Socialist Demands for the COVID-19 Crisis

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Re: Socialist Demands for the COVID-19 Crisis

Post by blindpig » Fri Aug 20, 2021 2:24 pm

The Moral Scandal of Vaccine Inequality Has a Name: Capitalism
August 18, 2021

Stephen Gowans

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In a new editorial the British Medical Journal thunders against the monopolization of life-saving vaccines by rich countries, calling it a “moral scandal” and “crime against humanity.” Vaccine makers and “their political allies” are flayed for turning a “blind eye” “towards the innumerable deaths in disadvantaged nations” caused by their refusal to share vaccine technology with poor countries, while at the same time presenting themselves as the greatest servants of humanity. What they are really doing, the editorial fumes, is “making a killing”, both figuratively (in massive profits) and literally (in preventable deaths.)

According to the BMJ:

“Vaccine preventable deaths and illness are occurring across Africa, Asia, and Latin America at an unprecedented speed and scale” because there is an artificial shortage of vaccines, and what vaccine doses are available are being sold to the highest bidders—the rich countries.

“Contrary to claims, it is possible to make enough vaccines for the world” by sharing vaccine know-how, making vaccine technology open source, and allowing any company, anywhere in the world, private or public, to produce vaccine doses.

“Let us be clear what is causing these deaths,” the BMJ fulminates: “a free market, profit driven enterprise based on patent and intellectual property protection, combined with a lack of political will.”

In other words, capitalism. The editorial doesn’t use the C-word, but if the argument is followed to its logical end, capitalism is the inevitable destination.

Deaths and illness are occurring in low-income countries which could be prevented if vaccine manufacturers transferred their technology to poor countries and allowed them to produce the vaccines themselves.

Only one percent of people in low income countries are fully vaccinated, according to Our World in Data, while over 50 percent of the residents of rich countries have received two vaccine doses (and in some countries three. About one million residents of the United States have received three vaccine doses while health care workers, the elderly, and infirm in the world’s poorest countries have yet to receive even one.)

The disparity is due to two causes:

The rich countries’ pharmaceutical companies have exclusive rights to mRNA and viral vector vaccine technologies. Backed by their governments, they refuse to make the technology open source. If they did, spare manufacturing capacity could be engaged, and the supply of vaccines boosted, allowing a quicker roll out of doses around the world, but foregone profits for the vaccine oligopoly.

As the BMJ points out, the “world’s 30 richest nations—those able to pay high vaccine prices—have cleared the world’s shelves of doses through advanced purchase orders.”

Canada purchased enough doses to vaccinate its citizens five times over.
The United Kingdom secured enough doses for four times its population.
The United States has stockpiled 100 million doses.
Some high-income countries are administering, or planning to administer, vaccine boosters, absent evidence they’re needed, while at the same time destroying unused, expired, doses. Meanwhile, less than six percent of Africans have received even a single dose.
The real international community—over 100 countries—has proposed a temporary waiver on intellectual property protection of Covid-19 vaccine technologies. This would expand the supply of doses and expedite the roll out of vaccines to poor countries. On top of saving lives and reducing illness, a faster roll out would reduce the chances of new variants emerging that might evade current vaccines.

However, these developments, while a caress for humanity, would be a blow to pharmaceutical companies and the wealthy investors who back them. A supply shortage allows the companies to sell vaccines at monopoly prices with the attendant advantage of huge profits. Vaccine-makers argue that large margins are necessary to recover their research and development costs, but the vaccine technologies to which they have exclusive rights were produced in publicly-funded university and government labs. The truth of the matter is the companies seek large margins to do what capitalist enterprises are systemically compelled and legally obliged to do: generate profits to the highest level possible. Suffice to say, sharing technology with other manufacturers, means sharing market share. Any pharmaceutical company CEO who agreed to this repudiation of corporate responsibility would be quickly dismissed and replaced by another person whose moral qualms (if they have any) do not interfere with the pursuit of hard-headed business imperatives; namely, exploiting employees, despoiling customers, and paying out healthy dividends to the only people who matter in the calculus of capitalism: shareholders.

As for the dangers of new variants emerging, this can hardly be unwelcome to vaccine-makers. New variants, especially those that achieve “vaccine-escape”, present the pleasing prospect for vaccine company shareholders of a guaranteed future demand for new vaccines and therefore an unceasing stream of revenue stretching far into the future—the holy grail of capitalist pharmaceuticals. The prospect may be a nightmare for humanity, but it’s a pharmaceutical company CEOs wet dream.

Oxfam, the BMJ notes, accuses the G20 rich nations of putting the interests of pharmaceutical companies and their investors ahead of ending the pandemic. The journal adds that “Vaccine manufacturers and many rich countries are working tirelessly to block waiver discussions at the World Trade Organization”, while at the same time, the WTO drags it heels. Quelle surprise. Whose interests do vaccine manufacturers, the governments of rich countries, and the WTO represent? Not those of poor countries.

The BMJ’s moral indignation is understandable and warranted, but its failure to take its analysis far enough to confront the systemic roots of the problem leads to recommendations that leave much to be desired. While the BMJ can’t bring itself to mention the C-word, it is capitalism, its incentives, and its power to dominate the political process, that impedes the protection of public health and undermines the solution to the pandemic, not the moral or intellectual failures of business people and political leaders.

Unfortunately, while the BMJ’s diagnosis is sound, its treatment plan—the liberal use of moral suasion aimed at pharmaceutical company investors and politicians—is next to useless. Capitalism, an amoral system, does not respond to moral appeals.

The BMJ urges vaccine company workers and shareholders to speak out.

But shareholders, who, as the BMJ acknowledges, are “making a killing”, are not going to vociferate against a system that bestows generous financial rewards upon them. Employees who protest will likely lose their jobs; that should be deterrent enough to their speaking out.

Leaders of rich nations are exhorted to pressure vaccine companies to share their technology.

But leaders of rich countries are not morally neutral parties, hovering dispassionately above the fray, disconnected from capitalist class politics or the pharmaceutical industry. It was these very same leaders who transferred to select firms the right to exploit commercially, publicly funded vaccine technologies, as it has been their practice to do with countless other innovations churned out of public labs (the internet, GPS, AI, to name but a few.) The architects of the system are not likely to be its grave diggers, or even agents of its temporary suspension.

Moreover, the leaders of the richest country, the United States, are interlocked with the pharmaceutical industry. Its interests are their interests. Moncef Slaoui, who oversaw the US effort to develop Covid-19 vaccines and therapeutics, held executive posts for many years at the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline, a company in which he held $10 million in stocks. He was also a member of the Moderna board and had $12.4 million in stock holdings in that company. On top of these pharma-connections, he was a partner in Medicxi, a venture capital firm that specializes in biotech investments. Alex M. Azar II, his boss, worked for three years as president of Eli Lilly’s subsidiary in the United States.

As for the Biden administration, it has numerous direct and indirect connections to the pharmaceutical industry, and to Pfizer in particular. As Lee Fang has reported in The Intercept:

*Eric Lander, the White House science adviser, holds up to $1 million in shares of BioNTech, Pfizer’s vaccine partner. Lander has recently proposed a pandemic preparedness plan which pivots mainly on providing public funding to vaccine-makers to stockpile vaccines for use against potential pandemic pathogens.

*Susan Rice, Biden’s domestic policy adviser, holds up to $5 million in shares of vaccine-maker Johnson & Johnson and up to $50,000 in shares of Pfizer.

*Anita Dunn, who until recently was Biden’s senior advisor, is managing partner at the consulting firm she co-founded, SKDK, which does public relations and advertising work for Pfizer.

Pfizer is a top client of Albright Stonebridge Group, a consulting firm founded by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. ASG counts among its former employees a number of high-level Biden administration figures, including:

*Linda Thomas-Greenfield, US ambassador to the United Nations.

*Jeffrey DeLaurentis, Thomas-Greenfield’s deputy.

*Victoria Nuland, Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs.

*Wendy Sherman, Deputy Secretary of State.

*Uzra Zeya, Under Secretary of State for Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights of the United States.


*Molly Montgomery, Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs

*Philip Gordon, Vice President Kamala Harris’s national security adviser.

People who spend their careers working with or for pharmaceutical interests, and have financial stakes in pharmaceutical firms, can be expected to share the pharmaceutical industry’s point of view. This is the point of view of capitalist industry–that profits are the summum bonum. No one occupies a significant position in a capitalist state without an unswerving commitment to capitalist values. Except under the most extraordinary circumstances, capitalist governments will not pressure private enterprises to negate their obligations to their shareholders in order to prevent the illness and deaths of penniless foreigners who live in what a US president once infamously called—and rich countries treat as—“shithole countries.”

The BMJ fails to recognize that the interests of pharmaceutical company investors and those of the poor countries are irreconcilably opposed. There is an assumed common interest between these two parties, namely, the end of the pandemic. Yet, while the end of the pandemic would certainly benefit the poor, both in poor and rich countries, it would not benefit the vaccine oligopoly. Restricted vaccine supply and the monopoly pricing it allows, the opportunity to provide vaccines to a vast global market, and the prospect of an ongoing stream of revenue in vaccine boosters and vaccines for new variants, are manna for the pharmaceutical industry. For rich countries—those that produce vaccines or have purchased more doses than they need—the current state of affairs offers them leverage over the have-not countries; the have-not countries are dependent on the rich counties for access to vaccines, helping to ensure their continued pliability and openness to exploitation by the rich countries.

Clearly, a temporary waiver of patent rights would harm pharmaceutical company profits and deny rich countries their leverage, and therefore, it is naïve to expect pharmaceutical companies and interlocked political elites to voluntarily submit to demands that they sacrifice their interests for the good of the bulk of humanity. The whole idea of capitalism as an exploitative system is that the bulk of humanity exists as a means to the profit-making ends of a microscopic minority of billionaires. Profits, not people. To be sure, the Biden administration has withdrawn its objection to a temporary suspension of patent rights, but this may be a concession of little consequence. Germany and other rich countries continue to fight the proposal strenuously, and the WTO is slow-rolling the issue. If and when the waiver is approved, the damage it can do to vaccine oligopoly profits will be severely limited.

There is another reason for capitalist industry to oppose a temporary waiver. The lifting of patent rights acknowledges what no capitalist proponent wishes to acknowledge, namely, that capitalism, or at least its intellectual property protection provisions, can produce suboptimal, even harmful, outcomes for the welfare of the majority of the world’s population. The capitalist zeitgeist holds, in contrast, that capitalism is philanthropic, a blessing for humanity. Once it is established that a pillar of modern-day capitalism is harmful for public health, it becomes easier to make the case that the system of wealth accumulation in the hands of a miniscule elite of billionaires and their servants is harmful in other ways as well—for example, in anthropogenic global warming and the promotion of war. Might calls be made for the suspension, or worse, elimination of capitalism as a danger to humanity? In other words, the notion that patent rights ought to be suspended even temporarily is equivalent to the idea embedded in the Communist slogan, “people, not profit”—to wit, that the explicit aim of capitalism is to produce profits for a minority, not to enlarge and protect the interests of the majority of the planet’s inhabitants. It doesn’t take a genius to see that a people-centered system is, from the point of view of the bulk of humanity, preferable to one whose sole aim is to satisfy the wealth accumulation imperative of a tiny elite of uncrowned monarchs. Arguing that the intellectual property rights this minority has conferred upon itself need to be suspended in the interests of the rest us, is a potential opening for a system-challenging discussion. The BMJ editorial has provided that opening. It’s up to the rest of us to carry it forward.

Capitalism makes a suboptimal form of public welfare the possible, but never necessary, incidental outcome of profit-making. Optimal public welfare based on the elimination of the exploitation of humans by humans, and not profits, needs to become the sole organizing principal of society. The development of Covid-19 vaccines was made possible by public planning and spending. The leaders of rich countries recognized that capitalism was not up to the task of developing new vaccines. The costs were prohibitive and the risks just as great. Investors will not to risk their capital on an enterprise with a high probability of failure. Thus, a kind of socialism was pressed into service, under the rubric of Operation Warp Speed, to develop vaccines and therapeutics, in which the public assumed the risk. However, this was a socialism harnessed to capitalist requisites. Once the vaccines were developed, they were licensed exclusively to a vaccine-making oligopoly. The costs and risks were socialized; the benefits privatized. But rather than privatizing the fruits of socialized innovation, vaccine technology could have been socialized and produced for need, not profit. The disincentives to sharing vaccine technologies would have been few, if any, under a system of production for need.

Under the same system, the question of how to address the pandemic would not have been biased, from the start, in favor of a techno-fix that amounted to an attractive vaccine and therapeutics business opportunity, rather than in favor of public health and social measures, which China and Vietnam demonstrated are sufficient to eliminate community transmission of the virus and which the WHO has repeatedly endorsed as a proven method of pandemic control. It now appears that vaccines may be incapable of preventing transmission of the virus; it is now obvious that the vaccine strategy—based on the notion that vaccines are the exit ramp from the pandemic—is clearly incapable of rescuing humanity from the pandemic. The end of the pandemic lies, as the director of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus announced on August 4, in “a comprehensive approach of vaccines in combination with proven public health and social measures that we know work” (emphasis added.) As the WHO has also pointed out, had rich countries acted quickly and decisively to implement public health and social measures in February and March 2020, the pandemic would have been averted. The rich countries failed to abort the pandemic in embryo, but in allowing a crisis to be born, created many lucrative business opportunities.

The route to a system based on need, not profit, does not follow along the path of moral suasion and speaking truth to power. No matter how much they’re pressured, wolves will never act as sheep. Too often it is believed that any action, no matter how unlikely to bear fruit, is better than no action, but that’s doubtful. Actions which address symptoms (IP protections), and not causes (the capitalist interests IP protections serve), bring only temporary relief at best, and usually not even that. Actions which demand capitalists ignore the imperatives of capitalism to act as socialists—as if socialism is achievable within a capitalist framework—are quixotic. Pointless actions may be worse than useless if they foster illusions about where the problem lies and therefore what the possible solutions are.

To be sure, capitalist pharmacy is a moral scandal and crime against humanity, and not only in its production, pricing, and distribution of coronavirus vaccines, but in its operations from alpha to omega. A system designed to yield profit, not to protect and promote health, routinely produces suboptimal human health outcomes, if not outright harm. This is a virtual axiom. Recognizing that the problem is production for profit, carried out by private enterprises, organized by markets, and under the political control of governments dominated by plutocrats, is the first step on the road to a solution. Another step is recognizing the promise inherent in the alternative: production for use organized by a consciously prepared plan, carried out by publicly owned enterprises, and under the political control of governments guided by democratic, not profit-making, concerns. In this kind of system resides any hope humanity has for solving its most daunting problems: the pandemic, climate change, the threat of terminal war, and the unnecessary poverty of most of humanity.

https://gowans.blog/2021/08/18/the-mora ... apitalism/

Bolding added.
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Re: Socialist Demands for the COVID-19 Crisis

Post by blindpig » Mon Aug 23, 2021 1:37 pm

China reports no new local Covid-19 cases for first time since July, as Delta outbreak wanes

By Nectar Gan, CNN

Updated 5:10 AM ET, Mon August 23, 2021

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Police, security guards and volunteers stand at an entrance of a neighborhood placed under lockdown in Shanghai, China on August 21, after a resident tested positive for Covid-19.


Hong Kong (CNN)China reported no new locally transmitted Covid-19 cases on Monday for the first time since July, according to its National Health Commission (NHC), as authorities double down on the country's stringent zero-Covid approach.

China has been grappling with the spread of the highly contagious Delta variant since July 20, when a cluster of Covid-19 infections were detected among airport cleaning staff in the eastern city of Nanjing.
Since then, it has spiraled into the worst outbreak China has seen since 2020, spreading to more than half of the country's 31 provinces and infecting more than 1,200 people. The surging cases driven by Delta were seen as the biggest challenge yet to China's uncompromising zero tolerance virus policy.
Local authorities responded by placing tens of millions of residents under strict lockdown, rolling out massive testing and tracing campaigns and restricting domestic travels.
The strict measures appeared to be working. Daily infections have fallen steadily over the past week into single digits, down from more than 100 from its peak two weeks ago.
And on Monday, the country reported 21 imported cases and zero locally transmitted symptomatic infections -- the first time no local cases have been recorded since July 16. It also reported 16 asymptomatic cases, all of which were imported too, according to the NHC. China keeps a separate count of symptomatic and asymptomatic cases and does not include asymptomatic carriers of the virus in the official tally of confirmed cases.
If the trend continues, China could become the world's first country to control a major Delta outbreak.

(more)

https://us.cnn.com/2021/08/23/china/chi ... index.html

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

Aug 23

Outside China

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Latest data on the COVID-19 global confirmed cases in hardest-hit countries by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University at 0000 GMT, Aug 23.

China

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BEIJING -- The Chinese mainland on Sunday reported 21 imported COVID-19 cases but no new locally transmitted cases, the National Health Commission said in its daily report on Monday.

Among the imported cases, five were reported in Guangdong, four in Shanghai, three each in Tianjin and Yunnan, two in Beijing, and one each in Shanxi, Zhejiang, Henan and Sichuan.

One suspected case arriving from outside the mainland was reported in Shanghai on Sunday.

No new deaths related to COVID-19 were reported Sunday, said the commission.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20210 ... 65bcc.html

Better Red than dead, I think.
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Re: Socialist Demands for the COVID-19 Crisis

Post by blindpig » Thu Aug 26, 2021 2:16 pm

THE HUNGER BETWEEN THE CORONAVIRUS AND WAR
Clara Sanchez

25 Aug 2021 , 2:26 pm .

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Hunger, covid and war, three variables that are related in the current global plot (Photo: AP)

In 2019, the undernourished or hungry population in the world, according to estimates by the FAO Prevalence of Undernourishment Index (IPS), was 687.7 million people, 8.9% of the world's population , of the which was expected to increase between 83 and 132 million people in 2020 due to the pandemic and in accordance with the fall of the economy, for which three scenarios were projected.

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Scenarios of the increase in hunger in the world 2020-2030 (Photo: Food and Power)

HUNGER VS COVID-19

After more than a year in a COVID-19 pandemic, the world's hungry population increased to 768 million people or 9.9% of the world's population in 2020 . With 418 million hungry in Asia, 282 million in Africa, 60 million in Latin America and the Caribbean and 8 million between North America, Europe and Oceania.

Regarding the proportion, it is Africa that has the highest percentage of its population in a hungry condition (21%), while Asia and Latin America and the Caribbean have 9% in these conditions.

If we let ourselves be carried away by the scenarios posed in the midst of the Covid-19 crisis, hunger increased in correspondence with the first, that is, the least bad of all.

However, according to the Prevalence of the Food Insecurity Scale (FIES), there are 2.368 million people in moderate and severe food insecurity, indicating 30.4% of the world population without access to adequate food due to lack of availability or for economic resources to purchase food.

That is, there are 1.199 billion people in Asia, 799 million in Africa, 267 million in Latin America and the Caribbean, 98 million in North America and Europe, and 5 million in Oceania. A total increase of 300 million people.

In terms of proportion, after Africa which has 59% of its people in moderate and severe food insecurity, Latin America and the Caribbean is second with 40% of its population affected.

And, on the other hand, there are 155 million people in a food crisis in the world, an increase of 20 million people compared to 2019. Africa being the continent most affected by this situation.

Among the main drivers of hunger, armed conflicts continue to be identified, highlighting Afghanistan, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Syria, Yemen, the Democratic Republic of the Congo or Mozambique; second, climatic shocks and natural disasters as in Haiti; and thirdly, the economic ones; or ultimately, the combination of two or three. Considering among the economic shocks those driven by the pandemic.

In this scenario, to date, those infected by covid-19 exceed 200 million people, therefore, there are still more who suffer from hunger than those who are sick from the coronavirus.

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World population suffering from hunger vs. population infected with covid-19 (Photo: Food and Power)

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Population infected with covid-19 in the world (Photo: Food and Power)

On the other hand, UNHCR-UNHCR have assured for years that 8,500 boys and girls die every day of malnutrition, which corresponds to around 3 million each year due to hunger.

Seen in this way, in the midst of the global pandemic due to the coronavirus, it seemed that hunger would cause fewer deaths than covid-19, however, it is put on the table again, especially when it has been set as the Sustainable Development Goal of the Agenda 2030 "zero hunger".

In this case, in the midst of the pandemic, it is estimated that more than 5 million 700 thousand people die of hunger in the world each year.

And when comparing data from people who died from covid-19 , there are more than 4 million 400 thousand deaths that have occurred since the first cases were detected. That is, in more than 600 days or more than a year and a half. Therefore, to date, there are also more who die of hunger than those who died from the new coronavirus in a year.

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Estimation of people who can die of hunger vs. covid-19 in the world (2021) (Photo: Food and Power)

In fact, on average, more than 15 thousand people die a day from hunger, while these were only surpassed by the coronavirus during the peaks of the pandemic, on some days in January and February 2021, generally averaged in the 10 thousand people who died. a day .

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Average number of people killed by coronavirus per day in the world (as of August 23, 2021) (Photo: Worldometer)

HUNGER VS. WAR

On the other hand, dealing with the issue of hunger in the world goes through an obstacle, especially when it comes to investment or spending, the amount of which varies according to the approach.

According to a study by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI - 2018), from $ 265 billion a year (zero hunger / end of poverty), up to $ 52 billion (agricultural research, resource management and infrastructure) are required. ú 11 billion annually (care for the most vulnerable households) for a 5% decrease in the prevalence of undernourishment; even 7 billion a year proposes the World Bank, whose objective would not be to eliminate hunger in particular but to achieve healthy nutrition. All to 2030 and the last to 2025.

However, since 2001, according to the "Costs of War" project at Brown University, the United States has spent 2.26 billion dollars on the war in Afghanistan in 20 years. Of the total, 800 billion went directly to war, according to the US Defense Department itself .

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How much did the United States spend on the war and occupation of Afghanistan? (Photo: BBC)

Since 2009, the United States has largely exceeded or maintained about $ 52 billion a year in direct expenditures for the war in Afghanistan. Amount necessary to end hunger in the world according to the second of the approaches, even more so when compared with the model of the 11 billion dollars aimed at the most vulnerable, both to reduce the prevalence of undernourishment by 5% ; Not to mention if they were the 7 billion that the World Bank refers to until the year 2025.

The war in Afghanistan serves as an example at the present time to refer to the issue of hunger in the world, because after 20 years of foreign military intervention and an expenditure of 2.26 trillion dollars, among which 85 billion were also allocated For the endowment of the national armed forces, 144 billion dollars were included for Afghan reconstruction, 24 billion for economic development and up to 10 billion to combat drug trafficking, this country is one of the most serious food crises of the planet with 13.2 million people or 42% of the population in food emergency, whose increase has been constant since 2016 and, in addition, in need of help.

International aid aimed at the Afghan population that UNHCR has quantified in 2021 at 1.3 billion dollars to request support from donors from the international community and serve 10 million children, of which it has only received 37%. of the necessary funds (for August 2021), still having a deficit of 800 million dollars.

FINAL THOUGHTS

In this context, it can continue to be affirmed in the midst of the debates of a pandemic and post-pandemic world and its effects on the global agri-food system, that there is no discussion, debate or speculation about the increase in hunger in the world, being a fallacy to speak of "zero hunger" by 2030.

Hunger, a result of the prevailing world order, making every day we continue to speak of millions and millions of hungry as just another number of statistics in annual reports.

Especially after the United States spent $ 300 million a day for 20 years in the war in Afghanistan without ending the Taliban and leaving one of the worst food crises, whose requirement for humanitarian aid in 2021 to care for the hungry Afghans allows infer, even if multilateral organizations such as UNHCR do not say so, that it only takes the equivalent of 4.33 days of war or armed conflict in the same country.

Thus, less will end hunger in the world.

This article was originally published on the Food and Power blog on August 25, 2021 .

https://misionverdad.com/investigacione ... -la-guerra

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Re: Socialist Demands for the COVID-19 Crisis

Post by blindpig » Sat Aug 28, 2021 1:28 pm

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Herd Immunity Lite: Why Tories Allowed Covid-19 to Attack Pensioners and Disabled People
Content Warning: ableism, eugenics, ageism, racism, mentions of sexual assault

In 2017 the Conservative Party tweeted ‘There will be two million more people over 75 in the next 10 years – we to have a plan to deal with that challenge’. Now, in the midst of a pandemic which the government has done the bare minimum to save elderly and disabled lives, questions must be asked about what they meant by this.


Britain has 14 million disabled people and many of those are elderly. Overpopulation has been an issue for reactionaries since at least Thomas Malthus (1798). And in a heavily stratified society like ours, it’s clear who the ruling class perceives as surplus and who it perceives as essential (themselves!). The poorest, especially the working class elderly and disabled, as far as the ruling class is concerned, are a burden.

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Ruling class ideology is fundamentally shaped by concern for profit growth and such ‘unproductive’ sectors of the population have long been a target for cost-cutting. Thus, eugenics (the practice of ‘improving’ the genetic quality of a population, which is inextricably linked to scientific racism) and Malthusianism (a belief in overpopulation myths, which is a short step from population culling) are inescapable factors of capitalism.

Britain was the main ideological developer of eugenics, though the word itself became tainted by association with the Nazis. It ruined Keith Joseph’s chance of becoming leader of the Conservative Party in the 70s, when he argued that ‘a high and rising proportion of children are being born to mothers least fitted to bring children into the world and to bring them up. They are born to mothers who were first pregnant in adolescence in social classes 4 and 5 … Some are of low intelligence, most of low educational attainment.’ But the killer line was this: ‘The balance of our population, our human stock is threatened’(i). It scuppered his designs on the role of Prime Minister, but not his role as eminence grise behind Thatcher, who rewarded him with the position of Education Secretary in her Cabinet. Overt eugenics was thus shown to be a dampener on one’s political ambitions, but far from fatal.

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Margaret Thatcher & her mentor Keith Joseph

Then in 2020, Covid-19 (C-19) struck – especially lethal to those very groups which the Tories see as a burden. It provided a unique opportunity to ‘solve’ their problem.

Anti-Lockdown and Herd Immunity

It was leaked that right at the start of the pandemic, Dominic Cummings (Johnson’s chief adviser) described policy as ‘herd immunity, protect the economy and if that means some pensioners die, too bad’. On March 5th, the same day the government policy moved from ‘containment’ to ‘delay’, Boris Johnson told the media that one approach would be to ‘take it on the chin, take it all in one go and allow the disease, as it were, to move through the population’, he continued ‘but I think it would be better if we take all the measures that we can now to stop the peak of the disease being as difficult for the NHS as it might be’[ii].

Firstly, though it’s not an explicit endorsement of a complete herd immunity plan, it’s striking how euphemistically he talks about abandoning the nation to a lethal disease which would kill over 150,000. Secondly, it’s not a disavowal – he is emphasising balance between protecting people (what he terms ‘draconian measures’) on the one hand and on the other simply allowing the virus to do its worst – the euphemism for this being ‘herd immunity’. In other words: Tory policy was herd immunity lite and this is borne out in their subsequent policy of doing the bare minimum.

Herd immunity lite was further confirmed on 11th March when Dr David Halpern, chief exec of the government behavioural insights team (or ‘nudge unit’), suggested to the BBC that the government was pursuing the policy outlined in the NHS document seen by the Guardian: ‘There’s going to be a point, assuming the epidemic flows and grows as it will do, where you want to cocoon, to protect those at-risk groups so they don’t catch the disease,’ Halpern said, ‘by the time they come out of their cocooning, herd immunity has been achieved in the rest of the population’.

And confirmed again on the 13th March, when Patrick Vallance, government’s chief scientific adviser, defended this approach by saying that 60% of the population, 40M, contract C-19 was one of the ‘key things we need to do’.

The day after, Matt Hancock denied aiming for ‘herd immunity’ in a Telegraph article: ‘We have a plan, based on the expertise of world-leading scientists. Herd immunity is not a part of it. That is a scientific concept, not a goal or a strategy’. This was mere hedging. Hancock was spinning the government policy of ‘not total herd immunity’ as ‘not herd immunity’. And the reason for not going for total herd immunity plan was merely to prevent complete collapse of the NHS at that time. Otherwise, allowing the virus to spread was basically fine as far as they were concerned.

This was further reinforced on 23rd March, an NHS planning document included ‘targeted herd immunity’ as a possible government intervention to be modelled via computer simulation. Whatever the government has said, and we know better than to take their word for it, their policy has been in effect, this herd immunity lite one.

Later again the ‘stopping short of total herd immunity’ policy was confirmed on the 7th April when about 2,000 employees of the Passport Office were asked to go back into work because, in the words of Home Office deputy scientific adviser, Rupert Shute, ‘we are working on the assessment that 80% of us … will get the virus … we cannot hide away forever’. He confirmed that government strategy was not attempting to contain the virus, but simply to slow down ‘the rate at which we get this virus [which] has direct impact on the NHS. It’s vitally important that we don’t get it at the same time. But that does not mean we won’t still get it at some point … we’ve got to keep functioning our lives … and go out for work … And that’s why we have the advice of trying to slow down the spread, but not stopping the spread. It’s not possible to stop the spread’.

Downing St reinforced the decision to get Passport staff back in workplaces and refused to disavow the claim of 80% getting C-19. The spokesperson said ‘the government’s focus is on stopping the spread of the disease to protect the health service’ (my italics).

The idea that it was impossible to stop the spread was simply a barefaced lie. There’s no way that senior officials and politicians like this were unaware of successful plans to stop the spread of the virus in many other countries around the world – Vietnam, New Zealand, DPR Korea, Cuba to mention just a few.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) and other health experts had attacked the initial ‘herd immunity’ non-plan. Its Director-General said: ‘The idea that countries should shift from containment to mitigation is wrong and dangerous’ and Rob Wallace, a public health expert researching epidemics, gave this indictment: ‘a campaign of active neglect would kill hundreds of thousands of the very vulnerable the Tories claim they wish to protect. But destroying the village to save it is the core premise of a State of the most virulent class character. It’s the sign of an exhausted empire that, unable to follow China and other countries in putting up a fight, pretends, as I wrote, that its failures are exactly the solution’.

The policy was not purely passive, not just refusing to take effective action, but in fact, active: the government discharged 25,000 patients into care homes where the elderly and the disabled live, mostly without testing them, but even forcing care homes to accept patients with positive C-19 test results. In between lockdowns both Tories and Labour have encouraged the public to put their children back in school, to go back to their workplaces, and the government spent over half a billion pounds encouraging people to go out and eat in restaurants.

Bojo and Crew

The herd immunity lite plan is a callous and murderous one and we have a death toll of over 150,000 to show for it, one of the worst death tolls in the world. But where does it come from? Does sheer callousness and murderousness explain it? No. First of all, they believe in hierarchy, and they believe hierarchy is naturally reflected not only in our social stratification, but our very DNA. Sources close to the PM revealed that Boris Johnson simply didn’t believe people like him, with his superior genes, would get the virus. This is why he walked around a Covid ward shaking hands with everyone (He tested positive on 27th March, entered hospital on 6th April and was discharged on the 12th).

As Mayor of London, Boris Johnson told a room full of bankers ‘it is surely relevant to a conversation about equality that as many as 16% of our species have an IQ below 85 while about 2% have an IQ above 130 … the harder you shake the pack the easier it will be for some cornflakes to get to the top’. Hierarchy, for these people, is ingrained and just. Social Darwinism, or the ideology of ‘survival of the fittest’ (propounded by 19th Century British sociologist Herbert Spencer) logically follows.

These views of hierarchy, genes and IQ are inextricably linked to their views on race. As editor of The Spectator, Bojo published an article in which his writer, Taki, wrote ‘On average, Orientals are slower to mature, less randy, less fertile, and have larger brains and higher IQ scores. Blacks are at the other pole, and whites fall somewhere in the middle, although closer to the Orientals than the blacks’. When asked about these remarks, Johnson simply said Taki was a ‘very distinguished columnist’.

The view of racial hierarchy also feeds back into the Malthusian fears (totally unfounded) of overpopulation mentioned above. This makes the concern a global, and therefore, imperialist one. Specifically about Africa, Johnson framed its problems as being that Britain is no longer in charge and called for a second ‘scramble’ by the colonisers to divide it among them. In 2007 Johnson wrote in the Telegraph ‘the world’s population is now 6.7bn, roughly double what it was when I was born. If I live to be in my mid-eighties, then it will have trebled in my lifetime… I simply cannot understand why no one discusses this impending calamity, and why no world statesmen have the guts to treat the issue with the seriousness it deserves… we seem to have given up on population control’. Then, along came C-19 and Johnson saw his chance to show he has ‘the guts’.

These views are unsurprisingly shared by his advisers: Andrew Sabisky, who was appointed by Dominic Cummings, the prime minister’s chief adviser, said in 2016: ‘Eugenics are about selecting “for” good things. Intelligence is largely inherited and correlates with better outcomes: physical health, income, lower mental illness’. He has also called for contraception programmes to be expanded to stop the creation of a ‘permanent underclass’, claimed black people were intellectually inferior, and dismissively compared women’s sports to the Paralympics. Sabisky also suggested having children take performance-enhancing drugs which come with health risks was probably worth ‘a dead kid once a year’ for the educational benefits. Though Sabisky had to resign, Johnson refused to condemn any of this. Johnson himself has referred to black people as ‘picaninnies’ with ‘watermelon smiles’.

Then there’s Cummings, who argued that in education ‘a child’s performance has more to do with genetic makeup than the standard of his or her education’. And he is equally keen to discount family wealth, social position and class as factors: ‘differences in educational achievement are not mainly because of “richer parents buying greater opportunity”’.

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Tory and Ruling Class Ideology

This isn’t just a cabal around Boris Johnson imposing a cull policy on a resistant Party and Parliament, pulling the wool over the eyes of a truth-disseminating media. It takes a whole ruling class to get behind this policy, or at least enough of them not object to it, for it to work.

First of all, the Conservative Party: about 70 Tory MPs formed the Covid Recovery Group in November to campaign against any form of lockdown. This section of the Party believe the government has been far too soft, and it’s costing Big Business far too much money. One member, Graham Brady, insisted the government was ‘throwing our prosperity away by shutting down and destroying our economy’.

Another Tory MP, Lucy Allan, tweeted a Telegraph article in late December with the headline ‘More under 60s died on roads last year than those with no underlying conditions from coronavirus’. The subtext here is that people with underlying conditions are fair game. She also falsely claimed C-19 was a ‘virus that has no symptoms and causes no illness in the majority of people that get it’.


These kind of abhorrent and downright mendacious statements emanate from the ideology which holds the Tory Party together: their sense of hierarchy and superiority. In 2012 A group of newly elected Tory MPs who would become cabinet selections by Bojo, brought out their own sort of manifesto called Britannia Unchained (Kwarteng, Patel, Raab, Truss and Skidmore). In it they claimed ‘the British are among the worst idlers in the world … we work among the lowest hours, we retire early and our productivity is poor’, and therefore to compete with the rising economies of India, China and Brazil we need to avenge the ‘dependency culture’.

The ‘Nasty Party’ has long been known for its contempt for the working class in general and in particular the disabled. The Tories are so right-wing that in 2019 Britain First admitted 5,000 of its members had joined the party. Earlier that year Jacob Rees-Mogg blamed the working-class residents of Grenfell for their own deaths, claiming they lacked ‘common sense’. Subsequently, a video of a party, where attendees celebrated the tragedy of Grenfell on a bonfire, went viral. In 2018 Iain Duncan Smith recommended bosses hire disabled people because ‘they often work longer hours’ and forgo holiday ‘because they love the whole idea of being in work’. In 2017 Chancellor Hammond blamed low productivity of the economy on an increased number of disabled people in the workforce. Tory welfare minister, Lord Freud, stated in 2014 that disabled people are ‘not worth the full wage’ and should have £2 an hour. David Cameron’s response to the 2011 riots placed blame on ‘Children without fathers’. And in 2005 Owen Lister, a Tory Mayor (and a GP!), stated that disabled children should get the guillotine.

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Nor is the Labour Party exempt, with its long history of espousing eugenics and anti-working class ideology (check out the history of the Fabian Society, for example). David Lammy also blamed working-class parents for the London riots in 2011. Tony Blair described the long-term unemployed as suffering from ‘drug abuse, low aspirations and family instability’. In 2017, under Corbyn’s leadership, Labour MP Frank Field recommended disabled people be paid less than minimum wage. Novara Media, hanging on to the left-most apron-string of the Labour Party, recently platformed a major proponent of eugenics (Peter Singer, who advocates killing disabled babies and argues that sexually assaulting those with cognitive disabilities is actually fine). The fact that a philosopher can hold these views and be lauded as one of the most prominent in the world tells its own story, but for a supposedly left-wing media outlet to promote such a figure in the context of an ongoing cull is all the more sinister. While the Tories put a eugenics programme into practice, they receive ideological justification from their supposed political opponents.

None of this should come as a great shock in a society dominated by the idea of hierarchy, racism, ableism and classism, all of which is institutionalised in monarchy and aristocracy. Thus, a Telegraph journalist made government motives explicit, saying ‘not to put too fine a point on it, from an entirely disinterested economic perspective, the COVID-19 might even prove mildly beneficial in the long term by disproportionately culling elderly dependents’. Another journalist, Julia Hartley-Brewer, cited on Twitter official NHS England figures published on 19th November that 96% of C-19 deaths had ‘pre-existing health conditions’ and 92% were aged over 60. She concluded that pandemic response had been overblown – after all, who cares about over-60s (JHB is 52) or those with asthma or diabetes? Similarly, in response to a tweet referencing the ‘unnecessary deaths of 120,00[0] people’, another journalist (Dan Hodges) replied ‘How do you know they were unnecessary’.

None of this ideology, whether in weaker or stronger form, is confined to the Tory Party. It is pervasive in our society and culture, emanating from the ruling class and its institutions. Richard Dawkins was another who offered qualified support for eugenics in February 2020: ‘It’s one thing to deplore eugenics on ideological, political, moral grounds. It’s quite another to conclude that it wouldn’t work in practice. Of course it would. It works for cows, horses, pigs, dogs, and roses. Why on earth wouldn’t it work for humans? Facts ignore ideology’. This is not a disavowal of eugenics – it’s an affirmation of the premises on which it’s based: that we are a bundle of genes, some with better and some with worse, and eugenics could therefore ‘work’. The word ‘work’ here carries a whole load of ideological presumptions with it – it cannot be neutral. The editor of the Spectator, Fraser Nelson, heartily agreed: ‘When Richard Dawkins says that eugenics would work for humans, he is simply saying what a lot of like-minded people are thinking. Eugenics is back’.

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Eugenics never really left. Eugenicist ideology is inherent in much of the Hollywood superhero genre – Marvel and DC movies in particular. Disney’s The Incredibles is a perfect example. Meanwhile, UK aid has been used to fund forced sterilisation of India’s poor. The government pursues eugenicist 2-child limits on child tax credits in Britain and retains enough support to get re-elected. Malthusian charities like Population Matters get vocal support from figures such as David Attenborough. Attenborough is firm friends with the Royals who share his vision of a global cull: Prince Phillip said that if he was reincarnated he’d come back as a deadly virus and Prince William complained that there are simply too many Africans reproducing and using up precious resources which should go to those more deserving. Any attempt to ‘control’ a population, of course, raises the question of who, exactly, is being controlled. The poorer, the darker your skin, the less able-bodied you are, the more likely you are to be its target.

Pre-Covid Policy

The government’s assault on the disabled and the elderly wasn’t from a standing start in March 2020. The default position in our system is that all disabled people are con artists and cheats, and they must, to use a hackneyed phrase, jump through hoops to prove they’re the real deal. They’re being demonised in the tabloids as ‘swindlers’ and ‘scroungers’ on a constant basis. Thus, The Observer revealed in 2016 that 85% of benefit fraud accusations were completely unsubstantiated. The Independent reported that in the previous 2 years 300,000 public tip-offs had been dismissed due to lack of evidence. The press have whipped the able-bodied population up into a frenzy of snitching on the disabled. Supermarket chains like Sainsbury’s get in on the action by spying on disabled customers and grassing them up to the DWP. And the supposed ‘protector’ of the working class, Labour leader, Keir Starmer, has a solid reputation of demonising benefit claimants in his prior career as chief prosecutor.

All of this leads to an increasing amount of hate crimes against the disabled as well as workplace bullying/harassment, as recorded by the trade union GMB. And it leads to a hostile environment for the disabled and elderly where the government can literally get away with murder. A 2017 UN report found that conditions for disabled people were tantamount to a ‘human catastrophe’ and a further 2019 report found Britain’s policies on disability social security in violation of their human rights.

Disability assessments (for example, one disabled woman was forced to crawl up stairs) and Help to Work schemes are 21st century forms of the workhouse. One disabled person, Errol Graham, died of starvation after his benefits were cut off. On average, patients with learning disabilities are restrained every 15 minutes in care, with regular use of ‘prone restraint’ which can be lethal and is against the government’s own guidelines. Even Labour MP, Harriet Harman, described this treatment as ‘inhuman and degrading’.

Then along comes C-19. The perfect solution to an otherwise irresolvable problem for Britain’s ruling class. To further underline the state’s vindictiveness towards this community, look at how they’ve been singled out: 1 in 5 disabled employees had requests to work from home or be furloughed rejected. The government could have given people on the list of clinically vulnerable automatic right to furlough, but refused. The government denied disabled people the same money it was giving other social security claimants during the pandemic because ‘computer says no’. Literally. Universal credit was given a small £20 boost in March, yet those on disability and sickness benefits (approx. 2M) were deprived of the increase, despite the fact that this group in particular has been found to have increased costs as a result of the pandemic. Those in care homes were singled out with blanket ‘Do Not Resuscitate’ orders, denied access to hospitals, and had C-19 positive patients discharged into their places of residence. We don’t really know the scale of the impact, but a conservative estimate would be that 10%+ of disabled and elderly care home residents have been culled during the pandemic. This is a direct result of the contempt with which disabled people and pensioners are held by the Tories and by the ruling class as a whole.

Welshman, John Underclass: A History of the Excluded, 1880-2000 (Continuum: London, 2006) p108-110

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Re: Socialist Demands for the COVID-19 Crisis

Post by blindpig » Sun Aug 29, 2021 2:19 pm

As an anti-pandemic tool, vaccines have turned out to be more mirage than oasis
Stephen Gowans COVID-19 August 26, 2021 5 Minutes
August 26, 2021

Stephen Gowans

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For various reasons, the United States has a predilection for tackling problems with techno-solutions that offer profit-making opportunities to private industry. In the realm of pandemics, the preferred solution is vaccines.

Consistent with this bias, vaccines were offered as the “exit strategy” from the pandemic. In November, Anthony Fauci, referring to vaccines, announced that “The calvary is coming.”

With more than half of year of experience with vaccines, it’s clear that immunizations are not an oasis, but are more a mirage.

I’ve gathered below figures from Our World in Data for eight countries. Four of the countries—China, New Zealand, Australia, and South Korea—have pursued elimination strategies to drive infection rates to zero through public health and social measures. The other four—the USA, Israel, UK, and Canada—have invested heavily in vaccines, treating inoculations as an escape route from lockdowns, masking, and other public health measures.

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All countries examined here have seen the number of deaths per million increase over the same period last year, despite Fauci’s promised arrival of the vaccine cavalry. (China and New Zealand, are exceptions. Deaths per million in these two countries have remained at zero.)

Of the eight countries, the United States has the highest number of deaths per million, up 19 percent over this time last year, though half the population is fully vaccinated. The calvary has arrived, and more people are dying.

New Zealand, South Korea, and Australia, which have pursued a Covid elimination strategy based on public health and social measures, have comparatively low numbers of deaths per million, and at the same time, comparatively low levels of vaccination—half that or less of the US rate, and many times less than the rates for Canada, the UK, and Israel. Even so, their deaths per million are much lower than those of the highly vaccinated countries.

China, which is peerless in pandemic control, has pursued a zero-Covid strategy along with a robust vaccination campaign.

The comparative experience of the eight countries is consistent with the view of the World Health Organization that vaccines alone cannot bring the pandemic to an end, and that public health and social measures—specifically, test, trace, isolate, and support—are also required.

Israel is a case in point. It replaced public health and social measures with a vigorous vaccination program. Eight of 10 Israeli adults have received two shots of Pfizer’s vaccine, and more than half the country’s seniors have received three. Despite this, Israel has a high rate of Covid-19 deaths, exceeded only by the United States of the eight countries considered here. The rate is almost double what it was last year at this time, when there were no vaccines.

The preferred explanation of the fact that more people are dying, despite the arrival of Fauci’s cavalry, is that the delta variant has become dominant and it is more contagious that its predecessors. An alternative explanation is that when you lift public health and social measures, more people get sick and die.

The idea that vaccines can be a replacement for public health and social measures is false. Countries that are relying on vaccination programs in place of programs of test, trace, isolate, and support, are faring poorly in minimizing deaths, while countries that emphasize these measures are doing well, regardless of their level of vaccination.

These data suggest, then, that the effects of vaccine programs in the project of ending the pandemic may be secondary to the more significant effect of public health and social measures.

Cuba and Vietnam, two countries that held infections to low levels for many months by pursuing elimination strategies, are now experiencing high numbers of deaths per million, after relaxing pandemic control measures. Both countries had zero deaths per million last year at this time. Today, their numbers exceed that of the United States:

*Cuba, 7.14

*Vietnam, 3.71

Cuba is fighting back with domestically produced vaccines, to little avail. Deaths have remained stubbornly high through August.

Based on the analysis above, it’s doubtful that Cuba will be able to bring its outbreak under control without returning to the robust public health and social measures that previously served it well. Whether this option is feasible, in light of the country’s economic challenges and Washington’s continued and escalating program of economic aggression and sponsored subversion, is an open question.

The analysis similarly suggests that Vietnam’s return to its previous outstanding record of pandemic control (total deaths per million to July 1 were less than one versus 1,829 for the United States) will require a return to the methods that had previously made Vietnam a world leader in pandemic control

US companies, which rely on Vietnam as a low-wage manufacturing center to produce consumer electronics, exercise equipment, apparel, and foot wear for Western markets, are concerned that the Vietnamese government will shutter factories in an effort to bring the outbreak under control, disrupting supply chains.

So far, this hasn’t happened. Instead of closing factories, the government has asked workers to quarantine at their places of work. This way, community transmission of the virus can be managed, without disrupting production.

True to the US cultural bias for techno-solutions, US companies have pressed the White House to accelerate its distribution of vaccines to the southeast Asian country, proposing that Vietnam emulate the United States’ failed vaccine strategy in preference to the country’s previous highly successful public health measures-based elimination strategy.

Shipping more vaccine doses to Vietnam will do little good.

First, vaccines, as we’ve seen, cannot do the job alone.

Second, even if they could, the number of doses the administration is sending is too small to make any difference. Washington has added one million Pfizer doses to the six million it has already sent, a trifle considering that Vietnam has a population of 100 million.

For months, scientists and public health officials have warned that vaccines are not a silver bullet.

*“There’s no fairy-tale ending where we wake up and there’s a vaccine that’s 100% effective and a 100% of people around the world can get it and take it and Covid’s gone.” Dale Fisher, National University of Singapore.

*“Vaccines alone won’t stop community transmission.” Mariangela Simao, WHO assistant director-general.

*Vaccines “are not magic solutions.” Peter Hotez, Baylor College of Medicine.

*“There’s been an attitude in some quarters that a vaccine is our automatic savior. They’re really important, but they’re not a silver bullet.” Simon Clarke, University of Reading.

*“Vaccines alone will not be the silver bullet that will allow us to return to normal life.” Emer Cooke, Executive Director, The European Medicines Agency’s.

*“Anyone who says that vaccines alone can end the pandemic is wrong.” Martin McKee, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

*“The vaccinations were supposed to solve everything. We now understand that the vaccines are not enough.” Nadav Davidovitch, member of Israel’s Covid-19 advisory panel.

The WHO director-general, Dr. Tedros, explained earlier this month 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.”

In other words, vaccines are not an oasis. Indeed, in ending the pandemic, they appear to be of much less importance than the public health and social measures that China, New Zealand, and a few other countries have demonstrated actually work.

https://gowans.blog/2021/08/26/as-an-an ... han-oasis/
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Re: Socialist Demands for the COVID-19 Crisis

Post by blindpig » Tue Aug 31, 2021 1:37 pm

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Socialism or barbarism: contrasting approaches to Covid-19

The following comment on the contrasting approaches of capitalism and socialism to Covid-19 by Friends of Socialist China co-editor Keith Bennett was originally published in abbreviated form by China Youth Daily.

Ever since the Covid-19 virus was first detected in Wuhan there have been consistent attempts to politicise the issue by certain Western powers and political forces in the West on anti-China, anti-communist and racist bases.

Decent people and the overwhelming majority of countries in the world felt sympathy and solidarity with China and with the Chinese people as they courageously battled a then unknown virus and dealt with the situation in an exemplary way that put human life first and also assumed a model attitude of international responsibility, identifying the coronavirus and sequencing its genome in record time and immediately sharing this with the entire international community, not only through the recognised international channels, but even by publishing it on the internet, thereby making it freely available to all scientists and researchers.

But there was also a counter current. Human Rights Watch, which seems more focused on political denigration of socialist and developing countries than on any genuine concern for human rights, attacked the prompt and effective measures taken in Wuhan to suppress the virus and save lives as being somehow incompatible with ‘liberal democracy’. A reluctance to lock down and to adopt a ‘zero Covid’ strategy on the part of many capitalist countries has deprived literally millions of people of the most basic of human rights, namely the right to life.

Others in the West speculated that the virus would be China’s, “Chernobyl moment” – that is, it would lead to the downfall of the People’s Republic and the socialist system. A senior official of the Trump administration openly gloated that the virus was a good thing. Apparently it would bring investment and jobs back from China to America. However, China suppressed the virus with very little loss of life, and has continued to keep it under stringent and effective control, whilst the national economy has resumed healthy and robust growth. In stark and sad contrast, hundreds of thousands of Americans, the majority of them poor, working class and from oppressed minorities, have lost their lives, millions have lost their jobs and millions more will face losing their homes when the moratorium on evictions inevitably comes to an end. Life expectancy in the USA has seen its steepest decline since World War 2, with African Americans and Hispanic Americans particularly badly hit. Yet again, they “can’t breathe”.

This approach is the opposite of the scientific and people-first policy followed by China as well as by other socialist and socialist-oriented countries, such as the DPRK, Vietnam, Laos, Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua. In China, the entire country rallied to the aid of Wuhan, which President Xi Jinping aptly called a “hero city”. People throughout the world watched with amazement as fully equipped, state of the art hospitals, with thousands of beds, were built literally from scratch and opened within days. Tens of thousands of doctors and other medical workers, with Communist Party members in the lead, volunteered to come to Wuhan from all parts of the country. Many of them sacrificed their lives in the people’s war against the virus. They proved by their deeds that this generation of Chinese communists, too, remain faithful to the original mission and aspiration, still maintain and carry forward the revolutionary spirit of fearing neither hardship nor death and surmounting every difficulty to win victory, of healing the wounded and rescuing the dying, and of devotedly and wholeheartedly serving the people.

While the virus was first identified in Wuhan, due not least to China’s excellent public health and anti-epidemic policies and practices, honed, for example, in the earlier successful struggle against SARS, an ever increasing number of reports, and a growing body of evidence, indicates that the virus was long circulating in numerous countries prior to its identification in China. It is therefore essential that investigation into the origin of the virus be conducted strictly in an objective, rational and scientific manner, free from political bias and interference and from racist prejudice. From the first day, China fully cooperated with the international community and with the WHO, in particular, at a time when the US had withdrawn from the organisation and sought by every means to undermine it and frustrate its work. Whereas China welcomed the WHO investigation team, including to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the United States continues to refuse access to the biological and bacteriological warfare facilities that it maintains not only at home, but also in countries throughout the world, including the notorious Fort Detrick base, which has been the site of repeated scandals ever since it was created on the basis of inheriting the work and personnel of the criminal Unit 731, used by the Japanese militarists to conduct vile ‘experiments’ and vivisection on live human beings when they occupied north-east China. In contrast, the Bloomberg news service, certainly no friend of China, reported the testimony from a New Zealand woman scientist who worked at the Wuhan Institute, which made clear that a leak from its labs was almost impossible, something that was also essentially confirmed by the WHO’s investigation team. To persist in levelling unsubstantiated and baseless accusations against China, and insolently making unilateral and arbitrary demands, while refusing access to your own dubious facilities, or an impartial investigation in all those places that have now identified likely instances of Covid prior to its identification in Wuhan, is nothing short of a new Cold War political provocation. It also begs the question – what do some people have to hide?

The stark contrast between the two systems and two approaches can also be seen when it comes to shouldering international responsibilities. China, Cuba, Vietnam, Russia and Venezuela have all set an example in extending a helping hand to others. In the early days of shortages, people in Britain, as in many other countries, gratefully received donations of face masks and other much-needed PPE from China as well as from Vietnam. China is now supplying huge quantities of vaccines to dozens of countries in the Global South, building a new ‘Health Silk Road’ and fulfilling President Xi Jinping’s solemn pledge to make the vaccine, once developed, a global public good, as part of his grand vision for a community of shared future for humanity. In the last few days, President Xi has pledged that China will provide two billion vaccine doses to the rest of the world in the course of this year and will also offer US$100 million to Covax, mainly to assist developing countries. Russia, too, has offered its Sputnik V vaccine to many countries. In contrast, the Western approach has been one of false promises and paltry results. With shocking cynicism, China’s and Russia’s generosity and responsibility is derided as “vaccine diplomacy”. One is tempted to say that the people of the world would probably prefer Chinese vaccine diplomacy to Western gunboat diplomacy! The Financial Times and other western media were at one time euphoric, claiming that, by supplying vaccines to countries like Mongolia, that neighbour China, India was apparently “beating China at its own game”. But China was never playing games, especially not at this moment of existential threat to humanity. Rather it was admirably fulfilling its basic humanitarian and internationalist duties. It was the western powers who were playing games and it was India and the Indian people who proved to be among their hapless victims. Reliable estimates of the numbers of people killed by Covid 19 in India in the most recent period range as high as 10 million – a damning and tragic indictment and one of the cruellest crimes against humanity recorded this century. Whilst accusing China and Russia of practising “vaccine diplomacy”, it is the imperialist countries that have actually been practising “vaccine apartheid”. Not only is this policy murderous and criminal, it is also foolish and shortsighted. This devilish coronavirus has proved, if nothing else, that no one is safe until everyone is safe. The western policy of vaccine apartheid is not only condemning millions to death in the poor countries – so long as the virus is not effectively suppressed on a worldwide scale, it will likely continue to constantly mutate, spawning new and ever more deadly and contagious variants, some of which will inevitably prove resistant or impervious to existing vaccines and which will surely find their way into countries around the world, no matter how well they have done with their vaccine programmes, just as we are presently seeing with the Delta variant.

It is now more than 100 years since the outstanding leader of the German and international working class movement Rosa Luxemburg popularised the warning originally sounded by Friedrich Engels – that humanity faced a choice of socialism or barbarism. Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro formulated his people’s choice, not to say that of the wider human family, as socialism or death. Covid-19 and the struggle to suppress it has vindicated and illustrated these graphic and prophetic warnings in the most dramatic and starkest terms.

https://socialistchina.org/2021/08/18/s ... -covid-19/
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Re: Socialist Demands for the COVID-19 Crisis

Post by blindpig » Thu Sep 02, 2021 1:18 pm

WITH THE PANDEMIC, THE GREATEST CERTAINTY IS UNCERTAINTY

Eder Peña

1 Sep 2021 , 12:31 pm .

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Covid-19 is part of a civilizational crisis in which uncertainty could become as common again, as before we declared war on nature (Photo: wladimir1804 / stock . Adobe . Com )

"Preliminary results", "hypothesis", "fact-checking", "fake news", "lack of evidence" are some of the terms and phrases with which the global pandemic that broke out in 2020 has made us familiar. They are usually accompanied of news and information that, more than bringing us closer to certainties, try to bring us closer to a truth: with covid-19 there are no certainties.

Certainly science, as a methodical and meticulous search for the truth, has tried to underpin the development of good policies that manage to translate each evidence-based truth into concrete actions. However, this pattern of knowledge has been impregnated with a halo of infallibility carefully guarded by those who have made a network of business out of the truth.

This is how the "truth" in capitalism is also a business managed by a clergy made up of "authorities of the matter" (experts), the media that choose whom or what to project ad nauseam and, of course, the governments set up by the corporations that anoint with their financial wand.

WELCOME TO THE COMPLEX (WITHOUT COMPLEXES)

We have been malnourished with ideas and linear concepts that make us believe that everything works like a soda machine or an ATM. Our relationship with almost everything, including the living, is that if we apply this or that formulation of codes or inputs then we will obtain certain results.

Covid-19 has revealed the complexity of life and, of course, of science that seeks to understand it in depth. Likewise, policy-making based on "scientific rigor" enters a context of uncertainty and, although some recent research results may be considered factual, the evidence base on the efficacy of preventive and therapeutic interventions on the disease (and on all health) is still irregular.

Interventions such as vaccines, confinement, the mask, medications or others are still being tested and generate evidence that we are facing something new , the SARS-CoV-2 virus continues to evolve and adapt. The extent to which research results for other diseases and viruses can be extrapolated to COVID-19 is always debatable.

No one has shown that the pandemic can be ended, many studies in this regard pose scenarios that even include herd immunity, but some recent data has stimulated a debate that, if undertaken with generous dedication, would bear more fruit than frustration.

As the experience of each country with covid-19 goes from being an acute national problem to being part of a civilizational crisis , all those involved, that is, doctors, scientists, political leaders and citizens, we are assuming that uncertainties can never be resolved or be resolved late. We also learn to live with them, as it was before the Baconian notion of war against, and domination of, nature permeated our view of everything.



Covid-19 is a complex problem in a complex system. Each complex system is, by definition, made up of multiple interacting components, it is open because its limits are fluid and difficult to define, it evolves dynamically because its elements affect and are affected by other elements, they are unpredictable because a fixed input to the system does not have a fixed outcome, they also self-organize when they respond adaptively to interventions.

Each complex system can only be properly understood in its entirety, so isolating one part of the system to "solve" it does not produce a solution that works across the entire system for all time.

IN THE HEAT OF VARIANTS: DELTA ... AND THOSE TO COME

One of the issues that continues to be investigated and debated is whether there is a possibility of becoming infected with the new Delta variant after being vaccinated. It is a SARS-CoV-2 mutation that has frustrated a return to "normalcy" in at least 100 countries and is likely to become the dominant variant globally in the coming months.

In the United States it continues to spread rapidly because it is highly contagious, it is responsible for 83% of new cases of covid-19. With less than half of the country's population fully vaccinated, the conditions exist for the virus to continue to evolve.

The scenario is complicated because there is a high level of human mobilization and many vaccinated people have relaxed prevention measures with the belief, not sufficiently demonstrated, that the vaccine protects them as if it were an insulating bubble.

A year ago it was believed that with 70% of immunized people there would be sufficient herd immunity to stop the transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 virus; the number of people that, on average, an infected person infected (replication rate) was between 2 and 3; but with the Delta variant this number rises to between 6 and 10 people.

Seen this way, the herd immunity necessary to "contain" transmission is 90%, also knowing that vaccines are not 100% effective and this figure may increase if children are not immunized. In the United Kingdom, the Zoe Project has been developed, which consists of a study on a sample of more than 40 thousand cases of covid-19 confirmed by sequencing the genome of the virus in England. The results confirm a two-fold increased risk of hospitalization for infections in patients with the Delta variant compared to Alpha infections.

This risk is greater in unvaccinated or partially vaccinated people. These people made up the majority of the cases in the study that was published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases and conducted with official data collected from March 29 to May 23.

The key points of transmission are in the non-mandatory use of masks and the increase in meetings in open spaces, also in mobility between regions. The good news was that, as the most vulnerable people were vaccinated, the rebound was not accompanied by hospital saturation.

The most common clinical symptoms in SARS-CoV-2 infection also changed, as can be seen in the following image published by the immunologist Alfredo Corell Almuzara : the most frequent symptoms of the original variant that continue to appear (blue) are displaced by others that they appear even in vaccinated people (red), as the Delta variant advances.

Image
In blue the most frequent symptoms of the original variant that continue to appear and in red the symptoms that have appeared more frequently associated with the Delta variant (Photo: File)

Addicted to certainty and "normality", many are the citizens who refuse to abide by the minimum security measures in the face of a virus that has proven to adapt better to changes, to this is added the need for that "normality" for those who maintained from the informal economy.

As unemployment is one of the social effects of the pandemic, the levels of informality have increased, which means that many have to take to the streets in search of income, more in an economy lacerated by "sanctions" and internal sabotage such as the Venezuelan.

Recently, WHO scientists reported that they are analyzing a new variant named "mu" or B.1.621, first identified in January in neighboring Colombia and still classified as a "variant of interest." It has mutations that could indicate a risk of "immune escape" or resistance to vaccines, and further studies are required to understand its characteristics.

It has been found in other South American countries and Europe where its prevalence is less than 0.1%, but it has steadily increased in Colombia to 39% and in Ecuador to 13%.

THE GREATEST CERTAINTY IS THAT EXCLUSION AND MONOPOLY REMAIN

The pandemic, as such, may not put as much stress on the corporate-dominated global market as vaccine control. Vaccination rates in high-income countries are notably lower than the accumulation rates of vaccines, most of them have bought doses enough to vaccinate their populations between two and three times but few have managed to exceed 70% of the population vaccinated.

In addition, although there is no scientific evidence on the effectiveness of third doses in a generalized way over the entire population, countries such as Israel, the United Kingdom and Germany have already decided to inoculate the Pfizer vaccine to those who received the first two doses of AstraZeneca or the single dose of Janssen.

Their media, their experts, their manuals tell us that we must all get vaccinated to eradicate the virus, but they do everything so that not all of us can do it. While more than 3 billion people have not even received the first dose, in these countries they continue to impose their law of the global funnel.

It is the same development narrative: they have sold us a development model with a pattern of well-being that only they have access to; If we all wanted to live like them, we would have to look for continents-mine that will sell us cheap raw material under threat of snatching it, invading it or changing its regimes if it refuses.

Let's get on with the vaccinations. The achievement of herd immunity through vaccination is uncertain, especially with the Delta variant, so the benefit, no less, of the vaccine now is that it could reduce the severity of symptoms and avoid hospital saturation.

Furthermore, it is not possible to expand the capacity to care for serious cases because the medical and diagnostic equipment industry, like the pharmaceutical industry, is a monopoly, with all the concomitant characteristics of for-profit production dominated by a few. few.

Control of the production and supply of these equipment is exercised through the granting of patents to maximize their price, and they also control the direction and scale of technological innovation by acquiring companies with innovative ideas. This has enabled many of these US-based companies to play an important role in establishing and leading the multinational diagnostic and medical equipment industry.

*In 1999, 733 of 5,998 companies (12%) accounted for 80% of industry sales, and the top 2% accounted for 48% of those sales. Today, the total number of companies in the industry has dropped to 1,183, suggesting a deepening of monopoly control.

*Along the same lines, according to a 2017 estimate, the top 20 medical technology companies controlled just under 55% of the global medical technology market, the majority of which were US companies.

In Israel, according to commentator Nadav Eyal , serious cases rose by 70% in just one week, the number of serious cases increased 10-fold since the beginning of July, and 90% of serious cases were people over the age of 50 years; but also 95% of those people are vaccinated.

A recent non-peer-reviewed medical study determined that after COVID-19 infection, patients develop considerably longer and stronger natural immune protection against the Delta variant than two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. Data published by scientists from the Zionist entity shows that people who once had a SARS-CoV-2 infection were 27 times less likely than vaccinated people to contract the Delta, to develop symptoms from it or to be hospitalized with covid- 19.

However, there is the debate in the European Union regarding the use of a "vaccine passport". In New York City, France, and the Canadian provinces of Quebec and British Columbia, these mobilization requirements have recently been adopted. However, a vaccinated person and an unvaccinated person have the same ability to carry and transmit the virus, with or without symptoms.

The exclusionary ideology on which the development model, the design of cities, the factory, the international division of labor and many other key elements of modernity are founded, was the same one that created the vaccination passport. Not content with having designed a first-class world for themselves, the authorities of those countries internally exile their inhabitants, deepening the discrimination that is constitutive of Western "values."

One lesson from the pandemic has been that determinable, reproducible, transferable and predictable facts can be difficult to achieve, so many decisions about this stage of the pandemic have to be based on incomplete, uncertain, recent or scarce information.

This requires different approaches, recognizing that those of us who use such data have our own confirmatory biases, applying the same critical scrutiny to what seems to support our previous beliefs or personal biases as those that challenge them. These times seem to suggest that decision-making be based on the "balance of probabilities" rather than on "evidence beyond reasonable doubt." These may not arrive in a good time.

Waiting for immediate technological solutions can prevent us from being open about uncertainty and recognizing the limitations of imperfect data, with little certainty the divergences regarding the solutions to the crisis will remain. These times are useful to rebuild some habits that range from hygiene to food, because, in particular, these remain at the heart of the pandemic.

The different perspectives could stimulate mutual respect in the debate and the space for negotiation in social and political conflicts that are channeled towards multifaceted solutions and adaptive actions, starting with assuming covid-19 as a syndemic .

The American medical anthropologist Merrill Singer proposed a syndemic approach in the 1990s, revealing important biological and social interactions for prognosis, treatment, and health policy. Beyond settling for analyzing the damage caused by SARS-CoV-2 as an epidemiological issue, much more attention should be paid to non-communicable diseases (NCDs) and socioeconomic inequality than has been done so far.

A syndemic is not simply a comorbidity but encompasses interactions that increase a person's susceptibility to harm or worsen their health. In the case of COVID-19, preventing NCDs would serve to contain them, address hypertension, obesity, diabetes, chronic cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, and cancer.

Image
Non-communicable diseases (NCDs) are part of the biological and social interactions that increase a person's susceptibility to being aggravated by covid-19 (Photo: La Nación)

Texts like Rich skinny and fat poor. Diet in crisis , by the Argentine anthropologist Patricia Aguirre, allows us to pay more attention to NCDs as a cause of poor health also in the poorest countries.

The search for a purely biomedical solution for covid-19 will fail, no matter how effective a treatment or a protective vaccine may be, it is time to reverse the deep disparities or our societies will never be safe from shocks like the current ones. Addressing covid-19 as a syndicate will invite a broader vision, encompassing education, employment, housing, food and the environment. Occupational health and safety, new trends in entrepreneurship that enslave employees, the distances between residences and work entities.

The collective construction of solutions in which multiple voices, knowledge and experiences would allow a debate that goes from the democratization of intellectual property to the demystification of technological panaceas.

There are no miracles, recipes, or magic solutions; only a world to build when we look up from our navel to a horizon of broad questions. These are times of uncertainty, of changes that upset us but force us to rethink aspects of this "normality" to which we are addicted more out of habit than out of desire.

https://misionverdad.com/investigacione ... ertidumbre

Google Translator

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Why the U.S. Still Suffers from Covid
Margaret Kimberley, BAR senior columnist 01 Sep 2021

The Covid-19 crisis cannot be separated from the failed state.

Donald Trump was the convenient scapegoat for the first year of the Covid-19 crisis. Austerity, low wage work, housing insecurity, and the profit driven health care system were problematic issues before anyone heard the word Covid-19 or indeed before Trump’s presidency. Every failing of the United States already in existence came into sharp relief when the pandemic struck.

Joe Biden has done nothing to alleviate these many crises. Temporary unemployment benefits end in September, and millions of people were denied these funds when republican state legislatures decreed that they wanted people back at work. The Supreme Court struck down the eviction moratorium and 90% of the funds allocated to pay for rent relief remain unspent. Millions of people face the prospect of becoming unhoused.

Meanwhile even a small increase in the number of Covid patients upends health care around the country. Intensive care units are full, staffing shortages abound, and patients who don’t have Covid-19 are also suffering because the system isn’t designed to respond to emergencies.

The words “trust the science” ring hollow when information changes daily. The public were assured that vaccines were a kind of magic bullet but they are not. The unvaccinated comprise at least 90% of those who are seriously ill, but vaccine efficacy wanes and the vaccinated are urged to get boosters for protection.

Biden is little better than Trump in addressing the pandemic. Like his predecessor, Biden’s goal was to get people back to work and make life easier for the private sector. He arbitrarily chose July 4 as the date when all would be right, with hoped for high vaccination rates. He didn’t trust the science either, as the Centers for Disease Control declared that the vaccinated no longer had to wear masks. The World Health Organization was far more cautious and advised against any such declaration. The rise of the Delta variant has driven an increase in cases and Biden administration miscues are responsible.

The United States is as much a failed state now as it was when the pandemic began. Absent a coordinated plan for systemic change, the public have been whipped into a frenzy of hysteria and heaping scorn on the unvaccinated as the cause of every problem. Judges are ordering defendants to get “the jab” whether they want it or not. A judge in Chicago briefly deprived a mother of visitation rights because she was unvaccinated. Local governments are requiring workers to be vaccinated or lose their jobs, and restaurants, theaters, museums, and other public places are now accessible only to those who are vaccinated.

Anyone who questions these actions is shouted down as somehow promoting the spread of disease. The right wing speak out against government overreach but then discredit themselves by dismissing the impact of Covid-19, with some denying its existence altogether. Liberals who ordinarily speak up on behalf of civil liberties believe they must go along with any and all restrictions in order to stay safe.

The solutions needed to minimize the impact of covid are multi-faceted. There is no miracle drug, no miracle vaccine, and nations which seemed to succeed with “zero covid” plans are also coping with an increase in cases.

While individuals declare themselves to be pro or anti vaccines the larger issues are unaddressed. The debates and mistrust stink from the head, that is to say from the oligarchy that runs this country. Covid-19 does not have to be a never ending crisis. It can be managed but only by establishing people centered solutions to every problem in the country.

The pandemic put millions of people out of work, and many of them aren’t going back to the dead end spiral of low wage exploitation. They need more than temporary unemployment benefits. What they need is an entirely new system which gives everyone free health care and doesn’t put one class of people in overcrowded housing during a pandemic. Workers need an assurance that their children will be safe in the classroom and if not that they can still be educated at home. Forcing vaccines and deciding that kids must be back in school regardless of local conditions is a recipe for more illness.

Skepticism abounds for good reasons. What passes for political leadership lurch between pretending that Covid-19 isn’t an issue until hospitals are full of patients or demanding that everyone be vaccinated without changing any of their living conditions. In any case the virus is now endemic, meaning that it isn’t going away. A nation that puts everyone on a knife edge of precarity cannot begin to address what this reality means for millions of people. Systemic change was needed before the pandemic and it is sorely needed now.

https://www.blackagendareport.com/why-u ... fers-covid
"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 » Tue Sep 07, 2021 2:09 pm

Just Say It: the Health Care System Has Collapsed
BY VISHAL KHETPAL
SEPT 07, 20215:45 AM

Recently, a local news station in Houston ran a story about a man who passed away while waiting for a hospital bed. The story went viral.

Daniel Wilkinson, a 46-year-old veteran who served two deployments in Afghanistan, presented to a community hospital a few doors down from his home in Bellville, Texas, a small town on the outskirts of Houston. He was feeling sick, and was ultimately diagnosed with gallstone pancreatitis.

In countries with modern health systems, gallstone pancreatitis is a dangerous, but highly treatable diagnosis— often requiring an emergency interventional procedure that can be done at most large referral hospitals (including many in the Houston area), followed by a short ICU stay. But with the COVID-19 pandemic raging throughout Texas and much of the larger region, finding an ICU bed these days is no small task. Daniel was forced to wait more than seven hours before a bed finally opened at a VA hospital in Houston. But by then, gas pockets had started to form inside Wilkinson’s pancreas, suggesting that the failing organ was spreading an infection throughout his body. After waiting too long to have that procedure done, Daniel Wilkinson died.

For a year or so, we’ve been told repeatedly that the American health system has been on the brink of collapse. In the past month, this phrase has been used to describe the plight of hospitals in Oklahoma, Louisiana, Alabama, and Alaska; last winter, it was used to describe health systems in California and Idaho. Mississippi’s health care system in a recent New Yorker essay, was observed to be approaching statewide failure, while in a Politico headline at the start of the pandemic, hospitals in New York were quickly reaching a breaking point. Descriptions of health systems at the very limit of functionality rank among other COVID clichés like new normal and in these trying times.

But to say that our health care system is on the brink of collapse is to sugarcoat it. The story of a veteran dying near a city known for having some of the best hospitals in the world—and from a very treatable ailment—illustrates that our health system has already collapsed.

Daniel Wikinson’s story feels at once shocking and almost typical at this point in the pandemic. As a resident physician who has only trained in an era of COVID—I was asked to consider graduating from school early in April 2020 to help with medical staff shortages—my time as a doctor has been defined by working in a system that has already collapsed. The American health system I work in has featured limited personal protective equipment, oxygen shortages, and the construction of field hospitals in convention centers and parking garages. Last winter, many hospitals across the country instituted crisis standards of care, forced to ration health services based on criteria that few people envisioned would be used outside of a mass casualty event, like a terrorist attack. Today, hospitals are full in much of the country, with patients requiring an ICU being airlifted thousands of miles in search of a staffed bed. These are not features of a health system that is approaching failure. These are features of a health care system that has broken down spectacularly, forcing doctors and patients to climb through the rubble looking for help.

There isn’t a textbook definition of “collapsed health care system.” But it can be framed through a related concept in global health, defined by the World Health Organization: health systems resilience. Thought of as bulwark against collapse, resilience describes the ability of a health system to absorb shocks and adapt while delivering core services. That is, during a big disaster, a functioning health care system can take care of the wounded, as well as patients with the assorted health emergencies that pop up in regular life, alongside those who need routine preventative care. In terms of resilience, our system over the past year has not passed muster. Last year, it quickly became clear that we didn’t have a contingency plan for a prolonged disaster like a pandemic. During the first year of the pandemic, utilization of routine preventive care—like childhood immunizations and colon cancer screening—plummeted while our health system was overwhelmed with COVID. Nearly half of all patients, according to data from a large survey, forewent medical care, following the implications of public health messaging at the beginning of the pandemic to stay home unless there was an emergency (even though hospitals proved an unlikely place to catch COVID). The number of excess deaths during the pandemic in the United States is estimated to be more than 900,000. If America’s health care system might in normal times be too expensive for many to access and, for some, difficult to trust, the pandemic made things terrifically worse. Health care workers, lacking the support needed to function at such a grueling pace for so long, are voting with their feet. Nurses, fed up with working in a dysfunctional system, are quitting their jobs in droves, while an uptick of doctors are retiring early or following other health care workers to the exits.

I don’t blame voices in media and in public health from hedging their descriptions of where our health systems have stood throughout the pandemic. COVID has been unpredictable. No one wants to cry wolf or be wrong. Yet brink and hedge words like it—cusp, verge, threshold—offer us a state of suspended animation between normalcy and a true crisis. Focusing on language so intently may seem pedantic. But there is power in simply stating the truth. It validates the experiences of health care workers on the ground, and those of people who are unable to get adequate health care. In the future, acknowledging that our health system did collapse under the weight of the COVID-19 ultimately sets the stage for comprehensive health reform. It pushes back against any revisionist history that may emerge in the coming years; it’s easy to imagine accounts that conveniently emphasize health care heroes while waving away how flawed our health care system is. Recognizing our failure brazenly could push us to build a system that is more resilient.

Some health care leaders are starting to take a blunter approach in their messaging, in hopes of accurately communicating the help that is needed right now. In Baton Rouge, Catherine O’Neal, a physician and chief medical officer of Our Lady of the Lake Hospital, warned her community recently in a press conference about what it means to have no beds left in her hospital. “We can’t tolerate it,” she said, going on to explain that there are people sitting in ERs waiting for a bed as they risk health complications and even death. “We are out of things in our pockets to open beds. We need you to open our beds for us,” said O’Neal, urging people to get vaccinated. To the public, acknowledging that the health system has collapsed communicates the gravity of the situation. It adds further urgency to calls for people to get their shots, and to mask in areas with significant community spread. Already, vaccination rates have increased in states significantly impacted by the delta variant.

To say that we’re on the brink of disaster offers hope that the people in charge can take steps to keep us from plunging toward an abyss. It suggests that the situation is at least temporarily sustainable, that maybe you can keep hunkering down and doing what you’ve been doing, and everything will be fine. But it is not sustainable, and it is not fine. The health care system is not approaching some kind of cliff, while still functioning—what is happening right now is killing people like Daniel Wilkinson. People who do not have to die are dying.

https://slate.com/technology/2021/09/he ... -beds.html

All true, but with neither a 'how' or 'why'. Both questions are answered by 'capitalism'.

Because our health-care is profit motivated there is no 'waste', that being defined as 'not making money'. No equipment or facilities more than those generating immediate 'return'. No ongoing vaccine work as that is not hardly profitable so US firms had to waste time re-inventing the wheel. No reliance upon social means of response(masks, testing, quarantine), ain't no real money there.( but hundreds of millions of doses guaranteed paid in full by the government are another story...)

Because a large portion of workers must live hand to mouth and the social safety net was poor at best they were forced to work under conditions conducive to the transmittal of the disease. Because many small businesses are not much better situated, they stayed open. Because big business cannot tolerate a bad quarter. This only changed after the death count became a PR nightmare.

Because individualism is one of the ruling ideas of capitalist society there is a grievous lack of social responsibility and a great reluctance of government to insist upon such responsibility. It is the worst sort of anarchy when individualism threatens the community.

Socialism or barbarism...
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Re: Socialist Demands for the COVID-19 Crisis

Post by blindpig » Fri Sep 17, 2021 2:10 pm

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How US Media Misrepresent the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s Laboratories and Safety Protocols
September 16, 2021
By Joshua Cho – Sep 15, 2021

Even if we were to accept all the accusations against the WIV regarding their alleged subpar safety standards, none of it has any relevance to the COVID-19 pandemic unless it can be shown the WIV possessed SARS-CoV-2 in its lab before the outbreak, and there is no evidence of that.

While many people have already criticized the lack of evidence and scientific basis for the hypothesis that the COVID-19 pandemic originated from a laboratory, both critics and proponents of the lab-leak theory appear to have uncritically accepted false or unproven premises regarding work done at the laboratory most often implicated in these speculations, the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

Some of the most prominent accusations pointed at the WIV are that it was conducting research as part of China’s alleged biowarfare program, and was conducting its experiments in substandard biosafety conditions. The implication is that if the WIV lied about not having SARS-CoV-2 before the outbreak, the virus would also be more likely to have originated from there owing to their inadequate biosafety standards. However, after investigating these widely circulated claims and contacting several scientists, it turns out there is actually little evidence for any of these allegations.

State Department cable a ‘nothing burger’

The claim that the WIV was conducting its experiments in substandard or unsafe working conditions started gaining mainstream acceptance whenWashington Post columnist Josh Rogin published an op-ed based on redacted State Department cables from 2018. Rogin claimed that the redacted cables were evidence of “safety issues” at the WIV:

Two years before the novel coronavirus pandemic upended the world, US Embassy officials visited a Chinese research facility in the city of Wuhan several times and sent two official warnings back to Washington about inadequate safety at the lab, which was conducting risky studies on coronaviruses from bats.

What the US officials learned during their visits concerned them so much that they dispatched two diplomatic cables categorized as Sensitive But Unclassified back to Washington. The cables warned about safety and management weaknesses at the WIV lab and proposed more attention and help. The first cable, which I obtained, also warns that the lab’s work on bat coronaviruses and their potential human transmission represented a risk of a new SARS-like pandemic.


Certainly, when reading Rogin’s contrived interpretations of the cables, it’s understandable why these characterizations of the WIV’s biosafety standards would create a sense of mass panic and hysteria among people unfamiliar with laboratory work. However, around the time of publication, Rogin’s opinion piece was already criticized by experts like virologist Angela Rasmussen at the University of Saskatchewan, who tweeted that Rogin’s claims were not only “extremely vague”—with the portions of the cables cited not demonstrating a “clear and specific risk”—but also highly inaccurate.

The sections Rogin cites from the January 19, 2018 cable are:

During interactions with scientists at the WIV laboratory, they noted the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory…

Most importantly, the researchers also showed that various SARS-like coronaviruses can interact with ACE2, the human receptor identified for SARS-coronavirus. This finding strongly suggests that SARS-like coronaviruses from bats can be transmitted to humans to cause SARS-like diseases. From a public health perspective, this makes the continued surveillance of SARS-like coronaviruses in bats and study of the animal-human interface critical to future emerging coronavirus outbreak prediction and prevention.


Rasmussen pointed out the main takeaway is that the cables conclude “it’s important to continue working on bat CoVs because of their potential as human pathogens,” and that it “doesn’t suggest that there were safety issues specifically relating to WIV’s work on bat CoVs capable of using human ACE2 as a receptor.” Other critics at the time argued that if Rogin truly believed the State Department cable was as damning for Beijing as he claimed it was, there was little reason for him to refuse to release its full contents in his op-ed upon publication, or when people voiced their skepticism of his presentation of it afterward.


Rasmussen’s skepticism and expert judgment were vindicated three months later, when the Post released the full cable after it filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, and reported that Rogin’s selective leaks “sparked unproven speculation.” It noted, “The full cable does not strengthen the claim that an accident at the lab caused the virus to escape, nor does it exclude the possibility.”

Rasmussen later remarked that the full cable is a “big old nothing burger,” because it doesn’t actually raise any concerns with the WIV’s work. Rather, the cable showed how the WIV “wanted to ensure staff working with dangerous pathogens were trained so they could do so safely.” This would explain why the cable requested further aid and training for the lab’s projects and personnel, instead of trying to cancel them.

The Post also pointed out that the lack of trained personnel is not a problem unique to the WIV, as it cited Rob Grenfell, the director of health and biosecurity at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (an Australian government biomedical research agency), saying “All [such] facilities around the world face this challenge.”

No proof WIV’s BSL-4 lab involved with bioweapons research

As confirmed by the release of the full cable, the “new lab” mentioned is the WIV’s BSL-4 laboratory (the highest biosafety level), which first opened in 2018. Many irrelevant speculations have surrounded this BSL-4 facility, as it deals with the most dangerous pathogens, like smallpox and SARS-CoV-1, that cannot be handled at lower biosafety levels.

Journalist Sam Husseini, one of the biggest promoters of the laboratory origin hypothesis, has recounted his suspicions regarding the possibility of the SARS-CoV-2 virus originating from the WIV’s BSL-4 laboratory when he asked a CDC representative about the facility:

I asked if it was a “complete coincidence” that the pandemic had started in Wuhan, the only place in China with a declared biosafety level 4 (BSL4) laboratory. BSL4 laboratories have the most stringent safety mechanisms, but handle the most deadly pathogens.

Husseini goes as far as to insinuate that the mere existence of a BSL-4 laboratory is evidence of China’s biowarfare program, largely based on his assertion that the concepts of “biodefense” and “biowarfare” are “largely indistinguishable”:

“Biodefense” implies tacit biowarfare, breeding more dangerous pathogens for the alleged purpose of finding a way to fight them….

The US and China each have dual-use biowarfare/biodefense programs. China has major facilities at Wuhan—a biosafety level 4 lab and a biosafety level 2 lab. There are leaks from labs.


The talking point that the distinction between concepts like “biowarfare” and “biodefense” is merely a “rhetorical sleight of hand” is a popular assertion among journalists promoting the lab-leak theory’s legitimacy, as journalist Glenn Greenwald also claimed something similar:

But ultimately, that distinction barely matters. For both offensive and defensive bioweapons research, scientists must create, cultivate, manipulate and store non-natural viruses or infectious bacteria in their labs, whether to study them for weaponization or for vaccines.

These claims by journalists with no formal science background struck me as far-fetched, so I contacted microbiologist Stanley Perlman at the University of Iowa, virologist Stephen Goldstein at the University of Utah, and virologist James Duehr at the University of Pittsburgh, to check these assertions. Both Perlman and Goldstein simply rejected the assertion that “biowarfare” and “biodefense” are “largely indistinguishable” concepts, with Perlman stating that the claim “doesn’t make sense.” Duehr responded: “Saying that there is no difference between “biodefense” and “biowarfare” is like saying there is no difference between developing bullet-proof vests and armor-piercing bullets. Sure, knowing how one works helps you develop better versions of the other, but conflating them is really missing the point.”

Australian virologist Danielle Anderson, the only foreign scientist to work in the WIV’s BSL-4 laboratory until November 2019, has attested that claiming “the Wuhan Institute of Virology as ‘one of only two bioweapons research labs in all of China’ is simply false,” undermining Husseini’s claim that the WIV’s BSL-4 lab is evidence of China’s alleged dual-use “biowarfare” program. Critics of Husseini’s allegation that the WIV is engaged in “biowarfare” research—one being Claudia Chaufan, director of the graduate program of health policy at York University—have punctured his logic on several grounds. Chaufan stated:

“That linguistic sleight of hand in particular, the equivalence of biowarfare and biodefense, is factually not true, and is certainly not true in one very obvious way regarding the Wuhan lab: If there were a biowarfare arms race happening around the world, the countries putatively at war with each other—the US and China—would not share or allow access to their labs to a competitor state, collaborate, or exchange their research and researchers.

But the fact is the US was given wide access to the Wuhan Labs—not just scientists but also US State Department functionaries—as were French scientists. The Wuhan lab solicited US aid and funding. (Husseini seems to believe that biowarfare labs openly solicit funding from other countries). Scientists in the US and China collaborated and worked together collegially, trained each other, shared information, published papers and still maintain some relations.


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A view of the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s P4 lab after a visit by a WHO team on Feb. 3, 2021. Photo: Ng Han Guan / AP

It is true that the WIV has carried out unspecified classified research projects, and has heightened secrecy due to the inherent national security risks of handling dangerous pathogens. However, it’s also true that initial reports explained why WIV officials claimed that “transparency is the basis” for the BSL-4 lab, and why the WIV frequently collaborates with foreign scientists and openly publishes its research—further undermining the allegation that bioweapons research is being conducted there. According to the scientific journal Nature, when the BSL-4 lab was getting cleared to operate:

It will focus on the control of emerging diseases, store purified viruses and act as a World Health Organization ‘reference laboratory’ linked to similar labs around the world. “It will be a key node in the global biosafety-lab network,” says lab director Yuan Zhiming…

The opportunities for international collaboration, meanwhile, will aid the genetic analysis and epidemiology of emergent diseases.

The preventive (rather than militaristic) nature of the WIV’s research is also corroborated by the judgments of U.S. diplomats in the Post’s unredacted State Department cable when it described how the 2002-03 SARS outbreak “convinced China to prioritize international cooperation for infectious disease control”: “This state-of-the-art facility is designed for prevention and control research on diseases that require the highest level of biosafety and biosecurity containment.”

WIV’s biosafety practices not substandard

For the sake of argument, even if one grants the unproven premise that the WIV’s BSL-4 lab was engaged in bioweapons research, it is still irrelevant to the question of whether SARS-CoV-2 originated there, since the WIV doesn’t conduct coronavirus research at a BSL-4 setting. Most coronavirus research around the world is conducted at BSL-2 and BSL-3 settings.

This demonstrates that those who suspect the pandemic originated from the WIV’s BSL-4 lab don’t seem to be aware of basic information about coronavirus research. Some notable examples are people like novelist Nicholson Baker citing Husseini’s suspicions of the WIV’s BSL-4 facility in a lengthy speculative piece for New York Magazine. Others include Josh Rogin citing similarly ignorant anonymous Trump administration officials to imply that the irrelevant State Department cable is “evidence” that supports “the possibility that the pandemic is the result of a lab accident in Wuhan.”

However, lab-leak proponents like disgraced science writer Nicholas Wade—who penned an influential Medium blog post that was later reprinted by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists—are also fond of moving the goalposts to argue their evidence-free conspiracy theory. Wade cites Rogin’s long-debunked and irrelevant op-ed to claim that the BSL-4 lab’s “state of readiness considerably alarmed the State Department inspectors who visited it from the Beijing embassy in 2018,” before going on to make an entirely separate argument that the WIV’s biosafety standards were substandard and amounted to professional malpractice:

The real problem, however, was not the unsafe state of the Wuhan BSL-4 lab but the fact that virologists worldwide don’t like working in BSL-4 conditions…

Before 2020, the rules followed by virologists in China and elsewhere required that experiments with the SARS1 and MERS viruses be conducted in BSL-3 conditions. But all other bat coronaviruses could be studied in BSL-2, the next level down. BSL-2 requires taking fairly minimal safety precautions, such as wearing lab coats and gloves, not sucking up liquids in a pipette, and putting up biohazard warning signs. Yet a gain-of-function experiment [wherein a pathogen is reasonably anticipated to gain enhanced virulence and/or transmissibility] conducted in BSL-2 might produce an agent more infectious than either SARS1 or MERS. And if it did, then lab workers would stand a high chance of infection, especially if unvaccinated.


Wade briefly explained biosafety levels to readers before taking a quote from Dr. Shi Zhengli—the renowned virologist at the WIV—out of context to maximize the impression that the WIV’s biosafety standards were unprofessional:

There are four degrees of safety, designated BSL1 to BSL4, with BSL4 being the most restrictive and designed for deadly pathogens like the Ebola virus…

Much of Shi’s work on gain-of-function in coronaviruses was performed at the BSL2 safety level, as is stated in her publications and other documents. She has said in an interview with Science magazine that “[t]he coronavirus research in our laboratory is conducted in BSL-2 or BSL-3 laboratories.”


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Researcher Dr. Shi Zhengli is pictured carrying out research at a lab in the Wuhan Institute of Virolog, Feb 23, 2017. Photo: Chinatopix via AP

Wade also seemed comfortable parroting molecular biologist Richard Ebright’s heavily disputed claim that BSL-2 conditions are about as safe as a “dentist’s office,” which has been uncritically parroted in other reports as well:

It is clear that some or all of this work was being performed using a biosafety standard —biosafety level 2, the biosafety level of a standard US dentist’s office —that would pose an unacceptably high risk of infection of laboratory staff upon contact with a virus having the transmission properties of SARS-CoV-2,” Ebright says.

Although Wade provides the link to the Science interview, he omits crucial context that dramatically changes the impression of Shi’s answer and the professionalism of the WIV’s work. When one actually reads the interview, one quickly discovers that the interviewer takes it for granted that most coronavirus research is actually conducted in BSL-2 and BSL-3 settings, as Dr. Shi was asked: Given that coronavirus research in most places is done in BSL-2 or BSL-3 Labs—and indeed, your WIV didn’t even have an operational BSL-4 until recently—why would you do any coronavirus experiments under BSL-4 conditions?

University of Utah virologist Goldstein also explained why likening a BSL-2 lab to a dentist’s office is a “ridiculous comparison”: “In BSL2, experiments are conducted inside a class II biosafety cabinet. These have negative pressure, so air circulates within the cabinet but doesn’t escape, and the air is HEPA filtered as it circulates inside the cabinet. A dentist’s office has none of these critical safety controls.”

This helps prevent aerosol droplets or splashes of samples (like viruses) from traveling around inside the air of the cabinet—though one can simply see for oneself how a biosafety cabinet works, and the proper precautions scientists follow while using it, to confirm how it differs from a mere “dentist’s office.”

Wade actually provides yet another damning instance of misrepresenting sources—consistent with his history of misrepresenting scientists—when he critiques an influential Nature letter (he mischaracterizes it as a mere “opinion piece,” instead of being a short report on original research for “an outstanding finding”), which corroborates the opposite of what Wade claims in his blog post. The Nature letter in question is a study by a group of virologists led by Kristian Andersen, and it states that the “possibility of an inadvertent laboratory release of SARS-CoV-2” must be examined because SARS-like viruses (not SARS-CoV-1) found in bats are often studied at BSL-2 settings: “Basic research involving passage of bat SARS-CoV-like coronaviruses in cell culture and/or animal models has been ongoing for many years in biosafety level 2 laboratories across the world, and there are documented instances of laboratory escapes of SARS-CoV.”

The authors later concluded that they “do not believe any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible,” and the statements above undermine Wade’s depiction of the WIV’s professionalism.

When I asked Dr. Goldstein and Dr. Perlman (who both research coronaviruses) to confirm this information, they each agreed that most coronavirus research is done at BSL-2 and BSL-3 laboratories and that there’s nothing unusual about Chinese scientists also doing coronavirus research in those settings. Goldstein declined to specifically comment on the quality of the WIV because he has never visited, and Perlman suggested that some scientists were concerned about experiments with bat viruses being performed at BSL-2 settings, even if they were “all done following the precautions used at the time.”

However, Dr. Rasmussen clarified in a tweet that “many labs studied bat CoVs at BSL2 pre-Covid,” and that “there is no evidence that lab work was occurring with substandard containment,” further corroborating the claim in the Nature study, though she seemed to suggest that the practice “should be revisited.” Dr. Duehr also explained that “more biosafety controls are not always better,” and that “too many biosafety controls can also be dangerous,” because that can lead scientists to become fatigued and careless, as how scientists put on and take off gear are some of the most important moments in biosafety. This is why scientists use the appropriate amount of biosafety controls, rather than pointlessly using the most restrictive equipment for every experiment.

Experiments with bat viruses in BSL-2 labs

MIT’s Technology Review article “Inside the Risky Bat-Virus Engineering That Links America to Wuhan” cited a few scientists critical of the WIV conducting similar experiments to the heavily scrutinized 2015 Nature study, led by virologist Ralph Baric (which has frequently been misrepresented as “gain-of-function” research), at a lower biosafety setting than the ones conducted at the University of North Carolina:

The Chinese work was carried out at biosafety level 2 (BSL-2), a much lower tier than Baric’s BSL-3+….

Today a chorus of scientists, including Baric, are coming forward to say this was a misstep. Even if there is no link to COVID-19, allowing work on potentially dangerous bat viruses at BSL-2 is “an actual scandal,” says Michael Lin, a bioengineer at Stanford University.

In response to the news that the WIV conducted more experiments with bat virus WIV1 at the BSL-2 level in another study published in 2017, Technology Review cited criticisms from other virologists like Ian Lipkin. “That’s screwed up,” the Columbia University virologist Ian Lipkin, who co-authored the seminal paper arguing that COVID must have had a natural origin, told the journalist Donald McNeil Jr. “It shouldn’t have happened. People should not be looking at bat viruses in BSL-2 labs. My view has changed.”

However, Dr. Duehr explained to me that the US CDC’s own Biosafety in Microbiological and Biomedical Laboratories manual states that viruses related to “Risk Group 3” pathogens (the kinds typically handled at BSL-3), which lack the virulence in humans that the BSL-3 viruses have, can often be safely handled in BSL-2 or BSL-2+ settings (p. 307).

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Page 307 of the CDC’s Biosafety in Microbiological and Biomedical Laboratories manual

This is precisely Dr. Shi’s explanation given to Technology Review for conducting experiments with the WIV1 virus in a BSL-2 lab. In an email, Zhengli Shi said she followed Chinese rules that are similar to those in the US Safety requirements are based on what virus you are studying. Since bat viruses like WIV1 haven’t been confirmed to cause disease in human beings, her biosafety committee recommended BSL-2 for engineering them and testing them and BSL-3 for any animal experiments.

Duehr also explained that the SARS-like bat viruses used in the Baric study appear to have previously infected humans, but that those persons didn’t recall any symptoms or worrisome illnesses. Given that data, it was reasonable to infer that any infection was likely either asymptomatic or extremely mild, so a similar rationale would explain why scientists inferred these viruses were less virulent and could be handled at a lower biosafety level. Duehr expressed agreement with Dr. Rasmussen’s statement that the scientific community should reconsider the practice of conducting experiments with bat coronaviruses that haven’t been shown to be virulent in humans in BSL-2 laboratories, but also stated that we “should not fault researchers at the WIV for doing what was common practice all around the world at the time.”

Intercept’s reporting is actually evidence against a lab leak

Two recent reports on a grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to the EcoHealth Alliance—detailing research by the WIV, following FOIA litigation by The Intercept—were misleadingly presented as “new evidence” that US-funded experiments in China “posed biosafety risks” and constituted “high-risk research.” However, it is unclear whether Intercept journalists Sharon Lerner and Mara Hvistendahl understood the significance of the documents they obtained.

Soon after the publication of the first report, Dr. Goldstein argued that The Intercept actually provided evidence against a lab leak because they further confirmed what we have already known since the beginning of the pandemic: that the WIV was only working on “SARS1-like viruses,” with “not a hint of experimental work” on viruses related to SARS-CoV-2.

Virologist Stuart Neil stated on Twitter that there’s “absolutely nothing new here” apart from “disabusing everyone of the notion that animal experiments were carried out at BSL2” because they were carried out in a BSL3 animal facility at the Wuhan University Center for Animal Experiment, and not at the WIV as was previously assumed, which is “entirely appropriate for this work and should provide more than adequate containment.” Dr. Duehr added that the grant also shows us that WIV scientists were doing animal work with SARS-like bat coronaviruses at BSL-3 (not SARS-CoV-1 or 2) (p. 126), which is also how American scientists would handle these bat viruses.

The Intercept also credulously cites biologist and prominent lab-leak booster Alina Chan’s fearmongering and irrelevant speculations that WIV researchers potentially getting bitten by a bat during fieldwork could have led to the pandemic, citing a risk assessment of some of the WIV’s fieldwork:

The grant proposal acknowledges some of those dangers: “Fieldwork involves the highest risk of exposure to SARS or other CoVs, while working in caves with high bat density overhead and the potential for fecal dust to be inhaled.”

Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute, said the documents show that EcoHealth Alliance has reason to take the lab-leak theory seriously. “In this proposal, they actually point out that they know how risky this work is. They keep talking about people potentially getting bitten — and they kept records of everyone who got bitten,” Chan said. “Does EcoHealth have those records? And if not, how can they possibly rule out a research-related accident?”


However, it would actually be more worrisome if there were no risk assessments for fieldwork to cite at all. Dr. Neil ridiculed Dr. Chan on Twitter for criticizing scientists for writing “a proper risk assessment” for fieldwork “after all the accusations of unsafe working.” Dr. Perlman stated that scientists “have to write risk assessments for their work” in order to get funded and that it was “the right thing to do.”


But perhaps more importantly, citing Dr. Chan’s speculations about the pandemic originating from a bat bite is proof that neither she nor The Intercept’s journalists are aware of basic information about SARS-CoV-2 being a respiratory virus.

In order for that scenario to have any basis, SARS-CoV-2 would also have to be a bloodborne pathogen because the virus from an infected animal bite would pierce the skin and enter the bloodstream, but there is no evidence of SARS-CoV-2 being a bloodborne pathogen. Dr. Rasmussen pointed out that there is no known case of anyone contracting a sarbecovirus like SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2 from an animal bite, and that while it is “theoretically possible,” it does not actually happen in real life because, as the FDA’s own website confirms, respiratory viruses generally aren’t known to spread via blood-mediated transmission. Dr. Perlman agreed with Rasmussen’s statements and told me that if he were bitten by a bat during fieldwork, he’d “worry about rabies,” not SARS-CoV-2.

It’s also unclear why Dr. Chan is still repeating her baseless claims when Dr. Rasmussen had already criticized her “inexperience with virology” for speculating that it’s “plausible” for humans to be infected by a mouse-adapted strain of coronavirus if lab workers were bitten by mice back in January.


Perhaps The Intercept would not have presented their documents in a way that promotes the lab-leak theory despite it being evidence of the opposite, or published Dr. Chan’s embarrassing speculations, had they sought out other scientists who could have helped them understand their material. But the only scientists asked to opine on the significance of their documents in their bad-faith report were lab-leak boosters like Richard Ebright and Alina Chan.

A second Intercept article cited virologist Jesse Bloom’s opinion that the WIV “creating chimeras of SARS-related bat coronaviruses that are thought to pose high risk to humans entails unacceptable risks.” However, the virus being discussed in the article is WIV1, which hasn’t been shown to cause disease in humans, which is why Dr. Perlman stated that he thinks it’s “not a risk” to study it and that some of the titles of Dr. Baric’s papers on the virus, like “SARS-like WIV1-CoV poised for human emergence,” may have given the “misleading impression” that it was. Dr. Duehr also agreed that it isn’t a risk to study a SARS-like virus like WIV1, and told me: “The chimeric experiments that Bloom says we should not be doing, are how we find out whether it would pose a risk to humans. He’s assuming that we know the virus is high risk before doing them.”

Dr. Rasmussen disagreed with Dr. Bloom’s personal assessment of the WIV1 experiments and questioned why he thinks he should be the sole arbiter of whether the experiments posed an “unacceptable risk,” when the WIV’s work is subject to external oversight (which is how it was FOIA-ed), and showed that WIV scientists aren’t reckless and don’t singlehandedly decide what is an acceptable risk or not.

Judgments of scientists directly familiar with the WIV
Arguably, the opinions of scientists and biosecurity experts directly familiar with the WIV’s safety protocols should count more than others. And they paint a very different picture from the one painted by the critics, and argue that reports insinuating that the laboratory was operating under subpar safety conditions are misrepresentations.

French biosecurity expert Gabriel Gras—who oversaw safety standards at the WIV from 2012 to 2017, since the WIV’s BSL-4 laboratory is a joint collaboration between China and France—dismissed the lab-leak theory and vouched for the WIV’s professionalism and safety standards. He also stated that a BSL-3 laboratory is usually used to study a coronavirus, as it made little sense to use BSL-4 facilities owing to the time and cost considerations. Dr. Danielle Anderson testified that the WIV was being misrepresented by critics and the media: “Half-truths and distorted information have obscured an accurate accounting of the lab’s functions and activities, which were more routine than how they’ve been portrayed in the media… It’s not that it was boring, but it was a regular lab that worked in the same way as any other high-containment lab. What people are saying is just not how it is.”

American scientists who trained WIV staff attested that the safety protocols at the WIV are not only practiced by scientists all over the world, but that those safety protocols and practices were partly shaped by WIV scientists themselves, owing to their excellence. Some of the safety protocols include wearing safety equipment to prevent themselves from getting infected while doing field work, and making sure that the samples they handle in the lab are “inactivated,” and aren’t actually infectious, by using a chemical process that breaks apart the virus itself, while preserving its genetic material for study.

But even if we were to accept all the accusations against the WIV regarding their alleged subpar safety standards, none of it has any relevance to the COVID-19 pandemic unless it can be shown the WIV possessed SARS-CoV-2 in its lab before the outbreak, and there is no evidence of that either.

In hindsight, it seems there may be a legitimate debate to be had over whether certain experiments conducted at the WIV should have been handled at higher biosafety settings, even if they weren’t out of the ordinary. However, it’s clear that accusations of the WIV being a nefarious bioweapons lab conducting research in subpar safety conditions compared to the rest of the world at the time are misleading at best, and at worst unproven or false.

https://orinocotribune.com/how-us-media ... protocols/

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China Announces Full Vaccination of Over 70% of Its Population

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Two of the main Chinese vaccines have already been licensed for use in children aged 3 years and older, although the process has not yet been fully implemented for children under 12 years of age. | Photo: Twitter/@TaiwanNews886

Published 16 September 2021 (14 hours 31 minutes ago)

Beijing also announced that 91% of students between 12 and 17 years of age had been vaccinated against COVID-19.


China's health authorities reported Thursday that they have fully vaccinated more than one billion people against COVID-19, which would constitute more than 70 percent of its population, the largest in the world.

The pace of injections in China averages between 10 and 15 million and sometimes even 20 million each day since the country began ramping up its vaccination process in April.

Two of the leading Chinese vaccines have already been licensed for use in children aged three years and older, although the process has not yet been fully implemented for children under 12 years of age.

China, the first country to be affected by the pandemic, was also the first to emerge from the crisis in the spring of 2020, following the adoption of radical measures, especially mass testing and the almost total closure of its borders.

The country of some 1.4 billion people was where the epidemic of the new coronavirus broke out at the end of 2019.


It has several domestically produced vaccines, of which it has distributed a total of 2.16 billion doses, the Ministry of Health said.

China still records limited, sporadic outbreaks, such as the one in recent days in Fujian province (east), with about 50 cases per day. The official death toll from COVID-19 is 4,636 people throughout the territory.

Meanwhile, the Chinese Ministry of Education announced that the country had vaccinated 91 percent of students between 12 and 17 years of age and 95 percent of students over 18 years of age, as well as teachers and education workers, with the complete COVID-19 vaccine regimen.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Chi ... -0019.html

So now, lemme see, .7 X 1.4B = 980M fully vaccinated vs 169,592,873(51.1%)....USA! USA!

"The Greatest Nation On Earth", whadda shithole...
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Re: Socialist Demands for the COVID-19 Crisis

Post by blindpig » Mon Sep 27, 2021 1:32 pm

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Almost 50% of Latin America & Caribbean Receive Vaccines from China & Russia
September 24, 2021

MEXICO CITY (Sputnik) – During the ministerial meeting of the Alliance for Multilateralism within the 76th session of the UN General Assembly, the Foreign Minister of Mexico, Marcelo Ebrard, announced that presently almost 50% of the population of Latin America and the Caribbean received COVID-19 vaccines from China and Russia.

The Alliance for Multilateralism was initiated on April 2, 2019 by the Foreign Ministers of France and Germany. On June 26, 2020, the first meeting of the Alliance for Multilateralism was held in order to reinforce the multilateral health architecture and Franco-German declaration for strengthened international cooperation and solidarity on a planetary scale.

During the meeting at the 76th session, the Mexican Foreign Affairs said, “I will share with you a proposal and a concern about the geopolitical reality that we are facing in vaccination and vaccines. In Latin America and the Caribbean, almost 50% of the population has been vaccinated with vaccines from China and Russia, not with the US or European vaccines.”

The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic in the subcontinent “are going to be enormous in terms of gender equality,” explained the foreign secretary. Ebrard added that gender inequity “occurs very quickly, and this is because access to vaccines was [provided] this way.”

If countries make decisions that create differences between the vaccines recognized by the World Health Organization (WHO), “we are creating a new inequality, not only in access to vaccines, which is already significant in terms of inequality,” Ebrard warned.

Furthermore, he added that now there is another inequality because “vaccines are explicitly linked to economic recovery or personal income in our countries.”

Ebrard pointed to the reasons behind the delay in World Health Organization and European authorities to certify some vaccines and not others. He indicated that during the recent summit of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), held on September 18 in Mexico, the representatives “asked me to share with you this concern about the decisions of the European Union (EU) and countries around the world, in order to avoid distinctions between vaccines, because otherwise we are going to create, in the short term, another type of segmented inequality.”

60% of women received Russian and Chinese vaccines
The other concern is about gender because it seems that “maybe 60% of the women who have already been vaccinated in Latin America and the Caribbean had access to vaccines from China and Russia, not European and American vaccines,” he explained.

The Mexican Secretary of Foreign Affairs pointed out that decisions must be made in the coming weeks or months, or decisions that have already been made in recent weeks should be evaluated, with these facts on the table.

In the Latin American and Caribbean region, a “unique strategy” is being promoted, which is a gender recovery program, “due to the fact that we had a great impact on gender inequality, which already exists in our countries and in our companies,” said Ebrard.

Latin American and Caribbean countries are working to have this gender strategy for next year, with the limited resources available.

“We can figure out how to handle this in a global strategy, not only in one region, but perhaps also the major regions of the world can have the same approach to recovery and the gender dimension of recovery,” said Ebrard.

The Alliance for Multilateralism was launched between countries posing a world order based on respect for international law as “the only reliable guarantee for international stability and peace.” It also stresses that global challenges cannot be solved except through multilateral cooperation.



Featured image: Vial with the second component of a Russian COVID-19 vaccine. Sputnik/Vladislav Vodnev.

(Mundo Sputnik)

Translation: Orinoco Tribune

https://orinocotribune.com/almost-50-of ... na-russia/

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Cuba Ships First Batch of Abdala COVID-19 Vaccine to Vietnam

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Based on a rigorous evaluation of the Abdala vaccine, the Vietnam Medicines Control Authority issued the Emergency Use Authorization for the Cuban vaccine. | Photo: Twitter/@BioCubaFarma

Published 24 September 2021

Following last week's visit of the Vietnamese president to Cuba, a supply agreement for 5 million doses was signed.


BioCubaFarma, the conglomerate of Cuban public enterprises in the biotechnological and pharmaceutical area, sent this Friday to Vietnam the first batch of Abdala anti-viral vaccines, designed by the Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (CIGB) in Havana.

The information appeared in the social networks of the CIGB itself and although it does not detail the exact number of doses, it is about 15 boxes of 20 kg each, which will be transported in a Vietnam Airlines plane, the flag carrier of the Southeast Asian nation.

This shipment follows the agreement signed between the CIGB and the Center for Research and Production of Vaccines and Medical Biologicals (Polyvac) of Vietnam, which includes a contract for the supply and distribution of 5 million doses of Abdala.

Abdala was the first of three vaccines developed and produced in Latin America and the Caribbean, all in Cuba, and received its authorization for emergency use in Cuba last July 9 and in Vietnam on September 17, shortly before the arrival in Havana of the President of that nation, Nguyen Xuan Phuc.

Around 20 million doses of national vaccines have been applied in Cuba, and a significant number of them correspond to Abdala, whose production was brought forward and allowed, since last May, its massive expansion in the country's capital and other cities.


"Cuba sends to the people of Vietnam doses of the Cuban anti-COVID-19 vaccine Abdala, developed by
@CIGBCuba. Its production platform has been used in other vaccines, registered in more than 30 countries and certified by WHO."


This drug is based on the receptor binding domain (RBD) of the SARS-CoV-2 virus spike protein, its most protruding segment, which is why it is known as a subunit vaccine.

In clinical trials, it showed 92 percent efficacy against symptomatic disease and after its massive application in Havana, studies with the whole population showed 90 percent effectiveness in preventing severe cases, in a context of intense circulation of the Delta variant, more contagious and deadly.

According to the CIGB, the technological platform for the production of Abdala, protein subunits, has a 30-year history of development and production in Cuba, since it has been used in other vaccines administered in the country, in the Latin American and Caribbean region and in Vietnam itself.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Cub ... -0018.html

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At the service of the patient, a hero who does not serve enemy campaigns
Cienfuegos relies on its medical staff to overcome the pandemic situation unraveling in the province for the last few weeks, which is also one of the most complicated in the country

Author: Julio Martínez Molina | informacion@granma.cu

september 20, 2021 14:09:57

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Photo: Granma

The work of the medical staff in the central province has become the work of heroes amidst the current difficulties caused by the tightening of the U.S. blockade imposed on Cuba that closes the access to medicines and equipment needed to tend medical emergencies. In moment like these, humanism lights up the genius and looks for alternative solutions to erase tiredness and solve shortages.

Those are the heroes we are talking about. Not the ones that new slandering campaigns manipulate at convenience, presenting them as “victims” or putting them at the center of fabricated protests due to the conditions in which the country handles COVID-19, and want to make them the spokespersons of their anti-Cuban campaign. The same medical staff they once called representatives of the regime and mocked because the people would applaud them from their balconies every night to express their gratitude to their work.


Our heroes, the real ones, have names and many sleepless nights on their backs. In Cienfuegos, Yoany Ojeda Treto, first and second Degree Specialist in Intensive Care and Emergencies, who has been working in the provincial hospital since 2011, have stories that are difficult to tell, that have stayed in their memory forever, like watching two siblings died side by side, facing each other, due to their disease taking a sharp turn for the worse, and been unable to do anything to help them. However, they save more people than they lose, and that is what keeps them going.

Other heroes are working in the Neonatology Ward, tending to the newborns of mothers who are positive to SARS-COV-2.

The chief of Neonatology services, Dr Anolys Piña Rodríguez, first degree specialist in Neonatology and Integral General Medicine, says that the families in Cienfuegos can trust that neonatologists do, and will do, everything in their hands to save the life of the youngest ones.

“Medical duty shifts are specially equipped and staffed to tend the birth of children from mothers who are suffering or recovering from COVID-19. The resources for this kind of care are guaranteed, even within the limitations imposed by the blockade. Very recently, we delivered by C-section, in the Center for Ambulatory Services (located next to the hospital), the children of Yunisleydis Antúnez, a 27-year-old woman who suffers from COVID-19 and from chronic high blood pressure. It was a twin pregnancy with a normal development. The result was two babies of 3,000 grams each, both in good health.”

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Young doctor Sandra Sobrino Moya, resident of General Medicine and doctor of the community’s doctor office number three in Las Minas neighborhood in the 2nd Area of Cienfuegos, brings Cuban vaccine Abdala to around 20 patients.

“Due to the remoteness and their diseases, they cannot walk the distance, thus we go to their houses. We prepare the material to help those who are bed-ridden and to other people, so everybody receives their shot.”

Leanilis Rodríguez Díaz, her accompanying nurse, says that the patients are very thankful, they even cry of emotion when they receive their shot, because this is a major event in Cuba.

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Her colleague, Olga María Escandón Torres, battled COVID-19, first in Venezuela and later on in in her birth province of Cienfuegos, in Cuba. “As nurses, we are prepared to handle this situation. It is true that in the face of high numbers of sick and death we can be under some stress, but we come with the mission to help save our people and the people of Cienfuegos can trust we will do so,” she concludes.

Translated by ESTI

http://en.granma.cu/cuba/2021-09-20/at- ... -campaigns
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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