How Brexit Won

Thomas Klikauer & Norman Simms

With Brexit in the box, many have started to reflect on what has happened. Looking back is always a bit like George Bush – or perhaps Karl Rove(he is certainly smart enough) – once said, We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

In a similar vein, German anarchists used to say, die regieren und wir protestieren – they govern while we protest against their government. In any case, with Brexit, British conservatives have created their reality. We are left to analyse it (Rove) and to protest against it. Looking back, there is a clear reason why Brexit won. Brexiters had three ingredients that assure that right-wing populism wins. It wins from Brexit to BoJo (Boris de Pfeffel Johnson), from Modi to Duterte, from Orban to Bolsonaro – the list goes on. What makes them and Brexit win are three things:

1. Politicians: right-wing politicians and their henchmen produce lies, falsehoods, disinformation, myths, conspiracy fantasies, etc.
2. Platforms: online platform providers transmit right-wing propaganda to millions fast and very cost-effectively while eliminating editors, journalists, facts, and truth.
3. Money: well-financed – often through dark money – lobbying institutions, euphemistically labelled think tanks, institutes, agencies, astroturf organisations, etc., lobby governments and the public for right-wing causes.

Brexit had plenty of all three. It had right-wing politicians like David Cameron promising a Brexit referendum, Theresa May pushing Brexit, and BoJo’s Getting Brexit done! Pro-Brexiters also created a strong, highly targeted and very strategic campaign using social media rather aggressively. Finally, pro-Brexit lobbyists ran a sophisticated campaign featuring the accidental misinformation but mostly focusing on deliberate disinformation, outright lies, fibs and falsehood. In short, the Brexit campaign had almost everything the right-wing propaganda playbook offers.

With Dark Money coming in by the truckload, the demagogues of Brexit were able to overspend on their campaign significantly exceeding the legal limit. For the Brexiters, it was simply an All Out War against their perceived enemies – Britain’s quality press, the Labour Party, most economists, the EU, the remainder campaign – and most of all it was a campaign against facts and figures as well as the truth.

Yet, the Brexit campaign never focused on converting the British public. Too many people favoured remaining inside the EU. Targeting the entire UK would have been a hopeless operation. Consequently, Brexiters focused on those they thought can be persuaded to leave the EU – those that could be easily manipulated and persuaded. They are called persuadables – a marketing term that has entered political campaigning.

In the case of Brexit, BoJo’s right-wing and right-hand man – David Cummings – identified Brexit’s persuadables early on. BoJo’s mastermind saw these as a group of about nine million people being between 25 and 55 years of age and living mostly outside of London and Scotland. In other words, BoJo’s clique knew that people in the city of London would not support Brexit and neither would the people of Scotland where 62% voted to remain inside the EU. This meant that the Brexit campaign could not focus on them. They were seen as unpersuadable.

Instead, the Brexit campaign would focus on two things: the persuadable and onboarding – another marketing term. Onboarding seeks to convert sympathisers into committed supporters, financial contributors, and – preferably – into active Brexit campaigners. The onboarding strategy of the Brexit campaign consisted of three steps:

1) People were enticed to click online advertising placed on Facebook, for example. The idea was that such clicks would automatically direct them to a pro-Brexit website, the Vote Leave website, for example.

2) Once on a pro-Brexit website, visitors were tempted to leave their personal details which were to be used for further campaign planning and micro-targeting.

3) In a final step, people were invited to donate to the Brexit campaign and/or become a volunteer supporting Brexit through real political action.

The tripod of right-wing politicians, the willing executioners of the Internet, and Dark Money handlers allowed the pro-Brexit team to engineer a very strategic campaign. As a consequence, each step of their onboarding campaign was planned, tested, and checked. Nothing was left to chance. Messages that went out and onto Facebook were tested beforehand. Those messages that failed to achieve a set target were reformulated or discarded. Often, pro-Brexit messages were re-worked until they converted enough people to the cause of Brexit. The measure used is called the conversion rate.

In one plan, the Brexit campaign even offered $50 to anyone correctly predicting the winner of a soccer tournament. The marketing plan was to entice seemingly unpolitical soccer fans into the manipulative orbit of Brexit rather successfully. To enter the $50 competition, people had to leave their data on the Brexit website. The soccer competition data was fed into Brexit’s ever-growing database, creating a welcome supply of personal data that was instrumental in campaign planning and targeted messaging.

Overall, the Brexit campaign collected data of about 120,000 individuals. Brexit’s “Vote Leave” campaign also started an App for smartphones reminding their friends to vote in the Brexit referendum. By the Brexit referendum on 23^rd June 2016, roughly seventy thousand messages were sent via this App, contributing to the victory of the Brexit campaign.

Thirdly, there also was David Cummings infamous Waterloo Strategy. The Waterloo campaign delivered a pro-Brexit advertising Blitz during the last days of the referendum. It was designed to collect undecided swing voters. Someone in the Brexit campaign nailed it by saying, we spent a shitload of money right at the end.

Indeed, the Brexit campaign was spending about $2 million in the last week before the referendum on Facebook advertisements and videos. By US standards, $2 million isn’t much money. But for rigidly controlled non-money-based election campaigns held in Europe, this is a rather significant sum of money – mostly dark money.

Like many other political advertising campaigns, the Brexit campaign knew that ads work best the closer they are launched to an election day or in the case of Brexit, to the day of the referendum. It hits voters almost on the way to the voting booth, and it targets the unsuspecting voter who had not spent time much thinking about the issue of the day. Besides such media strategies, the subject and content of the Brexit campaign focused on three overarching messages:

The Political Lie: the falsehood that the UK was spending £350 million ($480 million) per week on the EU and that this money could be better spend on health and education once the UK left the EU.

The Fear: fear was created by telling the British people – falsely – that soon Turkey, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Albania would join the EU, bringing a wave of migration to the UK. One of BoJo’s ministers even claimed that the UK could not stop Turkey from joining the EU. It was plain wrong, but it was good propaganda, and it worked.

The Nationalism: the final propaganda item came as Take Back Control. It falsely promised to take back control from the EU. Once this was done, the UK could reduce migration.

All three were targeted disinformation. They were all false, but they were good propaganda or public relations as it is called nowadays. This is the PR side of the Brexit referendum. On the lobbying side, the following happen as perfectly outlined in Howard’s Lie Machines,

The UK Electoral Commission found that pro-Brexit – Vote Leave and BeLeave – had breached the UK’s campaign finance law. Vote Leave spent £449,079 ($620,000) in excess of the statutory limit, and BeLeave knowingly spent £666,016 ($920,000) more than the legal limit. The commission fined both organizations.

In other words, playing by the book doesn’t pay. Pro-Brexiters did not play by the book, exceeded the limit on what they could legally spend and won the Brexit campaign. Years after the Brexit campaign won, they received a slap on the wrist. That was it. Just as Karl Rove said, we make history, and all you can do is, analyse it. The pro-Brexit campaign made history, and years later, we can analyse what was done.

Just as Rove implied, years later we can even speculate that hypothetically that if the Brexit campaign stuck to the legal limit, it would have stopped campaigning in the dying days of the Brexit referendum. Perhaps this might have changed the outcome of the Brexit referendum. On the other side of the Brexit referendum was the Remain campaign. The Remain campaign stuck to the legal limit on campaign financing – and lost.

At the end of the successful Brexit campaign consisting of right-wing politicians, online platforms, and dark money, the referendum’s result was surprisingly narrow. Pro-Brexit received 51.89% and Remain got 48.11%. Despite all the (dark) money spent and all the lies told, the Brexit campaign just scraped in by a relatively slim 1.89% margin. In other words, Cummings managed to convert roughly 1.2 million – many came from the targeted group of 9 million. If slightly more than 600,000 or about 6.7% would have voted against Brexit, Brexit would have been dead. But Cummings, dark money, and clever online marketing won the day.

This gave the UK the pro-Brexit referendum British conservatives had been craving. In the subsequent “Get Brexit Done!” election of 2019, BoJo only managed to get yet another narrow election victory. If 51,000 voters shifted their votes across forty seats, Boris Johnson’s victory probably would have been destroyed.

In short, Brexit is the outcome of two narrow victories for the Brexit campaign in which right-wing politicians were seeking de-regulation through the backdoor by eliminating the EU. The Brexit team successfully used compliant online platforms that transmitted the three great lies of Brexit: a) £350 million per week goes to the EU; b) the conjured-up fear of migration; and c) nationalism’s take back control – control that after Brexit has moved from the EU to BoJo – but not to the British people.

All this came with a strategic, well-choreographed, and generously financed Brexit campaign of mis- and more importantly, disinformation that reached and manipulated millions of voters. In the end, the Brexit campaign was effective in four ways:

1) The pro-Brexit campaign was highly targeted persuading – not the British people as a whole – but a selected group of persuadables. It also targeted voters in the final days of the Brexit referendum.

2) Using the newest advertising tools, better data, and online platforms allowed the Brexit campaign to engineer enough impact that shifted a few voters needed into their favour.

3) Carefully fine-tuned messaging based on sophisticated testing delivered a high success rated for the Brexit campaign.

4) The carefully formulated and texted messages of the Brexit campaign hit a group that it needed to hit: the persuadables. That is how Brexit was done.

In short, right-wing politicians, willing online platforms, and plenty of dark money had set a ruthless right-wing propaganda machine of mass deception in motion that delivered Brexit.

Venezuela: an Example of Struggle for Food Sovereignty and Food Security

Nino Pagliccia

In our daily political struggle we demand our independence from the invader, from the occupier, from imperialism. All of those demands are in essence struggles to assert our sovereignty as a nation and as a people.

A nation is truly sovereign when its people are protagonists in shaping their own destiny, when they are the real rulers that govern their country, and the working class controls the means of production and the production itself.

We believe that full uncompromising sovereignty is the ultimate goal of a socialist society. That is the kind of society that Venezuela is trying to achieve with the Bolivarian Revolution; one where sovereignty is not only a statement on paper but translates into security in all aspects of life of its citizens. Food most essentially.

The international peasants’ movement called La Via Campesina developed the concept of food sovereignty as an alternative to neoliberal policies during the World Food Summit in 1996. Because it has been precisely the prevailing neoliberal economic system, represented by the World Bank and the IMF with their structural adjustment policies, that threatens food sovereignty and food security.

Neoliberal policies cause most harm to food security by allowing corporate-driven agricultural land grab, control over type of food production and distribution, dependency on patented genetically modified seeds, high speculative food prices and low farmers wages, and forced imports as opposed to local production of food.

For these reasons we must stand in solidarity with the on-going struggle of Indian farmers who are fighting precisely neoliberal policies from their own government that threaten their livelihood and the nation’s food sovereignty.

It was not until 2014 that the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) finally came to recognise the importance of food sovereignty. Eventually FAO became bolder and indirectly blamed neoliberal policies for interfering with the food system.

Many years earlier, when Hugo Chavez became president in 1999, Venezuela recognised the importance of food sovereignty and food security and so it is now imbedded in the 1999 constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.

The first challenge of the Bolivarian Revolution was to deal with land access and ownership. By 1997 it was estimated that 5 percent of landowners controlled 75 percent of the land and 75 percent of them cultivated only 6 percent of the land. Much of the land concentrated in the hands of large landholders was idle or underused.

In 2001 Chavez issued a series of decrees shaping the revolutionary Land Law with its leading project Misión Zamora that led to assigning to landless farmers land belonging to large estates, or latifundios, that were not producing at least 80% of their potential.

By the end of 2003, 60,000 families had received temporary title to a total of 55,000 square kilometres of land by the Chavez government. The land reform may have been what triggered the failed coup attempt against him in 2002.

One of the largest land expropriations, which by the way are perfectly legal in international law, took place in 2011 when 13,000 hectares of farmland (close to 10,000 football fields) called “El Charcote”, of questionable property of a British business group, was nationalised under Venezuelan Food Security and Sovereign Law. This legislation allows the government to legally expropriate land in “exceptional circumstances” relating to issues of national food security and the public good.

We must wonder how this event may have influenced the decision of the British courts when they decided not to return $1 billion worth of Venezuelan gold held in the Bank of England.

In 2009 a report about the Venezuelan effort to build a new food and agriculture system with Chavez’s vision of Socialism of the Twenty-First Century showed outstanding results with significant increased production of basic crops. In some cases Venezuela reached levels of self sufficiency like in its two most important grains, corn and rice.

However, the illegal US coercive economic and financial measures (sanctions) that started in 2015 have caused the reported death of about 40,000 Venezuelans in 2017-2018 and possibly up to more than 100 thousand.

Forced to confront food shortages caused by the “sanctions”, in 2016 the Maduro government undertook one of the most successful programs to guarantee equitable access to food so no one would be left behind: the Comité Locales de Abastecimiento y Producción (CLAP – Local Committees for Supply and Production of food). The program distributes house-to-house boxes of food, containing some of the main staples of the Venezuelan diet: cornflour, pasta, rice, black beans, cooking oil and more at subsidised cost.

From 2017 to 2020 the CLAP program has distributed almost 500 million food boxes equivalent to 6.5 million metric tons of food. Currently it benefits a reported six million Venezuelan families through monthly deliveries of food boxes.

In the most cruel action bordering callous criminality the US Treasury Department has imposed sanctions affecting the CLAP food program.

It is highly commendable how many Venezuelans, mostly farmers, have organised themselves and immediately responded to food shortages in a large scale by increasing the production of staple food items. They have mobilized to become protagonists of their own destiny.

Finally, it is important to recognise that the Bolivarian Revolution is not only dealing with the immediate urgent need to put food on the table of Venezuelan families in order to overcome a real siege from the US empire, but also with the more meaningful long term political goal to develop all the necessary programs and infrastructure to turn Venezuela in a truly food independent and sovereign country.

Biological labs are being created for pest control in agriculture in order to increase organic production of food. At the same time labs are created to produce microorganisms for natural fertilisers to reduce the imports of expensive fertilisers.

There is also a strong push to rescue endogenous foods to eliminate the dependency from the genetically modified varieties exported by large corporations and not adapted to the local environment. This is leading to the production of native seeds that are then used by farmers with their old agricultural traditions.

The full systematic and comprehensive plan – as a strategic response to the impact of the US unilateral coercive economic and financial measures – is laid out in the program Gran Misión Agro-Venezuela that includes land reform, agricultural practice, biological use of inputs, development of native seeds, popular production organisations, financing, and distribution to consumers.

Ultimately, the government of Venezuela together with the active participation of the majority of the population and farmers in their respective communities – known as Communes – have to be praised for undertaking the process of building socialism and the urgent response to tackle the most pressing need: food.

Their example says that the use of food as a weapon must be eradicated.

Trouble in Vaccine Land: The Wiliness of South Africa’s Coronavirus Variant

Binoy Kampmark

It began as a shudder through the scientific and public health establishments.  A new variant of the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 had been found, mutating in South African climes, potentially outwitting human responses to it.  Vaccines such as Oxford-AstraZeneca’s would have to be brushed up.  Rollouts would have to be reconsidered.

The South African variant has been given a few designations: 501Y.V2 or B.1.351.  Within it lies a mutation –N501Y – which suggests a greater degree of contagiousness.  Another, E484k, might bypass the human immune system, thereby blunting the effectiveness of the vaccines.

A study on the effectiveness of the Pfizer vaccine against N501Y and E484k mutations found that the vaccine did still work, but with less efficacy.  The authors of the study treaded carefully, making it clear that the study had made assumptions about levels of neutralisation.  The biological functions of N501Y and other mutations also remained “to be defined for viral replication, pathogenesis, and/or transmission in animal models.”

The concern for the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine is graver, given that it was deemed the great hope for developing countries, with lower pricing and less demanding conditions for storage.  Preliminary, and yet to be peer-reviewed research of some 2,000 individuals, has found the vaccine to have less impressive protections (under 25%) against mild-to-moderate illness caused by the 501Y.V2 variant.

The same cannot be said about protecting against severe COVID-19, an open point given that those recruited in the study were generally healthy, young and sporting only mild symptoms.  None required hospitalisation.  Such qualifications were seized upon by World Health Organization’s Director-General, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.  “Given the limited sample size and the younger, healthier profile of the participants it is important to determine whether or not the vaccine remains effective in preventing more severe illness.”

Despite this not entirely gloomy picture, politicians in South Africa have been bitten by fear.  As the country most affected on the African continent, doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine are being traded in favour of Johnson & Johnson shots.  The latter vaccine has also been shown in trials to be less effective in combating the mild aspect of 501.V2 (57%) though does a much better job of combating instances of severe disease (85%).

The announcement of this policy shift came from the Health Minister Zweli Mkhize on February 10: “Given the outcome of the efficacy studies [the government] will continue with the planned phase one vaccination using the Johnson & Johnson vaccines instead of the AstraZeneca vaccine.”

This would have delighted the J&J crew, given that the one-shot vaccine has only been approved for use in studies in South Africa and has yet to be officially authorised for general use in any country.  Applications for emergency use from South Africa’s regulatory authority and the US Food and Drug Administration have been made.   Not to worry, claimed Mkhize: the vaccine had been tested on 44,000 people so far; safety for intending recipients was assured.

The health minister was also keen to give the impression of business.  “Our scientists are continuing to evaluate other [vaccine] candidates and we are simultaneously engaging manufacturers.  We are in advanced stages of evaluating and engaging the manufacturers of the Sputnik V candidate.  Engagements with Sinopharm continue, with an offer already made by China for vaccines which are being considered.”

The move has not convinced certain health practitioners.  Sipho Dinabantu of Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital is worried that “that trust we had in the government to do a proper vaccination program” has evaporated.  “We were given assurances that it was ready to go but now it has been put on hold.  It makes me wonder a lot about the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which has yet to be approved.”

The risk of waste is a serious one.  A million Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines have been procured from the Serum Institute of India.  These are due to expire at the end of April.  Shabir Madhi of the University of Witwatersrand, the lead investigator of the South African trials of that vaccine, finds it rather daft that these would not be used, despite acknowledging its weaknesses.  “It doesn’t make any sense to have 1 million doses of vaccine available to us known to be safe and to not start distributing it at least for high-risk groups.”  The country’s elderly and those with comorbidities could receive those shots.

Mkhize hopes that these might be sold or swapped depending on what the Ministerial Advisory Committee suggests.  Countries were already making inquiries.  But there are concerns that expired vaccines might also find their way into the program.  We only have Mkhize’s assurance that the vaccines had not expired, and would not be administered if they had.

Confidence in public health authorities has again received a bruising, though the South African government has its defenders.  Professor Willem Hanekom, director of the Africa Health Institute, was all praise at the decision to embrace the J&J option.  “We’ve never been in such a situation. Every day things change, and we need to adapt to these changes.”  The trend of treating whole populations as guinea pigs in a grand public health experiment continues.

Communication: the ethical side to organ donation

Chandrima Chatterjee, Bhagyashree Dutta, & Anamika Roy

Organ donation is a much debated and sought-after topic, yet numerous bioethical controversies are associated with it. With the advent of organ black markets, revised regulations and increased precautions for donating organs. As far as bioethical concerns are there, one factor is communicating the different facets to the family members or relatives. This paper will look into the various prototypes of donors, their perceptions about organ donation, their relatives and the role of communication in the arena of organ donation.

The first subject is the prototypes of donors and how communication can be used to determine the people’s intentions in expressing their organ donation wishes. Hyde and White have applied the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) to analyse and evaluate. They had proposed a model for each behaviour of registering consent on an organ donor register. They were then discussing the organ donation decision with a partner of family members to examine the contribution of attitude, subjective norm, PBC, self-identity, moral norm (extended TPB predictors) and donor prototype evaluations and at the same time, controlling for the effects of past behaviour and respondent type. Through this study, it has been found that the donor prototype plays a significant role in communicating the intentions to donate the organs. There is a substantial relation of the type and how they have done the public disclosure of their wishes. The family members’ reaction to each kind has also been different. The fluidity in accepting their wants and also consenting to the same are crucial factors. This study also lays the foreground of how communication has played a significant role and realises further interventions in the same area. It is imperative to communicate the wishes of the donor to the family members to avoid any bioethical issues and also to make an informed decision.

Family discussion is an exciting communication process to study to understand people’s willingness to become organ donors. The most important aspect of the family discussion is that they are responsible for organ donation. The willingness of the donor must be communicated to them. This gap has led to many people who are awaiting an organ than organ donors. One of the articles talks about the importance of Willingness To Communicate (WTC) scale has been used. The significance of the scale has also been discussed. The role of this is the encouragement to communicate the wishes of the donor to the family members. Other important factors like Prior Thought and Intent (PTI) and the Credibility of Messages. The ease with which the organ donation process is initiated and completed depends on the family members’ knowledge and the wishes communicated to them.

One of the most direct ways to dramatically increase deceased donors’ number is to improve the “conversion rate.” That figure represents the percentage of deceased individuals registered as organ donors whose family consented to organ donation after death. Anxiety is an essential variable in efforts to increase information-seeking behaviours. It is believed that increased information seeking will reduce uncertainty about the issue and thereby improve family discussion rates. Another critical variable in health and well-being is religious beliefs or religiosity. Both religious beliefs and family discussions are essential factors in determining the anxiety towards accepting the wishes of donating the organs after death. The data from different studies suggest that researchers interested in examining the role that anxiety plays in determining the information-seeking strategies used to discuss organ donation should also consider the religious concerns of the individuals involved and the role that religion plays in their everyday lives. The evidence is vital in getting the idea of how the problems related to communication can be addressed.

Research has shown how psychological reactance affects individuals’ responses to health promotion messages, but little is known about how family processes might moderate the reactance process. Organ donation is a significant health issue in which the interplay of interpersonal and mediated communication might have life-saving potential. According to psychological reactance theory, people value their ability to choose among alternatives. When a person perceives a threat to that freedom, psychological reactance (i.e., motivation to restore freedom of choice) ensues. The theory proposes that all persuasive messages constitute a potential freedom threat. Although the degree to which a compelling message is perceived as a freedom threat varies among individuals, the magnitude of a freedom threat directly predicts reactance intensity. Reactance, in turn, energises individuals to re-establish their threatened freedoms by maintaining unfavourable attitudes toward the advocacy or forming intentions to act contrary to the advocated behaviour in the future.

All these factors are essential in playing the role behind how communication is vital in organ donation decision-making.

UK government escalates deregulation as corporations cut pay and conditions

Paul Bond

The British government’s post-Brexit deregulation agenda is accelerating. The closing of the freeport (free trade zone) bidding process and the government’s recent recalibration of its plans for workers’ employment rights, followed quickly by an application to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) trade agreement, signals an intensified class war policy.

Margaret Thatcher’s former Chancellor Nigel Lawson spelled out the post-Brexit agenda in 2016. Her economic transformation, he wrote, “was done by a thoroughgoing programme of supply side reform, of which judicious deregulation was a critically important part,” but this was now “bound by a growing corpus of [European Union] regulation.”

Brexit was an opportunity to “address this,” i.e., rip up any regulation standing in the way of super-exploitation, and “finish the job that Margaret Thatcher started.”

After taking office in 2019, Prime Minister Boris Johnson set out to “finish the Thatcher Revolution.” He personally asked 250 business executives for ideas to cut regulatory and legislative burdens.

This week the application window closed for the first 10 freeports. These are low tax, cheap labour, free trade zones, where goods can be imported, manufactured and re-exported without facing standard tariffs or requiring normal customs checks. Companies pay lower VAT and employment tax and receive tax relief on land purchases. They were described by right-wing author and journalist Paul Johnson in 1980 as a “dagger aimed at the heart of socialism.”

Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak (centre) with Frances O’Grady, General Secretary of the Trades Union Congress (left) and (right) Dame Carolyn Julie Fairbairn, Director General of the CBI, London, September 24, 2020 [Credit: AP Photo/Frank Augstein]

Some 35 organisations are known to have expressed an interest in bidding for freeport status. Freeports are a favoured policy of Chancellor Rishi Sunak. Johnson recently tasked Sunak with driving “an ambitious programme of regulatory reform,” and new global trade deals. Sunak had called for freeports in a 2016 paper, “The Free Ports Opportunity,” for the Centre for Policy Studies, a Thatcherite thinktank.

Freeports are not restricted to coastal areas. The latest bid was submitted by London’s Heathrow airport based on “facilitating Britain’s position as an independent trading nation.” Its application said having freeport status would ensure that the “unique role of the UK’s only hub airport and the biggest port by value is fully maximised—allowing the UK’s businesses, customers, and supply chains to capitalise on the international connections and routes available, whilst reducing administrative burdens and controls.”

Britain had seven freeports while in the EU. It closed the last five in 2012 to focus on other “enterprise zones.”

The new proposals will add other inducements for business not permitted by the EU. Bloomberg noted last year that whatever gains could be made would depend on the government’s “tax breaks and other inducements.”

This follows the government cancelling a post-Brexit review of workers’ employment rights it previously denied was taking place. The review, instigated by former Business Secretary Alok Sharma with Johnson’s encouragement, covered “the whole body of EU law.”

Withdrawing the review, current Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng said the government was “not looking to diminish” its provisions, but this is a recalibration, not a retreat. It underlines how far the existing legislation existed solely for the benefit of big business. Even the right-wing Daily Telegraph said the EU Working Time Directive was “not seen as particularly burdensome” as many companies “just ask workers to opt out of the rules if needs be.”

The ministers now in charge of ensuring that the UK attracts inward investment from corporations seeking higher returns have long been explicit about their intentions. Most striking was their 2012 book, Britannia Unchained: Global Lessons for Growth and Prosperity, a 1collection of articles by Brexiteer MPs in the Thatcherite Free Enterprise Group. Four of the five authors are now in leading government positions—Dominic Raab (Foreign Minister), Priti Patel (Home Secretary), Liz Truss (Department for International Trade), and Kwarteng.

It attacked the UK’s “bloated state, high taxes and excessive regulation,” calling for deregulation of trade, tax cuts and demolishing any legal obstacles to increasing the exploitation of the working class. Kwarteng wrote that Britain’s employment law “discourages small business from taking a risk,” and Britain should “do whatever we can to cut the burden of employment regulation.”

British workers, they wrote, “are among the worst idlers in the world. We work among the lowest hours, we retire early and our productivity is poor.” This informs his view of Brexit as a “unique once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

Kwarteng told the Telegraph, “A lot of the Brexit debate centred around low wages.” As a result, “the idea that we would secure Brexit and then have a race to the bottom has always been preposterous to me.”

The Telegraph described him as “over-correcting in playing down his libertarian credentials,” but this is PR gloss. The race to the bottom is already underway.

Sharma’s review targeted specific EU employment provisions, including the legal requirement to provide a written statement of pay and conditions within 28 days of taking on a worker. This already excludes zero-hours contracts, which do not require employers to specify the number of hours to be worked.

Media focus centred on the EU’s Working Time Directive, which sets a 48-hour limit on the working week, protecting the working hours of 750,000 workers in Britain. The directive contains sufficient get-out clauses not to impinge on profits. EU member states were authorised to negotiate opt-out clauses for individual companies and employees.

The review also looked at legislation on rest breaks. Presently, workers must have rest breaks during their working hours if they are on duty for six hours or longer. They are entitled to 11 hours rest for every 24 hours worked, and a further 24 hours’ uninterrupted rest over seven days.

The other main threat identified was over holiday pay. The EU directive introduced statutory holiday pay of at least four weeks. Ministers were reportedly not planning to scrap the holiday pay provision altogether but aiming to derail a recent ruling put in place by the European Court of Justice that insisted holiday pay calculations include commission payments and compulsory overtime.

Sharma’s review has been shelved for the present, but the ruling elite’s direction of travel is clear. As the Spectators’ Ross Clark commented, “There wouldn’t have been much point in Brexit at all unless a UK government was prepared to vary from the EU--either by deregulating or changing regulation in some other way.”

Employers have seized on the coronavirus pandemic to declare open season on workers. A Trades Union Congress (TUC) poll published January 25 showed that in the last year nine percent of workers in Britain had been faced with reapplying for their jobs on worse terms and conditions or be sacked—“fire and rehire” ultimatums. Nearly a quarter of workers reported having seen their hours or pay cut back since last March, rising to 30 percent of low-paid workers earning less than £15,000 a year.

The City of London parasites are specialists in all manner of financial skullduggery and corporate plunder. This is to be ramped up, as Kwarteng, like Johnson, seeks to establish a “Singapore-on-Thames” low-tax economy. In 2012, Kwarteng included Singapore among the places where “a combination of private enterprise and effective government policy has enabled economic growth rates which we can only dream about in the west.”

Britain’s application to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership means it will be the first new member since the US withdrew in 2017. Hosuk Lee-Makiyama, a senior fellow at the London School of Economics, said the trade bloc offered a “bridge” to Asian markets.

This points to the volatility of inter-imperialist relations. One former British diplomat suggested the political implications of the move were more significant than the trade volumes.

The CPTPP was originally founded by former US President Barack Obama as an anti-China trade bloc. China has now expressed an interest in joining, as have South Korea and Thailand. Johnson last year declared himself “pro-China” and “very enthusiastic” about Chinese President Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative—a massive infrastructure scheme aimed at linking China throughout Eurasia and enhancing China’s global position, though his government is now singing from a US-dictated anti-China hymn-sheet.

Still, Freeports are to play a major role in the CPTPP. Announcing the CPTPP application, Truss noted lower tariffs for car manufacturers was a major factor, as vehicles make up 27 percent of UK exports to CPTPP countries.

When Kwarteng withdrew the legislation review, TUC General Secretary Frances O’Grady welcomed this as “good news if true,” before presenting Johnson as a prime minister who could be pressured into defending workers’ rights. He had “promised voters he would enhance protections at work,” she said.

Netanyahu relies on vaccine to beat pandemic in Israel while offering just 5,000 doses to the Palestinians

Jean Shaoul

Nearly 3.5 million of Israel’s eligible citizens, those 16 years or over—have received at least one shot of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, at 60 percent the highest rate in the world.

Nevertheless, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, which operates an apartheid regime as the human rights organization B’tselem recently acknowledged, is refusing to make similar arrangements for the five million Palestinians living under its military rule in the occupied West Bank and Gaza.

Even as the pandemic ravages the Occupied Territories—West Bank has reported 1,557 deaths and Gaza 531—decimating the already inadequate Palestinian health care system, Israel has sent just 2,000 doses of a promised 5,000 to the Palestinian Authority (PA) for frontline healthcare workers, with 300-500 doses to be sent to Gaza.

COVID-19 vaccine (Stock image credit: Envato)

Vaccines, which the PA has ordered from Russia, are unlikely to be delivered in any number for many weeks, while vaccines from AstraZenica are supposed to arrive later this month. In the meantime, the PA is seeking additional supplies via the World Health Organisation’s COVAX initiative. Even so they will at best be sufficient for less than 10 percent of the population.

Netanyahu is staking his political survival on Israel’s successful vaccination rollout, paying premium prices for the vaccine and—in breach of privacy laws—handing over the anonymized but detailed data collected by its health-care network over to the company. He is aiming for 90 percent of those over 50 years of age to be vaccinated by the end of this month and promised Israelis they would be COVID-free by late March.

He wants to be seen as the man who banished the virus in the elections on March 23, the fourth in less than two years, under conditions where unemployment is soaring, the average standard of living based on income fell by 22.7 percent in 2020 and the economy is staring into the abyss. Facing years in jail if convicted of bribery and corruption to secure favourable news coverage, his freedom depends on retaining the premiership with a sufficient majority to pass legislation that will allow him to evade trial.

His refusal to supply the Palestinians with the vaccine is a violation of Israel’s responsibilities under the 1949 Geneva Convention for the health of the Palestinians living in the areas it controls, including the obligation to ensure medical supplies and preventative measures “to combat the spread of contagious diseases and epidemics.”

Furthermore, while Israel agreed under the Oslo Accords to co-operate on issues involving healthcare and epidemics, it in practice reneged on its obligations to the extent that the Palestinians have long endured problems importing medical equipment—with Israel’s opaque security permit system making it difficult for those in need of life-saving medical care to seek treatment in Israel or abroad.

Health Minister Yuli Edelstein arrogantly declared, “It is our interest, not our legal obligation, but it is our interest to make sure that Palestinians get the vaccine, that we don’t have Covid-19 spreading” and said that “first of all we can also look into the so-called Oslo agreements, where it says loud and clear that Palestinians have to take care of their own health.”

Israelis receive a Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine from medical professionals at a coronavirus vaccination center set up on a shopping mall parking lot in Givataim, Israel, during a nationwide lockdown to curb the spread of the virus, Thursday, February 4, 2021. (AP Photo/Oded Balilty)

Describing the Palestinians as Israel’s “neighbours,” Edelstein turned truth on its head, telling Sky News, “I think that we’ve been helping our Palestinian neighbours from the very early stages of this crisis, including medical equipment, including medicine, including advice, including supplies.” He added, “I don’t think that there’s anyone in this country, whatever his or her views might be, that can imagine that I would be taking a vaccine from the Israeli citizen and, with all the goodwill, give it to our neighbours.”

Israel refused to vaccinate the 4,400 Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails, in crowded conditions with poor hygiene and a lack of fresh air that made social distancing and basic hygiene impossible. According to a Palestinian report, 189 prisoners have tested positive for the virus, but received “deplorable treatment.” It was only after President Reuvin Rivlin intervened that Edelstein reversed the policy.

UN human rights experts have called on Israel as the occupying power to ensure swift and equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines for the Palestinian people. “Morally and legally, this differential access to necessary health care in the midst of the worst global health crisis in a century is unacceptable,” they said.

The UN’s Human Rights Council, set to convene February 22, is expected to issue a resolution condemning Israel’s failure to vaccinate Palestinians.

Irrespective of Netanyahu’s hoopla over his vaccination programme, with Israel reporting more than 706,000 cases of the infection——more than 70,000 of which are currently active—and 5,233 deaths, there are several factors that have begun to lower expectations that it will emerge quickly from the pandemic. Not least, the failure to eradicate the disease among the Palestinians in the occupied territories, many of whom travel into Israel and the settlements to work, will ensure its continued transmission.

While the number of hospitalisations has begun to decline from the peak in January following the implementation of the country’s third limited lockdown, this is still around the level of the September peak and double the peak in April.

The decline is largely within the over-60 population, most of whom have been vaccinated. According to a government study, 44 percent of cases diagnosed in Israel last week were among those younger than 19, with just 6.2 percent in those aged 60 and older. The result was that hospital beds freed up by older patients were being filled by those under 50 and ever younger patients. This increase is being attributed to the emergence of new and more virulent strains, including the variants discovered in the UK and South Africa.

The incidence among children is particularly worrying, as those under the age of 16 are excluded from vaccine trials and cannot be inoculated until further research is conducted.

Although vaccines are now being offered to everyone over the age of 16, the pace of inoculations has slowed dramatically, a senior official in Clalit, one of country’s largest health providers, said, accusing social media of “fake news” and promoting vaccine skepticism.

Israel’s Palestinian citizens and the Haredim, the ultra-orthodox community, who make up some 20 percent and 12 percent of the population, have been vaccinated. The Haredim have been hit hard by the coronavirus, not least due to their impoverished and overcrowded living conditions—almost half of whom study full-time while their wives work in low-paid jobs and look after their large families—and refusal to implement social distancing measures that conflict with their religious beliefs and practices.

The ultra-orthodox communities, whose religious leaders are a key component of Netanyahu’s right-wing government, have received various exemptions from the lockdown restrictions, including permission to keep their schools open that have increased tensions between the secular and religious communities. The city of Bnei Brak and other towns with large ultra-orthodox communities recently witnessed violent clashes with police trying to enforce lockdown and social distancing measures in the face of large gatherings for prayers, weddings, and funerals.

Irrespective of the rate of inoculation, Dr Sharon Alroy-Preis, who heads the Health Ministry’s public health services explained, “Since there are 2.5 million children [of Israel’s 8.7 million population] who cannot be vaccinated, we likely will not reach herd immunity, even if the entire rest of the population gets vaccinated.”

The situation is set to deteriorate further as the Netanyahu government puts profits before lives. It began lifting its third partial lockdown on Sunday even as its hospitals were struggling to cope with 1,144 coronavirus patients in serious condition, compared to 949 serious cases at the start of the third lockdown. The third lockdown, which began with a rate of positive tests at 4.9 percent, ended with a positive test rate of 9.4 percent, the second began with 9.4 percent and ended with 4.5 percent and the first with 3.7 percent and ending with just 1.7 percent.

Air New Zealand admits to working for Saudi Arabian navy

Tom Peters

TVNZ’s “One News” reported on February 8 that Air New Zealand, the national airline, “has been secretly helping the Saudi Arabian military despite it fueling a humanitarian crisis in Yemen.”

For “nearly eight weeks,” the report stated, Air NZ refused to answer questions about its involvement with Saudi Arabia: “First it ignored media queries then claimed it would never discuss its clients.”

Yemen’s capital Sana’a following an airstrike on October 9, 2015 (Source: Wikipedia)

Finally, the airline issued a short statement admitting that Gas Turbines, a business unit of Air NZ, had worked “on two engines and one power turbine module from vessels belonging to the Royal Saudi Navy.” The $3 million contract was signed with a German company acting as a third party for the Saudis.

Since 2014, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, supported by the United States, have carried out a brutal war in Yemen, aimed at crushing the Houthi rebellion and installing a pro-Saudi regime. A naval and air blockade has prevented fuel, medicine and food from entering the country, resulting in mass starvation and a cholera epidemic that the World Health Organisation says has infected 500,000 people.

By 2018, an estimated 85,000 children had died of starvation. About 100,000 people have been killed, including through intensive bombing by Saudi warplanes. Three million people have been displaced by the war.

The revelation that Air NZ, which is 52 percent owned by the government, has been assisting the Saudi war effort, potentially making it complicit in war crimes, triggered a crisis for the airline and the Labour Party-Greens coalition government, which rushed to wash its hands of any culpability.

Deputy Prime Minister Grant Robertson, the minister responsible for Air NZ, claimed the government had no knowledge of the deal until contacted by TVNZ. He said he was “alarmed,” adding: “I think most New Zealanders would find it unacceptable to be doing that work.” Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said the deal was inappropriate and “has ramifications for New Zealand, its reputation.”

Air NZ chief executive Greg Foran issued an apology, saying “this is not the type of work that we… should be engaging in.” He said he did not know about the contract because it was not large enough to require his oversight. He refused to say who authorised the deal, telling the media there would be an internal “review” of how such contracts are approved.

When the contract was signed in May 2019, the airline’s chief executive was Christopher Luxon, now a member of parliament in the opposition National Party. Luxon told the media he had “no recollection” of the deal, which he called an “error in judgement.”

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade is investigating whether the contract was legal. Foran told a parliamentary committee hearing on Thursday that the ministry was not notified about the deal. Air NZ did not obtain any export permits for the engines it was sending to the Saudi navy.

The denials issued by Robertson, Foran and Luxon are not credible. It beggars belief that Air NZ is allowed to sign multi-million dollar contracts with foreign militaries, especially those actively engaged in war, without any scrutiny from the airline’s leadership or government officials.

This is not the first time that Air NZ has been implicated in a criminal war in the Middle East. In August 2007, then-Labour Party government ministers feigned outrage after revelations that the airline had a contract to transport hundreds of Australian soldiers to join the US-led war in Iraq.

This further undermined then-Prime Minister Helen Clark’s claims that her government was not supporting the war. In fact, the government had sent 61 army engineers to Iraq to support the occupation, and dispatched frigates to the Persian Gulf on rotating tours of duty. The Clark government, backed by its pseudo-left coalition partner, the Alliance, also sent special forces to join the 2001 US-led invasion of Afghanistan.

The latest criticisms of Air NZ from the Ardern government, including its coalition partner the Greens, are similarly hypocritical.

Green Party spokesperson Golriz Ghahraman said: “We as a nation have an absolute legal and moral duty to investigate, and hold to account anyone in Air New Zealand’s leadership who may be found to have knowingly provided support and assistance to the atrocities committed in Yemen.” New Zealand had “to stand as an independent principled voice for peace.”

But Foran told Radio NZ: “It is not a secret that we have been doing work for navies, such as the US navy and the Australian navy, in terms of fixing engines… This has been part of our business now for many years.” This practice has not been opposed by the Greens, or anyone else in parliament, or by the Labour-affiliated E tū union, which has thousands of members at Air NZ. E tū has remained silent about the airline’s Saudi contract.

The US is a participant in the war in Yemen; it has helped to enforce the Saudi blockade, provided intelligence and carried out air strikes against Houthi forces. Australia sells weapons to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

At Thursday’s parliamentary committee hearing, the Greens’ Ghahraman asked whether any other militaries had contracts with Air NZ. Foran replied, “you need to give us a little bit of time” to produce a complete list of military customers.

Far from being a “voice for peace,” the Labour Party-Greens coalition government, which from 2017 to 2020 also included the far-right NZ First, has increased military spending and recruitment and further strengthened the alliance with US imperialism. The government kept hundreds of troops in Iraq until mid-2020. A small number remain stationed there and in Afghanistan. Military personnel are also deployed in Japan as part of the encirclement of North Korea.

The Green Party sought to justify the government’s military spend-up, including the purchase of new planes and naval vessels, by depicting it as necessary for “humanitarian” interventions. In fact, the Ardern government’s 2018 defence strategy identified China and Russia as the main “threats” to the global order, in line with Washington’s preparations for war against China. New Zealand has boosted its military presence in the Pacific and welcomed the growing US militarisation of the region to push back against China and defend New Zealand’s own interests as a minor imperialist power.

The dominance of the UK variant of the coronavirus threatens a massive surge in cases in the United States

Benjamin Mateus

Despite the recent decline in the United States cases, the new variant, B.1.1.7, also known as the UK or Kent variant, is causing widespread disquiet among public health officials. The Biden administration’s primary plan was to see a rapid return to economic normalcy, which includes the reopening of in-class teaching for educational institutions so that parents and guardians can be back at work full-time.

The math behind the rising cases of the new variant is interfering with these plans, and mass vaccination is to slow to come to their rescue. According to McClatchy News, the Biden administration is considering imposing domestic travel restrictions, especially on Florida, which has the highest number of B.1.1.7 variants detected in the country.

A woman and her children in New York, December 2020. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)

An unnamed White House official told McClatchy, “There are active conversations about what could help mitigate spread here, but we have to follow the data and what’s going to work. We did this with South Africa. We did this with Brazil because we got clear guidance. But we’re having conversations about anything that would help mitigate spread.”

The decision remains uncertain. The US administration is having conversations about anything that could help mitigate the spread, but that also avoids implementing extensive measures that include closing non-essential businesses, closing schools, and limiting the number of people who can assemble.

In other words, a lockdown remains off the table. However, it has been precisely strict implementations of mitigating social measures that have been able to eventually turn the rise in cases in countries like South Africa and, more recently, in the UK.

The United States presently has reported over 27.9 million cases of COVID-19. The death toll will exceed half a million in the next week or two, a staggering and dismal figure.

Over the last two weeks, the US saw only 1.4 million new cases, a 42 percent decline from the preceding two weeks. Deaths have declined more slowly, at 17 percent, registering 37,908 over the same period. It is known that deaths lag case detection by two to three weeks.

The primary reason for the declines seen in January come from restrictions placed by local authorities and on the role played by the population to stem the rising tide of cases that were overwhelming health systems throughout the country.

However, barely a month has passed, and a massive drive, a charge led by President Biden and the Democratic Party, is underway to open commerce even while their vaccine rollout continues to flail. All the public health infrastructure for pandemic surveillance and monitoring remains in the same state as when Biden took his oath of office three weeks ago.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding, a Harvard epidemiologist and health economist, explained that what we are seeing with the COVID-19 cases in the US is the end of one pandemic and a beginning of a second one with the more contagious and lethal B.1.1.7 lineage, which will be dominant in mid-March. “We will be soon slammed very hard,” he tweeted.

Because the wild type of the SARS-CoV-2 remains more common, we presently see slow declines in cases. The reproductive number R0 is around 0.9 for the US. As the new variant begins to assume critical mass by becoming the dominant lineage, 40 to 80 percent more contagious, the R0 will start to rise over 1, and cases will quickly turn upwards sharply.

Projection of COVID spread in Alberta under current restrictions (Without reopening)

Referencing work conducted by Dr. Magorzata Gasperowicz, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Calgary, Dr. Feigl-Ding explained that the B.1.1.7 variant is doubling every seven to 10 days. Given that Alberta, Canada, had ten community cases of B.1.1.7 variants by January 25, Dr. Gasperowicz’s projections show that the UK lineage will dominate by March 4 in the province. The graph shows that after cases flatten out at the end of February, under their present “lax” restrictions, cases will return to their winter highs by the beginning of April.

Providing context, the US is only lagging Alberta’s projections by maybe one to two weeks. Based on Dr. Feigl-Ding’s projections, only an R0 under 0.7, or even 0.6, which implies implementing a strict mitigation strategy immediately, would mean US cases continuing their decline.

As a point of reference, the website epiforecast.io lists the state of New York’s R0 at 1.0. With school reopening and relaxation presently underway, these numbers will only take a turn for the worse. And as data on schoolchildren shows they are a critical factor for community spread, it has become clear that the Democrats will be using them as kindling to build an enormous fire.

Epidemiologists have emphatically stated that the measures used to control the spread of the previous lineage of SARS-CoV-2 won’t be effective with the new variant.

According to the Imperial College, when England imposed new restrictions in December, they saw “no evidence of decline.” By then, the UK variant had become the dominant form of the SARS-CoV-2. In January, the worst month in terms of fatalities, the UK saw over 32,000 deaths, representing 28 percent of all British fatalities to COVID-19.

The Independent Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies wrote on January 4, “It is now clear that the new variant of the virus, which seems to have emerged in the South East of England, is substantially more transmissible than earlier variants, by 40 to 80 percent. This increases the R0 number by between 0.4 and 0.8. It is also clear that the current Tier 4 restrictions are unable to contain the spread., even with closure of schools and universities. The pandemic is now out of control … The urgency of concerted and effective action to suppress the new variant cannot be overstated.”

On January 5, Prime Minister Boris Johnson imposed strict lockdown measures, instructing people to “stay at home,” closing most schools, bars, and restaurants, with health systems under severe strain. Cases rapidly declined, which indicated that adherence to effective public health measures could contain even these new variants. But apparently it is the public officials doing the bidding of the ruling oligarchs that pose a threat more sinister than the virus.

Under pressure from big business, Johnson has now announced that he considered beginning opening schools by March 8, “the prudent date to set.” The UK is also banking on the AstraZeneca vaccine to curb the blistering consequences of these variants.

Professor Devi Sridhar, chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, told the Guardian, “If you keep having cases, you will be having bubbles of 50 kids going home repeatedly, and that’s not sustainable education. You are better keeping them closed longer to get your numbers down and then opening in a more sustainable way.”

Dr. Deepti Gurasani, a clinical epidemiologist from the Queen Mary University of London, has been vocal against an early reopening of schools and warned the prime minister that March 8 looked premature and unrealistic. “We are in a very, very precarious position. Parents and children have made huge sacrifices because of schools being closed to most children. It’s very important we don’t squander this,” she told the Guardian. She went on to add that evidence indicates young schoolchildren are twice as likely as adults to be the first case in a household, and once they are infected, twice as likely to transmit the virus as adults. She called returning children to schools when community transmission was still high a “recipe for disaster.”

Denmark too had faced their reckoning with the new UK variant. However, they elected to take a different approach. After six weeks of a rigid national lockdown initiated in late December, Denmark’s CDC reported that they appear to have brought the virus finally under control.

On February 1, health authorities stated that the R0 had been brought down to 1.0, which means that people infected with this virus lineage continue to pass it to just one other person, on average. The country has partly opened primary schools as a phased response to assess how these measures impact the pandemic dynamics. The rest of the restrictions remain in place, with businesses closed and people under orders to work from home.

The Johnson & Johnson vaccine expects to receive emergency use authorization by the end of February from the US Food and Drug Administration, which would provide the United States a third vaccine.

Dr. Jason Salemi, an epidemiologist at the University of South Florida in Tampa, told STAT News, “We keep rolling the dice and keep letting the virus and its variants stay in the population at pretty high levels.” Last week saw the Super Bowl being celebrated in Florida. Many who had traveled there for the game have returned home and possibly brought the B.1.1.7 variant with them.

CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, who assured teachers that schools were safe, and teachers didn’t need to be vaccinated, said at a briefing on Monday, “I’m asking everyone to please keep your guard up. The continued proliferation of variants remains of great concern and is a threat that could reverse the recent positive trends we are seeing.”