 to 3,122 since the beginning of March.

"Because the virus hit us out of a sudden and we responded a little late, we are attempting to catch up with the spread of the virus," he said.

"But our precise control and testing for people in key areas have picked up pace. When daily life slows down, the transmission of virus will also be slowed."

Zhang said that his discussions with virologists at the University of Hong Kong on Sunday resulted in the conclusion that people who are fully vaccinated and have normal immune systems will unlikely develop serious conditions.

"The first step we must make is to dismiss the fear of the virus," Zhang said.

Only 0.1 percent cases of the 2,266 patients being treated in Shanghai over the past six months developed severe symptoms, and none have died, he added.

He pointed out that 89.4 percent of those who died from COVID-19 in Hong Kong were patients who had not been inoculated or had only received one dose of the vaccine. The death rate of people who aren't fully vaccinated, he said, was 23 times higher compared with people who have received two doses.

"But these are not excuses for us to 'lie flat' and do nothing," Zhang said.

"If China opens up too quickly, a large number of people will still get infected in the short period of time, and this will lead to a staggering number of hospitalizations and shock the society even though the virus has a low mortality rate."

Zhang added that a large proportion of elderly Chinese and those with preexisting health problems have not received their vaccines due to a fear of possible side effects, and the current response against the COVID-19 outbreak in the country shows that it is necessary to protect this group of people.

"It is vital for China to continue its strategy of achieving zero infection out of the transmission chains to control the outbreak caused by the highly transmissible Omicron variant," he said. "But it doesn't mean that we will shut down communities and test everyone continuously.

"We should not miss the window of opportunity to form more comprehensive, smart and sustainable approaches."

The expert also mentioned approaches including rolling out an extensive booster vaccine plan for seniors, ensuring the supply of oral antiviral medicine and affordable home testing kits, and well-prepared triage medical services and home quarantine protocols.


Outside China

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The latest figures reported by each government's health authority as of March 14, 2022.

End of restrictions, new strains cause virus spike
By EARLE GALE in London | China Daily | Updated: 2022-03-14 10:00

People walk past a direction sign for a COVID-19 vaccination centre in London, March 10, 2022. [Photo/Agencies]
The United Kingdom's recent decision to ditch its remaining novel coronavirus restrictions has contributed to an alarming spike in the number of people with COVID-19.

The Office for National Statistics, or ONS, said in its latest analysis of the virus's impact on the UK that around one person in 25 currently has COVID-19. In Scotland, that rate is around one in 18, which is the worst it has been since the pandemic began.

Experts said the abandonment of measures aimed at containing the spread of the virus - such as the mandatory wearing of face masks and the need for people with the virus to self-isolate - has led to many of the new infections. But they say waning immunity among people who have been vaccinated, and a new, more transmissible strain of the Omicron variant of the virus have made matters even worse.

Health Secretary Sajid Javid insisted, however, the government has "no concerns at all" about a resurgence of the pandemic in the UK.

"There's a world-class surveillance system in place, and, whilst in some regions we have seen a modest rise in infections, overall case numbers are still very low and hospitalization numbers are way below their peak," the BBC quoted him as saying.

The ONS said its survey of a cross-section of the UK population, alongside random testing it oversees, suggests around 2.6 million people had COVID-19 in the week ending March 5. A week earlier, the total was 2.4 million.

The ONS said the sharpest rise in new infections is happening among older people and the government has announced plans to offer them, and others deemed vulnerable, an extra booster jab as part of a new program starting in April. This is to counteract the waning immunity of previously given injections, which fade in their efficacy over time.

Jenny Harries, the chief executive of the UK Health Security Agency, or UKHSA, said the emergence of new strains of the novel coronavirus shows the pandemic is far from over.

"We can expect to see COVID circulating at high levels," The Guardian newspaper quoted her as saying. "Vaccination remains the best way to protect us all from severe disease and hospitalization due to COVID-19 infection."

The Daily Express newspaper said healthcare professionals are currently worried about the emergence of a variant called Deltacron, which is a recombinant of Omicron and Delta and which could have the ability to cause severe illness, as with Delta, while spreading easily, as with Omicron.

Gisaid, a global group of scientists that shares virus information, said the first Deltacron variant was identified in France last week. The World Health Organization subsequently said the strain had been detected in the Netherlands and Denmark. By Friday, the UKHSA had recorded the first 30 cases of strain in the UK.

https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202203/ ... 8c65f.html

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More than 89% of Cubans are vaccinated against Covid-19

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Authorized specialists applied at least the first injection to 10 million 614 thousand 788 citizens. | Photo: Granma
Published March 9, 2022

Cuba is the third country in the world with the largest number of people with the complete schedule of the anticovid dose.

The Cuban Ministry of Public Health (MINSAP) reported this Wednesday that 9,889,981 people completed the anticovid vaccination scheme in the Caribbean nation, which represents 89.3 percent of the population.

According to the entity, on the last day, 35,860,108 doses against Covid-19 were applied in the country, administered from the national drugs Soberana 02, Soberana Plus and Abdala.

Likewise, the health authority indicated that at least 10,614,788 people in the nation have the first anticovid dose.


In another order, 6,032,529 people administered the single booster dose; of this total, at least 282,828 as part of the drug clinical trial, and 5,749,701 during the nationwide mass vaccination campaign.

“The Center for the State Control of Medicines, Equipment and Medical Devices (CECMED) on August 20 decided to grant the Emergency Use Authorization (AUE) to the Cuban Sovereign 02 and Sovereign Plus vaccines,” the MINSAP specified.

It should be noted that Cuba occupies the third position in the list of countries with the largest population immunized against Covid-19, surpassed by the United Arab Emirates and Portugal.

https://www.telesurtv.net/news/cuba-reg ... -0035.html

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Re: Socialist Demands for the COVID-19 Crisis

Post by blindpig » Tue Mar 15, 2022 1:51 pm

China confines millions of people due to Covid-19 rebound

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On Tuesday, authorities reported 5,280 cases across mainland China. | Photo: @descifraguerra
Published 15 March 2022

According to health authorities, the country has recorded the highest incidence rate for coronavirus since the start of the pandemic.

Chinese authorities confined more than 50 million people on Tuesday due to the increase in Covid-19 cases.

In the last few hours, the Chinese National Health Commission (NHC) ordered the confinement of approximately 24 million residents in Jilin province, as well as 17.5 million people in the city of Shenzhen, and another 10 million in the city of Dongguan. , in the south of the country.

According to the Chinese health authorities, the regions will remain in quarantine after registering the highest incidence rate for coronavirus since the beginning of the pandemic.


On Tuesday, authorities reported 5,280 cases across mainland China, although no fatal cases have been recorded to date. In the Hong Kong region, meanwhile, the surge in new infections has killed at least 249 people.


Through tough restrictions, Beijing managed to contain coronavirus infections after the first wave was born in late 2019 in the city of Wuhan, but recently faced multiple outbreaks linked to the arrival of the Omicron variant.

https://www.telesurtv.net/news/china-co ... -0010.html

Google Translator

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Experts back zero-COVID control policy
By WANG XIAOYU in Beijing and XING YI in Shanghai | CHINA DAILY | Updated: 2022-03-15 07:14


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An employee of online grocery platform Dingdong Maicai prepares to deliver fresh food on Sunday to customers in Shanghai. Many people in the city have turned to online purchases for fresh food after the recent surge in COVID-19 infections. [Photo by Tang Yanjun/China News Service]

Nation's strategy still effective despite biggest surge in cases in two years

As China strives to contain its biggest COVID-19 surge in two years, officials and experts have urged continuation of the dynamic zero-COVID strategy and enforcement of science-based control measures to halt the spread of the virus.

Despite the large spike in new cases and challenges in blocking the highly transmissible Omicron variant, they said the goal of zero infection in communities must be achieved to protect medical systems from being overstretched and a jump in related deaths.

More sustainable response strategies should be devised, such as providing home test kits, antiviral pills and better preparing healthcare services.

The Chinese mainland reported 1,337 locally transmitted, confirmed infections for Sunday, down from over 1,800 the previous day. However, it was the second day in a row that confirmed infections topped 1,000.

The number of asymptomatic cases also went down by about 500 to 788 on Sunday, according to the National Health Commission.

Lei Zhenglong, deputy head of the commission's Bureau of Disease Prevention and Control, said on Monday that the recent epidemic has affected 27 provincial-level regions. As of Sunday, more than 10,000 domestic infections had been reported this month.

The country's virus control strategy is still effective against the Omicron variant, but Omicron's stealth and rapid transmission means that faster and stricter measures should be taken, he said.

The hardest-hit regions include Jilin and Guangdong provinces and Shanghai.

Vice-Premier Sun Chunlan arrived in Jilin on Sunday to guide local virus control work, and visited a local high school and a residential complex.

The province registered 895 locally transmitted, confirmed cases, or nearly 67 percent of total cases nationwide for Sunday, presenting a "severe and complicated situation", according to Sun.

During the inspection, she stressed local authorities should cope with the outbreak in a resolute, scientific, and effective manner, and strictly implement mass testing, quarantine and treatment protocols to achieve zero cases as soon as possible.

China approved on Sunday the use of rapid antigen testing kits, and Sun said screening for infections should be accelerated via both nucleic acid and antigen tests and improved organization.

More aid will be sent to Jilin to boost its ability to conduct epidemiological investigations. While high-risk groups must undergo centralized quarantine, people at lower risk can isolate at home, she said.

The latest outbreaks sweeping the Chinese mainland and the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region are mainly caused by the highly transmissible subvariant of Omicron, known as BA. 2, according to experts.

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Workers in Northeast China's Jilin province transform Changchun's International Exhibition Center into a makeshift hospital. [Photo by Zhang Jian/For chinadaily.com.cn]
Zhang Wenhong, head of the infectious disease department at Fudan University's Huashan Hospital in Shanghai, said it is vital to stay confident, calm and clear-minded, and to not give up the fight against the virus.

"The infections in the mainland are still in the early stage of an exponential rise," he said on the microblogging platform Sina Weibo. "Because of a surge of cases in a relatively short span, many regions have appeared to be flustered."

With local authorities implementing targeted lockdowns and speeding up screening of key areas, Zhang said the virus' spread will eventually be slowed.

Based on discussions with virologists at the University of Hong Kong, he said the virulence of the new strain has decreased, and that fully vaccinated people and those with normal immune systems are unlikely to develop serious symptoms.

Only 0.1 percent of the 2,266 patients being treated in Shanghai over the past six months have been classified as having severe cases, and no one has died, he added.

Based on Hong Kong data, the death rate of people who aren't fully immunized is 23 times higher than those have received two shots.

Though the virus has become milder and less lethal, Zhang argues against relaxing virus containment policies.

"If China opens up too quickly, many people will get infected quickly, leading to a staggering number of hospitalizations, strained medical systems and an impact on society," he said. The consequences would be unimaginable for the elderly and those with underlying health problems who have not been vaccinated for fear of side effects, he said.

While it is vital for China to continue its strategy of achieving zero infection and bring the wave of Omicron infections under control, "it doesn't mean that we will impose lockdowns and mass testing persistently", he said.

When the outbreaks are stamped out, it is essential to seize the window of opportunity to develop smarter and more sustainable strategies, such as launching an extensive booster vaccine plan for seniors, ensuring the supply of oral antiviral medicine and affordable home testing kits, and developing fully trained triage medical services and home quarantine protocols, he said.

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202203/1 ... 82e_2.html
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