India’s Growing Disease Burden… Will Healthcare Budget Suffice?

Harleen  Shergill

The global health emergency that jolted the world from its slumber made us realize the value and importance of health, probably the only positive outcome of the pandemic. Baring few nations, others struggled hard to cope with their crumbling health infrastructure. In India too, Health sector which had long been overshadowed and ignored in both priority and fund’s in the race of development came under pressure and scrutiny. Our healthcare spending of GDP has been measly in the last seven decades of independence. The Modi government aims to increase the public health spending to 2.5% of GDP by 2025, which is way too low for a country of 1.3 billion. Whereas, countries with much smaller populations like US are spending 16.9% of GDP (2018), Switzerland 12.2% (2018), France and Germany spending11.2% respectively.

The disease situation in India has been in a consistent state of deterioration with little improvement over the decades. The ailing health of our population has hardly ever been a priority with state authorities or a cause of concern for health experts. Till the time pandemic decided to hit us -Health ministers were neither heard nor seemed worried for the persistent health issues gripping our people and eroding the human capital of our country.

Even though the Healthcare allocation in the budget has surged by 137% from Rs 94,452 crore to 223,846 crores in 2021 (Economic Times), But is this budget enough for a perpetually ailing population marred by burden of disease. What needs to be understood is that mere pumping of money in the under resourced and up till now ignored sector will only marginally help at a superficial level in regaining the lost health of our population. We have been quick to applaud ourselves over the unearned victory in tackling the COVID-19 crisis and conveniently ignoring the real pandemic looming large.

India ranked 94th on the Global Hunger Index (2020) among 107 countries. The score based on four indicators of undernourishment, child wasting, child stunting and child mortality makes it all the more crucial to recognize the grim reality. The ‘Serious Category’ tag exposes the irreparable damage being done to our young population.  As per the National Health Survey (2015-16) conducted by Ministry of Health and Family Welfare-35.7% children under 5 years of age are under weight, 38.4% are stunted and 21% are wasted. What is even more alarming is the prevalence of hunger in our country over the decades, with 8,82000 reported malnutrition deaths in 2018, of children below 5 years of age as reported by UNICEF. Though, these staggering figures are slowly declining but they still continue to impact the lives of our young population. Malnutrition impairs cognitive ability and reduces work performance in school. The burden of the disease in childhood also leads to detrimental effects that persist throughout the course of life. Surprisingly, India is not only a self sufficient but a surplus food grain country, the hunger pangs of the deprived population failing to find a voice.

Rabies, a completely preventable disease has shown no obvious decline for almost a decade, the reported incidents are probably only an understatement of actual incidence of the disease, since Rabies is still not a notified disease in our country. According to World Health Organisation (WHO) Bulletin released in 2014, the annual reported deaths due to the disease were as high as 18,000 to 20,000 and India accounts for 36% of the total deaths across the world.

Most of the infected people are from lower socio-economic background. Thus, these depressing statistics fail to find any mention in government Health Schemes or awareness programs.

Communicable disease remains a major threat for crippling India’s population, with Tuberculosis (TB) being the biggest challenge. The elimination of TB by 2025 as proclaimed by the National TB Elimination Program seems unrealistic with its extremely high prevalence across the country. WHO has categorized India as a ‘High Burden’ country as it accounts for 27% of total worldwide deaths. The absolute figures for total infected and notified cases is even more shocking with a total 24 lakh positive cases and 79,000 reported deaths in 2019, TB being a bigger killer than covid.

Moreover, most of the TB cases in India are also drug resistant posing major hurdles to its elimination. Worse, the TB infected population shows higher incidence of also being HIV positive making it a lethal combination.

The HIV positive status of our country is even more disconcerting as we are home to second largest population living with HIV infection in the world. In 2019, 23.49 lakh people were suffering from AIDS and 69,000 had died due to the unforgiving illness(Ministry of Health and Welfare). The extent of prevalence of the disease is equivalent to any scary epidemic.

The burden of Malaria has also not eased much in the last several years, with consistent break outs every year. India accounts for a whopping 77% of total Malaria cases in South Asia. There are glaring discrepancies in the reported cases and recorded deaths as far as statistics provided by Indian authorities and data reported by World Health Organisation is concerned. The estimated figures for the disease as reported by WHO in 2019 were as high as 6,737,000 confirmed cases and 9620 recorded deaths. The impact for Malaria is more profound in case of pregnant women causing severe anemia, abortions, still birth, and maternal mortality. Unfortunately, data for these lost lives does not find any reference.

According to a report released by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) for 2020, India ranked 131 on Human Development Index among 189 countries. Health being one of the prime parameter’s in measuring Human Development Index. The life expectancy of Indian’s at birth is worse (69.7 years) than even developing countries like Bangladesh (72.6 years). This clearly substantiates the growing disease burden in India, making it pertinent to recognize several factors that accelerate the spread of diseases. The link between poverty and disease is obvious and indisputable. Hence, lack of clean drinking water, poor sanitation conditions, absence of adequate food, rising pollution levels are major risk factors, with air pollution being the biggest contributor in rampant spread of Pneumonia and other respiratory illnesses.

The prevalence of disease dampens and depresses human development and is detrimental to its progress. It is common knowledge that poor countries tend to be unhealthy and diseased nations tend to be poor. Human capital itself is a prime resource for economic development as ill health and disease reduce lifetime incomes.  Human-resource being the driving force behind nation building, makes investment in Health sector imperative and crucial.

The threat posed by disease burden in our country needs to be understood and addressed at the micro level by revisiting the numerous health schemes started by the government. There is an urgent need to make healthcare affordable and available for the poor and deprived population. Awareness drives need to broaden their spectrum. COVID-19 pandemic with less than 2 lakh deaths should not become the only top priority in allocation of funds. Therefore, to raise the health status of our population healthcare policies, need to be all inclusive and comprehensive, rather being inclined to a particular population group or a particular disease. Health of a nation should be a collective responsibility carried out in a cooperative manner towards a common goal.

Modi’s politics of tears

Bhabani Shankar Nayak

Mr Narendra Modi often cries as if tear drops can replace misgovernance and hide the failures of his government. The display of tear drops help to build a persona of human feelings. There is no scientific way to measure whether his tear drops reflect sincerity or master act of political strategy to hide Hindutva politics of hate. This is an old strategy of politicians to weep in order to manipulate public and manufacture their humane qualities. It is becoming a permanent feature of Modi’s politics to hide his broken promises to the people of India. Historically, fascists display their emotional side more often to decorate their rhetoric and hide their ruthless leadership under the tear drops. The sinking democracy, loss of public trust in Modi, awful economic crisis, social and economic conflicts are serious signs of a fractured republic in India under the BJP government.

The political journeying of Mr Narendra Modi from Gujarat to New Delhi is based on well-crafted propaganda full of deceptive image making and promises. His political success based on his ideological politics of Hindutva and policies of crony capitalism have accelerated deaths and destitutions of many Indian citizens. His tears did not fall neither during the death of Hindu karsevaks in Godhra nor for the Muslims died in 2002 Gujarat riots. The political dividends provoke Modi’s tear drops. He has used tear drops as a potent tool to accomplish his political objectives. Mr Narendra Modi’s tear drops are master classes in acting to revive his lost glory as a visionary strong man in politics.

Historically, Adolf Hitler, Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini, Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher have used tear as a tool of ruthless politics. The merchants of power have used wet eyes as a strategy to hide the failures of their political leadership and sinister politics. The tear shedding is a profound political expression and not an emotional human outburst for these reactionary, authoritarian and fascist leaders.

The acting skills and propaganda can help the actors in cinema, but politics of performance cannot stay away from everyday realities of people and their lives for long. The material crisis represented by the rise of mass poverty, hunger, homelessness and unemployment brings back leaders from their dream journeying of power to the pedestrian path of democratic accountability. The tear drops of Modi might be providing illusionary relief to the fraudulent politics of the BJP and RSS but no weeping can save Mr Narendra Modi led BJP government from its quick fall. The farmers movement in India reveals the working-class consciousness and exposes the hollowness of Modi’s politics of tear and his diversionary tactics.

In larger philosophical landscape, the political tear shedding emerges when democratic politics of representation based on people’s needs and desires no longer have a material foundation. Tear drops mark the end of politics of reason, debate and disagreements grounded in evidence. In the market driven cultural politics of Hindutva, the RSS and BJP is trying to create a long-lasting emotional space independent of material reality of people and their everyday sufferings in India. The mass media is accelerating such a transformation in which emotive issues take precedence over everyday necessities. The media manipulates public mind by creating scenes of external threat to national security, heritage, culture, religion, unity and sovereignty of the country. Such propaganda signals to people that we need a strong leader to overcome these crises. The same propaganda machines also offer Mr Narendra Modi as an alternative leader based on strong vision.

The times of tide reveals the cowards in politics and puts all strong men and their political propaganda in the dustbin of history. As time progresses, the people of India realised that Mr Narendra Modi is a political conman of capitalist forces in India. He has no feelings for the people and their country. He is only interested in false propaganda and capture power through electoral means to facilitate the deepening of capitalism which marginalises masses in India. The people of India learn from their everyday realities that BJP and RSS cannot govern and represent their interests. The regular weeping scene of Mr Narendra Modi is a product of such a situation in India.

Modi’s tear drops are political and lacks human emotion. His weeping is a strategy to overcome the crisis created by his ideological politics of Hindutva and economic policies.  It is time to expose Mr Narendra Modi and his politics without substance.

Switzerland’s contribution to the International Neoliberal Order

Franklin Frederick

The Russian Revolution in 1917 panicked Europe’s upper middle classes, already much discredited and weakened by the gigantic tragedy of the First World War, the result of their own greed, irresponsibility and incompetence. The crash of 1929, which almost ruined most of the industrialized capitalist countries but hardly affected the young Soviet Union, further strengthened the alternative posed by the Russian Revolution. This bourgeoisie subsequently faced two huge tasks: rebuild the international capitalist order and respond to the challenge posed by Marxist criticism and the Russian Revolution. A group of intellectuals hostile to communism, to the left in general, and even to New Deal capitalism in the U.S., sought to develop and impose a more authoritarian and profoundly anti-democratic reconstruction of capitalism: neoliberalism. As mentioned in a previous article, Switzerland was the first country to welcome and finance these intellectuals, playing a key role in shaping the neoliberal order.

Quinn Slobodian, author of Globalists, gave a name to Switzerland’s contribution to neoliberalism: the Geneva School.

For Slobodian:

“The Geneva School includes: thinkers who held academic positions in Geneva, among whom Wilhelm Röpke, Ludwig von Mises, and Michael Heilperin; those who pursued or presented key research there, including Friedrich Hayek, Lionel Robbins, and Gottfried Haberler; and those who worked at the secretariat of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), such as Jan Tumlir and Frieder Roessler. Geneva School neoliberals transposed the ordoliberal idea of ‘the economic constitution’ – or the totality of rules governing economic life – to a scale beyond the nation.”

Still according to this author;

“Geneva – later the home of the WTO – became the spiritual capital of the group of thinkers who sought to solve the riddle of postimperial order “– the period following the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire – that obviously included the challenge posed by the Russian Revolution. Slobodian added:

“What the neoliberals of the Geneva School sought was not a partial but a complete protection of the rights of private capital, and the ability of supranational judiciary bodies like the European Court of Justice and the WTO to override national legislation that might disrupt the global rights of capital”, in short, an economic constitution for the world.

For the Geneva School, always according to Slobodian:

“Commitments to national sovereignty and autonomy were dangerous if taken seriously. The Geneva School stalwarts thus believed that after empire, nations must remain embedded in an international institutional order that safeguarded capital and protected their right to move it freely throughout the world. The cardinal sin of the twentieth century was unfettered national independence, and the neoliberal world order required enforceable isonomy – or “same laws”, as Hayek would later call it – against the illusion of autonomy, or “own laws”.”

Put another way, for neoliberals in the Geneva School, laws defending the ‘rights’ of capital should overlap with national laws concerning workers’ rights or environmental protection, for example.

Many of the Geneva School’s participants were among the founders of the Mont Pélerin Society in Switzerland, an organization that played a key role in the intellectual construction of neoliberalism and the international dissemination of its proposals. The Mont Pélerin Society has served as an inspiration and model for other important organizations on the international right such as the Atlas Network and the Atlantic Council.

Faced with the challenge posed by the Russian Revolution, the Swiss bourgeoisie very early on sided with capital, embracing even the most authoritarian extremes of capitalism as represented by neoliberalism, all to stop the ever more threatening ‘danger’ of the left, always much more menacing, from the point of view of capital, than any totalitarian threat from the right. An important testimony of the Swiss bourgeoisie’s crusade against communism and the left in general is given by the writings of Harry Gmür, Swiss writer and communist. Born in Bern in 1908, Gmür witnessed the rise of fascism in Europe and the neo-liberal reaction in Switzerland, both reactions to the challenge posed by workers and the Russian Revolution. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Gmür embraced the left and its humanitarian values. In a text published in 1965 under the title Hitler’s War and Switzerland, Gmür wrote: “After the outbreak of war, the government in Bern, under German pressure, but certainly availing itself all too readily of the opportunity, had hastened to ban and subject to police surveillance all consistently anti-fascist parties, associations, newspapers, book distributors, and so on.”

And in another article published in 1975 – At that time in Switzerland – Gmür wrote:

“The Swiss Left was subjected to particular pressure during the war…After the outbreak of the war, the Federal Council, out of anti-Communism no less than out of servility to the Third Reich, had suppressed Freiheit, the organ of the Communist Party, and the two daily newspapers of the Left Socialists of Vaud and Geneva, which had split from Social Democracy. After the French surrender, the Communist Party, the left socialist parties of French-speaking Switzerland, the German-Swiss Socialist Party Opposition (a faction working against the right-wing course of the party leadership) and the Switzerland-Soviet Union Society were banned outright. Their property – printers, bookshops, even office inventory – was confiscated and never returned even later.

Justifiable complaints by the Soviet press about the treatment of Soviet prisoners of war who had fled to Switzerland were rejected by the chief of justice and police.”

Gmür’s two articles were published in Weltbühne, a publication in the former Democratic Republic of Germany, under the pseudonym of Stefan Miller, certainly to avoid repression from the right wing in Switzerland.

However, the most compelling document about Switzerland’s bourgeoisie, its ceaseless war against the left and its uncompromising defence of capital above all else is the Bergier Report.

In December 1996, an independent commission was created by the Swiss Federal Council under the direction of the historian Jean François Bergier, with the mandate, according to Bergier himself:

“ to answer a series of specific questions: on “unclaimed” assets, i.e. assets deposited in Swiss banks before the (Second World) War by future victims (of Nazism) and never later recovered by them or their heirs; on the treatment of refugees; on all economic and financial relations between Switzerland and nazi Germany – trade, industrial production, credit and capital movements, insurance, arms trafficking, the market in art works and property looted or sold by force, rail transit, electricity, forced labour in the German subsidiaries of Swiss companies.”

The Bergier Report as a whole consists of 11,000 pages distributed over 28 volumes. It is an immense and invaluable piece of work.

For Pietro Boschetti, author of a book that summarizes the Bergier Report titled Les Suisses et les Nazis [The Swiss and the Nazis], from which Bergier’s previous quote comes,

“the report in general confirmed what historians already knew: yes, asylum policy was extremely harsh during the war; yes, the National Bank bought a lot of suspicious gold from Nazi Germany, thus providing it with a much-appreciated service.”

In his book, Boschetti mentions a few examples of the cooperation of big business in Switzerland with nazi Germany as revealed by the Bergier Report. From the examples given by Boschetti, I mention some below, to give an idea of the scope of the Bergier Report.

On business between Switzerland and nazi Germany, Boschetti wrote: “Relationships between businessmen were obviously very close and lasting. Thus, after the war, the president of the [Bank] SBS [Rudolf Speich] and the director of the [Bank] UBS [Alfred Schaefer] supported the only Nazi banker [Karl Rasche, member of the SS, of Dresdner Bank] before the International Tribunal in Nuremberg.”

On ‘aryanisation’: “Aryanity certificates to prove racial purity appear to have been a fairly common practice. For example, in order to obtain the right to land in Munich, Swissair accepted that its crews prove their aryanity. Nestlé did the same, as did insurance companies.”

And again, about Nestlé: “From Vevey, Nestlé remained in contact throughout the war with the Swiss Hans Riggenbach, who was in charge of the multinational’s German operations in Berlin. Nestlé sold its Nescafé to the Wehrmacht during the Russian campaign, despite the difficult of importing of coffee beans.”

On forced labour by prisoners of war: “‘Struck, like their competitors, by the lack of workers, Swiss firms resort to forced labour. …at the Lonza factories in Waldshut, where 150 Frenchmen landed between July 1940 and April 1942. From then until the end of the conflict, more than 400 Russian prisoners of war worked there. Georg Fischer, BBC, Maggi, Nestlé and many others did not hesitate to draw on this pool of labour.”

“Ill-treatment was commonplace, including in the Swiss subsidiaries… Until August 1944, Switzerland repatriated fleeing forced labourers, especially Russians and Poles, to Germany.”

For Bergier, the authorities and the people responsible for Swiss companies at the time, “did not fail to justify each of the measures they took, or their refusal to take them, or their hesitation. But their explanations rarely stand up to scrutiny”, as he wrote in the introduction to Boschetti’s book.

However, the public debate that should have taken place after the Report was published – the ultimate goal of all the effort employed – was thwarted. In the words of Pietro Boschetti:

Curious country all the same! While it has just completed a praiseworthy work of historical introspection recognised almost everywhere as exemplary, while it has invested considerable resources to enable historians to work seriously and independently, while it has gone through an ‘identity crisis’ caused by the scandal of unclaimed assets which gave rise to all sorts of exaggerations and excesses, this country, at a time when it has the historical material necessary to have a serene debate, refuses to hold it…. What a pity!

The suppression of this debate was a fundamental victory for the bourgeoisie and big business in their endeavour to protect their own image and maintain within Switzerland the space and credibility needed to continue the expansion of the neoliberal agenda. Were it not for this, institutions as different as the World Economic Forum and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), both based in Switzerland and both heirs and proponents of the neoliberal vision of the world, i.e., the market as the main instrument for organizing society and even the ‘saviour’ of the planet, might not have achieved such renown.

2022 marks the 20th anniversary of the publication of the Bergier Report. It is an occasion to hold the suppressed but still necessary discussion about this document, not only for a deeper understanding of the role of the Swiss bourgeoisie and big business and their ideology at the time of the Second World War, but above all to understand current developments. After all, the neoliberal world view and its representatives still hold enormous political power in this country, hostility against the left remains as aggressive as it was during the Cold War, and Switzerland continues to be an important partner in the construction and dissemination of the fake U.S. narratives supporting anti-democratic campaigns against Cuba and Venezuela, to cite just these two examples. The political forces and economic interests that led to the collaboration of large Swiss companies with nazi Germany are the same as those behind the proposals to reorganize the state according to the interests of capital as advocated by the Mont Pélerin Society and the World Economic Forum; they are also the same forces that prevented public discussion of the Bergier Report.

Neoliberal capitalism continues to be advanced in Switzerland as the only possible solution to the various problems facing humanity today, from the ecological crisis to the health crisis represented by the pandemic. The role of neoliberal capitalism as the cause of these same problems is never even mentioned. When the climate movement dared to question neoliberalism in Switzerland, the reaction was brutal and repressive legislation. Despite the Mont Pélerin Society and the Geneva School, the World Economic Forum and the WWF, there is another tradition in Switzerland, one that was embodied in Harry Gmür, in the Bergier Commission and is now reappearing in the climate movement. It is now up to this tradition to reopen the necessary debate and challenge neoliberalism in one of its most important and influential centres, Switzerland.

Information Interruptus: Bing, Google and the News Media Bargaining Code

Binoy Kampmark

It’s looking a touch quixotic, but the News Media Bargaining Code has become Australia’s weapon of choice in attempting to redistribute proceeds from big tech into the coffers of a withering fourth estate.  It has now reached a point of sufficient concern for Google as to become threatening, winding its way to a Senate Committee Inquiry before going to Parliament for a vote.

The Code aims to remunerate news media businesses for content they generate that is subsequently found through searches on digital platforms.  The body behind its drafting, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, states that it would “address the fundamental bargaining power imbalance between Australian news media businesses and major digital platforms.”  Such an imbalance has led to news outlets “accepting less favourable terms for inclusion of news on digital platform services than they would otherwise agree to.”

The Code encourages tech giants and news outlets to engage in commercial negotiations outside its remit and establish a framework for negotiations where the parties bargain in good faith in coming to binding agreements.  Arbitration is available to determine the remuneration in question should the parties find themselves unable to reach an agreement.

The redistribution measure in the draft Code amounts to a “link tax” that would only serve to benefit core news media and require them to be alerted prior to any upcoming algorithmic rankings made by the tech giants.  Those companies are also required to yield collected consumer data.  As the ACCC describes it, Facebook and Google would have to furnish “information about how and when [they] make available user data collected through users’ interactions with news content.”

Mandating such data collection converts Google into a hoover of consumer information.  Tech giants, according to the code in its current form, have to list all collected data which may, or may not be handed over without the consent of the user.

This is a field with many villains and few heroes.  Google has not covered itself in glory by threatening to pull its search engine from Australia in what would amount to an act of information interruptus.  A statement by Mel Silva, Managing director for Google Australia, excoriates the Bargaining Code for potentially undermining “the benefits of the internet for millions of Australians”.  The company takes issue with having to pay publishers for links – not even the article itself – that would pop up in the search results.  “Right now, no website or search engine pays to connect people to other sites through links.  This law would change that, making Google pay to provide links for the first time in our history.”

On January 31, Google published 12 answers on questions pertaining to the Code.  They are naturally self-flattering.  Market alternatives are suggested.  “Instead of paying for links, we’re proposing to pay publishers through Google News Showcase, our AU$1.3 billion global investment in news partnerships over the next three years.”  A commercial arbitration model based on News Showcase is also suggested, “one that would let arbitrators look at the comparable value of similar transactions, rather than an unpredictable process which looks at one side’s costs and discounts the value Google provides publishers.”

Australian politicians smell a chance for undeserved popularity.  Other platforms are also sensing a chance to move in.  Microsoft, in a move that can only draw some suspicion, supports the Code and is willing to supplant Google’s role in Australia should that search engine exit.  Company president Brad Smith and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella have already spoken to Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Communications Minister Paul Fletcher.  Smith was keen to butter up the officials, with Microsoft “committed to Australia and the news publishers that are vital to the country’s democracy.”  Public interest journalism faced “many challenges from the digital era” and supported the ACCC in its efforts to confront them.  The proposed code “reasonably attempts to address the bargaining power imbalance between digital platforms and Australian news businesses.”

Given that Microsoft, with its search engine Bing, is a midget relative to the monster that is Google (Google’s Australia share is 94.5%, Bing’s 3.6%), this sounds much like the loser’s bid to claim ground yielded by a great and bullying power.  Smith promises further investment “to ensure Bing is comparable to our competitors”.

Clearly, the message from that company has found a willing audience in the Australian government and among such think tanks as the Australia Institute’s Centre for Responsible Technology.  Morrison found Microsoft’s confidence appealing.  Admitting to having no expertise on the subject of Google’s influence in the search market, Fletcher was still delighted by Microsoft’s interest “in the market opportunity in Australia”.  Bing is also attractive for not personalising searches to the user.  Bing, suggested one academic, “doesn’t know and frankly doesn’t care that you’re in the market for yoga pants, for example.”

For all that backslapping praise, Bing comes with its problems.  The engine hosts its own rich share of misinformation and disinformation.  Conspiracy theories find comfortable spaces to occupy in the search algorithms. It privileges student-essay sites, the bane of many university instructors.  Chris Duckett and Null Pointer further suggest that Bing will leave the general or casual searcher generally satisfied but not one keen on trawling the deeper subjects.  By way of contrast, Dave Nilsson of the digital marketing agency ConvertedClick is sold on the image and video searches on Bing.  Good if you like pictures and prettiness, then.

There is much wishful thinking behind the Code, not least in the pigs might fly notion that individual journalists will necessarily benefit from it.  Reining in the gargantuan power of big tech monsters is an admirable position to take and Australian politicians can draw upon precedent.  They might have, for instance, busied themselves with drafting such laws modelled on the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation.  But a model that props up such failing entities as News Corp and actually seeks to channel cash into the long stained and grubby pockets of media moguls is a questionable proposition.  Australia finds itself caught between a blackmailing Silicon Valley giant and such ruthless purveyors of mind numbing trash as Rupert Murdoch.  Some choice.

UK unemployment rises to highest level in four years

Simon Whelan

The number of workers being made redundant in the UK is rising at the fastest pace on record, as pandemic lockdown measures place increasing pressure on the economy.

The Office of National Statistics (ONS) revealed last week that unemployment is at its highest level for four years, reaching 5 percent. It found that 1.7 million workers are without work.

Britain’s economy has suffered the deepest recession for more than 300 years, with Bank of England chief economist Andrew Haldane saying that without state intervention the unemployment figures would have already reached five million. The government’s furlough scheme has supplemented the wages of almost 10 million workers employed by more than 1.2 million companies during various pandemic lockdowns since last March.

In addition to the rapidly rising figures of those without work, millions more workers on furlough run the risk of being made redundant once the scheme is lifted at the end of March. The government’s independent economics forecaster, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), expects the jobless rate to more than double from pre-pandemic levels to 7.5 percent when furlough ends—representing more than 2.6 million people out of work.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, over 210,000 UK jobs have been axed and this figure does not include job losses announced by transnational corporations making redundancies but who have not yet stipulated how many jobs will be cut from their UK located operations. According to the Financial Times, “418,000 people have fallen out of work since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, taking the total number of unemployed people to 1.72m.”

Jobs have been slashed across all sectors, with retail especially hard hit—with closures, mergers and acquisitions occurring as traditional retailers lose out to the online corporations.

The Arcadia group, which included the Topshop and Miss Selfridge brands, fell into administration at the beginning of December last year with debts of £750 million. Last week, online retailer Asos bought up Topshop, Miss Selfridge and another Arcadia brand, HIIT, from administrators for £265 million. Only a fraction of Arcadia’s 13,000 strong workforce will keep their jobs as Asos is only concerned with the online operations of these firms.

This week another fashioning conglomerate Boohoo acquired Dorothy Perkins and two more Arcadia brands for £25.2 million. Boohoo also bought the remains of collapsed high street department store chain, Debenhams, for £55 million, including its digital assets. From next month, 125 Debenhams stores will close. Boohoo previously bought the collapsed retailers Oasis and Warehouse and will take over the e-commerce and digital assets of their brands, and their inventory.

As with Asos, Boohoo’s business model requires no high street shops and the deal sees 214 stores permanently close and 2,450 jobs lost immediately.

Edinburgh’s department store, Jenners, will close in early May with 200 workers losing their jobs.

This year will see thousands more job losses in retail, following the closure of 320 stores every week in 2020. The Centre for Retail Research forecasts 200,000 job losses in 2021. Job losses were being “caused by high costs, low profitability, and [the high street] losing sales to online shopping… The low growth in consumer spending since 2015 has meant that the growth in online sales comes at the expense of the high street.”

Job losses continue in manufacturing, with car maker Nissan in talks with trade unions over redundancies at its Sunderland plant. The BBC reported, “About 160 office-based roles are potentially affected by the consultation which does not involve production staff…”

Rolls-Royce is shedding 9,000 staff from its 52,000 pre-pandemic workforce, with 7,000 jobs already gone. On Monday it was announced that it was finalising, with the trade unions, a cost-saving shutdown. Employees will lose two weeks pay over the summer affecting all 19,000 staff in its civil aerospace arm worldwide. The firm has 12,500 UK employees.

The Conservative government is finalizing its “road map” for ending all restrictions on opening up the economy, to be announced February 22. Fearing the outbreak of workers struggles in the current febrile atmosphere, the Trades Union Congress (TUC) have raised concerns regarding the consequences of mass unemployment unless the pandemic furlough scheme is extended.

Frances O’Grady, TUC General Secretary, framed her response in pro-business terms: “The government must understand we need to work our way back to growth, and for that we need people in jobs. Otherwise we are going to end up with real, deep economic and social problems.”

O’Grady advised Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak to extend furlough provisions until the end of 2021. O’Grady appealed to the better nature of the Tory government, which has overseen over 120,000 deaths over the last year, saying it had a “moral obligation” to prevent a return to 1980s levels of mass unemployment.

Between the early to mid-1980’s, unemployment topped three million. The real figure of those without jobs, including large numbers shifted off onto other welfare benefits and 19 government instigated changes to the way the numbers of unemployed was calculated, meant the real numbers without work was probably double the official figures.

Speaking on behalf of big business, the director general of the British Chamber of Commerce, Adam Marshall, called for a slight extension to the furlough scheme—extending it only from April to July.

The Tories are refusing to extend any form of economic support to workers, with the Treasury claiming to have already spent in excess of £280 billion. The government increased the value of Universal Credit unemployment benefits by £20 a week at the start of the crisis, but this is set to be cut back at the end of March—bringing about a significant increase in poverty.

All talk is that the economic fundamentals are sound and that exit from the European Union is a springboard to economic recovery. This is premised on ramping up the exploitation of the working class, in particular the younger generation.

The Department for Work and Pensions recently rolled out a long-planned cheap labour scheme to push 160,000 unemployed people into an already saturated jobs market. Blaming the unemployed for their plight, Therese Coffey, the employment secretary claimed “digital job surgeries” would assist those without work to improve their interview skills.

Young people, who are being lined up to take up mainly minimum wage jobs, are bearing the brunt of the unemployment crisis. Many are employed in sectors of the economy typified by a lack of security, part-time status, poverty level wages and poor terms and conditions—hospitality, the arts, retail, leisure, entertainment and security, all negatively affected by shutdowns and physical distancing measures.

Since the first pandemic lockdown in March 2020, unemployment for those aged 16 to 24 increased by 124,000 to 597,000. The number of graduate entry level posts declined 11 percent during 2020. Recruitment is reduced at more than half of the UK’s biggest graduate employers, representing the largest annual decrease since the financial crisis in 2009.

Experts have drawn attention to the long-term impacts of unemployment, not the least of which include lower pay and reduced employment prospects. In addition, the mental and physical health of young people is being adversely affected.

The group most affected by the pandemic are those aged 50 plus. There are now 91,000 more unemployed older people than there were 12 months ago—an increase of a third in a single year, significantly more than in any other age group. Workers aged over 50 who lose their jobs are significantly more likely to suffer long-term unemployment than other age group and are more than twice as likely as other age groups to be out of work for at least two years.

Johnson government’s homicidal drive to reopen UK schools justified by feigned concern for children’s welfare

Liz Smith & Margot Miller

The Johnson government is hell-bent on relaxing lockdown restrictions to reopen the UK economy, beginning February 22. Schools are to reopen in England from March 8 with the Tories justifying this on the grounds of feigned concerns about children’s welfare.

Schools in Scotland and Wales will reopen even earlier, on February 22, and Johnson is under pressure to reopen sooner in England. Tory MP Mark Harper, from a 70-strong section of the party in the anti-lockdown “Covid Recovery Group”, told the BBC: “I was pleased the Prime Minister confirmed that schools will be the first thing to reopen from 8th March but disappointed it wasn’t earlier. Now we see that Scotland is going to start bringing back pupils from 22 February, straight after half-term, many colleagues will hope that Ministers will look urgently to see if that could happen in England as well.”

Professor Robert Dingwall of the government’s New and Emerging Respiratory Advisory Group (NERVTAG), referring to the numbers vaccinated, told the Telegraph, “Many people… think it’s a tolerable risk to get the kids back as the Scots are doing.”

Year seven pupils are directed to socially distance as they arrive for their first day at Kingsdale Foundation School in London, Thursday, Sept. 3, 2020. AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)

The pandemic demands the strictest lockdown measures. At least 113,000 people have succumbed to the virus in the UK and new more transmissible variants are emerging.

Just over 12 million people of the 66 million population have received only their first vaccine dose. Until the virus is suppressed in the population, the opportunity lurks for vaccine-resistant strains to develop. According to one study, whose results are being verified, the protection offered by the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine may not be as effective against the new South African variant.

When Johnson precipitously reopened schools and businesses last September, it led to a massive resurgence of the virus which killed more people than the first wave in the spring. He used the same cynical justification for opening schools then: “It’s the kids from the poorer families who aren’t going back, and so you are entrenching social injustice.”

Another unsafe reopening would be devastating. Professor Neil Ferguson’s team at Imperial College London warns that easing restrictions too rapidly from March to July could lead to an additional 130,800 fatalities between now and June next year. This would take UK COVID-19 deaths up to around a quarter of a million.

Addressing Parliament January 27, Johnson declared reopening schools “a national priority” and insisted, “we are doing everything in our power to keep them open because children’s education is too vital… This is why schools were the very last to close and when we move out of lockdown, they will be the first to reopen.”

Children’s education and mental health certainly suffered the over the past year. The attainment gap between poorer and better-off children widened. Referrals to child mental health services reached an all-time high. Charities such as Childline and the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children experienced an increase in children under 11 seeking counselling.

Child and adolescent psychotherapist Jane O’Rourke, founder of website for mental health professionals Mind in Mind, told the BBC Today programme for “deprived children, the pandemic has exacerbated issues… not just [for] teenagers. I am seeing very young children displaying signs of depression, five, six, seven-year-olds.”

But the government—backed by the Labour opposition and education unions—is not rushing to reopen schools out of concern for children’s welfare. As in the US and Europe, schools are viewed only as holding pens for children which must be opened to get parents back to work and producing profits for the corporations. Child welfare is being weaponized in a despicable propaganda campaign to justify criminality and mass deaths described by the British Medical Journal as “social murder”.

Johnson had the gall to repeat his previous absurdity that schools are simultaneously “safe” and contribute to the spread of the pandemic: “I want to stress that the problem is not that schools are unsafe to children. The problem is that schools may nonetheless act as vectors for transmission, causing the virus to spread between households.”

The fact is that schools, alongside workplaces, are proven major vectors for the virus and that closing schools is one of the most effective measures that can be taken to save lives. Up to 100 children a week are currently being hospitalised with paediatric inflammatory multi-system syndrome (PIMS), a rare inflammatory disease linked with coronavirus.

Johnson was not contradicted by Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, who agreed, “Of course we welcome any steps to reopen schools.” He then wrote in the pro-Tory Daily Mail, “I share the Government’s ambition to make it a national mission to reopen our schools. I will do everything in my power as leader of the Labour Party to make that happen.”

The education unions took the same line. National Education Union (NEU) joint leader Mary Bousted said in a press release on January 27, “We all want schools to open, but like the Prime Minister we want them to open when it is safe to do so… We agree with Boris Johnson that this is a balancing act [emphasis added].”

The Tories’, Labour’s and the unions’ concern for the fate of children is belied by decades of cuts to children’s services and rising child poverty. Johnson added a derisory £300 million to the £1 billion catch-up programme for pupils announced in November. This measly amount is no compensation for the privations of the last year for which the government was responsible—overseeing a surge in unemployment, poverty and destitution—let alone the decades of cuts to education and children’s services.

Between 2009-10 and 2019-20, spending on state education fell by 8 percent in real terms. In this time, more than 1,000 Sure Start centres—that provided a wide variety of services to support children's learning skills, health and well-being—closed due to Tory austerity cuts imposed by Labour controlled councils. These forced the poorest families to rely on volunteer provision run by charities and the church.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation wrote in a recent report that “in 2019, 4.2 million children were living in poverty” and a total of “14.5 million people in the UK, over one in five.”

United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, following his visit to the UK in 2018 reported that, “Although the United Kingdom is the world’s fifth largest economy, one fifth of its population (14 million people) live in poverty, and 1.5 million of them experienced destitution in 2017. Policies of austerity introduced in 2010 continue largely unabated, despite the tragic social consequences. Close to 40 percent of children are predicted to be living in poverty by 2021. [emphasis added]”

Such deprivation has had a catastrophic effect on the mental health and well-being of the UK’s children. Over the past five years mental health professionals repeatedly emphasised the impact on children’s mental health of social disadvantage combined with government-driven tests and exam pressures.

In 2017, research carried out by the National Health Service (NHS) reported one in 20 five to 19-year-olds met the criteria for having two or more mental disorders. One in eight (12.8 percent) five to 19-year-olds had at least one mental health disorder. That rose in the first year of the pandemic to one in six, which translates into four to five children in each class.

Less than one in three children and young people with a diagnosable mental health condition get access to NHS care and treatment and the average median waiting time for children in 2017/18 was five weeks to receive an initial assessment and nine weeks to receive treatment. In 2019/20, 538,564 children were referred for help, an increase of 35 percent on 2018/19, and nearly 60 percent on 2017/18. The numbers getting treatment are also increasing but at a much slower rate. In 2019/20, 391,940 children received treatment.

Research by the Young Minds (YM) mental health charity on A&E attendances by young people with psychiatric conditions in 2018 showed a doubling in five years to 27,487.

The fight to put an end to child poverty, provide high-quality children’s services and education, and to end the mass loss of life from the pandemic puts the working class in direct conflict with the profit interests of capitalism. These goals are incompatible with the monopolisation of huge swathes of social wealth by a tiny super-rich oligarchy, many of whom have profited handsomely throughout the pandemic and benefited from government bailouts and money printing. That wealth must be seized and distributed to meet social need.

International Criminal Court ruling paves way for legal proceedings against Israel for war crimes

Jean Shaoul

The International Criminal Court (ICC) has ruled that it does have jurisdiction over war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Palestinian territories of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.

This paves the way for investigations into Israel and Hamas’ conduct during Israel’s murderous assault on Gaza in 2014 and Israel’s response to the weekly protests held under the banner of the Great March of Return that started in March 2018 and lasted for more than a year.

According to United Nations figures, Israel’s bombardment of Gaza in 2014 killed 2,251 Palestinians, including 1,462 civilians, and injured 11,231. Of the Palestinians who lost their lives, 521 were children and 283 were women. The civilian death toll was far higher than that of the estimated 400 fighters belonging to Hamas, the Islamist group that controls Gaza and the ostensible target of the war. Just 67 Israeli soldiers, along with six civilians, were killed, and 1,600 soldiers were injured. The UN’s Human Rights Council (UNHRC) concluded that the mass killing and destruction were deliberate, not accidental, resulting from explicit decisions taken at the highest level of the Israeli government.

Gaza Strip, July 2014: The Kaware’ family home, where eight people, including six minors, were killed, and from the Hamad family home where six members of that family, including one girl – a minor – were killed. (source: Muhammad Sabah and B'Tselem-Creative Commons)

Israeli forces responded to the largely peaceful Great March of Return protests, held in Gaza near its border with Israel, by firing tear gas canisters, some of them dropped from drones, rubber bullets and live ammunition, mostly by snipers. As a result, 214 Palestinians, including 46 children, were killed, and over 36,100, including nearly 8,800 children were injured. One in five of those injured (over 8,000) were hit by live ammunition. In contrast, just one Israeli soldier was killed and seven others injured during the demonstrations.

The ICC ruling constitutes a potential legal barrier to Israel’s plans to extend and/or build new settlements and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plans, now on hold, to annex the Jordan Valley in breach of the ban on an occupying power settling civilians in or annexing occupied territory.

While Fatou Bensouda, the ICC’s chief prosecutor in The Hague, announced in December 2019 that there was sufficient evidence to investigate allegations of war crimes, she requested a jurisdictional ruling from ICC judges to confirm that the court has the necessary territorial jurisdiction before proceeding to a full investigation. The Palestinian Authority, which is an observer state at the UN, joined the ICC in 2015 and asked it to investigate Israeli war crimes.

Until now, the ICC has largely confined its investigations to Africa, which accounts for virtually all of those indicted or arrested by the court since its founding nearly two decades ago. The announcement reflects the increasing international opposition, and within Israel itself, to the wars, repression, occupation, dispossession, torture and collective punishment inflicted on the Palestinian people.

This latest ruling has infuriated Israel and its patron in Washington, which rejects any constraints on its geostrategic interests and plans for a new imperialist carve up of the world in which Israel plays a central role in carrying out this agenda and suppressing the working class in the region.

Neither state signed up to the 1998 Rome Statute that established the ICC with powers to prosecute individuals—not states—accused of genocide, crimes against humanity or war crimes committed since July 2002, when the statute came into force. This was because their record of wars of aggression and criminal actions would open their officials to prosecution.

As the ICC came under pressure from the major powers, Bensouda sought to deflect allegations of anti-Israel bias by accusing the Palestinians of committing war crimes, despite the grossly uneven nature of Israel’s seven-week long war against Gaza in 2014 and provisions in the UN Charter recognizing the right of self-defence when attacked.

Last April, the Trump administration revoked Bensouda’s entry visa to the US and two months later announced that it was placing sanctions on the ICC in response to the court’s intention to probe the conduct of US forces in Afghanistan. Netanyahu called the ICC a “kangaroo court” and a “politicized court obsessed with conducting witch hunts against Israel, the United States and other democracies that respect human rights.”

While any investigation or prosecution of Israeli officials by the ICC is fraught with practical difficulties, which Israel will seek to exploit, and Bensouda’s term of office expires in June, the ICC’s ruling poses two threats to Israel.

It opens up the possibility that hundreds of Israeli government and military officials could be open to arrest if they travel abroad to countries that have “universal jurisdiction”, although countries including the UK have refrained from using such powers against Israelis. A senior Israeli official in the Justice Ministry said that it had prepared a list of hundreds of Israelis who might be at risk and that “We are preparing to mount a full defence for any Israeli citizens that the court attempts to legally persecute if an investigation is opened.”

Second, the ruling, by recognising the Palestinian Authority as a state with the right to seek redress from the court, paves the way for legal action against Israel in the ICC over any construction in West Bank and East Jerusalem settlements that are now home to nearly 700,000 Israelis, or the demolition of homes belonging to Palestinians. As an Israeli official told Ynet News, the online outlet for the Yedioth Aharonot newspaper, “It is unprecedented that every action taken on the West Bank can now be investigated by the court.”

Attacking this latest ICC ruling, Netanyahu said, “Today, the court proved once again that it is a political body and not a judicial institution. The court ignores real war crimes, and instead persecutes Israel, a country with a stable democratic regime that holds up the rule of law and is not a member of the court. With this decision, the court harmed democratic nations’ right to defend themselves from terrorism and played into the hands of elements that undermine efforts to expand the circle of peace.”

Netanyahu released a video statement accusing the court of “pure anti-Semitism,” even as it “refuses to investigate brutal dictatorships like Iran and Syria, who commit horrific atrocities almost daily.” He pledged to “fight this perversion of justice with all our might.”

Netanyahu’s statements distort the ICC’s actual ruling that merely determined that Palestine, which is recognised by the UN General Assembly and whose Palestinian Authority, established under the 1993 Oslo Accords had joined the ICC, could delegate its jurisdiction to the ICC. The court insisted that it had no authority to rule on Palestinian statehood and that its ruling on jurisdiction is “neither adjudicating a border dispute… nor prejudging the question of any future borders.”

In Washington, the incoming Biden administration continued former President Donald Trump’s support for Israel, with State Department spokesman Ned Price saying, “The United States objects to today’s [ICC] decision regarding the Palestinian situation. Israel is not a State Party to the Rome Statute…

“The United States has always taken the position that the court’s jurisdiction should be reserved for countries that consent to it, or that are referred by the U.N. Security Council,” he added, concluding, “We will continue to uphold President Biden’s strong commitment to Israel and its security, including opposing actions that seek to target Israel unfairly.”

The furious response by Tel Aviv and Washington to the ICC’s ruling flows from the ever-escalating pursuit of their predatory interests by means of military force.

Peru in COVID-19 lockdown as new Brazilian variant exposes murderous “herd immunity” policy

Miguel Andrade

Peru’s government imposed another two-week lockdown on January 31 in an attempt to counter a renewed collapse of the country’s health care system. Family members of COVID-19 patients have been left waiting in the streets for up to three days to fill life-saving oxygen cylinders, and the daily death toll has risen to over 180 in a country of just 32 million inhabitants. Late January figures show 600 excess deaths in the country when compared to January, 2020, pointing to a vast underestimation of the already alarming rate of COVID-19 deaths.

The new lockdown involves a total ban on land and air travel in or out of 10 of the 26 regions in the country, including the capital, Lima. It allows each person to leave their home for just one hour a day. Before the second wave of the pandemic spread in the northern hemisphere with the murderous maintenance of an “open economy” for the holiday season, Peru had sustained the world’s highest per capita death rate, a situation the renewed lockdown backhandedly admits may be repeated in the next months.

The Pargue Taruma Cemetery in Manaus, Brazil. Credit: Bruno Kelly

Peru has thus far recorded over 42,000 official COVID-19 deaths and roughly 1.2 million cases. Among the hardest hit are Peruvian health care workers, with nearly 300 doctors having died from COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic, along with over 100 nurses.

The medical consensus is that the real number of infections and deaths is far higher, as the country has a test rate of only 200,000 tests per million inhabitants.

This rate is just one fifth that of the United States, which itself suffered open sabotage by the Trump administration in order to hide the extent of the pandemic’s spread. At the same time, the Peruvian test rate is much higher than in neighboring countries such as Brazil and Argentina, where it stands at just 140,000 per million, and Mexico and Bolivia, where the rate is under 50,000 per million.

The capital of the Peruvian Amazon, Iquitos, was left out of the lockdown, after already having registered cases of the new Brazilian variant first found in travelers from Manaus. This new variant is suspected to be a major factor in the horrific collapse of the health infrastructure in Brazil’s Amazonian capital. Authorities are being forced to fly no less than 1,500 patients out of Manaus to avoid more deaths from the lack of oxygen. Peru’s department of Huánuco and the capital Lima have also registered cases of the Brazilian variant. In neighboring Bolivia, more than 100 cities had their COVID-19 alert status raised to maximum last week, but no lockdown has been announced yet.

Parallel to the surge in cases in Latin America is the unprecedented surge in the demand for medicinal oxygen, which now stands at almost triple the production and distribution rate in Manaus, and has surged by more than 700 percent in Mexico from December 20 to January 20, according to local authorities. In both Mexico and Peru, pandemic profiteers have tripled the price of oxygen cylinders.

With a rolling average of more than 1,000 deaths and 45,000 new cases in Brazil for 18 days now, the lack of oxygen is already threatening Brazil’s largest and richest city, São Paulo, which has taken in patients from around the country. The leading medicinal oxygen producer, White Martins, has notified local authorities in the city that it will retrieve oxygen cylinders from 3,000 home users in order to avoid a collapse in distribution to hospitals. From the north to the south of Brazil, nine states have more than 80 percent of COVID-19-dedicated ICUs occupied, while expansion capacity is hindered by hospitals struggling to treat patients who avoided or were unable to find medical care during the pandemic, leading to the onset or aggravation of other diseases.

The new Brazilian variant, named P.1 by the expert community, shares many genetic characteristics with the UK and especially the South African variants, which are believed to be more contagious than the original Wuhan strain. In the case of the South African variant, clinical trials have already found a dramatic decrease in the efficacies of two of the newest vaccines, from Novavax and Johnson & Johnson. The Novavax vaccine had its efficacy reduced from 89 percent in the UK to just 50 percent in South Africa, where the new strain is already dominant, while the Johnson & Johnson vaccine saw its efficacy drop from 72 percent in the US to just 57 percent in South Africa.

The P.1 variant was originally detected in Japan, after the genetic sequencing of samples taken from SARS-CoV-2 carriers coming from Manaus. Japanese authorities notified their international counterparts on January 10, and by January 27, eight countries, including South Korea, the United States and a number of European countries, had already registered cases of the new variant. Brazilian researchers have concluded that the new variant now accounts for at least 91 percent of cases in Manaus, up from 50 percent in December.

The resurgence of COVID-19 in the Amazon region connecting Brazil and Peru is the direct product of the murderous herd immunity policies pursued by the ruling classes internationally, and underscores their utter bankruptcy. Manaus was the stage for some of the most terrifying scenes internationally in the pandemic in mid-2020, with pictures of hundreds of fresh graves being dug seen around the world.

In September, a preliminary study estimated that 76 percent of the population in the city had already contracted COVID-19. The local authorities boasted that the city had achieved “herd immunity,” using this as the pretext for reopening schools and sending 110,000 pupils back to their classrooms—5 percent of the city’s population. The Manaus study was accepted for publication in the prestigious Science magazine, but appeared only in January, when the city was already seeing a 600 percent jump in COVID-19 deaths from December.

The same January 15 Science issue in which the article on the Manaus infection rate appeared, published a piece in the magazine’s Perspectives commentary section by British health experts Devi Sridhar and Deepti Gurdasani, reviewing the Manaus data. They warned bluntly in their headline, “Herd immunity by infection is not an option.”

They wrote: “What the findings of Buss et al. definitively show is that pursuing herd immunity through naturally acquired infection is not a strategy that can be considered. Achieving herd immunity through infection will be very costly in terms of mortality and morbidity, with little guarantee of success.” The article concluded: “Even a mitigation strategy whereby the virus is allowed to spread through the population with the objective of keeping admissions just below health care capacity, as is done for influenza virus, is clearly misguided for SARS-CoV-2.”

The same conclusion was reached almost in parallel by another team of Brazilian experts that had their work published in the Lancet on January 27. Titled “Resurgence of COVID-19 in Manaus, Brazil, despite high seroprevalence,” the article also raised the possibility that the Manaus surge could be related to the new variants evading previously acquired immunity. The Lancet paper also raises the crucial point that the same infection rate—or “attack rate,” as it is termed by immunologists to differentiate it from active infections—was found in the Peruvian Amazon capital, Iquitos. At the time, the EFE Spanish news agency posted a report titled “The strange case of the Peruvian city where the coronavirus ‘disappeared,’” also raising the dangerous and unsubstantiated prospect that “herd immunity” had been achieved in the city.

Lucas Ferrante, the lead author of an August 7 Nature Medicine article, titled, “Brazil’s policies condemn Amazonia to a second wave of COVID-19,” told the Intercept on February 3 that the new Brazilian strain may turn Manaus into the epicenter of a deadly international third wave of the pandemic. Expressing with utmost clarity the scientific understanding of the dynamics of the breeding of new variants, he said that the new variant was “caused by the second wave” his team had warned about in August. He concluded: “Either a lockdown is imposed now, or Governor Wilson Lima and President Bolsonaro will be responsible for the impact of additional infections and deaths in the republic and around the world.”

Even at this point, Manaus’ authorities are refusing to shut down non-essential services. On Monday, Ferrante stressed to Estado de S. Paulo: “It is unthinkable to return to in-person learning in any part of Brazil right now, in order to avoid the further spread of the new variant. We also recommend the shutdown of factories in the Manaus Industrial District,” adding this could be done “without pay cuts for workers.”

In fact, the city has been a central target of Bolsonaro’s herd immunity policy. The president and his sons—especially Eduardo, the head of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the Brazilian House who was a special guest at Trump’s White House in the lead-up to the January 6 putsch—celebrated the “liberation” of the city in late December, when authorities decided to “reopen the economy.” This followed a small, and largely staged, protest against restrictions by a handful of Bolsonaro loyalists. This had the same character as the staged anti-lockdown protests attended by right-wing militias in Michigan and other US states.

The reopening of Manaus was the most blatant act in what has been recently described by law scholars at the University of São Paulo (USP) as an “institutionalized strategy for virus propagation” by the Bolsonaro administration. A legal team coordinated by USP’s Global Health and Ethics expert, Deisy Ventura, in collaboration with the Conectas advocacy group, was able to document a timeline of actions taken by the Bolsonaro administration, including federal decrees, the promotion of quack cures and the undermining of any measure that restrained the economy.

This timeline, together with the unchecked spread around the world of deadlier new variants of SARS-CoV-2, stands as testimony to the essential unity of the ruling classes internationally in promoting the spread of the virus in the name of “herd immunity,” despite the somewhat more polished language of some European leaders, the incoming Biden administration or Bolsonaro’s local rivals in Brazil. Against clear scientific requirements, one state after another is pressing ahead with reopening schools, with the São Paulo government boasting of “leading” the back-to-school drive by enforcing the return of pupils in face of a strike by teachers.

Manaus stands as Bolsonaro’s pandemic Guernica. Just as the punitive bombing of the small Spanish town by the fascists in 1937 previewed the horrors of World War II, the murderous policy pursued in the Amazonian capital exposes the cruelty of the ruling classes and the pandemic carnage that is being unleashed worldwide.

Workers around the world must take the struggle against the herd immunity in their own hands, organizing a shutdown of non-essential services with full compensation for workers and ruined small businesses to stop the spread of the virus until effective vaccines are available worldwide.