Socialist Demands for the COVID-19 Crisis

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10598
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Socialist Demands for the COVID-19 Crisis

Post by blindpig » Fri Jul 02, 2021 1:37 pm

Cuba’s Vaccine Shield and the Five Monopolies that Structure the World: The Twenty-Sixth Newsletter (2021)

JULY 1, 2021
Español

Image
Raúl Martínez (Cuba), Yo he visto (‘I Have Seen’), n.d.

Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

In 1869, at the age of fifteen, José Martí and his young friends published a magazine in Cuba called La Patria Libre (‘The Free Homeland’), which adopted a strong position against Spanish imperialism. The first and only issue of the magazine carried Martí’s poem, ‘Abdala’. The poem is about a young man, Abdala, who goes off to fight against all odds to free his native land, which Martí calls Nubia. ‘Neither laurels nor crowns are needed for those who breathe courage’, Martí wrote. ‘Let us run to the fight … to war, valiant ones’. And in the rousing address by Abdala, comes these lyrical words:

Let the warlike valour of our souls
Serve you, my homeland, as a shield.

Martí was arrested and sentenced to six years of hard labour. Eventually, the Spanish imperial government sent the young Cuban into exile in 1871. He spent this time – much of it in New York – writing patriotic poems, producing political essays and commentary, and organising the resistance to Spanish imperialism. He returned home in 1895, only to be killed shortly afterwards in a skirmish, his legacy cemented in the war against the Spanish in 1898 and in the Cuban Revolution that began in 1959.

The lines from Martí about the ‘warlike valour’ serving as the country’s ‘shield’ form the basis for the name of the new Cuban vaccine, Abdala. This vaccine, the fifth to be produced in Cuba, was developed by the Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (CIGB) in Havana. In announcing the results of their trials, BioCubaFarma, the country’s leading biotechnology and pharmaceutical institution, noted that it had an efficacy rate of 92.28%, almost as high as the efficacy rate of the vaccines by Pfizer (95%) and Moderna (94.1%). The vaccine is administered in three doses, each given with a two-week gap. The Cuban authorities plan to vaccinate three quarters of the population by September. Already, more than 2.23 million vaccines have been administered to the 11 million Cubans on the island, 1.346 million people have been vaccinated with at least one dose, 770,390 with the second dose, and 148,738 with the third dose.



Image
Juan Roberto Diago Durruthy (Cuba), Tu lugar (‘Your Place’), 2006.



Cuba has already planned to export its vaccines to countries around the world and has now produced five different vaccine candidates, including Soberana 02 and the needle-free intranasal vaccine, Mambisa. The latter, which holds great promise for vaccine administration in low-resource countries, is named after guerrilla soldiers who fought in the Ten Year War (1868-1878) for independence from Spain.

Each of these vaccines has been developed under conditions of duress imposed by the illegal US blockade. Since 1992, the UN General Assembly has voted annually against the US blockade, except for 2020, when, due to the pandemic, there was no vote. On 23 June 2021, 184 member states of the United Nations again voted to end this blockade. In the context of the coronavirus pandemic, Cuba’s foreign minister, Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla, said, ‘Like the virus, the blockade asphyxiates and kills. It must stop’. One of the casualties of the blockade has been Cuba’s inability to buy ventilators to treat critically ill patients, since the two Swiss companies (IMT Medical AG and Acutronic) who made them were purchased by a US company (Vyaire Medical, Inc.) in April 2020. Cuba has now developed its own ventilator in response.

At the same time, Cuba suffers from a shortage of syringes. Syringe manufacturers are entangled in one way or another with the US pharmaceutical industry. Terumo (Japan) and Nipro (Japan) have operations in the United States, while B. Braun Melsungen AG (Germany) is in a partnership with Concordance Healthcare Solutions (US). An Indian syringe firm, Hindustan Syringes & Medical Devices Ltd., is linked to Envigo (US), which brings US government scrutiny to the Indian firm. In an act of concrete solidarity, a campaign is underway to raise funds towards the purchase of syringes for Cuba.

Image
Belkis Ayón (Cuba), La consagración III (‘The Consecration III’), 1991.



The Our World in Data project calculates that, as of 29 June, just over 3 billion doses have been administered worldwide, which amount to less than 1 billion people out of the 7.7 billion in the world who have been vaccinated. Just over 23% of the world population has had their first vaccine shot. But the data shows that vaccination drives have been predictably uneven. In low-income countries, only 0.9% of the population has received at least one dose of the vaccine. In April 2021, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Gheybreysus said, ‘There remains a shocking imbalance in the global distribution of vaccines. On average in high-income countries, almost one in four people has received a vaccine. In low-income countries, it’s one in more than 500. Let me repeat that: one in four versus one in 500’. By May 2021, Ghebreyesus said that the world was in a situation of ‘vaccine apartheid’.

In February 2021, in one of our newsletters, Tricontinental: Institute of Social Research noted that we lived in a time of ‘three apartheids’. These apartheids include that of food, money, and medicine. At the heart of the medical apartheid is vaccine nationalism, vaccine hoarding, and, as Ghebreyesus put it, vaccine apartheid. Matters are quite grave. The COVAX vaccine alliance has seen vaccines move out of its reach both because of bilateral deals being made between the richer countries and the vaccine makers and because of the lack of financial support from the richer states to the poorer ones. The trends show that many countries will not see significant enough numbers of their population vaccinated before 2023, ‘if it happens at all’, says the Economist Intelligence Unit.

Image
Raúl Corrales Fornos (Cuba), La caballería (‘The Cavalry’), 1960.

What is the cause of these three apartheids? The control that a handful of companies exercise over the global economy, driven by five types of monopolies, as our friend, the late Samir Amin, laid out:

1.The monopoly over science and technology
2.The monopoly over financial systems
3.The monopoly over access to resources
4.The monopoly over weaponry
5.The monopoly over communications

We are looking closely at this list and the relationship between each of these elements, analysing it to see if anything has been left out. Amin argued that it is not the lack of industrialisation alone that impacts the subordination of countries; what has kept the world in a situation of great inequality, he suggested, were these five monopolies. After all, many countries in the world have developed industries over the past fifty years but remain unable to advance the social agenda of their populations.

Central to the discussion about vaccine apartheid are at least two of these monopolies: the monopoly over finance and the monopoly over science and technology. A lack of finances in hand draws many of the world’s states to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), to various public investors (the Paris Club), or to commercial capital (the London Club). These financiers take their lead from the IMF, which has demanded that countries cut back on several crucial areas of human life – education and health care, for instance. Cutting funds for education drains countries’ potential to develop sufficient numbers of scientists as well as the scientific temper necessary to create essential technologies such as vaccine candidates. Cutting funds for health care systems and adopting intellectual property rules that block the transfer of technology leaves countries disarmed from being able to appropriately deal with the pandemic.

A lack of funds has driven many states to surrender the possibility that they could advance the well-being of their populations (as of April 2020, sixty-four countries spend more to service their debt than on healthcare). It is not enough to demand the transfer of technology to states in the midst of a pandemic so that they can make the vaccine. Technology is yesterday’s science; science is tomorrow’s technology.

To use the social wealth of a population, to teach science, and to establish a basic norm of scientific literacy are essential lessons of the pandemic. These are lessons well-learnt by the Cubans. This is why Cuba has, against all odds, developed five different vaccines. Abdala and Cuba’s four other vaccines stand as a shield against COVID-19. These vaccines emerge out of the social productivity of socialist Cuba, which has not surrendered to the ugliness of the five monopolies.

Warmly,

Vijay

https://thetricontinental.org/newslette ... -vaccines/

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

Image

Campaign for the Elimination of Patents
July 1, 2021
By Pasqualina Curcio – Jun 28, 2021

A debate has been going on worldwide about the exemption of COVID-19 vaccine patents. The director general of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom, warned governments and pharmaceutical companies that “unless we eliminate the virus everywhere, we could end up back at square one.” This statement is mainly due to the fact that the longer we take to vaccinate the world’s population, the more likely the coronavirus will mutate and evade vaccines, making them less effective in containing the disease. A clear example has been Brazil, where several experts warn that it could become a “factory” of variants capable of escaping the effectiveness of vaccines, which, as Adhanom warned, could lead us back to the starting point of the pandemic.

The issue of potential COVID-19 variants is not just a small detail towards understanding why the pharmaceutical industry has flatly refused the request made by governments and the United Nations to lift the patents and, therefore, has not wanted to transfer its licenses, knowledge and technology so that other companies can join in the mass production of vaccines and thus immunize the world’s population in the shortest possible time.

It is estimated that between 10 and 14 billion doses are required by 2021 to guarantee the immunization of 80% of the 7.7 billion people living on the planet, a production capacity that the pharmaceutical companies that have developed the vaccines do not have. In addition, and as if this were not enough, more than two thirds of this total has already been demanded and committed to rich countries, according to reports by the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations.

There are two main obstacles to rapid and effective immunization. First, low production levels due to the low capacity of the companies that have developed the vaccine. Secondly, the unequal distribution of the vaccines produced, which are being shamelessly monopolized by rich countries that have enough vaccines to immunize three or four times their population.

To date, according to the WHO, three quarters of the vaccinated people live in 10 rich countries that account for 60% of the world’s GDP, while 130 countries, home to 2.5 billion people, have barely been able to start vaccinating. Médecins Sans Frontières reports that if the first two billion doses of vaccines were distributed in proportion to the population of each country, global mortality could be reduced by 61%. On the other hand, if the 47 richest countries monopolize the doses, the reduction will be only 33%.

The question that arises is: what are the real reasons for the pharmaceutical industry to refuse to cede its licenses and transfer technology and knowledge, despite the fact that this is a highly contagious and lethal disease that has not only surpassed the healthcare capacity of even high-income countries, but has also claimed the lives of almost four million people, and has had a tremendous impact on the economy and world poverty. What explains the behavior of this industry, knowing that the pandemic will not be controlled until we are all protected? We have two answers to this question.

The first is to avoid a precedent in the relaxation of the mechanism of intellectual property rights that would put at risk the substantial profits, not only associated not only with COVID-19, but also with its healthcare business.

Above the financial sector and after the oil and defense industries, pharmaceuticals is the third-largest profit maker worldwide. Before the pandemic, in 2019, its revenues were estimated at $700 billion USD a year. Patents are nothing more than the legalization of monopolies that grant, for at least 20 years, exclusivity in the production and marketing of medicines, generating a negative effect on access to these goods that are very necessary for the health and life of the people.

Patents grant great power, not only economic but also political, to the pharmaceutical industry. Imagine the power that the owners of the private companies that have developed COVID-19 vaccine candidates currently have. They have the power to decide on the health and lives of literally the entire world. To allow patent flexibilities is to surrender that power.

Secondly, with an estimated average price of $15 USD per vaccine dose multiplied by the 14 billion required this year, the patent relaxation would imply for these few companies, not only to share revenues in the order of $200 billion (an additional 28% on the $700 billion that they regularly, without a pandemic, earn each year) but also to share future revenues related to boosters and new vaccines, depending on the variants.

The pharmaceutical industry has estimated that the virus will not be eradicated with this year’s vaccination, but that third doses and new vaccines will be required due to the appearance of variants. The application of a third dose implies an average of $100 billion of additional revenue for the industry. Relaxing patents and handing over their know-how and technology will put them in the vaccine business for years to come. Eliminating patents puts at stake billions of dollars that the pharmaceutical industry would stop earning. In fact, according to Forbes magazine: “Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson have told investors that they will raise vaccine prices as soon as the pandemic phase is over. Vaccine makers are well aware of the real possibility that people will need annual booster shots and see this as an opportunity to increase revenues.”

We should remember that, incidentally, these companies did not even invest in the research and development of the vaccines. The financing was mainly from the governments with resources coming from our taxes, as it is also the governments that buy and pay for them. It is the case that, in an identical manner, patents work for other drugs, whether they are used to prevent, cure or treat other diseases. COVID-19 is just one more example of the perverse effects of the commercialization of health and patents, which are part of an exploitative and unjust system such as capitalism.

It is not enough for the peoples of the world, governments and international organizations to timidly request the temporary relaxation of patents on the vaccine against COVID-19. The campaign that we must undertake is for the elimination of all patents. The right to property, in this case intellectual property, cannot be above the right to health and life. That is not humane.

https://orinocotribune.com/campaign-for ... f-patents/

Property is not only theft, it is murder.

Image
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10598
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Socialist Demands for the COVID-19 Crisis

Post by blindpig » Mon Jul 05, 2021 1:39 pm

On covid, vaccination and workers' struggle
07/04/2021

What to do

Russia quickly plunged into the third "wave" of the covid epidemic. The number of people infected and hospitalized is on the rise again. The mortality curve has crept up again and sets sad records.

Image
Vaccine with memo to vaccination participant
The authorities, like last year, were caught by surprise. Instead of a unified strategy of behavior - a managerial "mess". What to do with the millions of citizens who rushed to the south on vacation? Closing resorts for the sake of preserving the health and life of citizens? Or not to close resorts to save business? What's the use of the vaccine delivered today, if the much-desired antibodies appear only after 40 days?
The apotheosis of the impotence of the authorities was the circus about "compulsory vaccination". By announcing the start of vaccination back in December 2020, having "the best vaccine in the world", having at their disposal a powerful propaganda apparatus of the state media, the government completely failed the campaign and the formation of the so-called "herd immunity". Unlike the advanced countries of the world, which are already completing this campaign. And even coercion, pressure on people through employers, the authorities did not help. Moreover, it is already necessary to give the "back", as it turns out that the Russian pharmaceutical industry is simply not able to provide the required amount of vaccines.

And in these conditions, when Putin , the government needs to be held accountable for the failure, for the suffering of hundreds of thousands of people, a convenient explanation-justification was found. Like, the people themselves are to blame! They say that the citizens themselves, believing all the covid dissidents there, refuse to get vaccinated and disrupt the campaign! They say that they themselves are to blame for infections, and their illness, and their death!

Well, how can the people trust the authorities, if this very authority is constantly lying and dodging? They used to lie about the retirement age. Now - about the covid. Can't get together? But to express "nationwide support" for Putin, on March 18, almost 80,000 state employees are taken to Luzhniki . So you can still? Putin has never appeared anywhere himself in a mask. So we don't have to? And so on.

Where can the trust in the authorities come from if, as a result of the "optimization", privatization and commercialization of the healthcare industry, in the current conditions, budgetary medicine has found itself in a "deep knockout"?

Where can trust in the authorities come from if citizens see that the authorities have turned the "covid epidemic" into a source of colossal enrichment for the owners of private clinics and pharmaceutical companies? Antibody tests, CT diagnostics for residents of most Russian cities are paid. And the notorious PCR tests often have to be done at their own expense. Not to mention the huge (by the standards of a poor population) costs of current treatment.

What are the working people and communists to do under these conditions?

1.Demand and seek from the authorities to ensure the fundamental rights to protect their health.
2.Demand free, budget-funded tests for Covid diagnostics.
3.Demand adherence to the principle of voluntariness when vaccinating! Let them convince, explain, prove to citizens the effectiveness and safety of vaccination, how safe it can be in the given conditions. Require the responsibility of the state (insurance) for possible side effects of vaccinations.
4.Demand equal access of citizens to highly effective medical care for all citizens. Officials, ministers, governors - in the general queue!
5.Demand effective, at the expense of the budget, rehabilitation for people who have had this disease.
6.Demand broad public scrutiny over the fight against covid.
7.Demand the abolition of the course on the privatization and commercialization of medicine.
8.Demand free medicines for the sick.

Medicine to the people! Life and health are not a commodity!

https://www.rotfront.su/o-kovide-vaktsi ... udyashhih/

Google Translator
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10598
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Socialist Demands for the COVID-19 Crisis

Post by blindpig » Sat Jul 10, 2021 1:01 pm

Efficacy of 91.2% with two doses of Soberana 02 and one of Soberana Plus
Results of clinical trials of this combination of Soberana candidate vaccines were announced yesterday at a meeting of the government’s COVID-19 task force, led by First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez

Author: René Tamayo León | internet@granma.cu

july 9, 2021 09:07:19

Image
Photo: Estudios Revolución

The combination of two doses of the candidate vaccine Soberana 02 and one of Soberana Plus, administered in a 0-28-56 day regimen, was found to have an efficacy of 91.2 percent, in preventing symptomatic cases of COVID-19, reported Dr. Vicente Vérez Bencomo, director of the Finlay Vaccine Institute (IFV), at Thursday's meeting of the Cuban government’s COVID-19 prevention and control task force.

The First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba and President of the Republic, Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, congratulated the IFV and other institutions that participated in the creation of Soberana, "a result,” he said, “that is an indication of how hard our scientists have worked."

Dr. Vérez recalled that the announcement comes exactly 415 days (59 weeks) after the President of the Republic met with a group of scientists at the Cuban Neurosciences Center (Cneuro) and requested that they develop a Cuban vaccine against the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Referring to the meeting at the Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology, a few weeks ago, when the 92.28 percent efficacy of the Abdala vaccine candidate was announced to workers there, Diaz-Canel recalled that he made the request with the conviction that Cuban scientists would succeed.

It was necessary, he pointed out, at the time, to have our own vaccines to achieve sovereignty in the COVID-19 battle, convinced that "Poor countries are not going to be able to have, on short order, the available vaccines that the rich world is producing to prioritize the rich."

He recalled that the result was validated in phase 3 of the clinical trial carried out in eight municipalities of Havana, precisely when the strain originally detected in South Africa (Beta), "considered a "the beast" in terms of resisting vaccines against SARS-CoV-2," was circulating within the capital.

Image
Photo: Estudios Revolución

The characteristics of the Beta strain, however, are not the same as those of the Delta strain detected in India, which, the IFV leader noted, is highly contagious, but much more susceptible to vaccines.

On Thursday afternoon, the Institute’s staff gathered to celebrate the successful results welcomed by all of Cuba.

As Dr. Vérez Bencomo pointed out in a previous meeting with the country's leadership, IFV scientists are only halfway there; "We still have a lot to do, and we will not rest until the entire population is immunized with Cuban vaccines.”

Also leading the government task force meeting were Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz, Vice President of the Republic Salvador Valdés Mesa and Roberto Morales Ojeda, Communist Party of Cuba secretary for Organization and Cadre Policy.

http://en.granma.cu/cuba/2021-07-09/eff ... erana-plus

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

Umelisa SARS-COV-2 antigen, a 100% Cuban diagnostic tool
By July 8, 826 kits were delivered, and by July 15, more than 1,600 will be, providing Cuba’s public health system with more than 705,000 tests to diagnose suspected infections this month

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

july 9, 2021 15:07:01

Image
Cuba’s high-tech Ultramicroanalytical System allows for early detection of several diseases, now including COVID-19. Photo: David Despaigne Brito

The first 644 units of the Umelisa SARS-COV-2 antigen diagnostic, being incorporated into treatment and virus detection protocols in our country, will be delivered soon to the Medication Sales and Distribution Enterprise (Emcomed), after exhaustive effectiveness tests were conducted.

A report on the Cubavisión Internacional television network indicated that the new biotechnological product - developed by the Immunoassay Center and validated at the Pedro Kourí Institute of Tropical Medicine - is ready to contribute to the diagnosis of suspected infections.

According to Irina Valdivia Alvarez, deputy director of the Diagnostic Development and Production area, this test, registered by the Center for State Control of Medicines, Equipment and Medical Devices, identifies, in only four hours, the presence of the virus in asymptomatic patients suspected of a SARS-COV-2 infection.

She added that it is a 100% Cuban made test, both the kit and the raw materials used for its development and production.

As soon as the first 644 units were in the cold chamber, the last stage to which they are subjected before delivery, work was already underway on the next two batches scheduled this month.

By July 8, Valdivia reported, 826 kits were delivered, and by July 15, more than 1,600, providing our health system with more than 705,000 diagnostic tests.

http://en.granma.cu/cuba/2021-07-09/ume ... ostic-tool

It is instructive that Cuban socialism can accomplish this in the face of a 60 year siege. Brings to mind the Soviet Union during WWII.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10598
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Socialist Demands for the COVID-19 Crisis

Post by blindpig » Wed Jul 14, 2021 10:41 am

Image
President Joe Biden visits the Viral Pathogenesis Laboratory at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Md, Thursday, Feb. 11, 2021. Evan Vucci | AP

“Unchallenged Orientalism”: Why Liberals suddenly love the lab leak theory
Posted Jul 13, 2021 by Alan MacLeod

Originally published: “Unchallenged Orientalism”: Why Liberals suddenly love the lab leak theory (July 9, 2021 )

The theory that the COVID-19 pandemic began life in a Chinese laboratory is going viral. Once considering it an anti-science conspiracy theory, the corporate press has done a full 180° turn–and many progressive, alternative media figures are following in its footsteps.

Progressive news show “The Young Turks” recorded what was effectively an apology video to their audience, explaining their new direction. “It does appear that there is some indication that a lab leak in Wuhan, China, is the origin of the coronavirus pandemic,” host Ana Kasparian told viewers. Condemning the scientific journal The Lancet, co-host Cenk Uygur explained that he had falsely placed his faith in scientists with political motives who had led him astray. Writing in The Guardian, left-wing commentator Thomas Frank flagellated himself for his “complacency” in believing the idea was a far-right conspiracy theory. The lab leak is “the most likely explanation for the origin of COVID-19,” Saagar Enjeti told his mostly progressive viewership of “Rising,” announcing that, from now on, we should be “ten times more skeptical of the Chinese government.”

Image
A view of the P4 lab and the Wuhan Institute of Virology is seen in China’s Hubei province, Feb. 3, 2021. Ng Han Guan | AP

This new change in outlook for so many progressive media outlets is not based on new evidence. Rather, it appears to be a result of two new articles and a change in stance from the Biden administration itself. In early May, The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists republished a Medium blog post by controversial science writer Nicholas Wade. In an 11,000-word essay, Wade claims that Wuhan itself is simply far too far away from Yunnan Province–where coronavirus-carrying bats make their home–for it to be the natural source of COVID-19. The most logical explanation, Wade asserts, is that the virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Wade claims that the virus’s furin cleavage site–a point on the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 where the protein can more easily divide to better infiltrate and take over human cells–must be man-made, as no such site exists in natural coronaviruses. He also notes the previously undisclosed conflict of interests that zoologist Peter Daszak has. Daszak was an organizer of the 2020 Lancet letter signed by dozens of top scientists calling the lab leak hypothesis a “conspiracy theory.” However, he did not disclose that his company, the EcoHealth Alliance, has links to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Later that month, The Wall Street Journal released a report alleging that three employees of the Wuhan Institute of Virology came down with flu- or COVID-like symptoms in November 2019 and sought treatment in hospital. Although based solely on anonymous accusations from U.S. officials who refused to go on record, the story went viral and was picked up by a wide range of outlets, including Reuters, The Guardian, Forbes, NBC News, Business Insider, CNN, The New York Post, Yahoo News and The Hill.

Adding some intellectual weight to the theory was a letter published in Science Magazine, in which some 20 academics wrote that further inquiry into the source of the pandemic was necessary (although many, including its chief organizer, were at pains to state elsewhere they were highly skeptical of the lab-leak conspiracy). And after Dr. Anthony Fauci said he was “not convinced” of COVID-19’s natural origin, the Biden administration abruptly changed its position, the President ordering an intelligence-services investigation into the idea, launching the lab leak theory from a discredited fringe idea to an official position with surprising rapidity.

Professor David Robertson–Head of Viral Genomics and Bioinformatics at the University of Glasgow, U.K.–told MintPress:
It’s not very clear, given the lack of new (or any) credible evidence for a lab leak, why it’s been getting so much attention. There was a letter published in Science in May that quite sensibly supports the need for further investigation but this seems to have been hijacked by a vocal minority who are essentially advocates for a lab being involved as opposed to looking at the broader range of possibilities, and what the available evidence points towards.
In addition to mainstream outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, a host of alternative media figures have lent credibility to Wade, basing their new opinions on his work. On the “Bad Faith” podcast with former Bernie Sanders Press Secretary Briahna Joy Gray, Thomas Frank described Wade’s article as an “incredible piece of journalism,” “quite impressive” and “the likeliest explanation.” Gray appeared to agree, the two having a long conversation about the origins of COVID-19 as if Wade’s thesis has effectively been proven correct. Journalist Michael Tracey wrote that Wade’s words prove the theory is “highly plausible.” Current Affairs Editor-in-Chief Nathan J. Robinson praised Wade’s report, agreeing that it is “at the very least, a spectacular coincidence” that COVID-19 exploded so close to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Meanwhile, Enjeti based a segment called “Media’s Lab Leak Failure Is the Next Iraq WMD” on the Wall Street Journal article, telling viewers that the lab leak theory is now “the most likely explanation for the origin of COVID-19.” Popular writer Matt Taibbi also took The Wall Street Journal’s accusations at face value, claiming that “the toothpaste [is] fully out of the tube: there [is] no longer any way to say the ‘lab origin’ hypothesis [is] too silly to be reported upon.”

A theory resting on shaky ground

What is particularly worrying in all this is that there are huge, gaping flaws in the analysis. First, Wade is not some neutral expert but a discredited, racist pseudoscientist. His 2014 book, “A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History,” contends that humanity could be broken down genetically into three distinct groups–Africans, Caucasians and East Asians–and that each are sufficiently genetically distinct from each other as to qualify as subspecies. He argued that Caucasians’ genes could explain “the rise of the West” and that African nations are poorer because they are inherently more violent and lazy, writing: “Variations in their nature, such as their time preference, work ethic and propensity to violence, have some bearing on the economic decisions [Africans] make.” Laughably, he later speculates that Asian women have smaller breasts because that is what is “much admired by Asian men.”

Image
Nicholas Wade, next to the Chinese edition of his seminal work, “A Troublesome Inheritance.”

Perhaps his most controversial claim, however, is that Jewish people have evolved to be genetically predisposed to hoard money, writing:

From a glance at an Eskimo’s physique, it is easy to recognize an evolutionary process at work that has molded the human form for better survival in an arctic environment. Populations that live at high altitudes, like Tibetans, represent another adaptation to extreme environments; in this case, the changes in blood cell regulation are less visible but have been identified genetically. The adaptation of Jews to capitalism is another such evolutionary process.

The book was universally panned by scientists but was acclaimed by a host of neo-Nazi figures. Former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan David Duke, for instance, hailed the work as a “fascinating insight into how Jewish Supremacists attempt to guard the gates of scientific debate.” Of all the many alternative media figures praising Wade’s new revelations about Wuhan, only Robinson mentioned his past. Why a respected organization like The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists published such a person remains a mystery; MintPress asked the Bulletin for clarification but has not received an answer.

Wade’s pseudoscientific claims about the coronavirus furin might have been enough to convince progressive media stars who have no background in the field (as Frank wrote: “I am no expert in epidemics”). But they cannot fool trained scientists, who have hit back.

Virologists Angela L. Rasmussen and Stephen A. Goldstein counter that the furin site of SARS-CoV-2 has odd features that no human would ever design, making it “overwhelmingly likely” that it is natural in origin. Its sequence is suboptimal, meaning that it is relatively inefficient, bearing the hallmarks of “sloppy natural evolution.” “Any skilled virologist hoping to give a virus new properties this way would insert a furin site known to be more efficient,” they conclude.

Furthermore, the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s proximity to the outbreak is not inherently suspicious. Wuhan is a gigantic metropolis, larger than any city in the United States. It is an enormous transport and business hub situated in an area well-known for outbreaks of similar diseases and is, therefore, a natural choice for a research facility such as this. Yet there is a tendency in the West to think of it as some obscure village dominated by a virology lab. There is a myriad of laboratories in Los Angeles conducting not altogether dissimilar research. Yet if an epidemic were to break out there, it is unlikely that a natural origin would be so easily dismissed.

The SARS outbreak of the early 2000s was sparked in the markets of Guangdong, a similar distance from Yunnan as is Wuhan, with few at the time raising any eyebrows. Epidemics and pandemics usually begin in large cities as “pathogens often require heavily populated areas to become established,” one scientific study reminds us.

That is why it is particularly problematic that liberal icons like John Stewart and Stephen Colbert can ridicule the zoonotic transfer hypothesis believed by the vast majority of scientists to be the most likely explanation. “There’s been an outbreak of chocolatey goodness near Hershey, Pennsylvania. What do you think happened?” Stewart joked to an audience of millions.
Maybe it’s the fucking chocolate factory!
If anything, The Wall Street Journal article is more suspect, given that it is based on nothing but anonymous state officials who refuse to share the evidence or go on the record. National security state operatives are among the least trustworthy sources it is possible to encounter, journalistically speaking, as it is part of their job to plant false information in order to alter public discourse. The only group less deserving of blind faith than natsec officials would be anonymous natsec officials. Yet many of the biggest and most embarrassing media blunders in recent years have been based on dodgy data from shadowy spooks feeding dubious intelligence to credulous dupes in the press.

Without a name to match a quote, a story’s credibility immediately drops, as there are no repercussions for the individual if they are untruthful. Sources (or journalists themselves, for that matter) could simply make up anything they wanted with no consequences. Therefore, using anonymous sources is strongly discouraged. The Society of Professional Journalists’ code of ethics insists reporters “identify sources whenever feasible” and that journalists must “always question sources’ motives before promising anonymity.”

Even worse, The Wall Street Journal article’s lead author is Michael R. Gordon, the reporter infamous for co-authorship of a notorious 2002 New York Times article claiming Saddam Hussein was seeking to build weapons of mass destruction, a piece widely credited as a keystone of the push to invade Iraq the following year. For that article, Gordon also relied upon anonymous state officials. That figures in alternative media are blindly repeating his evidence-free assertions while invoking the Iraq WMD scandal, as Enjeti did, is profoundly ironic.

Image
Gordon, famous for co-authoring a notorious NYT article peddling the now-debunked Iraqi WMD claims, is a major proponent of the lab leak theory

Gordon’s claim–that three virologists were hospitalized with flu or COVID-like symptoms in late 2019–has been categorically rejected by Dr. Shi Zhengli, a director at the Institute. Zhengli challenged the U.S. to provide the names of those who got ill, but has received no response. It has also been disputed by the only Western scientist working there at the time. “If people were sick, I assume that I would have been sick–and I wasn’t,” said Dr. Danielle Anderson, who says she is “dumbfounded” by the portrayal of the lab in the West: “What people are saying is just not how it is.”

Josh Cho, a media critic at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, told MintPress that embedded in much of the discussion about the lab leak is a distrust of China and Chinese people, explaining:
There is a largely unchallenged Orientalism or Sinophobia among Western progressives that makes them predisposed to think the Chinese government or Chinese scientists could or would hide evidence for a laboratory origin due to an innate and exceptional penchant for ‘authoritarianism,’ ‘secrecy’ or ‘dishonesty.’ This leads to a presumption of guilt, and an interpretation of every action of the Chinese government as suspicious, when it is most likely what any other government would do in China’s situation.
Even if the anonymous U.S. intelligence proves to be accurate, it may not be particularly surprising or revealing. The Wuhan Institute of Virology is an enormous institution with hundreds of employees. That three people there might develop flu-like symptoms in November is far from suspicious. Furthermore, the implications of going to hospital in China are completely different from in the U.S. In China, healthcare is nationalized and so a hospital visit is not something an individual avoids at all costs–unlike in the U.S., where it can bankrupt you. Moreover, many general practitioners work from hospitals rather than out of small clinics, meaning that “hospital” could simply translate to “sought basic medical consultation.” Thus, if confirmed, The Wall Street Journal scoop still could be completely mundane.

Cold warriors’ favorite theory

As former MintPress staff writer Alex Rubenstein reported late last month, the lab leak theory has been mainstreamed by hackish, hawkish frauds who, for years, have been pushing for war with China. Among its early adopters was Trump advisor Steve Bannon, who claimed in March 2020 that COVID-19 was a Chinese bioweapon unleashed on the world. While advising Trump, Bannon constantly fear mongered about China and declared he had no doubt that the U.S. would be at war with Beijing within a few years. Then-President Trump, who claims that global warming was a “hoax” invented by China to destroy the U.S., insisted he had evidence the virus began in a Chinese lab but refused to divulge it. Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, among the biggest China hawks in Washington, also repeated the conspiracy.

While distinctly unfashionable in 2020, the lab leak idea was kept alive by warmongering neoconservative journalists like Josh Rogin of The Washington Post, who is now a regular guest on progressive media platforms like Krystal Ball and Enjeti’s “Breaking Points.” “You almost have to see it to believe how depraved this is. Indistinguishable from ‘Fox and Friends,’” remarked a dismayed Sam Sacks of Means TV.

These neocon talking points have been laundered into alternative media by those critiquing the establishment, Democratic-aligned press for its complete about-turn on the issue. Appearing on Fox News, Glenn Greenwald praised Rogin and condemned corporate media for their groupthink. “Journalists so often judge things not by what is true or not true but by what is politically beneficial to the partisan audience that they’re serving,” he said, even adding that “maybe Trump was right” about the virus’ origins.

Appearing on “The Jimmy Dore Show,” Taibbi was of a similar mindset, stating:

[quote[Originally what happened with this story was that, like everything else in the Trump era, the coverage of COVID was heavily politicized from the very start. The idea of a lab origin for COVID was associated with Trump, Mike Pompeo and Tom Cotton, so it was automatically bad and a conspiracy theory. And that’s really how the press treated it for the better part of a year.[/quote]

Dore responded that the media were a bunch of “spineless cowards” who pushed a “false narrative” about the lab leak theory being wrong.

Going unconsidered, apparently, is that the Democrats’ change of heart might not have anything to do with new scientific evidence and more to do with the fact that they now control the reins of power and are cynically using the same tactics Republicans used before them to ramp up hostility towards China.

During the Trump administration, Democrats condemned the treatment of immigrants on the border, raising hell about “concentration camps” and “kids in cages.” Yet, as soon as they found themselves in office, the pretense dropped and they pursued largely the same policies on the border. Speaking in Guatemala, Vice-President Kamala Harris sounded positively Trumpian as she warned those listening “do not come” to the United States. “The United States will continue to enforce our laws and secure our borders,” she added. Meanwhile, immigrant children are still being detained in cages, except that media have rechristened them “overflow facilities” and the camps have the word “bienvenidos” (Spanish for “welcome”) painted on their roofs. Despite this, no one in alternative media claims that Trump was right all along about the kids in cages.

Going further back, Obama and the Democrats condemned the Bush administration’s endless wars. Yet once in office, Obama expanded them, and was bombing seven countries simultaneously by the end of his tenure.

Stopping China’s economic rise is a bipartisan priority, and the Biden administration has proven to be every bit as committed to increasing aggressive actions towards Beijing as Trump was. None of this is to say that criticizing establishment media’s abrupt change of direction on the lab leak theory is not important or noteworthy. But it is all being done from the assumption that now the media are on the right track, that the global scientific community is not to be trusted, and that Bannon, Cotton and the rest were ahead of the curve. What many in alternative media appear not to have considered is the possibility that now that the Democrats are in office, they are attempting to weaponize the same smears as a way of increasing the pressure on China, with the media following suit.

Ignoring the science

A large majority of the public now believe COVID-19 started in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Last month, more than three times as many Americans told pollster YouGov that the theory was true than said it was false. Some 83% of Americans also support punishing China if the lab leak is proven correct, including by sanctioning it and forcing it to pay reparations to the dead or affected–something that could bankrupt the country almost overnight. This is music to the neocons’ ears, who likely can barely believe that so many progressive, anti-war voices are going along with their theory.

What is striking about the tone and outlook of the media coverage of the lab leak theory is how strongly it jars with the opinion of scientists. As Cho told MintPress:
A lot of the progressive commentators who are now giving more credibility to the lab leak theory because they are persuaded it’s more plausible now than before don’t seem to be aware of the latest scientific developments and arguments [and] that most scientists are making for the case that SARS-CoV-2 developed naturally.
Professor Robertson was of a similar opinion:
At some point the lab-leak narrative seems to have become a story in its own right and has been written about as if it’s an equivalent possibility to a natural origin for SARS-CoV-2, which is simply not the case. The available evidence supports zoonotic spillover similar to the first SARS-virus.
In March, a large team of international experts from the World Health Organization traveled to China and concluded that a lab leak was “extremely unlikely.” The leader of the team, Danish scientist Dr. Peter Ben Embarek, said that after visiting Wuhan he is more confident than ever that the idea is false. Yet media reporting on the study came away with exactly the opposite conclusion, sowing discord and doubt. “Theory that COVID came from a Chinese lab takes on new life in wake of WHO report,” ran NPR’s headline.

Writing in Wired, scientist and science communicator Adam Rogers criticized much of the coverage. “The evidence hasn’t changed since spring of 2020. That evidence was always incomplete, and may never be complete. History and science suggest the animal-jump is way more likely than the lab-leak/cover-up,” he wrote, comparing lab leak theorists to evolution deniers and tobacco lobbyists sowing doubt by insisting we “teach the controversy” where there is none.

Dan Samorodnitsky, senior editor of Massive Science and a figure who has a background working in virus research, was even more scathing about the return of the theory. “If the question is ‘are both hypotheses possible?’ the answer is yes…If the question is ‘are they equally likely?’ the answer is absolutely not,” he wrote, explaining:
One hypothesis requires a colossal cover-up and the silent, unswerving, leak-proof compliance of a vast network of scientists, civilians, and government officials for over a year. The other requires only for biology to behave as it always has, for a family of viruses that have done this before to do it again. The zoonotic spillover hypothesis is simple and explains everything. It’s scientific malpractice to pretend that one idea is equally as meritorious as the other.
“I would be embarrassed to stand up in front of a room of scientists, lay out both hypotheses, and then pretend that one isn’t clearly, obviously better than the other,” Samorodnitsky concluded.

Confidence in a natural origin of COVID-19 has actually grown over time, as the virus’s evolutionary trajectory has undermined the idea that it was artificially designed, not that one would guess that from listening to media or to politicians. Meanwhile, as more investigation is done into the earliest patients, it is clear that a majority of them–including two of the first three documented cases–were at the Huanan wet market where a wide range of wild animals that could potentially carry the virus were sold. There are still zero confirmed cases of staff falling ill at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a building over 17 miles away from Huanan market, where data mapping shows that early cases were clustered around.

Earlier this week, The Lancet, which came in for considerable criticism for its previous publication condemning lab leak conspiracy theorists, refused to back down, maintaining that the idea “remain[s] without scientifically validated evidence that directly supports it” (It did however, include a conflict of interests section this time, tacitly accepting that this part of Wade’s criticism was indeed valid). Its authors also directly warned of the danger of scapegoating China. “Recrimination has not, and will not, encourage international cooperation and collaboration,” they wrote.

It is time to turn down the heat of the rhetoric and turn up the light of scientific inquiry if we are to be better prepared to stem the next pandemic, whenever it comes and wherever it begins.

The coming war on China

The backdrop of the Biden administration’s sudden change of heart to parrot its predecessor is the increased U.S. buildup of hostilities against Beijing. President Joe Biden recently stated that the defining struggle of the 21st century will be that of the U.S. against China. Throughout 2020, the President’s team quietly stated that their entire industrial and foreign policy would revolve around “compet[ing] with China,” with their top priorities being “dealing with authoritarian governments, defending democracy and tackling corruption, as well as understanding how these challenges intersect with new technologies, such as 5G, artificial intelligence, quantum computing and synthetic biology.”

Earlier this year, NATO think tank the Atlantic Council published a 26,000-word report laying out its strategy to suffocate the People’s Republic. It advised Biden to draw a number of red lines around the country, past which the U.S. would directly intervene (presumably militarily). These include Chinese attempts to expand into the South China Sea, an attack on the disputed Senkaku Islands, and moves against Taiwan’s independence. A North Korean strike on any of its neighbors would also necessitate an American response against China, the report insists, because “China must fully own responsibility for the behavior of its North Korean ally.” Any backing down from this stance, the Council states, would result in national “humiliation” for the United States. If this could all be established, it noted, regime change in Beijing could be a distinct possibility. Top military officials like Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster have called for the establishment of an “Asian NATO” to achieve this dream. already there are well over 400 military bases encircling the country.

The U.S. is also conducting military operations in the region, readying itself for a potential war. Last summer, American ships sailed to the Chinese coast, the U.S.S. Rafael Peralta coming to within 41 nautical miles of the coastal megacity Shanghai. Meanwhile, American planes, including nuclear bombers, fly overhead, attempting to gain intelligence on Chinese defenses.

In addition to the military buildup, the U.S. has begun an economic and information war against Beijing, the Trump administration placing sanctions on the country and attempting to halt the expansion of the Belt and Road initiative, block Huawei’s global 5G rollout, and force Chinese-owned social media app TikTok to sell to an American company. At the same time, Twitter, under counsel from a U.S.-funded think tank, decided to delete more than 170,000 Chinese accounts in a single day, the think tank having accused them of spreading pro-China narratives.

The result of the increased hostilities has been the meteoric rise of anti-China sentiment in the U.S., along with a similar spike in anti-Asian hate crimes. The number of Americans seeing China as their number one enemy has more than doubled in 12 months. This is not a partisan issue, according to Pew Research, with a similar increase in “get tough on China” attitudes among Democratic and Republican voters.

It is this context in which the return of the lab leak theory should be seen. Lab leaks do happen. But there is precious little hard evidence that such is the case here. That so many of the nation’s top alternative news figures–individuals who stood against U.S. wars and against similar campaigns, such as RussiaGate–are buying into this one is remarkable. This is especially the case in light of the fact that the evidence is so weak and comes from highly discredited sources, while scientists remain highly skeptical of the theory.

The lab leak hypothesis was first pushed by the far-right and signal boosted by President Trump. In recent weeks, the Democrats have appropriated it wholesale, as they have with several other Republican policies. Corporate media’s newfound interest in the theory has nothing to do with its veracity, as many in alternative spaces have alleged.

The lab leak theory bears a striking resemblance to the weapons of mass destruction hoax of 2002-03, not only in the fact that one of its key players is literally the same journalist using potentially the same anonymous sources, but also in the bipartisan political and media support for the project, all while ignoring the opinions of the scientific community. That so many in alternative media who question war and U.S. intervention not only cannot see that, but are invoking the WMD story to bolster their own side, is extraordinary, and shows how badly the need is to build up a healthy media ecosystem.

Between 2001 and 2003, the public was subjected to a constant barrage of pro-war propaganda. But at least nascent alternative media offered a dissenting voice. Anti-war voices pushing the lab leak theory might one day find it is too late to stop the clock on the dangerous drive towards a second Cold War. If there is any conflict with China, it will make Iraq look like a tea party by comparison. But truth, in war, is always the first casualty.

https://mronline.org/2021/07/13/unchall ... ak-theory/

What I don't get is how the authors might conceive a "healthy media ecosystem" given the capitalist structure of video information/entertainment, a capitalists cartel driven by profit and class interest. It can only get worse.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10598
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Socialist Demands for the COVID-19 Crisis

Post by blindpig » Thu Jul 29, 2021 12:59 pm

Latest on the COVID-19 pandemic
chinadaily.com.cn | Updated: 2021-07-28 10:51
We provide the latest updates and crucial information on the global COVID-19 pandemic here.

July 29

Outside China
Image

China
Image

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20210 ... c2b49.html

It seems the stats for 'Outside China' wouldn't take. All capitalists, shame I guess...see link.

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

Review refutes lab-leak theory claims
By MAY ZHOU in Houston | China Daily Global | Updated: 2021-07-29 05:45

22 scientists conclude in paper that virus likely crossed from animals

The virus that caused the COVID-19 pandemic almost certainly originated from a wild animal and not from a laboratory leak, according to a report from nearly two dozen leading virus experts from around the globe.

Among the 22 contributors to the report is Stephen Goldstein, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. Their paper, "The Origins of SARS-CoV-2: A Critical Review", was published in early July.

It concluded: "The documented epidemiological history of the virus is comparable to previous animal market-associated outbreaks of coronaviruses with a simple route for human exposure."

The authors of the review, led by Edward Holmes from the University of Sydney, are scientists from universities and research institutes in countries including the United States, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Austria, Australia and China.

Goldstein, in elaborating on the findings, told the Salt Lake Tribune newspaper: "If you look at where the first cases in Wuhan were, there's a really striking concentration of those cases starting in the neighborhoods surrounding this market (Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market) and spreading outward from there.

"Similarly, the excess deaths observed in Wuhan begin in the part of the city that includes that market and then spread to other parts of the city."

Besides the geographic evidence, Goldstein said that those markets were selling animals that are susceptible to carrying the virus.

The review refutes the claims in theories advanced by some that the virus that causes COVID-19 likely originated from an engineered coronavirus that escaped from Wuhan Institute of Virology, or WIV.

"There is no evidence that any early cases had any connection to the WIV, in contrast to the clear epidemiological links to animal markets in Wuhan, nor evidence that the WIV possessed or worked on a progenitor of SARS-CoV-2 prior to the pandemic," stated the review, in referring to the name of the virus. "The suspicion that SARS-CoV-2 might have a laboratory origin stems from the coincidence that it was first detected in a city that houses a major virological laboratory that studies coronaviruses."

Goldstein drew the same conclusion. "There's no real reason to put any weight on the possibility of a lab leak right now. We've got nothing that points to the lab other than suspicion and innuendo based on the idea of not trusting China," he said.

Goldstein thinks that objective examination is important for preventing future outbreaks.

"If we don't figure out how this happened and generate the political will to eliminate the situations that allow it to happen, then it's going to keep happening," he said.

Commenting on the review, Jonathan Stoye, group leader of Retrovirus-Host Interactions Laboratory at the Francis Crick Institute of the UK, said the lab-leak theories "remain essentially speculative, at times verging on conspiratorial".

Stoye said: "The current preprint provides a refreshingly clear and reasoned description of the virological events that have taken place during the emergence of the pandemic virus. It makes a strong case for the natural origin of the virus followed by on-going adaptation in humans.

"The continuing evolution of the virus to give new variants, highlighted by the independent acquisition of the N501V change on multiple occasions, is clearly inconsistent with the notion of a purposely manipulated virus optimized for growth on human cells."

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20210 ... 6515f.html

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

Cuba Hits Single-Day Record COVID-19 New Cases With 9323

Image
The Cuban Ministry of Public Health (MINSAP) on Monday reported that for the second consecutive day, the country reported more than 8,000 COVID-19 cases, showing a high contagion rate. | Photo: Twitter @caribbeannewsuk

Published 28 July 2021 (14 hours 14 minutes ago)

Cuba has reached a new record of COVID-19 cases for a single day, in the midst of a ferocious US-led media and diplomatic campaign that seeks to discredit the island`s efforts to protect its population while fighting the pandemic and exacerbate an internal crisis.

Cuban health authorities on Wednesday reported 9,323 new Covid-19 cases, the highest number in a day, so the total number of contagions since March 2020 has risen to 358,378.

Dr. Francisco Duran, national director of Epidemiology at the Ministry of Public Health (MINSAP), reiterated the need to redouble self-care amid the pandemic peak in Cuba.

In his regular press briefing on television, Dr. Duran added that 43,593 active patients are in hospitals nationwide, including 43,243 who are clinically stable, 350 who are being treated in intensive care units, 201 who are seriously ill, and 149 who are in a critical condition.

The expert informed that 8,016 people were discharged from Cuban hospitals on Tuesday, so the number of recuperated patients rose to 312,169.

Dr. Duran noted that 68 people died on Tuesday due to complications related to the disease, so the death toll increased to 2,560.


#CoronavirusCuba Cuba has 43593 active cases with Covid-19; 43243 are stable.
In intensive care, 201 severe and 149 critical cases are being treated.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, the country has had 358,378 confirmed cases,
312,169 discharged, 2 evacuated, 54 returned, and 2,560 dead.


Cuba's chief epidemiologist said that 8,945,084 doses of Covid-19 vaccine candidates have been administered in Cuba through health interventions, intervention studies, and clinical trials.

Meanwhile, worldwide as of July 27, 190 countries and 32 territories have reported cases of COVID-19, with 195 million 911 thousand 108 confirmed cases (+ 569 thousand 607), 14 million 99 thousand 262 active cases, and 4 million 192 thousand 146 deaths (+ 9 thousand 380) for a case fatality rate of 2.14% (=).

In the Americas region, 77 million 255 thousand 199 confirmed cases (+ 149 thousand 974) were reported, 39.43% of the total number of cases reported in the world, with 7 million 149 thousand 556 active cases and 2 million 16 thousand 403 deaths (+ 2 thousand 709) for a case fatality rate of 2.61% (=).

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Cub ... -0021.html
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10598
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Socialist Demands for the COVID-19 Crisis

Post by blindpig » Wed Aug 11, 2021 1:23 pm

Why the US is "No 1" in eight aspects of COVID-19 response?
Xinhua | Updated: 2021-08-11 09:01

Image
Cai Meng/China Daily

A research report exposing the truth about America's fight against COVID-19 was made public on Monday by three think tanks in Beijing.

According to the report titled "'America Ranked First'?! The Truth about America's Fight against COVID-19," the United States is well deserved to be the world's No. 1 anti-pandemic failure, the world's No. 1 political-blaming country, the world's No. 1 pandemic spreader, the world's No. 1 politically-divisive country, the world's No. 1 currency-abusing country, the world's No. 1 turbulent country during the pandemic, the world's No. 1 disinforming country, and the world's No. 1 country advocating origin tracing terrorism.

The report was jointly released by the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies of the Renmin University of China, the Taihe Institute and the Intellisia Institute.

The following are some key points from the report.

FOR PARTISAN COMPETITIONS, NOT FOR THE LIVES

As of Aug. 7, 2021, the United States had reported 35,530,951 cumulative confirmed cases of COVID-19, including 613,658 deaths. In terms of both numbers, the United States ranks first in the world.

Behind the cold numbers lies the domestic politics of the United States -- particularly the highly politicized partisanship, which has claimed the lives of many Americans "who need not have died."

"It's a slaughter," said William Foege, an American epidemiologist.

ANTI-SCIENCE AND AGAINST COMMON SENSE

The US government's efforts in pandemic prevention and control, policy measures, and virus source investigation ran contrary to science and common sense, and are the direct reasons why the United States is a "failed country in fighting the pandemic."

Serious violation of common scientific knowledge: The US government spread false information on anti-intellectualism through various channels such as the White House press conference, mass media, and social media.

Covering up the truth: The first COVID-19 case in the United States was officially reported on January 21, 2020. However, increasing evidence suggests that the actual emergence of an outbreak in the country happened much earlier.

Presumption of guilt involving virus origin tracing: The US government repeatedly encouraged its allies and hijacked the World Health Organization to hype the so-called "evidence" and "convict" China. According to a US media report, senior White House officials pressured the intelligence community to link the COVID-19 virus to the Wuhan virology institute.

Suppression of scientists: To advance political goals on the pretext of the pandemic, the US government has suppressed scientists and throttled professional opinions. Scientists who denied the "lab leak theory" have been subjected to online harassment. This has not only affected their normal work but also jeopardized their personal safety.

SYSTEM FAILURES RESULT IN UNMANAGEABLE PANDEMIC

"Disunited America" pattern of response to the pandemic: The federal system in the United States, plagued by excuse-making partisanship, led to a "disunited" response to the pandemic.

Power checks and balances become power games: During the pandemic, the horizontal separation of power evolved from a check and balance of power to a game of power under the manipulation of partisan disputes. The United States has so far had confusing data on the pandemic. On the one hand, it has not been treating confirmed cases with full capacity in a timely manner. On the other hand, it has wasted a lot of valuable medical resources due to the lack of unified and effective coordination.

Everything for the capital: Save the stock market but not the people. The Federal Reserve took "extraordinary" measures to increase money supply. In fact, the United States in a year and a half printed nearly half of all the dollars for more than 200 years. Countries around the world had to bear the burden of inflation, instability, and "bubble" pressures that they should not have suffered.

EXACERBATED SOCIAL GAP

Steep rise in unemployment and worsening disparity between the rich and the poor: The COVID-19 pandemic has seen US business closures and waves of unemployment occurring faster and on a larger scale than expected. The lower class and other vulnerable groups are facing higher risks of unemployment. The gap between rich and poor further widened as wealth flowed into the hands of a few more quickly.

Intensification of racial conflicts: The conspiracy about the origins of COVID-19 has fueled bullying and hatred toward Asians. Asian-American discrimination cases nearly doubled in March 2021 alone.

Social unrest: Social unrest is a "chronic disease" in the United States. Sadly, the pandemic is acting as an "amplifier" to further exacerbate social tensions. This year, the US topped the list of crime rates in developed countries, much higher than countries such as the United Kingdom, Canada, and Spain, as well as many developing countries. Social unrest manifests itself in three main ways: guns out of control, hate crimes and political chaos.

The general public has a sense of anxiety and powerlessness: A report titled "Historic Shift in Americans' Happiness Amid Pandemic" by the National Opinion Research Center, University of Chicago, released in June 2020, shows that Americans are at their lowest level of happiness ever.

WILLFUL DESTRUCTION OF GLOBAL PANDEMIC RESISTANCE

Letting the virus be exported to act as a "spreader country": In the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak, more than 20 million US citizens were still traveling abroad. The United States has continued to export the virus outside its borders, making it a veritable "proliferator." The country has an inescapable responsibility for the spread of infections globally.

Rejection of international vaccine cooperation: In the early stages of promoting COVID-19 vaccination, the United States engaged in "vaccine nationalism" and created an "immunization divide," politicizing vaccine cooperation and impeding global cooperation on vaccines, treatment, and joint prevention and control. Such actions made it difficult for poor countries to obtain vaccines, leading to an imbalance in the global vaccine supply.

Duke University's Center for Global Health Innovation estimates that by the summer of 2021, the United States may have a surplus of 300 million or more doses of COVID-19 vaccine. The Wall Street Journal reported on May 17 that the United States had exported only 3 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine, less than one percent of its vaccine production.

Weaponizing the pandemic by blaming other countries: The United States has turned a global public health disaster into a major power tussle by politicizing scientific issues such as the anti-pandemic model, the origin tracing of the pandemic, and the effectiveness of the vaccine, shifting the blame to the outside world and misleading the international community.

The terrorism of tracing the origin of the virus: A "virus" even deadlier than the COVID-19 is the growing "retroactive terrorism" led by the United States. Washington has strongly promoted the so-called virus tracing in other countries, coercing the World Health Organization and some scientists to give up their objective and impartial positions in an attempt to make them bow down in front of hegemony and bullying.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20210 ... 68067.html
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10598
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Socialist Demands for the COVID-19 Crisis

Post by blindpig » Thu Aug 12, 2021 11:51 am

"Placing the United States as the first country to handle the pandemic is a disregard for history and even human ethics," say scientists (Photo: Liu Rui / Global Times)
TRUTHS AND QUESTIONS ABOUT THE PANDEMIC MELT US GLOBAL LEADERSHIP
11 Aug 2021 , 8:57 am .

Image
"Placing the United States as the first country to handle the pandemic is a disregard for history and even human ethics," say scientists (Photo: Liu Rui / Global Times)

There are multiple measurable data that show how the leadership of the United States is melting. The strongest indicator is their own media agendas that hide certain realities while distracting attention from others. Such is the case in handling the pandemic in which both the Trump and Biden administrations have taken missteps in burst mode.

Perhaps the most eloquent X-ray of how the mismanagement of the pandemic is covered up is Biden's announcement last May regarding a report delivered by the intelligence community that showed divergences on the origins of the pandemic. According to the president, there were two "elements" of the community that leaned towards the hypothesis that wild animals were the source, while one leaned towards a laboratory origin, "all with low or moderate confidence," he added.

Although the World Health Organization (WHO) conducted an extensive investigation last January, which concluded that the most likely origin was that the virus had spread from bats to humans through an unspecified animal intermediary, Biden declared that "the United States will also continue to work with like-minded partners around the world to pressure China to engage in a comprehensive, transparent, and evidence-based international investigation and to provide access to all relevant data and evidence."

The White House criticized the WHO report as incomplete and lacking crucial data, while WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said: "I don't think this assessment was comprehensive enough," and that the theory of the lab leak needed further investigation, all after having confirmed the results months ago.

Image
Most of the public health community does not believe that the origin of the new coronavirus was the Wuhan Institute of Virology (China), however both Biden and Trump support the hypothesis to cover up the mismanagement of the pandemic (Photo: Héctor Retamal / AFP)

These positions coincide, like many others of Biden, with that of Trump, whose director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC, for its acronym in English), Robert Redfield, said earlier this year that he believed that the virus had most likely escaped from the Wuhan laboratory.

However, Anthony Fauci, who heads the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and serves as Biden's advisor on the coronavirus, said most of the public health community disagrees.

STATEMENTS AND QUESTIONS FROM CHINA

Last Monday, August 9, the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies of the Renmin University of China (RDCY), the Taihe think-tank and the Intellisia Institute jointly published a report called " The truth about the United States' fight against covid-19 "in which they analyze five main aspects related to the failure of the United States in its response to the pandemic, such as its highly politicized partisanship, its unscientific and anomalous measures in the prevention and control of the epidemic, the growing social inequality exacerbated by the pandemic and its intentional destruction of the global resistance to the pandemic.

The report says the United States deserves to be called number one in the world in eight respects: pandemic response failure, political blame, spread of the pandemic, political division, currency abuse, upheaval of the pandemic period, the country of disinformation and country of terrorism about origin.

While the cartelized medium Bloomberg published an article entitled "The best and worst places to be while the world finally reopens", which highlighted the health management developed by the United States to the detriment of other countries, Wang Wen, executive dean of the RDCY, declared that placing this country as the first country to handle the pandemic is a disregard for history and even human ethics.

Image
The report issued by several groups of Chinese scientists describes the failure of the United States against covid-19 and questions that it intends to demand transparency having questioned facilities such as Fort Detrick (Photo: Liu Rui / Global Times)

" For the last half year, the United States has been shirking its responsibility, not a single American official tried to rethink the situation of the epidemic in the United States or resign due to its failure to fight the epidemic, while this report serves to draw lessons of the failure of the United States and prevent them from occurring in the future and calls for solidarity to fight the epidemic , " Wang said.

The report affirms that the systemic failure of the United States in the fight against COVID-19 has its origin in the lucrative nature of capitalism: there is talk of the "supremacy of human rights" while acting in the interests of the capital, and the socially Darwinian "law of the fittest" is adopted in its response to public health crises.

He adds that, while exporting the virus to the world, the United States has also turned the global public health disaster into a struggle of higher power models by politicizing scientific issues such as the antipanddemic model, tracing the origins of the pandemic and the efficacy of vaccines, shifting the blame abroad and misleading the international community.

The aforementioned report recalls that former President Donald Trump promoted disinformation about covid-19 by showing how until May 26, 2020 he was mentioned in about 38% of false reports in the English media about the disease.

However, the Biden administration, which promised to reshape the American image as a responsible power under the slogan "America is back," deepened the lack of respect for science in aspects such as tracing the origins of the virus. Not only does he refuse to carry out multi-point and multidimensional tracking around the world, but he also rekindled the "lab leak theory" shortly after taking office for political gain, possibly with sectors that are adept at the tycoon.

The document is asked:

*What is the outbreak of the so-called "respiratory disease" or "white lung disease" of unknown cause in the United States in the second half of 2019 really about?
*What kind of research is taking place at Fort Detrick and other biological labs around the country?
*Is it related to covid-19?
*How were the security measures applied?
*Is it related to the origins of the global covid-19 outbreak?

OBVIOUS FAILURE: THE DATA SPEAKS

As of Monday, August 9, the United States reported 35 million 775 thousand 272 confirmed cases of infections and 616 thousand 864 deaths from covid-19. Figures that cannot be surpassed by India, even though this subcontinental country has been a victim of the Delta variant, highly contagious and dangerous that has left 31 million 969 thousand 954 infections at the end of this note.

The report notes that the parties, both Democratic and Republican, are "doing everything to obtain political benefits" and are full of disagreements when carrying out the prevention and control of the pandemic, so that the period is constantly lost. window to take effective anti-pandemic measures and people's lives are sacrificed for their sectarian interests.

As a result, the Covid-19 outbreak has not been effectively controlled and more than 600,000 Americans have died. "It's a carnage," said William Foege, an American epidemiologist.

The aforementioned skein of interests has forced the political elite to make unscientific decisions and against common sense, to the point that, as mentioned, Trump became "the greatest promoter of false information about covid-19." Although they report growing evidence that shows how an outbreak occurred in the United States before January 21, 2020, the presumption of guilt in tracing the origin of the virus continues to be established under the anticipated conclusion of the "origin of the Wuhan laboratory" and obstructing scientific tracing work.

In addition, for purely political purposes, the United States has silenced the scientists and professional views of those who denied the "lab leak," who were subjected to online violence or physical threats.

Later, the report details how a pattern of resistance from the US federal system (or "disunited America"), under the competition between the two great parties, did not assume responsibilities and gave rise to prevarication at different levels. Furthermore, the horizontal separation of power did not play an effective role during the pandemic and instead shifted from a check and balance of power to a power play under the manipulation of partisan disputes.

In its quest to save capital, the Federal Reserve took "extraordinary" steps to create more money, and the US stock market has skyrocketed since bottoming out on March 23, 2020. Between that date and January 2021, the combined wealth of more than 600 American billionaires increased 38.65%, from $ 2.947 billion to $ 4.85 billion.

In a short period of time, 20.5 million people lost their jobs, almost double the number registered during the financial crisis that occurred between 2007 and 2009. Biden himself said in August 2020 that the unemployment figure reached up to 50 million Americans, that 1/6 of the businesses had closed and that more than 10 million had lost their health insurance.

Image
71% of people between 40 and 54 years old, added to 65%, between 24 and 39 years old, said they were in financial distress in August 2020 (Photo: Shannon Stapleton / Reuters)

The gap between rich and poor widened even further as wealth plunged into the hands of a few. As an example, he points out that during Thanksgiving 2020, millions of Americans had to turn to charity help to avoid hunger as the collective net worth of America's 614 billionaires increased by $ 931 billion. during the pandemic.

Toxic conspiracy theories about the origins of covid-19 have fueled harassment and hatred against Asians, more and more anti-Asian incidents have been reported to Stop AAPI Hate since the start of the pandemic, and the peak of discrimination cases almost ended. it doubled in March of this year, during Biden's "inclusive" government.

Covid-19 vaccination rates vary greatly based on skin color. As of March 3, 2021, the vaccine coverage rate in 38 Union states and the District of Columbia was three white people vaccinated for every two African Americans and one Hispanic.

As the pandemic has hit the US economy hard, feelings of anxiety and helplessness among Americans have been exacerbated. A CDC study published on August 14, 2020 shows eloquent data:

*40.9% of the adults surveyed declared having mental health problems.
*13.3% declared having started or increased substance use.
*10.7% seriously considered suicide.
*The number of calls to crisis intervention lines grew by 300%.

THE UNITED STATES ON THE THRESHOLD OF HEALTH COLLAPSE?

In the framework of a third wave, new daily cases have soared to 118,000, the highest number since February, due to the rebound of the Delta variant, highly transmissible and present in 93% of the most recent cases, while that deaths have increased by 89% in the last two weeks, despite a global decline, and children's hospitals in states like Florida are "overwhelmed" with more young people affected.

The director of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins, said on Sunday 8 August at the "This Week" program chain ABC , that the United States is failing in its fight against the pandemic and that "we should never have come to where we are now. "

Data from August 9 indicate that the average of the previous seven days was 89,977 new daily cases, a 33.7% increase compared to the previous seven days (67,274). The current average for the last seven days is 30.9% higher compared to the peak observed on July 20, 2020 (68,717).

Compared to the average of two weeks ago, the increase in cases has reached 111% while more than 97% of the US population lives in areas of high or substantial transmission.

Image
More than 97% of the US population lives in areas of high or substantial transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 virus (Photo: CDC)

In the city of Austin (Texas), with 2.4 million inhabitants, there are only six beds of intensive care units (ICU) while in the entire state , inhabited by 29 million inhabitants, there are 493 beds.

These effects have raised fear of the Delta variant and led to increased vaccination rates, yet millions of people, especially in conservative regions, remain skeptical despite scientific evidence supporting the safety of vaccines.

Collins added that "if we had been more effective in vaccinating everyone, we would not be in the situation that we find ourselves in now with the Delta variant." For his part, the director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, Anthony Fauci, warned that if the Delta variant is not controlled, another variant much more dangerous than this one may emerge.

Children under the age of 12 cannot yet receive vaccinations, and Collins reported that the number of children hospitalized with covid has risen to 1,450, an all-time high. This invoked the controversy over the use of masks, whereupon the official stated that if students who return to traditional schools are not forced to wear masks, "this disease will spread much more" and added that it is most likely that it will spread. lead to outbreaks in schools, forcing children to return to distance learning "which is exactly what we want to avoid."

The tension created by the United States against the rest of the emerging powers and countries that do not align themselves with its unipolar dogma is one of the elements that, together with the hoarding of vaccines and the refusal to take efficient prevention measures, prevent the pandemic from subsiding and countries acquire herd immunity.

Venezuela, along with more than 30 countries, suffer the effects of unilateral coercive measures that subject them to scarcity and dispossession, increasing the risk of collapse in the face of the pandemic, so the disaster caused by their bad internal policies is not the only way through which the new coronavirus serves the northern country to expand global chaos.

https://misionverdad.com/globalistan/ve ... al-de-eeuu

Google Translator

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

Over 1.8 Bln Doses of COVID-19 Vaccines Administered in China

Image
Top priority should always be given to epidemic containment, said Ma Xiaowei, head of the NHC, warning against any slackness in the anti-virus fight. | Photo: Twitter/ @ZouYueTweets

Published 11 August 2021

China has stepped up efforts to prevent hospital-acquired COVID-19 infections and strengthen nucleic acid testing, as the country is reining in a resurgence of locally transmitted cases.


More than 1.8 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines had been administered in China by Tuesday, the National Health Commission (NHC) said Wednesday.

China has stepped up efforts to prevent hospital-acquired COVID-19 infections and strengthen nucleic acid testing, as the country is reining in a resurgence of locally transmitted cases.

Top priority should always be given to epidemic containment, said Ma Xiaowei, head of the NHC, warning against any slackness in the anti-virus fight.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Ove ... -0021.html

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

Cuba Did Not Reject Covax, Prioritizes Its Vaccines Instead

Image
Cuba has managed to complete the immunization of 25 percent of its 11 million people. | Photo: Twitter/ @CarlosO28859673

The initiative created by the World Health Organization (WHO) aims to guarantee equal distribution of vaccines. Still, thus far, it has only been able to send shots to 15.7 percent of the world population, while Cuba has managed to complete the immunization of 25 percent of its 11 million people.

Cuban scientists said on Wednesday that the Caribbean did not refuse to participate in the COVAD mechanism although it chose to develop its vaccine instead. This, as the scientists sent a letter to the U.S. president pointing why Biden's comments that Cuba is "a failed state" were false.

'In addition to the fact that the decision was to design our programs with the available economic resources and despite the intensification of United States blockade, Cuba does not belong to Covax either, since it is not among the 92 low and medium-income economies that meet the requirements to receive support from the anticipated market commitment,' the director of biomedical research at the Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology Center (CIGB), Dr. Gerardo Guillen said.


"Cuba has not refused to receive vaccines from Covax, but it does not rank on the list of 92 developing nations that will receive free immunogens. Cuba created a strategy for the production of vaccine candidates and #vaccines, since the beginning of the pandemic."
The initiative created by the World Health Organization (WHO) aims to guarantee equal distribution of vaccines but thus far it has only been able to send shots to 15.7 percent of the world population, while Cuba has managed to complete the immunization of 25 percent of its 11 million people.

Although the production of medicines in Cuba is currently enduring a crisis induced by the U.S. blockade, the country continues its immunization plan now extended to minors and pregnant women.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Cub ... -0017.html
Published 11 August 2021
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10598
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Socialist Demands for the COVID-19 Crisis

Post by blindpig » Fri Aug 13, 2021 1:33 pm

Cuba Has Administered Over 11 Million Doses of Its Vaccines

Image
Three out of five Cuban vaccine candidates meet the 50 percent efficacy requirement of the World Health Organization (WHO). | Photo: Twitter/ @BrunoRguezP

Published 12 August 2021

According to the Ministry 4, 705,414 people have received the first dose of the vaccines, which accounts for 42 percent of the population. Also, 25.9 percent have received the second dose.

Cuba's Ministry of Health reported on Thursday that over 11 million doses have been administered in the country as its COVID-19 vaccination campaign advances.

According to Ministry 4, 705,414 people have received the first dose of the vaccines, which accounts for 42 percent of the population. Also, 25.9 percent have received the second dose.


"As of August 10, 4,714,451 people have received at least one dose of one of the Cuban vaccine candidates SOBERANA 02 and SOBERANA Plus, and of the Cuban vaccine Abdala. Of these they already have a second dose 3 389 339 and a third dose 2 898 039."
Three out of five Cuban vaccine candidates meet the 50 percent efficacy requirement of the World Health Organization (WHO) and Abdala was approved for emergency use on the island.

The authorities also reported that as of Thursday 2 898 039 have received the third dose. Moreover, 21,000 out of the 2.9 million who are fully vaccinated, 21,000 have gotten COVID and only 99 have died.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Cub ... -0020.html

It might sound like 'small change' to an idealist but in the context of a 60 year blockade it speaks volumes about the philosophy and capability of socialism.

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

Questions raised by Italian study over origins
By ZHANG ZHIHAO | China Daily | Updated: 2021-08-13 07:02


Image
A man wearing a mask walks in the Duomo square in Milan, Italy, March 5, 2021. [Photo/Agencies]

A different version of the COVID-19 virus may have been circulating in Lombardy, northern Italy, as early as late summer 2019, a new study shows, suggesting that a wider geographical area and a broader time span should be considered when investigating the origins of the virus.

Researchers from the University of Milan and the Italian National Institute of Health examined 435 throat swabs and urine samples from 156 patients with measles-like skin rashes. A total of 13 patients tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, according to a study published last week on the preprint server operated by the medical journal, The Lancet. The paper is still awaiting peer-review.

None of the positive patients reported any history of travel in the two weeks before the onset of rash. The very first sample that tested positive for the genetic material of SARS-CoV-2 was a urine sample collected as early as Sept 12, 2019, from an 8-month-old child whose serum also tested positive for antibodies against the virus.

"Our study provides strong evidence that SARS-CoV-2 was already circulating in Northern Italy by late summer of 2019 and shows a clear association between measles-like cutaneous manifestations and SARS-CoV-2, " the researchers said.

However, the current evidence of infection is too weak to definitively diagnose these patients as being sickened by the virus, the scientists said. Contamination and false positives for nucleic acid tests of COVID-19 were reported in similar retrospective studies done in other countries.

Another finding in the Italian report is that scientists have detected multiple variants of the novel coronavirus circulating during the pre-pandemic period. "These results confirm recent computational findings that several SARS-CoV-2 lineages had been spreading worldwide at least for several weeks before the first reported COVID-19 cases," the paper said.

Based on the examined evidence, they found that some of the coronavirus' mutations first reported in January 2020 were already present in strains from Northern Italy in October 2019, suggesting that a lineage of the virus substantially different from the strain that first emerged in Wuhan, Hubei province, in December 2019 was already circulating in the region.

This may push back the predicted date of the progenitor SARS-CoV-2 to between late June 2019 and late August 2019, the study said.

"Although it is possible that viruses carrying the mutations were imported into Europe, it is also conceivable that these mutations have evolved in parallel outside China as the virus was circulating in other geographical areas, as also already previously hypothesized," the study said.

A Beijing-based epidemiologist, who requested anonymity, said the study supports the hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 may have originated and evolved in different parts of the world before the first reported outbreak occurred in Wuhan.

"It gives a reason for scientists around the world to check their lab's freezers, blood banks and other sample stores for traces of SARS-CoV-2 and its relatives," the expert said, adding such retrospective studies have yielded surprising discoveries on coronavirus.

Such is the case of HCoV-HKU1, a human-infecting coronavirus that was first reported in 2004, only to be later found in samples collected in Brazil in 1995.

The journal Nature reported in November that scientists have discovered relatives of the COVID-19 virus in Cambodia's Shamel's horseshoe bats captured in 2010, as well as in frozen bat droppings from Japanese horseshoe bats collected in 2013. These findings suggest that relatives of SARS-CoV-2 may be common in horseshoe bats, even outside of China.

The expert said one of the biggest questions surrounding the multiple-origin hypothesis is that "if the virus has been circulating in other parts of the world, why wasn't there an increase of pneumonia-like diseases in those regions prior to the Wuhan outbreak?"

One answer is that early strains of SARS-CoV-2 may not have been as transmissible among humans as some later mutated variants. The virus may have been attempting to spill over from nature into the human population for years, if not decades, and after numerous trials and errors, it finally accumulated the right traits and suddenly became highly successful at infecting humans, the expert said.

"To know that a different version of the virus was already circulating in Northern Italy can substantiate this proposed explanation," the expert said. "There are still so many questions surrounding the origin of the SARS-CoV-2, and I hope more scientists from other countries can meticulously and bravely reexamine their collected samples and contribute to finding the answers."

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20210 ... 687eb.html
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10598
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Socialist Demands for the COVID-19 Crisis

Post by blindpig » Sat Aug 14, 2021 1:34 pm

<snip>

US PRESSURES WHO TO CRIMINALIZE CHINA

The truth is that the fight against the pandemic has shown two faces in the government's effort to provide the best health to the people, prevent the spread of the virus and minimize the number of fatalities. China reacted immediately to the appearance of the virus in its territory by giving a multiple response in which not only the government has been involved, but also millions of citizens, companies and social organizations who made donations to exceed 7 billion yuan (around billion dollars) which was added to the ten billion dollars that the State authorized at first to face the crisis. Likewise, 5 billion in material donations were received by the end of January last year, when the virus only affected China.

Likewise, since December 2019 when the infection was detected, response mechanisms were activated at the local, provincial and national level in the face of the situation created. On January 25, 2020, Prime Minister Li Keqiang was appointed chairman of a small core group established to fight the covid-19 epidemic, so he visited Wuhan two days later to inspect the latest developments and convey to the people the responsibility that the central government assumed in the confrontation of the virus. In the same way, more than 50 groups of around 6 thousand doctors and specialists were created to care for those affected.

In this regard, the director general of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, pointed out in a press conference on January 30, 2020 after visiting China that: "... the Chinese government should be congratulated for the extraordinary measures it has taken to contain the outbreak, despite the serious social and economic impact that these measures are having on the Chinese people. "

Faced with this situation, the following day, January 31, the interested opinion of the United States that the epidemic would spread in China was made clear. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross affirmed that he believed that the coronavirus outbreak - which at that time had already left thousands of victims in that country and forced the government to implement quarantine in several cities - "will help create jobs in the United States. ".

On the other hand, in the effort to produce the vaccines necessary to counter the virus, President Trump expressed his confidence that soon his country would have it, thereby preventing the spread of the disease. Trump was thinking that the problem could be solved in his country in an isolated way, even in that context, he simultaneously continued to increase his policy of sanctions and blockades that now criminally introduced the area of ​​health, exposing an insane behavior against those who consider his enemies. Thus, the coronavirus has operated as a bacteriological weapon of capitalism and the United States against humanity. On the contrary, Chinese vaccines have been regarded as the common good of humanity, as President Xi Jinping has said on multiple occasions.

Paradoxically, one of the vaccines developed by China emerged from the Military Academy of Medical Sciences of the People's Liberation Army. That is, while the United States armed forces carry out military exercises all over the world, including the largest-scale since the end of the Second World War - amid the spread of the virus throughout the planet - the Chinese armed forces were overturning to research to provide health to the world. This is another great difference between the imperial armed forces that serve capital and those of socialism that serve the people.

The United States effort has been directed - unilaterally and without any type of international consensus - to pressure for the WHO to carry out a second phase of studies on the origin of the coronavirus in Chinese territory. It is evident that this proposal has a clear political content, since it lacks scientific support.

It is worth saying that in February of this year a team of scientists sent by the WHO spent a month in Wuhan and its surroundings conducting an investigation into the origin of the virus and the spread that transformed it into a pandemic. Their conclusions were conclusive in the sense of considering it unlikely that the virus originated in a Chinese laboratory. However, since May and after his return to the WHO after the criminal withdrawal decided in the middle of the pandemic by the Trump administration, the United States has called for a second investigation of the same type as the previous one.

Given this, China has rejected the proposal, given the strong political motivations it faces. The strongest argument is based on the fact that a new investigation is illegal in terms of international standards accepted within the framework of the WHO because it is a unilateral request from a country that does not have the consensus of all the members of the organization. China believes that if another investigation is carried out, it must start from the results obtained in the previous one, not start over, as if nothing had been done.

However, the Chinese government has expressed its willingness to cooperate in conducting any research that is done on scientific grounds and for the good of humanity. It should be added that more than 60 countries around the world have expressed their approval and approval with the results of the research carried out in February.

https://misionverdad.com/opinion/eeuu-t ... a-pandemia

Google Translator
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10598
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Socialist Demands for the COVID-19 Crisis

Post by blindpig » Thu Aug 19, 2021 2:15 pm

Latin American socialism and the fight against COVID-19: Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua

Image

Posted Aug 18, 2021 by Sasha Gillies-Lekakis

Latin America has been one of the regions worst-hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, in every sense. Not only are countries like Brazil, Colombia, and Peru suffering epidemiological catastrophes, the result of right-wing neoliberal policies, but the World Bank and other financial institutions have reported that the region has suffered the most serious economic crisis as a result of the pandemic. The 2020s in Latin America are set to be a “lost decade,” with little social, economic, or political advancement in a number of nations. The failures of capitalism have become glaringly obvious during COVID-19, even though they were already apparent prior to the outbreak of the pandemic. And while there has been an overwhelming focus on the deaths, violence, and instability wracking numerous Latin American states, far less attention has been paid to the three countries that have, against all odds, defied this norm: Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua.

All three countries have distinguished themselves as having excellent, though little-studied COVID-19 responses. Not only that, but they are acting as global good Samaritans, rendering international assistance to other states in need, particularly those of the Global South. This internationalism sits in stark contrast to the right-wing Latin American governments that have abandoned their own people to the ravages of the coronavirus, and puts to shame the embarassing pandemic responses of the developed world, their barbaric hoarding of vaccines, and continued interference in the domestic affairs of sovereign states.

What is more, Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua have made significant strides in protecting their people and defending their socialist projects, even as they face a series of interventions orchestrated by Washington, ranging from long-running economic blockades to media campaigns and even military operations. The resilience of Latin American socialist societies and institutions in this context of COVID-19 and U.S. intervention merits significant attention.

It is important to discuss in detail the ways in which Latin American socialism has not only survived, but also shown its force amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Now more than ever, it is necessary to highlight successful alternative political models when the neoliberal capitalist system is clearly in an advanced state of decay and, in some places, nearing collapse.

Cuba
It is fitting to begin this analysis with a focus on Cuba. Well before COVID-19 arrived on the island, Cuban state-owned media was providing rigorous coverage of the spread of the virus worldwide, as well as updating recommendations on treatment and social distancing measures as health professionals became more acquainted with the virus. Having lived and studied in Cuba at the time of the COVID-19 outbreak, I can attest to the thoroughness of the Cuban media in their reporting. Moreover, a serious benefit of state control and coordination of the media is that it prevented the spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories, which have readily taken root in the United States, European states, and Australia—all countries with private media monopolies.

In late January, the Cuban Ministry of Public Health established a series of national training programs for over 95,000 doctors and 84,000 nurses to diagnose and treat COVID-19.1 This useful information was also shared across social media platforms in simplified language for everyday Cubans. Revolutionary mass organizations such as the Federation of Cuban Women and the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution also assisted in this awareness-raising campaign, ensuring that citizens across the island were well-informed regarding the dangers of COVID-19 and how to protect their communities. Once the first case was detected in Cuba on March 10, 2020, a range of testing sites were established across the nation, and thousands of Cuban medical students from across the nation’s thirteen medical universities undertook a massive campaign to visit every single house in the country.2 This has meant that Cuba provides some of the most accurate COVID-19 case data in the world. Once again, the benefits of a socialist system and a strong, centralized state were on full display. Centrally controlled, well-coordinated medical institutions allowed Cuba to respond to new outbreaks quickly and adapt to the rapidly evolving situation.

By March 20, 2020, as the number of cases began to climb in Cuba, president Miguel Díaz-Canel announced a series of measures to be implemented across the nation. This included the expulsion of tourists and foreign students; physical distancing; paid self-quarantine for vulnerable Cubans; full payment of wages for all Cuban workers for the first month of quarantine, and a subsequent guarantee of 60 percent of a workers’ wage for the duration of the pandemic; and an expansion of the rationing system to increase access to food and sanitation packages, particularly in poorer neighborhoods.3 It must be recognized that these measures are hallmarks of the socialist system. Very few countries have provided such significant, targeted, and appropriate socioeconomic assistance to their populations as has Cuba.

The mobilization of the public and grassroots organizations has been a cornerstone of the island’s COVID-19 response. The Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, or CDRs, number some eight million Cubans out of a total population of eleven million, and were first created in 1960 to root out U.S. subversion. These organizations have been essential in Cuba’s fight against the pandemic. Organized at the level of the neighborhood block, CDR members have volunteered en masse to clean and cook in quarantine centers, deliver supplies to families in remote areas, and prepare medical and food packages to send to vulnerable neighborhoods. This was clearly framed within a revolutionary context—the hashtag #EsteEsMiGirón (#ThisIsMyBayOfPigs), which became popular on social media, indicates that everyday Cubans viewed the fight against coronavirus as a revolutionary battle, something that needed to be overcome in order to defend the sovereignty of the nation.4

The start of 2021 saw cases on the island increase dramatically following a lifting of the ban on tourism. Since then, Cuba has recorded case counts exceeding 6,500 per day, though deaths remain low.5 This is a paradox of the Cuban context. While Cuba has undoubtedly implemented one of the best responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, the harsh economic reality of the poor, isolated nation, still suffering under an ever-more severe U.S. blockade, has necessitated sacrifices to ensure that Cuba can continue feeding and housing its citizens. Spurred in part by this reality, as well as the revolutionary vision first laid out by Fidel Castro, the Cuban government invested heavily in vaccine research right from the beginning.

Cuba’s biopharmaceutical prowess dates back to the 1980s, when Castro decided to focus Cuba’s scientific experience on this sector.6 And it has clearly paid off. Cuba is one of just three countries, alongside Russia and China, that has successfully produced a vaccine without relying on the private sector. In fact, the island has produced five. Of these five vaccines, Abdala is the most effective. Currently, it has an efficacy of just over 92 percent, with the Cuban president indicating that this will be improved to 95 percent by the end of the year.7 This would make it one of the most effective COVID-19 vaccines in the world, perhaps rivalled only by new developments with Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine. So experienced is Cuba’s state-led medical coordination that, by the end of the year, all Cubans will be fully vaccinated, and Cuba will be able to produce millions of doses each month for international use.8

This brings us to another component of Cuban socialism’s COVID-19 response: internationalism. Ever since 1959, Cuba has had a long tradition of assisting fellow nations of the Global South with education, health care, and infrastructure development, free of charge for those nations that cannot afford to pay. COVID-19 is no different. Cuba has sent COVID-19 medical teams to over thirty countries in Africa and Latin America, and even Italy and Andorra, assisting some of the most vulnerable communities in the world confront the COVID-19 pandemic.9

It is remarkable that Cuba has achieved so much with so little, particularly given the increasingly brutal nature of the U.S. blockade on the island, alongside other efforts by Washington to destabilize the island. The Donald Trump administration, for example, applied over two hundred new embargo-related sanctions against the Cuban government and economy throughout his four-year term, including many during the COVID-19 pandemic itself.10 Cumulatively, the blockade has cost Cuba some $130 billion over the past six decades.11 And Joe Biden, proving himself to be equally hostile to Cuba as his predecessor, has not removed any legislation relating to the blockade. Such a staggering economic impact, and the resultant social implications this has had, amounts to nothing less than a genocide. Citing shortages of food, medicine, and other essential products caused directly by the blockade, 184 UN member states overwhelmingly called for the United States to end its inhumane policy toward Cuba in 2021, as the international body has done for the past twenty years.12

This cruel situation, created and indeed maintained by the United States, has had predictably debilitating effects for Cuba during the pandemic, particularly when coupled with the collapse of tourism, vital for Cuba’s economic and social well-being. This has been exploited by the United States in its attempts to destabilize the island.

July 11, 2021, saw social unrest aimed against the Cuban government emerge in several towns and cities across the island, fomented and funded by the United States. International media was quick to claim that thousands of protestors had railed against the government. However, initial estimates and all available audiovisual evidence suggest that, in reality, it was hundreds, not thousands, of Cubans who took to the streets.13 Moreover, Cuban foreign minister Bruno Rodriguez has demonstrated with clarity and on public television that many of these protestors were backed by the United States, and were in large part linked to either the far-right Cuban-American community in Miami, or specific criminal elements.14 This latter group made itself known through attacks on security personnel and the destruction of public property during the demonstrations.15 President Díaz-Canel recognized that some protestors had legitimate grievances related to the scarcity of basic goods, though rightfully placed the blame on the U.S. blockade. The fact that these protestors failed to do so is indicative of their duplicity.

A torrent of fake news then followed. The counter-marches of thousands, and in some cases tens of thousands, of pro-government demonstrators were either omitted from mainstream media reporting or outright manipulated—examples abound of photos depicting revolutionary marches being presented as counter-revolutionary protests, including a particularly bizarre instance in which Fox News blurred signs of pro-government protestors in a bid to portray them as anticommunist demonstrators.16 In spite of these attempts at destabilization, Cuba’s government and people have resisted. The fact that Cuba can still manage a robust COVID-19 response in spite of these provocations is impressive.

Clearly, Cuba’s socialist system has allowed it to survive one of the deadliest combinations of challenges faced by any nation on Earth: a deadly pandemic and the cruel and unusual punishment of the U.S. blockade. However, the revolutionary unity of the Cuban people, together with their government, has meant that the island has outperformed not only its neoliberal neighbors in Latin America, but also most of the developed world, including the United States.

Venezuela
Another country that has surprised the world with its excellent COVID-19 response is Bolivarian Venezuela, a firm ally of Cuba that is also facing a severe crisis caused by U.S. intervention and economic blockade. Following the first cases of COVID-19 in Brazil on February 26, 2020, the Nicolás Maduro government established the Presidential Commission for the Prevention and Control of Coronavirus, several weeks before the country registered its first cases.17 Even more remarkable was the dire medical crisis the nation found itself in prior to the pandemic. Caused almost entirely by U.S. intervention, Venezuela faced an 85 percent shortage of medicines, while 300,000 citizens were at risk of death due to lack of medication for kidney disease, numerous cancers, and HIV.18 In spite of these challenges, Venezuela outperformed every other nation in South America with its COVID-19 response. On March 15, 2020, just two days after the first cases were reported in the country, Venezuela shut its borders to Europe, Colombia, Panama, and the Dominican Republic. Public gatherings and schools were suspended that same day to prevent the spread of the virus.19 Clearly, Venezuela took the threat posed by coronavirus seriously.

A key component of Venezuela’s successful response was the Sistema Patria, or System of the Homeland identity card program. First established by Maduro in 2016 to coordinate access to food and medicine services, Sistema Patria was digitized during the pandemic and an online platform established so that Venezuelans could describe their situation and what essential goods they required.20 Millions of Venezuelans created an account and used the online Sistema Patria, allowing for the majority of Venezuelans to receive the food and medicine they needed from the government. It also allowed the Maduro administration to keep an effective registry of the distribution and supply levels of such goods.

By late March, Venezuela had created a COVID-19 screening and diagnosis plan that saw Venezuelan doctors go door-to-door searching for cases.21 This was modeled off Cuba’s own anti-COVID-19 campaign and provided much-needed employment opportunities for medical workers amid an economic crisis. The resourcefulness of Venezuelan socialism saw numerous hospitals turned into COVID-19 treatment centers, while community medical centers, first established in 2005 by the Cubans, became diagnosis clinics.

It is interesting to note how Venezuela’s long experience of surviving and reacting to U.S. economic pressure prepared the nation well for COVID-19. For example, the Local Committees for Supply and Production (CLAP) food system, which since 2016 has been delivering food to the most vulnerable Venezuelans free of charge, was expanded significantly in 2020.22 To facilitate the purchase of foodstuffs for the CLAP program, Venezuela strengthened the power of its Centralized Public Procurement Plan, giving the state precedence over private producers to ensure that the government could use the country’s limited food resources to feed its population. Domestic production of foodstuffs has also been increased through cooperation with communes, meaning that extra fruit and vegetables for vulnerable groups, including children, could be included in regular food packages.23 Other localized projects, like the Yo Compro en Casa (I Buy at Home) scheme in Caracas, provides food at subsidized prices and specifically employs informal workers whose economic sustenance has vanished due to social-distancing measures.24 What we have seen in Venezuela is a robust and well-coordinated socialist system defending the basic human rights of the people.

In the socioeconomic field, the Maduro government has gone even further in its COVID-19 response. Once again relying on Sistema Patria, the Bolivarian government provides unconditional cash handouts to poor families and small businesses, and has prohibited evictions for the duration of the pandemic.25 These actions in defense of the people have spurred the mobilization of revolutionary organizations, and particularly notable was the role played by women in coordinating all aspects of these grassroots programs. Several thousand Venezuelans have also returned from COVID-19-ravaged countries in Latin America through the Vuelta a la Patria (Return to the Homeland) program.26

Venezuela, much like Cuba, continues to suffer at the hands of an economic war instigated by Washington. In addition to these destabilizing measures, 2020 saw the U.S.-backed Operation Gideon take place, which involved a botched invasion of Venezuela utilizing Florida-based mercenaries. This escapade, which resulted in the capture of the U.S. mercenaries, has also been linked to the right-wing Venezuelan opposition.27 The unity of the Venezuelan people and the coordination of their public institutions to stave off these threats is impressive.

International solidarity has also been a significant factor in Venezuela’s success. Cuba has been supporting the Maduro government throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, and Venezuela is now vaccinating the population with Cuba’s Abdala vaccine. Russia, China, and Iran have also rendered indispensable assistance to Venezuela, mitigating some of the worst impacts of the pandemic and U.S. sanctions. In a show of its own solidarity, Venezuela even sent two tankers full of oxygen to Brazil, where COVID-19 is claiming countless lives across the country.28 This move comes in spite of the fascist Jair Bolsonaro’s well-known hatred of Bolivarian Venezuela and the Maduro government. Once again, socialism’s success in protecting the most vulnerable has been difficult to ignore.

Nicaragua
This final case study involves the least-publicized COVID-19 response of our three examples, though arguably one of the most successful, potentially even more so than Venezuela and Cuba in some respects: Nicaragua, led by longtime Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega. Earlier this year, Nicaragua was listed as one of the top ten safest places to visit during the COVID-19 pandemic.29 As of the end of July 2021, Nicaragua had recorded just 7,313 cases and only 194 deaths.30 The Nicaraguan government’s response to COVID-19 was considered unorthodox by many Western medical experts due to the fact that almost no lockdown measures were implemented and borders remained open. These experts, however, have been disingenuous in their criticisms of the Nicaraguan COVID-19 response. In fact, they have been routinely debunked by numerous organizations, including the highly prestigious Lancet Medical Journal.31

Nicaragua established its COVID-19 strategy earlier than most other countries, in mid–January. By then, eighteen COVID-19 hospitals had been established; rigorous health checks were mandated at Nicaragua’s land, sea, and air borders; and all returning citizens and tourists had to quarantine.32 Some 250,000 volunteers belonging to Sandinista revolutionary organizations, alongside 37,000 medical professionals, were trained to combat COVID-19.33 Community health programs already in existence, many supported by the Cubans, were also repurposed to focus on COVID-19 treatment. Moreover, a state-led campaign against disinformation was mounted through government-controlled newspapers and social media, alongside house-to-house visits, phone calls, and pop-up clinics.34

Nicaragua, much like Cuba and Venezuela, has relied on international solidarity to support its COVID-19 response. Russia has provided large amounts of the Sputnik V vaccine, and Nicaragua is now also purchasing the Cuban Abdala vaccine. Suffice to say, Nicaragua is an outpost of safety in COVID-ravaged Central America.

Concluding Remarks
Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua all demonstrate what a society can do when it embraces a centralized system, people over profit, and solidarity. Not only are citizens protected, but the will to fight against threats like COVID-19 is all the stronger when nations are united behind a popular and radical project. Whether this be Cuba’s socialist revolution, Venezuela’s Bolivarian project, or the Sandinista development path in Nicaragua, all have proven themselves superior to the self-interested and destructive impulses of neoliberal capitalism. This stark contrast is all the more noticeable in Latin America. When Venezuela is compared to neighboring Brazil or Colombia, Cuba or Nicaragua to El Salvador, it very quickly becomes clear that socialism is far more effective than capitalism in reducing both the human and economic costs of the COVID-19 crisis.

Notes
1.↩ Redacción Minsap, “Cuba fortalece el sistema de vigilancia para contener la introducción del nuevo coronavirus,” Ministerio de Salud Pública, January 28, 2021.
2.↩ Nuria B. León, “Las universidaded participan y toman medidas ante Covid-19,” Granma, March 20, 2020.
3.↩ “Gobierno adopta nuevas medidas para enfrentar a la COVID-19,” Mesa Redonda, March 2020.
4.↩ Makand (@rain_on_your), “Inspired by the battles of the past, many students proudly say that COVID-19 has become their bay of Pigs (#EsteEsMiGiron),” Twitter post, July 18, 2020.
5.↩ Redacción Minsap, “Parte de cierre del día 18 de julio a las 12 de la noche,” Ministerio de Salud Pública, July 19, 2021.
6.↩ Ernesto López, Ricardo Silva, Boris Acevedo, José A. Buxadó, Angel Aguilera, and Luis Herrera, “Taking Stock of Cuban Biotech,” Nature Biotechnology 25 (2007): 1215–16.
7.↩ “Cuba’s Soberana 02 COVID-19 Vaccine to Reach 95% Efficiency,” teleSUR, June 25, 2021.
8.↩ Emiliano Rodríguez Mega, “Can Cuba Beat COVID with Its Homegrown Vaccines?,” Nature, April 29 2021.
9.↩ Helen Yaffe, “The World Rediscovers Cuban Medical Internationalism,” LSE Latin America and Caribbean Centre (blog), April 8, 2021.
10.↩ Manolo De Los Santos and Vijay Prashad, “If You Grew Up with the U.S. Blockade as a Cuban, You Might Understand the Recent Protests Differently,” Toward Freedom, July 21, 2021.
11.↩ “U.S. Trade Embargo Has Cost Cuba $130 Billion, U.N. Says,” Reuters, May 9, 2018.
12.↩ “UN General Assembly Calls for US to End Cuba Embargo for 29th Consecutive Year,” United Nations, June 23, 2021.
13.↩ Peter Bolton, “Washington’s Weaponization of Protests in Cuba Takes Its Regime Change Efforts to New Heights of Hypocrisy,” CounterPunch, July 14, 2021.
14.↩ “Cuban Government Denounces Subversive Plans of the U.S. Against the Country,” YouTube video by teleSUR English, July 14, 2021, 1:53:09.
15.↩ “Diaz-Canel: They Intend to Carry Out a Soft Coup Against Cuba,” YouTube video by teleSUR English, July 14, 2021.
16.↩ Ana/аня (@bademjanbitch), Twitter post, July 17, 2020; “Fox News Mocked for Blurring Pro-Government Slogans in Footage of Havana Rally Shown Alongside Fiery Ted Cruz Tirade,” RT, July 18, 2021.
17.↩ “Gobierno de Venezuela crea Comisión Presidencial y campaña preventiva para enfrentar coronavirus,” Xinhua, February 28, 2021.
18.↩ Mark Weisbrot and Jeffrey Sachs, Economic Sanctions as Collective Punishment: The Case of Venezuela (Washington: Center for Economic and Policy Research, 2019), 1–22.
19.↩ “Venezuela suspende las clases presenciales por el resto del año,” France24, September 14, 2020.
20.↩ “Prevención de COVID-19,” Patria (blog), March 16, 2020.
21.↩ “CoronaShock and Socialism,” Tricontinental, July 8, 2020.
22.↩ Misión Verdad, “Las acciones contra la pandemia en Venezuela son un modelo para armar,” Medium, March 26, 2020.
23.↩ Atenea Jiménez, “Are the CLAPS an Effective Measure to Combat Shortages in Venezuela,” Venezuela Analysis, November 15, 2016.
24.↩ Michele de Mello, “Agroecología vincula la producción campesina con las comunas urbanas en Venezuela,” Brasil de Fato, February 18, 2021.
25.↩ “Delcy Rodríguez: Están prohibidos los desalojos de locales comerciales y residenciales,” Finanzas Digital, April 7, 2021.
26.↩ “Plan Vuelta a la Patria Marítimo repatriará a 650 venezolanos,” teleSUR, July 17, 2021.
27.↩ Tatuy TV, “Untangling Operation Gideon,” Venezuela Analysis, May 26, 2020.
28.↩ Danica Jorden, “Venezuela envía oxígeno y médicos a la Amazonía brasileña,” Open Democracy, January 19, 2021.
29.↩ “Nicaragua, Among the 10 Safest Countries in the World to Visit Despite Covid-19,” Nicaragua Tourism Board, accessed August 10, 2021.
30.↩ “Nicaragua Situation,” World Health Organisation, July 21, 2021.
31.↩ Rohan Rice, “Nicaragua’s Inspiring Response to COVID-19,” Peoples Dispatch, May 23, 2021.
32.↩ “Brigadistas de salud visitarán a un millón de familias brindando las medidas preventivas ante el coronavirus,” El 19, March 19, 2020.
33.↩ John Perry, “Nicaragua’s Response to COVID-19,” Lancet Global Health 8, no. 7 (July 2020).
34.↩ “Nicaragua contabiliza más de 3 millones de visitas a familias,” tn8, April 17, 2020.

https://mronline.org/2021/08/18/latin-a ... nicaragua/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

Post Reply