Are We Ready For Vaccinating With Sputnik V?

Daniel Warner

Millions of people have died from Covid-19. Many more are infected; many more are at risk. With new variants popping up as the virus mutates, scientists around the world are searching for better protection with different vaccines. As supplies of the approved vaccines become limited, any new vaccine should be universally welcomed. After all, the pandemic has become a global danger. Any new and successful vaccine should be globally welcomed.

The scientific journal The Lancet has confirmed that “Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine shows 91.6% efficacy in clinical trials.” Wow. What a relief. Since Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines are in short supply, this should be a most welcome development.

But it hasn’t been. Why not?

Maybe the answer is in a nostalgia for a binary world. We have lived in a binary world. Our computers are programmed with two numbers, 0 and 1. Since the end of the Cold War, there have been two dominant political/economic systems, liberal/capitalism and state/socialism. Sexual orientation has been defined as male or female, he or she. In sum, our perceptions have been oriented towards either/or, black or white, good or bad. During the pandemic it’s been health or wealth, science or politics.

That binary world is over. Quantum computers do not use 0 and 1. The choice between liberal capitalism or state socialism is passé. The Chinese economy, projected to become the world’s largest in the very near future, has state capitalism, neither state dominated socialism nor market-oriented capitalism. Sexual orientation is no longer male or female. Third gender sexual theories distinguish between biological sex and social/psychological gender. The use of he or she can now be replaced by they, them or everyone. Either/or has become fluid; black or white has many shades, and good or bad depends on the situation and perspective. Absolutes no longer exist, except perhaps for pregnant or not, dead or alive.

And Sputnik V? From a nostalgic perspective, can you see Western countries such as the United States buying a Russian vaccine? Its very name is an obvious provocation. Referring to the world’s first satellite launched by the U.S.S.R. in 1957 and the vaccine, Kirill Dmitriev, CEO of the Russian Direct Investment Fund, a major sponsor of Sputnik V, boasted on CNN in late July, “Americans were surprised when they heard Sputnik’s beeping. It’s the same with this vaccine. Russia will have got there first.”

(I do remember the trauma of watching the satellite circling the globe in 1957 on a TV in an auditorium in my high school and fearing that the Soviets were going to invade us from outer space soon after Nikita Khruschev threatened to bury us in 1956.)

Currently, with the jailing of Russian opposition leader Alexsey Navalny, any purchase of something Russian, even if it benefits people medically will be seen as an appeasement of President Putin, especially post-Trump. The recent unsuccessful visit of the European head of diplomacy, Josep Borell, to Moscow has further heightened tensions between the West and Russia.

But not all countries or leaders are mired in binary nostalgia or anti-Russian animosity. “Every vaccine is welcome in the European Union,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel told German public broadcaster ARD, praising the “good data” related to Russia’s Sputnik V product. Merkel, a former scientist in East Germany, had no nostalgia problem in recognizing the value of the Russian vaccine as European countries scramble to find new sources of vaccines.

It was reported that Merkel discussed the pandemic with President Putin. During that call, it was confirmed that she said she is “is open to the idea of bilateral cooperation for the purpose of tapping European production capacities (for the Russian vaccine).” Europe’s regulators have approved the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine and Moderna’s, but have yet to receive a formal request to approve Sputnik V.

Europeans have been sceptical of the Russian and Chinese vaccines and are waiting for more “transparency” before making decisions. However, The Lancet article has given further incentives for the vaccines to be approved. European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen told EU lawmakers that “if the Russian producers, the Chinese producers open their books, show transparency, show all the data… then they could get… a conditional market authorisation like the other ones.”

Dmitriev recently stated; “Sputnik V is now approved in 18 countries and this number will keep increasing. High efficacy, safety, easy distribution and affordability allow regulatory authorities around the world to include Sputnik V in their national vaccine portfolio.”

But politics and medical science do not mix easily. Presidents Biden and Putin had their first phone conversation in late January. Among the items discussed, it was reported by the White House, were: election meddling by Russia in U.S. elections; Russian reaction to protests for Alexsey Navalny; the extension of the New Start nuclear agreement for five years; the SolarWinds cyberattack; the Kremlin placed bounties on U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, and the U.S. firm support for Ukrainian sovereignty. Nothing about the pandemic? Nothing about Sputnik V? Could Biden have even pronounced that word to Putin?

Indeed, in his first major foreign policy speech at the U.S. State Department on February 4, President Biden took a much harsher stance towards Russia than Donald Trump: “I made it clear to President Putin, in a manner very different from my predecessor, that the days of the United States rolling over in the face of Russia’s aggressive actions, interfering with our elections, cyberattacks, poisoning its citizens, are over,” he said.

Can we imagine Dr. Fauci being injected with Sputnik V? Or President Biden? Or President Putin being injected with Pfizer/BioNTech or Moderna? Why not? Wouldn’t that be a real sign of détente and resetting the relationship? A triumph of medical science over politics?

If the pandemic is the major global issue today, why can’t we imagine global cooperation for vaccines? Granted that Sputnik V needs final approval by the World Health Organization, several non-Western countries are already using the Russian vaccine. They are desperate. Does our nostalgia for a binary world continue to be self-defeating? In outdated binary terms, politics seems to be winning over medical science. While the West may have political differences with Russia, getting people vaccinated could be a non-political benefit for millions. Amid the shrill calls for science to (T)rump politics, are we ready for vaccinating with Sputnik V?

The Clash Between the UK and EU Over Northern Ireland is a Precursor to Confrontations That will Last Decades

Patrick Cockburn

“Get your retaliation in first,” is a cynical old saying in Northern Irish politics that means you hit your opponent whenever you can without waiting for a provocation. It neatly captures the violent traditions of the province and explains why the political temperature there is always close to boiling over.

Imagine then the pleasure of those unionists who had always opposed the Northern Ireland Protocol, which places the new EU/UK commercial frontier between Northern Ireland and mainland Britain, to find that they had been genuinely provoked by the European Commission. In a classic cock-up, but one with grave and lasting consequences, Brussels had briefly called for a “hard border” between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, something it had repeatedly told Britain was an anathema because it would endanger the Good Friday Agreement and open the road to communal violence.

Yet here was a glaring example of the EU selfishly backtracking on its own warnings and fecklessly reopening one of the most explosive issues in European politics, the culpable purpose of this being to stop vaccines capable of saving the lives of British pensioners from being exported from the EU to the UK.

The Commission was instantly struck by a hail of abuse for its folly and it promptly withdrew the proposal with embarrassment, but for almost the first time in four years the EU was on the back foot in its relationship with Britain. No wonder Michael Gove was openly gloating as he told the House of Commons that the European Commission’s action had been condemned by everybody from the Archbishop of Canterbury to the former prime minister of Finland. And there was indeed some innocent pleasure to be had in watching somebody as poised and ostensibly competent as the Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, get quite so much egg on her face.

She had presumably miscalculated or ignored, as have so many politicians before her, the extreme combustibility of Northern Irish politics, or failed to notice how far they had already been inflamed by the creation of an Irish Sea EU/UK commercial border at the start of this year. Such flames are not be easily put out, whatever calming noises may come from Brussels, London and Dublin.

Port officials in Belfast and Larne, who actually conduct the border checks, have stopped working on the grounds that they fear for their safety. A piece of graffiti has appeared on a wall in Larne reading: “All Border Post Staff are Targets.” For weeks, the media had been full of stories about frustrated Northern Irish businesses facing ruin because of the new border checks.

Ever since Boris Johnson openly betrayed the unionists and signed the Irish protocol, they have felt the ground shifting under their feet and, they found to their horror, apparently shifting inexorably towards a united Ireland. They complain that even the British Army was having to fill in EU forms to bring military equipment into the province (it turned out that they were doing so, though they did not have to under the terms of the Protocol). An element of “getting your retaliation in first” surfaces here since, under pressure from those even more hard line than themselves, the Democratic Unionist Party leadership which – along with Sinn Fein – heads the government in Northern Ireland, has switched its stance. Instead of reluctantly enforcing the Irish Protocol, it now opposes it.

One of DUP ministers, Edwin Poots, ordered the withdrawal of the port inspectors, though the police had told him that they did not believe the inspectors were under threat from loyalist paramilitaries. Poots claims the police did not have “a full understanding of the risks” – and in the long term he is probably right.

The bizarreness – and potential dangers – of the permanent crisis in Northern Ireland cannot be over-stated. By leaving the EU, Britain created a new UK/EU frontier the effect of which would be to the benefit of either the unionists/protestants or the nationalists/catholics. A repartitioning of Ireland by resurrecting a physical barrier along the 300-mile-long land border was never feasible, if only because it largely runs through nationalist/catholic majority areas where any new customs posts would be burned or wrecked as soon they were established. Now the unionist/protestant community is extending a similar veto over an “Irish Sea border”.

In other words, the frontier between Britain and the EU is a disputed no-man’s land where two communities struggle ceaselessly for dominance. This is something that will affect – and probably poison – future relations between London and Brussels for decades to come. Brexit automatically destabilised Northern Ireland and now Northern Ireland is going to destabilise Brexit Britain.

But the embattled province will not be the only friction point, only the one with greatest potential for violence. Boris Johnson won the general election of 2019 by claiming that he would “Get Brexit Done”, promising that relations between Britain and the EU would soon achieve a stable equilibrium. But that is precisely what is not happening. Instability is built into the Withdrawal Agreement, and the row over vaccines and the Irish Protocol is only a precursor to decades of friction.

Britain will be permanently in the position of negotiating and renegotiating access to the single market for its goods and services. It will, moreover, be negotiating from a position of weakness and will be continually forced to make concessions – as was so often the case during its negotiations to leave the EU. British fishermen, once the symbol of the benefits to come of enhanced British sovereignty, have become the first visible casualties of this new and unequal balance of power.

Remainers once fantasised about the day when Leavers would see the ruinous errors of their ways in exiting Britain’s largest market and lament their folly. But the exact opposite is likely to happen: the EU will in future fight for its 27 members’ interests with even less regard for the views of the British government and British public opinion than it did before.

A Brexiteer government and pro-Brexit media will inevitably respond by scapegoating Brussels for everything that goes wrong in Britain, accusing it of overbearing behaviour and unfair practices. They may even be right, but this will not do them any good, simply because the EU has the stronger hand of cards.

Just at the moment the government can say – though not too loudly – that the advantages of speedy national action, unobstructed by the restraints imposed by an unwieldy EU alliance, are exemplified by its swift development and rolling out of the coronavirus vaccine, but this type of success is unlikely to be often repeated.

On the contrary, the outlook is that Britain will remain obsessed by its relations with the EU – and that those relations will generate continuous friction. The economic relationship may begin to sort itself out in time, but at the cost of much bad political blood while Brexit turbo-charges Irish and Scottish separatism. The furore in Northern Ireland is not an atypical hangover from the past, but the first instalment of a permanent confrontation between Britain and the EU.

UK dismisses UN Maritime Court ruling that it has no claim to Chagos Islands/Diego Garcia

Jean Shaoul

Britain, with customary imperial arrogance, has again dismissed a United Nations court decision that it has no entitlement to the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean.

On January 27, the United Nations International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS), in the latest round in a protracted legal battle, ruled that the UK has no sovereignty over the Chagos Islands, which includes Diego Garcia, home to one of the US’s largest airbases.

Map of Chagos Islands

It follows a similar decision in 2019 when the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in an “advisory” opinion, ruled that Britain’s separation of islands in 1965 from Mauritius before it became independent in 1968 and their incorporation into the specially created British Indian Ocean Territories (BIOT), violated 1960 UN resolution 1514 banning the breakup of colonies before independence.

The ICJ described the UK’s method of gaining control over the islands as coercive and the removal of the residents to make way for the US base as “shameful” and urged the UK to end “its administration of the Chagos Islands as rapidly as possible.” The overwhelming majority of the UN General Assembly supported the ICJ’s ruling.

The maritime court confirmed the legitimacy of Mauritius’s claim to the Chagos Islands, calling Britain’s continuing administration of the islands “unlawful” and criticised its failure to hand the islands back.

The ruling implies that the UK’s leasing of Diego Garcia to the US is also illegal. Britain recently extended the rent-free lease on Diego Garcia, the largest island in the archipelago, halfway between Tanzania and Indonesia, to 2036. The US uses the site as a launching pad for its criminal operations in the Middle East, with the CIA using Diego Garcia as a “dark site,” where it detained and tortured people and also refueled extraordinary rendition flights.

Following London’s refusal to accept the 2019 ICJ and the UN opinions because they were advisory, Mauritius took the case to the international maritime court to press its claim to the islands. It asked the court to resolve its separate maritime dispute with the Maldives, the other nearest island to the waters around the archipelago, which tried to avoid negotiations with Mauritius by arguing that there was a valid live dispute over the sovereignty of the Chagos Islands between the UK and Mauritius. The court ruled that the Maldives could not avoid negotiating its maritime boundaries with Mauritius on this basis.

With no powers of enforcement, the court’s ruling is a dead letter and Britain knows this, declaring, “The UK has no doubt as to our sovereignty over the British Indian Ocean Territory, which has been under continuous British sovereignty since 1814. Mauritius has never held sovereignty over the BIOT and the UK does not recognise its claim.”

The Foreign Office said that since it had not been a party to the maritime court case, it was not obligated to comply with the ruling. Nevertheless, it has previously stated that it would eventually hand the Chagos archipelago over to Mauritius when it is “no longer needed for defence purposes.”

The UK’s rejection of the UN rulings is in line with a broader assault, led by the US, on the institutional arrangements established in the aftermath of World War II. It indicates that the imperialist powers, facing an ongoing decline in their economic position, will brook no constraint on their geostrategic interests and their plans for a new imperialist carve up of the world and new forms of colonial-style exploitation of the poorest nations on earth.

It is significant that apart from short articles in the Guardian and the BBC, Britain’s media has failed to report the UN maritime court decision, indicating their dismissal of the UN when it conflicts with Britain’s interests.

Mauritian Prime Minister Pravind Kumar Jugnauth called on Britain to end its unlawful occupation of the Chagos Islands and said that ITLOS would now determine the maritime boundary between Mauritius and Maldives on the basis that Mauritius held sovereignty over the Chagos archipelago.

Britain incorporated the Chagos archipelago into the newly created BIOT in 1965 for defence purposes and forcibly evicted and deported the Chagossians to Mauritius and the Seychelles, another former British colony, to make way for the leasing of Diego Garcia to the US Naval Support Facility. The UK rode roughshod of the 1,344 islanders’ rights, including denying them the right to return to their homeland, which international lawyer Professor Philippe Sands QC, who represented Mauritius, said was arguably “a crime against humanity within the meaning of Article 7 of the [International Criminal Court] Statute.”

Britain’s purpose in granting Washington the 50-year lease on Diego Garcia—kept secret from both Parliament and the US Congress--was to secure an $11 million discount on the US-made Polaris nuclear weapons system, which Labour had pledged to scrap when in opposition.

For more than five decades, Britain has acted like a colonial master, carrying out one crime after another against the Chagossians while lying, ignoring court decisions, invoking Royal Prerogative and then covering up its actions. The islanders have lived in impoverished conditions ever since, with just a few allowed into Britain.

None of the promises of support and compensation were kept. Many of the islanders were simply abandoned when they landed. The islanders, as a condition of accepting Britain’s derisory offer of compensation in the 1980s, which largely failed to materialise, were required to renounce their right to return. In 2016, the British Foreign Office set up a £40 million fund to compensate the islanders. Five years later, after it had distributed just £12,000 in direct support to them, Croydon Council, tasked with assessing how to allocate the money, abandoned the work.

Mauritius has sought the return of the archipelago in pursuit of its own interests, not those of the Chagossians. Sovereignty over the archipelago could bring significant benefits. Its size would increase dramatically. Included within the territory is the Great Chagos Bank, the largest coral reef structure in the world, much of it in pristine condition. Ownership would also allow Mauritius to charge the US for using Diego Garcia, potentially a large annual sum. Hosting the US base would expand and cement the US-Mauritian defence relationship and thus allow Port Louis to limit its dependence on India. Thus far at least, Washington appears to prefer to lease Diego Garcia from the UK than from Mauritius.

Britain is determined to hold onto its remaining 14 colonial possessions and to support the US, which has five, in pursuit of their predatory imperialist interests. It fears claims from the Mauritian government for compensation and the implications for other sovereignty disputes, including with Spain over Gibraltar and Argentina over the Falklands/Malvinas.

In the last weeks, Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative government has lambasted China for its abuse of democratic rights in Hong Kong and Xinjiang. Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab criticized Beijing for imposing wide ranging national security legislation that undermines Hong Kong’s autonomy as set out in the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration. He specifically called out Beijing for violating its international legal obligations. Since then, Britain has suspended its extradition treaty with Hong Kong.

The UK is increasingly lining up with the US and its confrontational stance in the Indo-Pacific, both because of its dependency on US imperialism—dressed up as its “special relationship” with Washington—and the need to direct increasing class tensions outwards against an external enemy, China.

London is supporting US efforts to assemble a new “coalition of the willing” against Beijing with its “tilt to the Indo-Pacific” in which the Chagos Islands occupies a strategic position. It is hosting the G7 summit that will include India, South Korea and Australia. Having signed trade and security deals with Japan, it is now planning to join the US-led Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) aimed at economically isolating China. It is soon to publish its post-Brexit integrated Foreign, Defence, Security and Development policy review that focuses on China.

Defying riot police, Moroccan autoworkers at Kénitra launch wildcat strike

Alex Lantier

On January 27, autoworkers at Stellantis' Kénitra plant in Morocco walked out and blocked their factory to demand higher wages, proper health conditions, and improved working conditions. News of the strike spread quickly on social media, gathering strong support from workers in France and internationally. Stellantis is the new entity created by the January 15 merger between Fiat Chrysler Automobiles and French automaker PSA.

Stellantis plant in Kénitra, Morocco (source: Moroccan Interior Ministry)

The 2,500 workers at the site, which is expected to produce 200,000 vehicles this year, including the Peugeot 208 and the Citroën AMI, marched through the plant and blocked the exits. Speaking to the production director, they issued demands which are now circulating on social media. They want to resolve in particular the very low salary (2600 dirhams, $290 monthly), poor sanitary conditions, non-payment of bonuses and overtime, with a performance bonus that has not been paid for six months, and equipment failures.

The Stellantis-Kénitra workers also demanded medical coverage for all, compensation for work accidents, an increase in the length of breaks, and a more respectful attitude towards the workers by the plant managers. The workers said they would not resume before their demands were met.

In Morocco, L’Opinion, who contacted strikers in Kénitra, wrote: “The majority of workers are hired on a 12-month temp contract that does not provide medical coverage or protection in case of serious accidents, and their monthly salary does not exceed 2,400 dirhams. They also confirmed to us that many of the employees are obliged to work an extra hour after the end of their shift without pay.”

On the first evening of the strike, several squads of riot police surrounded the plant to try to intimidate the strikers before the next meeting with management on January 29. On the 28th, however, the workers staged a sit-in in front of the plant. Management refused a deal on the 29th, and the strike is continuing, according to the latest reports.

The Kénitra site is of strategic importance to Stellantis, as Morocco has overtaken South Africa to become the leading automaker in Africa. While its predecessor PSA saw a decline in sales in Europe in 2020, it also saw a 46 percent increase in its market share in the Middle East, thanks in part to significant increases in sales in Turkey and Egypt. A significant portion of Kénitra’s production is sold to Middle Eastern markets.

The movement at Kénitra reflects the rise in workers' anger internationally at the effects of the pandemic and the working conditions created by the merger between PSA and Fiat Chrysler.

While PSA's sales fell by 27.8 percent and Fiat Chrysler's by 17 percent, the new corporation is trying to create maximum profits by employing a highly exploited workforce in Morocco as well as in France and internationally amid the raging pandemic. COVID-19 has infected 475,589 people and claimed 8,408 lives in Morocco, officially, with 234 new infections confirmed yesterday. There have been 31.4 million cases and 740,000 deaths in Europe.

Workers reacted to news of the strike in Kénitra with great enthusiasm on social media. On Facebook, an Alstom transportation equiment worker in France commented on the difference between the Kénitra strike and the usual corrupt deals between unions and management: “They are right, and it's rare, presenting demands at Peugeot, and presenting demands is offensive, it’s not defensive like when you negotiate on proposals from bosses and management.”

Another addressed the Kénitra workers: “You’re in a strong position, comrades! Keep going, they are having trouble filling all the car orders that are coming in.”

The conditions are ripe for a powerful international strike against Stellantis and a broader mobilization of the working class. This could not only improve the wages and working conditions of Stellantis workers, but also lay the basis for a struggle to stop the COVID-19 pandemic and the wars waged by French imperialism in Mali and across West Africa. In this struggle, the best allies of the workers in Kénitra are Stellantis workers internationally, and their class brothers and sisters around the world.

To wage such a struggle, however, workers will need to organize themselves in rank-and-file committees, independent of the union bureaucracies, and prepare for a political struggle. In the United States, Stellantis workers have already formed such committees at several plants.

The sending of riot police on the first night of the strike in Kenitra is a warning that the corrupt Moroccan monarchy, whose close ties to Washington and Paris are well known, sees a strike at Stellantis as an intolerable threat to its interests and its ties to international finance capital.

Moreover, the applause from French union bureaucracy for the strike at Kénitra is utter hypocrisy. Not only have the French unions given their support to the wars waged by French imperialism in Syria, Libya, Mali and throughout the Mediterranean, but they are led by bureaucrats who work closely with Stellantis management at autoworkers’ expense.

This is particularly the case of Jean-Marc Mercier, the principal delegate of the Stalinist General Confederation of Labor (CGT) union at Stellantis in France, who released a video cynically hailing the Kénitra strike.

A leading member of the petty-bourgeois Lutte Ouvrière (LO) party, Mercier led LO’s list in the 2019 European elections together with LO presidential candidate Nathalie Arthaud. Mercier has a long experience at Stellantis, having coordinated the shutdown of the Stellantis plant in Aulnay, north of Paris, in 2013. He is now a delegate at the Stellantis plant in Poissy.

In his video, Mercier said that in Morocco, “as in France, England, Germany and Algeria,” wages “are blocked.” He then stressed the contrast between autoworkers’ conditions and the financial situation of the company. According to Mercier, Stellantis recorded “2.5 billion euros” in profits last year. “However, we work every day of the week, Saturdays, nights (...) Our wages, your wages must increase.” He promised, “We will publicize your strike in factories in France and in all Stellantis factories in Europe.”

In fact, Mercier, aware of explosive social anger in Europe against the criminal official handling of the pandemic and the vast increase in social inequalities, is desperately trying to prevent the unions from being overrun by the workers. Whatever token solidarity actions Mercier may organize will not help workers in Kénitra any more than it helped workers at Aulnay.

Australian quarantine leaks underscore pandemic risks

Mike Head

Further COVID-19 infection escapes from Australian quarantine hotels, in recent days, have highlighted the continuing dangers of the global pandemic, particularly with the emergence of more transmissible variants. Nevertheless, major sporting events, such as the Australian Open tennis tournament, are being allowed to proceed.

Pedestrians walk away from the central business district in Melbourne, Australia, Wednesday, Aug. 5, 2020. (AP Photo/Asanka Brendon Ratnayake)

Yesterday, more than 100 people were placed in quarantine, as potential infection zones were identified across Melbourne, where the tennis “Grand Slam” event is being hosted. Within a few days, a second hotel quarantine worker tested positive for COVID-19. It was the third hotel quarantine-linked infection in the city in a week, with all three cases confirmed to be of the more contagious UK virus strain.

At the same time, health authorities issued a precautionary alert for sites in southeast Sydney and nearby Wollongong, after a returned overseas traveller tested positive to the coronavirus, two days after leaving their mandatory two-week quarantine at Sydney’s Sofitel Wentworth hotel.

In recent weeks, quarantine hotel leaks have occurred in all the mainland state capitals—Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Brisbane and Adelaide—indicating flaws in the facilities and safety procedures. Unlike the Western Australian government, which imposed a limited lockdown on Perth and surrounding areas for five days last week, including the closure of schools, the New South Wales and Victorian governments rejected such measures.

Each government claimed to be acting on the advice of health officials, but they made their contradictory decisions amid an escalating clamour from the corporate elite for a full and uninterrupted “reopening” of the economy.

Yesterday’s case in Melbourne involved a woman in her early 50s, who was part of the quarantine operation at the Holiday Inn at Melbourne Airport. She returned a negative test result after a nasal swab on February 4, and returned to work on Sunday February 7, where she developed symptoms and later tested positive. An alert was released just before midnight on Sunday.

The Victorian state Labor government’s Emergency Services Minister Lisa Neville, who oversees the quarantine program, said the woman had not appeared to breach any infection control protocols, and had worn a face shield as well as a mask.

The woman brought to about 80 the number of COVID-19 Quarantine Victoria and hotel staff who have been stood down, to be tested and placed in quarantine for 14 days. There were also nine police officers and 12 military personnel members in that position, Neville said.

Last Wednesday, a resident support officer was confirmed to be infected at Melbourne’s Grand Hyatt hotel, which housed some of the tennis competitors and support staff. As a result, about 600 players and staff were required to isolate for a day and be tested, interrupting warm-up events for the Open.

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews insisted that this “one case” would not stop the billion-dollar Open going ahead, with about 400,000 spectators permitted into the stadiums over the next ten days. “Decisions have been made, and we’ll proceed as we can,” Andrews said.

Last month, the lead-up to the tournament was thrown into disarray when numbers of positive coronavirus cases were detected from charter flights carrying tennis players, coaches and officials to Melbourne. Some players were forced to quarantine for two weeks.

In order to ensure that the Open is not disrupted, the Andrews government responded to last week’s Grand Hyatt infection by reverting to partial restrictions in place over New Year’s Eve. Masks were made mandatory indoors and the number of visitors allowed in homes was halved to 15. A plan to increase caps on staff in non-essential workplaces to 75 percent of capacity was paused.

Protocols at the state’s quarantine hotels were to be belatedly tightened, with workers wearing face shields, “buffers” introduced between large family groups in rooms and a review of ventilation.

In Sydney, the state health department issued a statement on Sunday evening saying the latest victim had not shown any symptoms, but had tested positive on day 16 as part of an enhanced follow-up strategy for people returning from overseas.

This development seems similar to that in New Zealand, where the government reported that a woman tested positive to the UK mutant strain after finishing her quarantine in Auckland in January, despite testing negative twice during her hotel stay.

These cases point to the heightened dangers posed by the new, more infectious variants, which have been able to evolve because of the refusal of governments internationally to impose shutdowns that would cut across returning to work in order to generate corporate profits.

Increasingly, epidemiologists are calling for a re-evaluation of the hotel quarantine system. Clinical epidemiologist Nancy Baxter, from the University of Melbourne, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation yesterday that any hotel suspected of airborne transmission should be immediately removed from the program.

“We need to get the airflow experts, the occupational health and safety experts, they need to go in, they need to assess these places and they need to say ‘this hotel has to close,’” she said.

Other health experts have pointed to inherent flaws, such as air conditioning and ventilation problems, in hotels that were not designed for quarantine purposes. Another factor is the hiring of poorly-paid contract security guards, who are not trained to manage coronavirus patients, nor provided with adequate personal protective equipment.

The federal Liberal-National Coalition government last week boosted its orders for vaccines to 150 million doses, even though the country’s population is less than 26 million. This typifies the breakout of vaccine nationalism, with Western powers buying up the majority of supplies.

Yesterday the government declared it was not concerned about the effectiveness of the AstraZeneca vaccine, despite the South African government suspending its rollout, after trial data showed the jab offered limited protection against B.1.351, the coronavirus variant first identified in that country.

Health Minister Greg Hunt told Sydney radio station 2GB on Monday: “I spoke with the UK health secretary in recent days—that’s their health minister equivalent—they’re having very strong results.”

Internationally, leading vaccine scientists are calling for a rethink of the goals of vaccination programs, saying that “herd immunity” through vaccination is unlikely to be possible because of the emergence of such variants.

Regardless of the dangers, the corporate media is ramping up its demands that governments rule out any further safety lockdowns. The February 5 editorial in the Australian Financial Review declared: “No more hair-trigger border and city closures by state premiers that constantly leave Australians stranded in their own country and disrupt a still fragile recovery in the domestic economy.”

On the same day, an Australian editorial praised Premier Andrews for his “sensible, refreshing response” to last week’s tennis-related Grand Hyatt case, contrasting it with the “hard lockdown” adopted by his Western Australian counterpart, Mark McGowan.

Last year, the Murdoch media publication denounced Andrews for weeks for partially shutting down Victoria in the face of about 800 deaths in that state. Now it is hailing him for trying to find a new “COVID normal” of “economic rebuilding and recovery” based on his bid to “manage contagion risks rather than eliminate them completely.”

Brazil: São Paulo teachers strike against deadly school reopening

Gabriel Lemos

Some 180,000 teachers in São Paulo, Brazil began an indefinite strike Monday against the resumption of partial in-person education in the state’s public high schools. Teachers voted for the strike action by an 80 percent majority in a virtual assembly held last Friday, February 5.

Teachers striking against pension cuts march in Sao Paulo last year.

Teachers went into the schools on the first day of scheduled classes to speak to students and parents about the strike, and are due to stay out beginning today. At the beginning of last week, private schools in the state had already reopened for in-person classes with up to 35 percent of their of students in classrooms. But on Monday, only 5 percent of students attended classes in the public schools.

The reopening of schools in São Paulo came after right-wing Governor João Doria (PSDB) decreed education an “essential service,” allowing schools to reopen in the so-called “red” and “orange” phases of the state’s supposed pandemic containment plan, dubbed “Plano São Paulo.” Before, schools could reopen only in the “yellow” phase, with the pandemic supposedly “under control.” Now infections are escalating.

The secretary of education of São Paulo, Rossieli Soares, is working closely with the most significant layers of Brazil’s ruling elite to reopen the state’s schools. This includes São Paulo’s corporate and commercial sectors, associations of private school owners, a section of the Brazilian medical sector, the corporate media, pro-business educational think tanks and the state’s courts.

On January 28, São Paulo Judge Simone Gomes ruled in favor of a suit brought by the teachers’ unions against the reopening of the schools. Basing her decision on the “protection of the right to life,” she barred the reopening of schools in the “orange” and “red” phases of the “Plano São Paulo.” One day later, the decision was reversed by the State Court of Justice.

Speaking for São Paulo’s governor, the state secretary of education threatened Monday that “appropriate judicial measures” will be taken against the strike, and that teachers who do not return to the classroom will not be paid.

The reopening of schools in São Paulo—Brazil’s richest and most industrial state, as well as the country’s financial center—will undoubtedly open the way for other states to do the same. Of Brazil’s 26 states, 20 have already planned to start in-person classes in the coming weeks.

The reopening of schools in Brazil, like all over the world, is being driven by the needs of the banks and corporations to reopen the economy. The dynamics of class struggle are increasingly pitting the profit interests of the capitalist class in reopening schools against the interests of the working class in saving lives and keeping schools closed.

The strike in São Paulo began after teachers in Rio de Janeiro decided to strike against the reopening of state and municipal public schools on January 30. Teachers in the southern state of Paraná are scheduled to strike on February 18, when in-person classes begin in the state. On Wednesday, February 10, teachers from the municipal public school system of São Paulo will hold an assembly to decide on strike action against the beginning of in-person classes, scheduled for February 15.

The strike in São Paulo was approved despite the efforts of the pseudo-left organizations working in the APEOESP teachers’ union to postpone its start. The Morenoite PSTU had proposed postponing the start of the strike until next Friday, February 12, while Resistência, one of the tendencies within PSOL (Party for Socialism and Liberty), had proposed holding another assembly, only on February 19, to consider action. Their main claim was that it was necessary to “build” support for the strike mobilization, even with the threat of more COVID-19 cases and deaths when schools reopened.

Expressing these tendencies’ middle-class pessimism and contempt for the lives of the Brazilian working class, Resistência’s union leader, João Zafalão, argued at Friday’s virtual assembly that: “The ideal policy, that of dreams, would be to decree a strike [now]. ... The problem is that our will is not capable, at this moment, of overcoming reality.” This means that, for him, the COVID-19 pandemic is not part of Brazil’s “reality.” Until Sunday, Resistência’s website, Esquerda Online, had not published a word about the teachers’ strike in São Paulo.

The teachers who attended the virtual assembly reacted with a revolt against the proposal of the Morenoite union officials. They wrote in the chat of the virtual assembly: “The difference in the calendar can mean more or less LIVES!!!”; “No more excuses. Build what? Graves?”; “The only need to strike immediately is a sense of reality! A year of Pandemic and you want to wait for more what??? STRIKE FOR LIFE, NOW!”

The reopening of schools is taking place with the pandemic still out of control in São Paulo. In addition to the enormous under-counting of COVID-19 cases and deaths, the Doria government has made constant changes to the criteria of the “Plano São Paulo” to force the reopening of businesses and schools in the state. Writing in the daily Folha de S. Paulo at the beginning of the second wave in Brazil in November, three professors at the University of São Paulo denounced the criteria of the “Plano São Paulo” by stating, “it was never a containment plan, but a plan for making economic activity more flexible despite the pandemic.”

In late January, Professor Alexandre Naime of the state university UNESP told the UOL website that, because of the worsening situation of the pandemic and the detection in São Paulo of the new highly contagious strain of coronavirus identified in Manaus, the state would need “something close to [a] lockdown.” However, according to him, “each time the problem worsens, they change the norm to make [the ‘Plano São Paulo’] classification more flexible.” In addition to the new Manaus strain, at the end of December the more contagious British strain of the coronavirus was detected in São Paulo.

In the last update of the “Plano São Paulo,” released last Friday, the pandemic situation in 10 of the 17 regions of the state supposedly “improved,” according to the state government. Even so, seven regions of São Paulo are in the “yellow” phase, seven in the “orange” phase and three in the “red” phase. In the “yellow” phase, in addition to non-essential services being allowed to work for more hours, the limit on the number of students attending in-person classes rises from 35 percent to 70 percent.

The main pretext given by the state government for relaxing the “Plano São Paulo” was a small decrease from 71.6 percent to 67.2 percent in the average rate of occupation of the state’s ICU beds. However, besides hiding the fact that the number of ICU beds in the state has increased in recent weeks with the worsening of the pandemic, this ignores the high number of cases and deaths still being registered in São Paulo during the second wave of the pandemic.

In the last month, the average number of COVID-19 deaths remained above 200 per day, reaching 365 on February 2, the highest number since September 9. In January, the number of deaths in the state of São Paulo was 37 percent higher than in December. The average number of cases in the state remained above 10,000 per day over the last month, with January the month with the highest number of cases since the beginning of the pandemic in São Paulo. The state has recorded a total of more than 1.8 million cases and 55,000 deaths. By comparison, California, the US state with the most coronavirus cases, has 3.4 million cases and almost 43,000 deaths.

The partial reopening of private schools for in-person classes and of state public schools for teachers’ meetings since February 1 has already led to dozens of new coronavirus cases and outbreaks in schools. APEOSP has registered 147 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in 79 state schools over the past week. In a private school in Campinas, in São Paulo’s countryside, 39 employees and eight students had tested positive by last Thursday, and one teacher had to be hospitalized.

APEOESP, whose president is the Workers Party (PT) state deputy Maria Izabel Noronha, known as Bebel, has insisted that the return to school should occur after teachers are vaccinated. This proposal, however, ignores the fact that the licensed vaccines in Brazil have not been certified for children and adolescents, who are a significant vector for coronavirus transmission and will continue to be infected and transmit the deadly virus to their families.

More importantly, this proposal blocks a unified fight with other sections of workers to implement measures that contain the spread of the virus in São Paulo and throughout Brazil. Faced with an out-of-control pandemic and the collapse of the vaccination campaigns, the only measure capable of curbing infections and saving lives is the closure of non-essential services and production, as well as schools, with financial compensation to all those affected, until the pandemic is eradicated.

This demand, however, has been ignored not only by Brazilian bourgeois parties, including the PT, but also the pseudo-left tendencies that orbit the PT and are today providing a left cover to a faction of the Brazilian ruling elite that has tactical differences with fascistic President Jair Bolsonaro.

São Paulo teachers are entering the same struggle as Chicago teachers in the US, who are now facing a bitter confrontation with the city’s Democratic mayor, the Biden administration and the Chicago Teachers Union.

Defying medical science and workers’ opposition, Dutch state reopens schools

Harm Zonderland

The Dutch government has mandated primary schools reopen their doors on February 8 and the easing of other lockdown restrictions. The curfew, which set off far-right protests, remains in force and may be extended. However, the Dutch Security Council, an assembly of mayors, stated through their chairman, Tilburg Mayor Hubert Bruls, that if the curfew is lifted, it should not be reimposed.

A family watches as the father get a nose an throat swab as residents of Bergschenhoek, Netherlands, take part in a mass test of all of the municipality's 62,000 inhabitants starting Wednesday, Jan. 13, 2021, following a cluster of COVID-19 cases at an elementary school, including about 30 cases of the British coronavirus variant. (AP Photo/Peter Dejong)

While mainstream media zealously pushes illusions that schools can be opened safely, governments across Europe and internationally are demanding schools be reopened even as evidence mounts that schools are key vectors in spreading COVID-19. Recent studies show that school closures reduced the spread of the virus in the United States. UK studies show that children are more susceptible to the so-called British variant and spread it more rapidly.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson had to admit that the “problem is schools may nonetheless act as vectors for transmission, causing the virus to spread between households.”

In the Netherlands, data from an outbreak of the British variant at a school in Lansingerland shows children spread the virus to their families in 17.9 percent of researched cases, against 5.6 percent for the “regular” virus. On February 3, Dutch communal health services (GGD) reported 4,060 confirmed cases and 205 hospitalizations.

While the government’s advisory board Outbreak Management Team (OMT) calls reopening schools a “real risk,” it advises not to keep schools closed, but to implement social distancing and supply “quick tests” to schools. Health Minister Hugo de Jonge also called school reopenings a risk, but he “think[s] the health care system can handle it.”

In fact, the Dutch health care system hangs by a thread. After decades of privatization and austerity, which led to the closure of five “bankrupt” hospitals in 2018, thousands of planned surgeries were canceled due to the pandemic. Public health examinations for cancer were cancelled in 2020 for the same reason, meaning that tens of thousands of people will likely develop cancer because of missing early treatment.

There is broad resistance among the international working class against the premature reopening of schools in the US, Brazil, UK, Germany, the Netherlands and beyond. US teachers in Chicago are striking against the school reopening. The United States has seen more than 26 million infections and suffered over 440,000 casualties. The Chicago Teachers Union negotiated with Democratic Mayor Lori Lightfoot for the reopenings as more than 10,000 teachers are breaking with the unions and organizing strikes themselves.

Everywhere, unions do everything they can to downplay and isolate strikes and force workers back to work. The Dutch Algemene Onderwijsbond (AOb), the largest teachers union, affiliated to the FNV (Federation of Dutch Trade Unions, the largest Dutch union federation), is at most sheepish as it follows the state’s dictates. An AOb spokesperson told RTL Nieuws, “Why can they not wait until the advice is completely pieced together, so that everybody can read which measures are necessary for children and teachers?”

Despite growing resistance among teachers, AOb claims that “most school workers would rather want the schools to be able to reopen.” In a recent article, the state-funded news outlet NOS Nieuws shows a twitter post from a concerned husband of a primary school teacher, saying: “She will strike. [...] Unions: idea perhaps? Strike for safety?” He also pointed to the government ignoring medical advice and said that education workers are “thrown into the fray unvaccinated.”

An online petition demanding schools open only after all school workers received vaccines has more than 31,000 signatures in four days. The petitioners point to the already severe personnel shortage and high workload in the schools. This makes replacing sick teachers nearly impossible.

The social crisis now unfolding in the Netherlands has been brewing for decades but erupted to the surface due to the government’s mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic. The government’s malign neglect of public health and treatment of the pandemic as a financial rather than health care crisis have intensified deep class tensions.

Unemployment has risen sharply, especially among flex workers and youth. The housing shortage, combined with student debt, makes it almost impossible for youth to find a place to live. More than 150,000 people rely on food banks for daily sustenance. One million people live in poverty, 250,000 of them are children, while the richest 10 percent saw their wealth increase by billions of euros.

The trade unions in the Netherlands are not working for the working class but against them. They give bogus reasons to justify rejecting members’ calls for strikes, arguing that the pandemic or lack of funds makes it impossible to strike.

This underscores the necessity, as the World Socialist Web Site has explained, for workers globally to build their own organizations, rank-and-file safety committees, for an internationally coordinated struggle against the pandemic and against school reopening policies. Independent organization and an international, socialist perspective are critical to mount a struggle. The trade unions, for their part, act like police enforcing state and corporate dictates on the working class.

The rank-and-file education safety committees in Germany and the UK have adopted a statement of solidarity with the protesting teachers in Chicago. Expressing their support and solidarity, the statement concisely explains the reasons behind the school reopening push: “The reason for this is clear to us: schools are being used as holding pens for children, and teachers are being employed as babysitters in unsafe conditions, so that parents can be forced to return to work and corporate profits can be maintained throughout the pandemic.”

Furthermore, the rank-and-file education safety committees point to the treacherous role of the trade unions in France and the UK. Only when teachers started taking matters into their own hands did the unions call for school closure, in order to prevent broader strikes they could not control.

The entire Dutch ruling class and political establishment—most prominently the far-right Forum for Democracy (FvD)—are pushing a policy of herd-immunity, allowing the virus to spread with as few containment measures as possible, in order to keep profits flowing to the banks. The way forward for workers in the Netherlands and internationally is in advancing a socialist program, placing human life above economics and the ruthless policies of the capitalist class.

Turkish government prepares to reopen schools as pandemic surges

Barış Demir

Amid a global homicidal back-to-school drive, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government is planning to begin in-person teaching starting February 15 in Turkey, where there are nearly 18 million students and 1 million teachers in K-12 schools.

Last week, after a cabinet meeting, Erdoğan said, “Considering limited internet access, we have decided to open village schools on February 15.” He added, “Preparations will begin for the 8th and 12th grades, primary and special education schools to start education from March 1.” The 8th through 12th grades already partially began in-person teaching on January 22.

Education Minister Ziya Selçuk’s announced Thursday that Monday through Friday, in-person education will begin at villages and similar schools on February 15.

Children wearing face masks for protection against the coronavirus, walk in Kugulu public garden, in Ankara, Turkey, Wednesday, May 13, 2020. (AP Photo/Burhan Ozbilici)

The ministry also declared: “As of March 1, face-to-face education will be held in all public and private primary schools, as well as nursery classes and special education classes within these primary schools as two days a week; face-to-face education will begin in the 8th grade of all public and private secondary schools and Islamic divinity secondary schools.”

Previously, Selçuk announced that the government had reached “a principled decision on the February 15 opening of schools,” emphasizing its determination against widespread concerns and opposition among teachers, parents and students.

With the lack of widespread vaccination, the spread of very transmissible COVID-19 variants and medical experts’ warnings of another surge, this decision continues the “herd immunity” policy at the expense of thousands of workers lives.

The purpose of the reopening drive is to get children out of their homes so their parents can be sent back to work to produce profits for the corporate and financial elites. The hundreds of billions of liras handed out to the corporations and banks since the beginning of the pandemic are to be recovered from the population, whatever the cost.

As of February 7, only 2,612,000 of Turkey’s population of over 83 million people had been vaccinated. Most have only received the first dose of a two-dose vaccine and so lack adequate protection.

Boston College Biology Professor Emrah Altındiş criticized the slow pace of vaccination. He wrote: “It is a dream to control the pandemic at this speed! If we think that an average of 100,000 people are vaccinated a day, 68 million people (2 doses per person), who constitute 80 percent of the population, will be vaccinated in nearly four years. Meanwhile, the protection of those who were vaccinated in the first year will probably be overdue! A vaccination mobilization is necessary!”

Moreover, Health Minister Fahrettin Koca recently announced that COVID-19 variants were found in 17 cities in the country. The campaign to reopen schools is all the more criminal as new strains of COVID-19, including potentially vaccine-resistant forms, are spreading.

Since the government gradually began face-to-face teaching in September, the number of daily cases rose rapidly up to 30,000 daily. With more than 30,000 daily cases in November and December, Turkey was in third place worldwide after the US and Brazil and became the first in Europe. Over the same period, the daily official death toll exceeded 250.

As the health care system neared collapse and public anger rose, the government had to suspend face-to-face education and take temporary lockdown measures in November. Due to these restrictions, however inadequate, the number of daily cases fell to around 5,000 in late January but only very briefly.

Even the Health Ministry’s discredited figures show that school closures and limited lockdown measures have slowed the spread of COVID-19, although the government has always called for keeping non-essential businesses open, making it impossible to contain the pandemic. The link between the return to face-to-face education and COVID-19 contagion is now a widely acknowledged scientific fact.

As the World Socialist Web Site reported, after UK children were noted to have higher infection rates than adults in December, Prime Minister Boris Johnson had to concede, “The problem is schools may nonetheless act as vectors for transmission, causing the virus to spread between households.”

With the reopening of US schools in the summer and fall as the pandemic raged, cases surged massively, driving the death toll to over 450,000.

Despite a considerable decrease in daily infections, the official number of daily cases in Turkey on February 3 increased again to above 8,000, with the trend rising particularly after the new strains were detected.

Moreover, medical experts and scientists continue to warn that it is too early to begin face-to-face teaching at schools and that a new surge might emerge as a result of the variant virus.

Professor Dr. Mustafa Necmi İlhan, a Health Ministry’s Social Sciences Board member, stated last Sunday, “We have 7,000 [daily] cases now [in an upward trend]. Because there is a mutated virus right now, I frankly think that it is too early to talk about lifting or loosening restrictions. … For now, I think it will be a bit early to consider decisions about opening schools or other restrictions.”

Prof. Dr. Elif Dağlı, a pediatric chest specialist, warned, “We have received information that health institutions treating the pandemic in Istanbul are being asked to prepare plans and programs for a new surge in March and April.”

Stressing that COVID-19 restrictions should continue, Infectious Diseases and Clinical Microbiology Specialist Professor Dr. Bülent Ertuğrul said, “We are now heading towards the third wave of the pandemic. The measures should be continued much more tightly. If we do not do this, we cannot overcome a third wave. If we do not be careful, we may also experience the troubles Europe is experiencing today.”

He added that there are two ways to prevent the disease. “We will either prevent it with a vaccine or by stopping the transmission of the virus in the society. This means restrictions, and we will prevent it this way.”

However, there are no widespread vaccination programs, full lockdown with contact tracing or other effective measures in Turkey. Bourgeois opposition parties and their allies in the pseudo-left groups and trade unions have tacitly backed the reopening drive. The pro-opposition Education and Science Workers’ Union (Eğitim-Sen) has not opposed the reopening drive since September and has worked to sow confusion among teachers, students and parents.

It demanded, “If you are going to open schools, education workers should be vaccinated right now.” Firstly, with current supplies, it is impossible to vaccinate all the hundreds of thousands of teachers and school staff before schools reopen.

Moreover, although the COVID-19 mortality rate in children is still low, they are not immune. It was also internationally confirmed that the virus, which children caught in schools, helped massively spread the disease when they carried it home to their parents. Limited vaccination of only a certain group without vaccination of the majority of the population will not control the pandemic.

An independent political intervention by the international working class is required to contain the global pandemic and save lives.