Sri Lanka prison massacre autopsy confirms victims were shot

W. A .Sunil

Postmortem reports have revealed that the deaths of inmates, during a protest on November 29 and 30 at Sri Lanka’s Mahara Prison, were caused by gunshot injuries.

The government deployed heavily-armed prison guards and special task force police officers to suppress a protest by thousands of prisoners, who were demanding PCR (polymerase chain reaction) tests, as hundreds of inmates had already tested positive.

Relatives of Mahara prison victims demanding information about their family members from STF soldiers (Credit: Shehan Gunasekara)

Eleven prisoners died during this incident and more than 100 were injured. So far, two postmortem reports have been submitted, which revealed that 8 out of 11 had gunshot wounds. Reports on three others are due to be submitted on January 8 before a local magistrate.

However, a leaked report of the committee appointed by the justice minister to investigate the incident, quoted in last weekend’s Sunday Times, has noted that all 11 inmates died from gunshot injuries. This report is to be submitted to the cabinet today.

Athula Kumara, a young remand prisoner, whose release had been authorized by the courts, was among the dead. He was caught in the gunfire because prison and police officers had delayed his release.

The authorities sought to cremate the bodies immediately, declaring that they had been infected by the coronavirus and, if kept, would constitute a health threat. Lawyers appearing for the victims accused the authorities of seeking to destroy evidence. Amid public outrage, the government was compelled to appoint a five-member committee to oversee the autopsies.

The relatives of the Mahara prisoners have expressed fears that more deaths could have occurred. Some of them have lodged complaints with the Sri Lanka Human Right Commission (SLHRC)—a toothless government body—concerning inmates that have been missing since the incident.

Relatives of victims outside Ragama hospital (Credit: WSWS Media)

A mother of a prisoner told the media that her son had disappeared and the prison officers refused to reveal where he was. “I have come every second day and made calls daily concerning the whereabouts of my son, but they have declared “he is not there.”

The government and the police have blamed the casualties on rival inmates attacking each other. State Minister of Prison Reforms and Rehabilitation Lohan Ratwatte told the parliament that “no one has been killed by shootings carried out by prison officers,” insisting that “this has been confirmed by the postmortems.” Ratwatte made this statement before any proper postmortems had been carried out.

Minister of Industries Wimal Weerawansa told parliament that the incidents in Mahara prison were “an attempt to discredit the rule of President Gotabhaya Rajapakse.” The clashes, he claimed, were a result of prisoners consuming a drug called “reverse” that was being circulated by an organised group of inmates.

A Sri Lanka College of Psychiatrists statement refuted this, pointing out that the drugs were circulated to create a calm environment, including drowsiness among the inmates.

The Rajapakse government’s lies, backed by the media, have been punctured by the postmortem reports.

The justice minister appointed a committee, headed by a retired high court judge. In the past, such committees have produced reports that suppress the truth and justify the government’s actions. In this case, however, the overwhelming evidence could not be swept under the carpet.

The committee’s interim report admitted that the inmates’ campaign advanced reasonable demands, including the immediate release of all those inmates who had been granted bail, PCR tests for all inmates, the removal of COVID-19 patients from Mahara Prison and the provision of edible food.

According to the report, inmates were angered and fearful of becoming infected once it became known that there were 186 new confirmed COVID-19 cases, including six prison officers.

The prison officers “used tear gas along with rubber bullets and live ammunition in order to disperse the rebellious inmates.”

The report claimed that there were quarrels among the several groups of inmates, who used “wood clubs, iron rods, large knives and swords.” However, it would not say how the weapons got into the prison.

During the protest, prison officers disconnected the water supply. The report pointed out that, when the prisoners began protesting and demanding water, “the officers fired shots to control the aggressive group.”

The Mahara killing is the third such incident this year. Two prisoners were killed and several others injured in Anuradhapura prison in North Central Province, following a protest related to COVID-19 in March. Another prisoner was shot dead on November 18 at Bogambara Prison in Central Province, supposedly trying to escape after more than 100 inmates had tested positive.

When the Mahara incident took place, there were 2,782 inmates in the prison, nearly three times its capacity.

According to information supplied by the prison department, Sri Lanka’s prison capacity is 11,762, despite the fact that there were 33,472 prisoners by December last year, an overcapacity of 184.6 percent.

Due to the government’s disregard for the difficult and unsafe conditions inmates face, more than 3,000 have so far tested positive. The majority of these prisoners are young people addicted to drugs—one of the terrible social products of the worsening crisis of capitalism.

Research compiled by the SLHRC following the Mahara massacre referred to the tragic conditions created by overcrowding, insufficient water and sanitary facilities, and inedible food.

According to this study, the lack of space in the prison has forced inmates to organize shifts to stand and sleep, and to excrete into buckets and polythene bags at night due to the lack of enough toilets. One inmate told the researchers: “We need to change this place, which smells like death; it smells like a graveyard. We must change this.”

After the incident, President Rajapakse took measures to tighten the repressive conditions in the country’s prisons. He appointed a presidential task force in order to “modernise” the prison system, using the experiences and technologies of foreign countries like China.

The government has also decided to establish a special riot control unit in the prisons. Commissioner General of Prisons Thushara Upuldeniya told newsfirst .lk that “500 Sri Lankan army personnel who have completed 12 years’ service and left the military will be recruited for this unit, as per the directive issued by the President.”

The special unit will be used for “the protection of high-profile prisoners and to combat riots inside prisons, and the special unit will be linked to Prison Intelligence.”

These measures are part of Rajapakse’s moves to militarise his administration as he moves towards the establishment of a presidential dictatorship.

The capitalist class is ruthlessly imposing the burden of the economic collapse and the impact of the global COVID-19 pandemic onto the masses, resulting in rising anger among Sri Lankan workers and the poor. Nervous about the eruption of a social explosion, the Rajapakse regime is preparing for class war.

Protest over appalling conditions in New Zealand prison

Tom Peters

On Sunday, following a tense six-day standoff, 16 prisoners involved in protesting appalling conditions at New Zealand’s Waikeria Prison surrendered to authorities. Five of the 21 men who started the protest had already given themselves up. The men had climbed onto the roof of a prison block and caused significant damage, including by starting fires. Hundreds of inmates were relocated due to the fires.

Authorities responded with brutal measures. On December 31, three days into the protest, Newshub cited an anonymous source who said negotiators from the Corrections Department were “withholding food and water in a bid to starve out” the prisoners—a claim echoed in other media outlets. The same source said prisoners had accused armed officers of trying to “storm them” during the night. Police denied this.

Waikeria Prison building (Source: NZ Department of Corrections website)

Prisoners were demanding improved conditions at Waikeria, which was built in 1911 in the Otorohanga district, and is one of the most run-down and unsanitary prisons in the country. The protesters alleged that they were being made to wait months for medical treatment and to wear the same dirty clothing also for months. As well, they complained about the poor quality of drinking water.

A manifesto posted on social media by People Against Prisons Aotearoa (PAPA), reportedly issued by the prisoners, also stated: “We have no toilet seats: we eat our kai [food] out of paper bags right next to our open, shared toilets… We are Māori people forced into a European system. Prisons do not work! Prisons have not worked for the generations before!... They keep doing this to our people, and we have had enough! There is no support in prison… no rehabilitation, nothing.”

On Sunday, Corrections Minister Kelvin Davis dismissed these complaints. He threatened that the police would consider laying charges over the destruction of facilities. Davis told the media that those involved in the stand-off, which he labelled a “riot,” had “never raised any issues prior to this event… It is my view that the underlying reasons for their actions are not what they claim.” He declared that the men “wanted political attention” and vaguely denounced “those who waded into the issue in order to generate headlines” and “embolden” the protesting prisoners.

The Labour Party-led government of Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, first elected in 2017, made false promises to reform New Zealand’s judicial system, with a focus on rehabilitation, reducing overcrowding and improving other inhumane conditions.

Waikeria exemplifies the brutal situation that exists throughout the prison system. A report issued by Ombudsman Peter Boshier, in August 2020, noted that two-thirds of Waikeria’s population were Māori. Indigenous people make up around 15 percent of New Zealanders, but they are far more likely to be incarcerated. The majority of Māori are among the most exploited layers of the working class.

Boshier found that most men in the prison’s high security complex (HSC) “were double-bunked in cells originally designed for one, and living conditions were poor… The provision and quality of clothing and bedding was problematic across both complexes.” Direct segregation cells, used to isolate prisoners from the rest of the prison population, “were run down… Windows did not have curtains and toilets did not have lids,” and ventilation was poor. Boshier concluded that the “HSC environment is not fit for purpose and is impacting adversely on the treatment of tāne [men].”

A typical double-bunk cell in Waikeria Prison (Source: Ombudsman's report)

Family members of the Waikeria protesters denied claims by Davis and his department that prisoners had not tried to complain before staging the protest. A statement quoted in the media said: “Our loved ones inside also tried many times to make complaints, but were denied access to PC01 complaint forms.” They said the jail was “unfit for humans to live in… the jail was unhygienic and conditions inside were disgusting.” PC01 forms are the only means for prisoners to lodge formal complaints.

Waikeria is not an isolated example. On December 14, Ombudsman Boshier released a damning report on a surprise inspection of Auckland’s Paremoremo Prison earlier in 2020. Inspectors found that maximum security prisoners were spending 22-23 hours confined to their cells. Boshier also viewed footage of prison officers using pepper spray on an inmate, which amounts to “cruel treatment” under the Convention against Torture.

The construction of a new maximum-security facility, opened in 2018, had not changed the culture, Boshier said, despite government claims that it would focus more on “rehabilitation and reintegration.” According to the Corrections Department, more than 90 percent of prisoners had mental health or substance abuse issues, but treatment is largely unavailable.

A previous report, released in August 2019, found degrading and severely overcrowded conditions at Ngawha Prison in Northland, which mostly housed low-security prisoners. The prison was opened with much fanfare in 2005, with a stated aim of operating based on “Māori values” focusing on rehabilitation. Among other findings, the Ombudsman noted insufficient access to drinking water and a lack of toilets, which forced prisoners to urinate and defecate in the compound.

The Labour Party campaigned in 2017 on a platform of reducing the overall prison population by 30 percent over 15 years, and lowering the proportion of Māori in prisons to the same level as in the general population, through various “cultural” programs, based on race or national identity. The most recent figures show that in September 2020 there were a total of 9,078 prisoners, down from 10,470 three years earlier, a drop of just 13.29 percent and still above the 8,700 prisoners in 2014. The government is clearly anticipating a resurgence in the prison population, since it has recruited an extra 1,200 police officers, and in 2019 allocated $406 million to build 976 new prison beds.

Māori Party co-leader Rawiri Waititi played a role in negotiating the end of the Waikeria stand-off, after the protesters demanded to speak with him. Waititi was highly praised by PAPA, which is linked with the pseudo-left group Organise Aotearoa.

The Māori Party is a right-wing party. It was part of the 2008-2017 National Party-led government and has campaigned for Māori-run prisons—as part of a parallel, racially segregated justice system. This would not make prisons humane, but would provide significant state funding for contracts for the tribal-affiliated businesses that the Māori Party represents.

Racism undoubtedly plays a role in the over-representation of Māori in prisons and as victims of police brutality. However, the prison system is not a “European” or colonial institution, as the Māori Party and its supporters claim. Prisons are part of the state apparatus that defends capitalism and oppresses the working class as a whole, regardless of race. That is why, amid soaring social inequality and growing anti-capitalist sentiment, due to the economic crisis exacerbated by the pandemic, the Ardern government is boosting the powers of the state—to deal with the inevitable eruption of working-class opposition.

“We have fewer rights than animals”: The unbearable life in the Greek refugee camp Kara Tepe

Katerina Selin

2020 was the year in which the mask fell. The coronavirus pandemic exposed the cruel essence of capitalism: Profits over lives. Millions of refugees have experienced this policy first-hand for decades, but the past year also brought their desperate situation to a head once again.

Anyone wanting to gauge the criminal character of European governments and the European Union (EU) must look to Kara Tepe, the temporary camp on the Greek island of Lesbos. Here, around 7,200 people spent Christmas and New Year in the cold and wet, in sickness and fear. More than 19,000 refugees are forced to persevere on the Aegean islands.

Migrants walk after a rainstorm at the Kara Tepe refugee camp, on the northeastern Aegean island of Lesbos, Greece. (AP Photo/Panagiotis Balaskas, File)

The Kara Tepe tent camp is located on a former military training area directly adjacent to the sea; it is a construction site where the noise is deafening day in, day out. Refugees had to move here in the autumn after the notorious Moria slum camp went up in flames in September.

Refugees and aid organisations report with horror that conditions in the new camp are even worse than in Moria. “We all live in fear and hardship,” Kara Tepe inmates wrote in a Christmas letter to the EU and its commission president Ursula von der Leyen (Christian Democratic Union, CDU):

How is it that after three months and so many millions of government donations and money raised by NGOs, we are still sitting in a place without running water, hot showers and without a functioning sewage system? ... Do we not have rights as human beings and refugees in Europe that include basic services for everyone? We often read and hear that we must live like animals in these camps, but we think that is not true. We have studied the laws protecting animals in Europe and we have found that even they have more rights than we do.

One in three refugees on the islands is thinking of suicide, the letter says. “We see a lot of appeals for donations and promises and we see our reality and it makes us frustrated and angry.” Their demands include adequate water supplies and showers, proper sanitation, provision of electricity, light, heating and tents for the winter, and better medical and psychological care.

But the EU will cast even these minimal demands for basic human needs to the winds because the hardship in Kara Tepe is not an accident, but a deliberate and conscious policy of deterrence. In the burnt-out Lipa refugee camp in Bihac on the Bosnian-Croatian border, refugees are also fighting for sheer survival under the eyes of the EU. For days, hundreds of refugees have been camping out in the open in the snow, facing death from frostbite with almost no help.

Marcus Bachmann of the aid organisation Doctors Without Borders Austria confirmed the extent of the disaster in the Greek refugee camps in an interview with the Viennese weekly Falter at the end of December. He used to be head of operations in crisis regions such as Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, and South Sudan. “But the dimension of the misery of the refugees on the Greek islands also stuns me,” he says.

Compared to his experiences in war zones, the Greek camps do not even reach the minimum standard. “As Doctors Without Borders, we have to do things in Greece that are otherwise only necessary in countries where the health system has completely collapsed,” says Bachmann.

An unbearable stench pervades the entire Kara Tepe camp. Until recently, there were no shower and washing facilities, people had to bathe and wash their clothes in the sea. There is still no hot water. There is no rubbish and sewage disposal. Dirty water and rainwater flow through the camp. Often the packaged food is inedible and already spoiled when it is handed out.

Food scraps, feces, mud—these unhygienic conditions attract rats and other creatures. They crawl into the tents at night and sometimes run around during the day, says Bachmann. “Especially children are badly hurt by these rodents,” he explains. “We have had babies in our clinic with several rat bites.”

“In the warmer months, the snakes also come.” He has treated many snakebite victims on Samos, for example. “We usually do that in South Sudan or the Central African Republic. But not in Europe.”

However, the warnings and demands of Doctors without Borders have not been heard in the EU and Greece for years, Bachmann said. “On the contrary, we see that the situation has even worsened.”

In addition to the coronavirus, numerous cases of diarrhoea, respiratory and skin diseases are rampant, as well as typhoid fever. People receive only 1.5 litres of drinking water per day per person, even in the hot summer, although according to Bachmann, the “minimum standard at the beginning of a refugee crisis” is 7.5 litres, which is achieved in camps in Ethiopia and Sudan, for example. He sums up, “It has to be said very clearly: if the people there are not evacuated, their lives are in danger.”

The severe traumas refugees suffer because of war, flight and the countless fires in the camps are particularly serious. Eight out of 10 people in the camps come from war and crisis regions, according to Doctors Without Borders. Mental illness and the risk of suicide increase dramatically. The huge Moria fire, in which several people were killed and wounded, drove thousands of families to flee.

Children, who make up more than a third of camp inmates at Kara Tepe, are suffering the most. On Lesbos alone, 49 children and young people with suicidal thoughts or attempts were treated last year. Joseph Oertel, who has worked as a counsellor in a therapeutic children’s project run by the aid organisation Medical Volunteers International in Kara Tepe, spoke to Der Spiegel of a “whole new form of hopelessness in the new camp.”

At least 300 police officers are operating in Kara Tepe. In an interview with the conservative newspaper Kathimerini, Greek migration minister Notis Mitarakis gloated that, “You didn’t have this feeling of security in Moria, it was a jungle.” By “security” he means the brutal repression of the refugees. The police monitor the camp around the clock and use batons against the refugees. Drones, barbed wire fences and exit restrictions give the camp more the character of a prison, as child psychologist Thanos Chirvatidis explained to Der Spiegel. Children are afraid of the police. Access for aid organisations and journalists is extremely difficult.

But Kara Tepe is only a foretaste of what is to come. The Greek government and the EU want to build a closed camp by summer 2021, which will probably be right next to a rubbish dump. German EU bureaucrat Beate Gminder, who heads the European Commission’s “Task Force on Migration Management” and is responsible for the construction of the new camp, sees no problem with this. Better sites were not available, but Greece had taken “numerous samples” of soil and water, she claims in an interview with Der Spiegel.

On December 31, Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis visited Kara Tepe and praised it as representing progress over Moria. With similar gall, Gminder also glosses over and justifies the conditions. The camp had many advantages, for example, it is located directly by the sea—“people can swim.” And in the winter? Well, “large, heated tents have been set up” and “warm blankets and sleeping bags have been distributed.” When it comes to a lack of hot water and electricity, it was the Greek authorities who were to blame for all the problems, according to Gminder.

The moral decay and criminality emanating from these words are an expression of an EU policy under German leadership that has only one goal: To get rid of refugees at all costs and to mercilessly crush resistance within their ranks.

In October, Migration Minister Mitarakis boasted that 73 percent fewer refugees had arrived in Greece in the first nine months of the year than in the same period last year. However, the drop in new arrivals is not the result of declining refugee numbers, but the massive intensification of illegal rejections and deportations without asylum procedures.

The so-called “pushbacks” of rubber dinghies into Turkish waters take place not only under the eyes but also with the involvement of the European border protection agency Frontex. According to an internal letter from Frontex head Fabrice Leggeri to the EU Commission, reported by Der Spiegel at the end of November, German officials were also involved in pushbacks. The German Interior Ministry is trying to cover up these crimes and human rights violations.

In early December, reporters from Der Spiegel described the story of one of these brutal deportations, which are happening more frequently. Two African female refugees were picked up by hooded Greek police officers after arriving on Lesbos, searched, beaten, spat on and forced to undress. “Along with sixteen others seeking protection, including minors and several pregnant women, according to the refugees, the two were left on two small inflatable life rafts. In the middle of the night, in the middle of the sea, with no chance of reaching the coast under their own power.” Only after holding out for hours were they rescued by Turkish coast guards and taken to Izmir.

The entire year 2020 was marked by the war against refugees in Greece. In February, Greek police used tear gas against protesting refugees on Lesbos. In March, the land border with Turkey was sealed off and the right to asylum suspended. Suddenly, refugees were trapped in no-man’s-land on the Greek-Turkish border at the river Evros. Soldiers and police fired live ammunition and tear gas at defenceless people; at least three refugees were killed crossing the border. In its brutal action, the Greek government worked closely with the EU leadership under von der Leyen and received backing from Syriza party leader Alexis Tsipras.

At the same time, the coronavirus was spreading throughout Greece and thus also in refugee shelters and camps. Due to a lack of tests and inadequate health care, there are many unreported cases of infection and death among refugees. Under the pretext of the pandemic, Europe has also effectively stopped sea rescue operations, further accelerating mass deaths in the Mediterranean. This was followed by the unveiling of a murderous “Asylum and Migration Pact” that will further drive forward the disenfranchisement, deportation and ultimately the killing of refugees. From January to November 2020, more than 1,200 refugees lost their lives on the way to Europe.

Mounting mental health crisis among US health care workers

Alex Johnson

With coronavirus infections and deaths rising to astronomical heights over the past two months, frontline health care workers are increasingly experiencing acute mental and emotional distress.

Research studies have shed light on the dangerous mental health toll that is being exacted on health care workers, who are facing extreme physical demands as a result of the growth of the pandemic. In a new study by Mental Health America (MHA), health care workers were found to exhibit elevated levels of anxiety, stress and emotional exhaustion. The study was carried out in November, a month that saw the initial resurgence of the pandemic, overwhelming hospitals.

A nurse looking out a hospital window (Credit: pexels.com/EVG Photos)

According to the MHA survey, 93 percent of health care workers were experiencing stress, while around 86 percent reported anxiety produced by the sudden overflow of sick patients. Some 77 percent reported feeling frustrated with their working conditions, and a similar percentage experienced physical exhaustion and burnout. Paralleling the extreme strain on hospitals all across the country, 75 percent of workers said they were overwhelmed.

The survey revealed widespread worry about contracting and spreading the deadly virus. Among health care workers, 76 percent reported that they were worried about exposing their children to COVID-19, and nearly half were worried about exposing their spouse or partner. Another 47 percent were concerned about exposing their older adult relatives.

Many health care workers said the pandemic left them feeling emotionally isolated and alienated in their workplaces, as well as having to cope with severe consequences in their home life.

A significant 38 percent of health care workers said they did not feel that they had adequate emotional support. Among nurses, the number was 45 percent. Among workers with children, half reported that they were lacking quality time with their children or were unable to be a consistently present parent.

In the introduction to the survey, MHA wrote that workplace conditions are “getting worse by the day and health care workers aren’t getting a reprieve.” Health care workers are feeling “frustrated, anxious... and worried about exposing their loved ones.” Given the extraordinary amount of stress placed on health care workers, many are at risk of developing even more severe mental health conditions such as depression and even thoughts of suicide or self- harm.

This phenomenon is mirrored in the general population, with alarming increases in reports of depression and anxiety nationwide. Psychological screenings showed a 634 percent jump in anxiety for the nation from January, and depression soared 873 percent.

For health care workers, however, the deterioration of mental wellness due to the pandemic has been accompanied by greater risks. Countless research studies have shown, even before the pandemic, that physicians were at increased risk of suicide compared to the broader population. While research has not revealed a causal link between worsening conditions due to the pandemic and cases of suicide, there is a high correlation between health care workers’ suicide risk and an exacerbation of job-related stressors from the virus.

According to the Psychology Health Center of Excellence, a clinical resource center, these job-related stressors include significant workload changes as a result of the growth of the pandemic, and the inability of hospitals to manage rapidly increasing nurse-to-patient ratios.

Many health care workers have also found it extremely difficult to obtain and maintain effective personal protective equipment. Amid the massive scale of death from the pandemic, now close to 360,000, many health care workers have also been traumatized by their experiences in intensive care wards, often witnessing scores of patients falling victim to the virus with little ability to save them.

Because of the tremendous influx of COVID-19 patients and the dilapidated state of health care infrastructure, workers have been forced to confront the terrifying issue of rationing care, choosing which patients should be left to die. This is similar to the crisis in New York last spring, when it was the main hotspot of the pandemic.

Adding to the mental health crisis has been the staggering increase in positive tests for health care workers. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there have been at least 287,000 COVID-19 infections among health care workers in the US.

Hospitals and medical facilities nationwide are being inundated with COVID-19 patients, countless ICU wards have filled beyond capacity, and states have been forced to build impromptu and makeshift facilities to deal with the extreme demand. Moreover, staffing shortages and burnout conditions are leading to severe strains on what was an already devastated health care infrastructure and severely overworked staff.

More than 3,000 health care workers have died from COVID-19. In most cases, these deaths are the result of shortages of PPE and the cover-up by hospital management of the spread of the virus.

Central responsibility for the spread of the virus in hospitals and clinics lies with the inability of capitalism and the profit-driven health care system. Both big business parties failed to enact the most elementary scientific measures to contain the transmission of COVID-19. Since March, the main priority of the Democratic and Republican parties has been to pump unlimited cash into the financial markets and increase the wealth of the super-rich.

Instead of devoting more resources to cash-strapped hospitals for more PPE, nursing staff and testing and contract tracing for health care workers, the capitalist class and its political flunkies have aggressively promoted the homicidal “herd immunity” policy, which in practice means resuming non-essential production and in-person school learning, while ensuring that nothing impinges on the fortunes of the ruling class.

To cut costs, hospitals are implementing the bare minimum in safety protocols, even if it means endangering the health of health care workers. At St. Mary’s Medical Center in Duluth, Minnesota, health care workers who treat COVID-19 patients are required to reuse their respirator masks up to six times before discarding them. Although N95 masks are typically sterilized daily, they invariably begin to sag after two or three shifts and leave gaps through which the virus can enter. One cardiac nurse at the hospital described the situation to the New York Times as “driving a car without seatbelts.”

In Chicago, nurses have complained of not receiving N95 masks that properly fit their faces. Speaking to the Times, one nurse at Community First Medical Center blamed the shortage of appropriate gear for the deaths of at least three nurses who contracted the virus at the hospital this past spring and summer. A recent survey by the volunteer organization Get Us PPE noted that 90 percent of frontline workers said they are repeatedly reusing masks designed for single use.

Even though the need for necessary medical equipment has become more dire than it was in early spring, President-elect Joe Biden has provided no indication of how the large distribution campaign that has been promised will actually be implemented, nor has he addressed the monopolized health care distribution system, which allows wealthy hospital chains to hoard medical supplies. Instead, he has proposed creating “financial incentives” and “buy American” policies for major companies. This translates into providing subsidies, cheap loans and other hand-outs to large corporations to drive profits even higher.

In contrast to the social suffering and death hitting the broad mass of the population, the health care industry and its wealthy executives have seen their profits increase to record-breaking levels. Billionaires in the health care industry had their wealth increase by 36 percent between early April and late July, from $402 billion to $548 billion in less than four months, according to a report by UBS and PricewaterhouseCoopers. Biden and the Democratic Party, loyal representatives of Wall Street and the financial aristocracy, will continue the policy of placing profits above social need and human life.

Brazilian state governments push to reopen schools as COVID-19 deaths approach 200,000

Gabriel Lemos

With most Brazilian schools remaining closed during the COVID-19 pandemic last year, state governors are preparing to reopen them in February, when the next school year begins. UNICEF data showed only 3 percent of Brazilian students attending in-person classes during the second half of last year, making Brazil a worldwide exception in not reopening its schools.

By October of last year, however, 11 of Brazil’s 26 states had allowed public schools to reopen in part or totally. Private schools, on the other hand, due to enormous pressure from associations representing school owners, had been reopened in 16 Brazilian states. Despite state permission, the final decision to reopen schools rests with municipalities. The return to school has also been on a voluntary basis, with many parents electing not to send their children into classrooms for fear of their contracting the deadly virus.

A student taking a test in Manaus. (Credit: Divulgação/Seduc)

The drive to reopen schools last year was not broader only because the end of the school year was approaching. In addition, November saw the first and second rounds of municipal elections, and many mayors running for reelection feared losing votes if the reopening of schools caused further COVID-19 outbreaks and deaths among students and their families.

However, after the first round of municipal elections, the Brazilian corporate media began a campaign echoing the mantra of the world’s ruling elite that it is safe to reopen schools during the pandemic. It widely reported an open letter from a group of pediatricians, dubbed “Science for Education,” calling for the return of in-person teaching. They argued that “children become less infected” and “transmit less,” concluding that “schools ... are not the places of major infection. The European experience has emphatically proven this.”

In early December, in a report titled “Most countries keep schools open even with new high cases,” Brazil’s leading daily, Folha de S. Paulo, served as a mouthpiece for the president of the Brazilian Association of Private Schools, Arthur Fonseca Filho, for whom “The logic in the rest of the world is this: education is an essential activity, so it needs to return,” and for the president of the largest Brazilian pro-corporate educational think tank, “Todos pela Educação” (“All for Education”), who said, “The right thing is to do like Europe, close bars, theaters and gyms to reduce the circulation of the virus, and keeps school open.”

A school in Manaus, Brazil. (Credit: Ione Moreno/Semcom)

Already in early December, Folha reported that six Brazilian states planned or had already deemed public education an essential service and that schools could reopen even in the “red” phase, when the pandemic is escalating and non-essential services are not allowed to open. Before, this could only happen in the “yellow” phase, with the pandemic under “control” and non-essential services functioning under restrictions. On December 17, the state of São Paulo, with the largest school district in Brazil and the Americas, proclaimed education an essential service, which will certainly pave the way for other states to do the same.

All the claims that it is safe to reopen schools have no scientific basis. The “European experience” has proved to be a catastrophe in recent weeks, with the UK and Germany reporting more than a thousand deaths per day, and December being the deadliest month since the outbreak of the pandemic. Undoubtedly, the decision by the British and German ruling elites to keep schools open contributed to the pandemic’s upsurge.

Although studies have shown that children are less susceptible to the virus and that they tend to become less severely ill, they are still one of the vectors for the spread of the deadly virus. Studies have also shown that adolescents are as susceptible and as major spreaders as adults. In addition, reopening schools means setting in motion a transmission network within a huge percentage of the population, including students, parents, teachers and school staff, which would inevitably send COVID-19 cases and deaths spiraling. A study published in December in Science magazine showed that the closure of schools and universities reduced the spread of the coronavirus by 38 percent.

Contrary to claims of the Brazilian ruling elite, the majority of Brazil’s population is against reopening schools. On December 17, a Datafolha Institute poll showed that 66 percent of the population supports the closure of schools to contain the pandemic, as well as the closure of non-essential services such as bars, stores and gyms.

The campaign for a broad reopening of schools in Brazil is unfolding as the coronavirus pandemic is spiraling out of control in the country. The last three days of 2020 saw more than 1,000 COVID-19 deaths per day. On December 30, Brazil registered 1,224 coronavirus deaths, the highest number since August 20.

Marking the beginning of the second wave of the pandemic in Brazil, December showed increases of 64 percent in COVID-19 deaths and 67 percent in cases. It was also the month with the highest number of cases since the beginning of the pandemic. COVID-19 is already the major cause of death in Brazil, which, according to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics, may reduce life expectancy in the country by up to two years.

The catastrophic situation of the pandemic in Brazil may be further aggravated by the millions of Brazilians who traveled over the Christmas and New Year holidays, and by the refusal of mayors and state governors to implement more restrictive measures on non-essential services. In addition, on December 31, the new strain of the coronavirus identified in the United Kingdom was detected in the state of São Paulo. It is estimated that it is 56 percent more contagious than the other coronavirus strains already identified, and that it has contributed to the huge increase in the number of cases in the UK since last month.

On January 1, Brazil surpassed 195,000 COVID-19 deaths, with a total of almost 7.7 million cases. It is the second country in the world in coronavirus deaths, trailing only the United States, and the third in cases, exceeded only by the US and India.

However, these numbers are a gross underestimation of the grim reality. On December 30, BBC Brasil reported that the excess number of deaths indicates that “there are at least 50 percent more COVID-19 deaths in Brazil than official data indicates.”

Since the beginning of the pandemic, Brazil has been one of the countries with the least coronavirus testing in the world, without any systematic contact tracing program to achieve a minimum control of the pandemic. Only 20 percent of the 24 million RT-PCR tests that the Brazilian Health Ministry promised by December of last year were carried out. Since August, after the peak of the pandemic, the number of tests has decreased by between 10 and 15 percent each month.

This, combined with the lifting of the few remaining lockdown measures and the complete underestimation of the pandemic by both Brazil’s fascistic President Jair Bolsonaro and state governors, means that a de facto herd immunity policy is being implemented to let the deadly virus spread freely and infect as many people as possible. Under these conditions, reopening schools will further increase coronavirus cases, hospitalizations and deaths.

Teachers, school staff, parents and students should be aware that it is not safe to reopen schools until the pandemic is under control on a global scale. The official claims of concern about the educational damage done to students by school closures are a fraud. For years, these same officials have been cutting education budgets and imposing pro-corporate policies with the aim of privatizing public education.

The main concern of Brazil’s corporate and financial ruling sectors in promoting the reopening of schools is to give parents somewhere to leave their children and to work without any kind of constraint. This campaign has a definite political and class logic: putting profits before human lives.

The COVID-19 vaccination efforts in the US are proving to be a massive debacle

Benjamin Mateus

In early October, Alex Azar, Health and Human Services Secretary, said that there would be 100 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine produced by the end of the year. Due to supply chain issues, that estimate was quickly curtailed to 40 million doses a month later.

Exactly four weeks ago, Margaret Keenan of the UK, a 91-year-old grandmother, was the first person to receive the Pfizer COVID-19 mRNA vaccine on December 8, 2020. The United States officially rang in their vaccination rollout on December 14 after emergency use authorization was granted for Pfizer’s vaccine. Moderna’s vaccine was inaugurated on December 20.

Before the Christmas holidays, the White House coronavirus taskforce had assured the public that they were on track to vaccinate 20 million people by December 31. But by the end of the year, barely three million had received the vaccine.

According to a detailed report by Bloomberg, the US has administered 4.66 million doses, or 1.55 million doses per week. This means that only 1.4 percent of the population has been vaccinated, and only 30 percent of the distributed vaccines have been given out. The United Kingdom had administered just over 947,000 doses, representing 1.42 percent of its population. At these rates, barely a third of the British and American people will have been vaccinated by the beginning of 2022.

Internationally, after much fanfare and a media blitz, the intervening weeks have recorded a disastrously anemic administration of just over 13 million doses of these lifesaving vaccines across 33 countries. The world is organized into a nation-state system tightly interlinked by financial ties. Still, when it comes to a broad-based public health initiative, the utter incompetence of these state machines befuddles the mind. It will take a decade to deliver billions of doses to the globe’s population at the current pace.

Presently, most of the vaccines have been given to healthcare workers and residents of long-term care facilities. The significant challenges ahead will be vaccinating the general population. With limited supplies and vaccination sites still undesignated, finger-pointing and blaming have quickly become common. The federal government has left it to states to decide how the rollout would take place with little funding to aid them in this herculean task.

Clair Hannan, executive director of the Association of Immunization Managers, told the Wall Street Journal, “There may have been an expectation from Operation Warp Speed or others that we’d give everyone the vaccine overnight. It was a logistics equation for them. If you’ve been in vaccines for a long time, you know that’s the easy part. Getting it into actual arms is the hard part.”

Compounding the inadequate budgets of most exhausted state health departments tasked with managing and overseeing the rollout is the massive underfunding for these initiatives. In a September press release, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention announced a miserly $200 million to jurisdictions for COVID-19 vaccine preparedness. At a minimum, it has been estimated that $6 to $8 billion would be needed to fund these programs.

Amid the ongoing surge in cases nationwide, health systems have a limited supply of staff available to assist in administering these vaccines. Attempting to administer these treatments in a socially distant approach and then monitor the recipients of the vaccine for 15 to 30 minutes for adverse reactions is resource-intensive. Overworked and stretched thin, the limited available staff are prioritized to the care of hospitalized patients.

Not surprisingly, a high percentage of health care professionals and frontline health providers, who are a priority for vaccination, are hesitant or refusing to be inoculated. After months of mismanagement by health systems and authorities at all government levels, many find it difficult to accept these interim analyses' results and prefer to wait for the actual studies to be concluded.

Governor Michael DeWine of Ohio noted he was troubled that a relatively high number of nursing home staff, 60 percent to be exact, have elected not to take the vaccine. He threatened them that if they didn’t accept the vaccine now, they would have to wait for it in the future.

Frozen vials of the COVID-19 vaccine (AP Photo/Francisco Seco)

Dr. Nikhila Juvvadi, the chief clinical officer at Chicago’s Loretto Hospital, who administered the first doses of the Pfizer vaccine to frontline health workers, told NPR that many hospital staff who are minority groups were mistrustful of the vaccine. In a survey conducted by the hospital, 40 percent would not get vaccinated.

In a recent Los Angeles Times article, less than half of the staff at St. Elizabeth Community Hospital in Tehama County were willing to be vaccinated. Twenty percent of the frontline health care providers at Providence Holy Cross Medical Center in Mission Hills refused to be inoculated. Close to half of healthcare workers at Riverside County have declined the vaccine.

On an anonymous basis, a Riverside nurse speaking to the World Socialist Web Site expressed her distrust of the government agencies from the California Department of Public Health and Governor Newsom, who have waived their patient to nurse ratios, to the CDC who has repeatedly stated that it was safe to open schools.

"For a very long time, the CDC kept saying the virus was spread through droplets. Health care workers were only given masks if their patient was on a breathing treatment. CDC was clinging to the fact that it was droplet-based. They did that because they knew they didn't have the respirator masks, so a decision was made—let's sacrifice the health care worker and hang on to the lie. But as for nurses, we knew from the beginning that this was airborne. We have a nursing degree, and we knew we were being lied to and demanded PPE. If my simple mind can understand and see what we need, why is it that they can’t, and they have all the greatest minds at their disposal? At my hospital and EVS, lab workers died, and they were not given proper protection. [The SEP Congress resolution 2020] resonated really hard with me. The right thing would be to quit worrying about profit, stop war profiteering off [of] people dying."

There is merit to these concerns raised by rank-and-file healthcare workers. Stop-gap solutions being posed to deal with supply issues mean distributing the vaccines in ways not validated by the trials conducted to date.

The UK’s chief medical officer has defended the decision to extend the second dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine out to three months, citing shortages in COVID-19 vaccines that will pose significant issues for several months to come. In a recent Washington Post opinion piece, Robert M. Wachter and Ashish K. Jha attempt to make the case for offering a single dose of a COVID-19 vaccine and delaying the second one in the face of the hundreds of thousands of daily infections. They claim that the vaccine trials indicated that a single dose after ten days offered 80 to 90 percent efficacy. Chief Operation Warp Speed adviser Moncef Slaoui has suggested that adults between 18 and 55 receive only two half-doses of the Moderna vaccine to increase the number available.

BioNTech warned the Financial Times that there was “no data” to support such recommendations, whose aim is to reach as many people as possible despite the limitations in supplies. Yet, other European countries like Germany are planning to follow the UK’s lead. As these regimens have been given emergency use authorization, a change in the protocol would need a separate approval, but based on what data?

A New England Journal of Medicine study published on December 31 found that twelve days after the Pfizer vaccine's first dose, efficacy was only at 52 percent with a confidence interval of 29.5 to 68.4 percent. The acceptable limits established by the World Health Organization require both a threshold of 50 percent and a lower bound over 30 percent, which would categorize the treatment barely acceptable.

One solution that all these national figures and leading scientist fail to mention is a program to “shut down all nonessential workplaces, the closing of schools and the emergency provision of the financial support necessary to sustain the population until the crisis is overcome,” as noted in the recent New Year’s Statement published on the WSWS yesterday.

This would allow time to contain the virus, provide breathing room for health systems, and initiate a mass vaccination initiative while resources were directed to vaccine production. It isn’t science, but its misapplication, that has created the present disaster.

Australian government slashes minimal pandemic subsidies for workers and unemployed

Oscar Grenfell

Scheduled cuts to federal subsidies for welfare recipients and workers in pandemic impacted industries came into effect with the new year, in the latest salvo of a government-corporate offensive against the social conditions of working people.

The reduction of the JobKeeper and JobSeeker payments is forecast to send hundreds of thousands more into poverty, amid the global economic slump triggered by COVID-19, and a continuing worldwide surge of the pandemic.

Workers queuing outside an inner-western Sydney Centrelink office last year (Credit: WSWS)

The cuts form part of a broader austerity offensive being enforced by Labor and Liberal governments at the state and federal levels, the trade unions and the largest corporations. All of them are seeking to impose the burden of the crisis on working people, as well as exploiting it to accelerate pro-business economic restructuring.

Under the JobKeeper program, eligible businesses, as well as some sole traders, have been provided with a fortnightly payment to cover part of their wages’ bill. The subsidy was initially capped at $1,500 per fortnight for each employee working over 20 hours a week. That was reduced to $1,200 in September and $1,000 on January 4. For part-time employees, with fewer than 20 hours a week, the payment has been slashed from $750 a fortnight to $650.

The changes will impact around 1.5 million workers, after 3.5 million were forced off JobKeeper in the final three months of last year. Employers will seek to pass on the cut by slashing wages, reducing workers hours and enforcing redundancies.

In comments to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation earlier this week, Jaymee Langrehr, a young hospitality worker in South Australia, explained that when JobKeeper was first cut in September, her hours were drastically reduced. “Suddenly, after doing 25 to 30 hours I was down to 10 to 15,” she said. “If things got busy and we had to stay back to clean, we would get in trouble because we stayed past what JobKeeper paid us for and they had to pay us out of pocket.”

While the breakdown of workers who remain on JobKeeper is opaque, many work in hospitality and other service sectors. Under conditions of a new spate of COVID-19 infections in Sydney, the country’s most populous city, and the reemergence of cases in Melbourne, businesses in hospitality, retail and related industries will again seek to drive down their labour costs, at the expense of workers, following the JobKeeper cut.

The impact that the cut will have was underscored by an Australian Bureau of Statistics survey on household expenditure, released last month. It found that, in the final months of 2020, 72 percent of JobKeeper recipients were receiving less income than prior to the pandemic, with 20 percent reporting a stable income and only 9 percent indicating that they were receiving higher wages than before the crisis.

Around 78 percent said they had spent a substantial portion of the subsidy on household bills, 63 percent reported using the income for their grocery purchases and 54 percent in order to cover rent or mortgage payments. Almost a quarter had allocated some of the payment to debt, and more than a fifth used it for medical expenses.

The immediate impact of the reduction will be magnified by the ending of JobKeeper altogether in late March. A relaxation of legislation, which effectively allowed businesses to continue to trade while insolvent, concluded on January 1. Combined with the reduction, and then abolition, of the JobKeeper payment, some financial commentators have warned that this will result in an avalanche of small business closures and job losses.

Modeling by the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute has indicated that in a mild, baseline scenario official unemployment could surge from the current 6.8 percent to 8.7 percent with the conclusion of JobKeeper. In a more severe scenario, the rate would jump to 15.1 percent, accounting for more than 1.7 million out of work.

Official figures, however, grossly understate the scale of the jobs crisis. The federal Liberal-National government has touted employment data indicating that some 75 percent of jobs lost at the beginning of the coronavirus crisis have been restored. However, around 85 percent of those are part-time positions, while only one in three full-time jobs have been restored. At least a third of young workers are either unemployed or underemployed.

The social impact of the mounting jobs crisis will be intensified by the reduction of the JobSeeker supplement, paid on top of meagre allowances, from $250 per fortnight to $150. The payment was halved in September, before being cut at the beginning of this year. It is due to be phased out entirely in March, returning the unemployed to the sub-poverty rate of the Newstart allowance, which equates to just $40 per day.

Modeling by Australian National University researcher Ben Phillips indicated that the latest cut to JobSeeker will force another 330,000 people below the official poverty line, taking the total from 3.49 million to 3.82 million.

In an article published by the Guardian, Cassandra Goldie, the CEO of the Australian Council of Social Service charity group, cited one JobSeeker recipient who responded to the reduction by stating: “I am so scared for my future and feel as if I am worth nothing to anyone. I am begging the government to see that affordable housing for a single female is impossible to find. I really won’t be able to go back to the $40 a day, I won’t be able to afford food, let alone the internet. Please, I’m begging the government because I can’t cope.”

According to a study commissioned by social housing organisation “Everybody’s Home,” the $100 JobSeeker reduction could result in a rapid 9 percent increase in homelessness, equating to some 7,500 people thrown onto the streets.

The projections are starkest in Sydney and Melbourne, where a speculative property bubble has persisted, as a result of interest rate cuts and other government incentives, despite the economic carnage triggered by the pandemic. In Sydney’s inner-west, for instance, homelessness is forecast to rise by 27.1 percent, while the increase is expected to be over 33 percent in the Baulkham Hills and Hawkesbury regions.

While the most vulnerable face the prospect of homelessness, broad sections of the population are confronting a housing crisis. According to some estimates, housing stress, generally measured as spending more than 30 percent of income on rent, could affect 25 percent of the population after JobKeeper and JobSeeker are ended in March.

The social crisis is, above all, an indictment of Labor and the trade unions. Having spearheaded the deregulation of the economy and the destruction of hundreds of thousands of jobs, beginning in the 1980s, they have served as chief enforcers of the pro-business response to the pandemic crisis, overseen by the federal Liberal-National government.

Labor leader Anthony Albanese and senior union officials have issued weasel words of concern over the cuts to the subsidies. Albanese’s comments have largely been couched in terms of the negative impact on sections of business caused by a drastic reduction in the income of large segments of the population.

When in office from 2007–2013, Labor governments, in which Albanese was a senior minister, rejected calls for any increase to woefully low unemployment payments. Labor and the unions played a key role in drawing up the JobKeeper program, which provided a bonanza to major corporations, even as they were laying off tens of thousands of workers.

With the intensification of a corporate offensive against jobs, wages and conditions, Labor and the unions have done everything they can to suppress opposition from the working class. They have played the central role in isolating workers involved in industrial disputes, imposing sell-out agreements with the employers and drawing up plans for a further pro-business overhaul of industrial relations.