São Paulo reopens schools, eases restrictions amid mass COVID-19 deaths

Gabriel Lemos

São Paulo began a new phase of easing measures against the spread of the coronavirus yesterday after having recorded the deadliest week of the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil’s most populous and wealthiest state. Last week, the government of right-wing Governor João Doria (PSDB) also allowed public and private schools to partially reopen for in-person classes.

The new “transitional” phase, between the “red” and “orange” phases of the supposed pandemic containment plan, the São Paulo Plan, will allow the reopening of nonessential businesses between 11 a.m. and 7 p.m. and the holding of in-person religious ceremonies, both with a maximum capacity of 25 percent. From April 24 on, gyms, bars and restaurants will be allowed to reopen under the same criteria.

Governor Doria, sixth from left, at March 11 press conference announcing "emergency" phase in São Paulo (Credit: São Paulo Government)

It was the second week in a row that the Doria government updated the São Paulo Plan after the state spent 28 days in the “emergency” phase, between March 15 and April 9, in which even services considered “essential” were restricted. The main justification for these changes was a slight decrease in ICU bed occupancy rates in recent weeks. On April 9, when the state moved from the “emergency” to the “red” phase, the rate was 88.3 percent, dropping to 85.3 percent on Friday, when the “transitional” phase was announced.

The “transitional” phase is the latest change made to the criteria of the “São Paulo Plan” in order to reopen the economy, even with pandemic raging. Before, the state could leave the “red” phase with an ICU occupancy rate below 75 percent, and only essential services were allowed to operate. According to the state’s economic development secretary, Patricia Ellen, this new phase “was born” from “dialog with the [economic] sectors and their request was that we need to resume activities.”

Domingos Alves, a professor at the University of São Paulo, told AFP that this change “is absurd. How are these new flexibilization measures announced when everything indicates that next week or the week after we’ll have a shortage of supplies to keep people inside the hospitals?” He referred to the lack of medications needed to intubate patients in many hospitals in São Paulo, which is causing many of them to refuse new patients even with available beds. Since March, 543 patients have died waiting for an ICU bed in the state.

After recording 1,282 deaths last Tuesday, the third deadliest day of the pandemic, last week ended with a record 5,690 COVID-19 deaths, a number almost three times higher than at the peak of the first wave in July. It is the eighth week in a row with an increase in deaths, which has led to the number of deaths in Sao Paulo surpassing the number of births for the first time in history. São Paulo, which has 21 percent of the Brazilian population, accounts for 28 percent of the deaths in Brazil. The country, in turn, has registered 25 percent of the deaths in the world. By Saturday, the state had recorded a total of 88,000 deaths and 2.7 million cases.

These figures demolish all attempts by São Paulo’s millionaire governor, who claims to be guided by “science” in fighting the pandemic, to differentiate himself from the open herd immunity policy of Brazil’s fascistic President Jair Bolsonaro. Having deemed a number of services “essential”—including industry and several business sectors—since the beginning of the pandemic in March of last year, Doria’s policy of putting profits above human lives led São Paulo’s GDP to grow by 0.4 percent in 2020, compared with a 4.1 percent drop in the national GDP.

Last December, São Paulo moved to also deem education as an essential service, allowing schools to reopen at any phase of the São Paulo Plan. However, the severity of the pandemic forced the government to move school vacations forward by two weeks during the “emergency” phase and suspend in-person classes in state public schools.

After January recorded the most cases in São Paulo along with the detection of community transmission of the most contagious variant from Manaus, in February schools partially reopened and business operations were extended. This explosive result came in March, which saw a 135 percent increase in the number of deaths over the previous month, from 6,459 to 15,159. In the first half of April alone, the state recorded 11,883 deaths, the second deadliest month of the pandemic after March.

During the entire “emergency” phase, the social isolation rate reached a maximum of 45 percent, 2 percentage points higher than in the previous period and far from the ideal of 60 percent established by the very group of specialists that supposedly guide the actions of the São Paulo government. This week, even the bourgeois media could not remain indifferent to the increased circulation of people in the streets and crowded public transportation. According to the director of the Brazilian Society of Immunizations, Monica Levi, this will lead to new outbreaks and “an endless cycle [of the pandemic]” at the moment when “the medical community is calling for total lockdown.”

The criminal indifference of the São Paulo government to this situation has clear motives: force the population to “learn to live” with this daily risk, avoid the implementation of more restrictive measures and maintain the extraction of profits from the working class. Part of this policy is the frenetic social media campaign by São Paulo’s Education Secretary Rossieli Soares, repeated incessantly by the bourgeois media, insisting that education is “essential” and that schools will remain open at any cost.

This effort has been accompanied by the promotion of distorted scientific studies to supposedly show that the reopening of schools does not contribute to the worsening of the pandemic. However, a study released on Wednesday showed that the incidence of COVID-19 cases among teachers in February was three times higher than that recorded by the general population of São Paulo. Conducted by the Network of Public School and University Researchers (Repu), the study was based on data collected by the APEOESP teachers’ union after the government refused to report the number of infections among teachers via access to information law.

Besides distorted data, another element that has helped confuse the public debate about the seriousness of the pandemic and convince the population to expose themselves to the risk of being infected is the propaganda carried out around the vaccination campaign in São Paulo. This has also been used by the government to justify the end of the “emergency” phase. However, by Sunday, just 3 million of the state’s 44 million inhabitants had received two doses of the vaccine, while the first dose had been administered to almost 6 million people. This week, São Paulo started immunizing 65-year-olds, while most of the people hospitalized today are younger than 40.

Even though vaccinations are advancing significantly, top health officials are warning that this cannot be an excuse for abandoning lockdown measures. Last Monday, World Health Organization (WHO) Director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said, “Make no mistake. COVID-19 vaccines are a vital and powerful tool, but they are not the only tool.”

On Saturday of last week, as part of the effort to reopen schools early, the São Paulo government began vaccinating teachers and school employees over the age of 47. According to Secretary Soares, this will allow even teachers who were assigned to remote work as part of the coronavirus risk group to return to unsafe schools.

Beginning the vaccination of teachers has also been a demand of the teachers’ union for a supposed safe return to in-person classes. The APEOESP has attempted to differentiate itself from Governor Doria and Secretary Soares by demanding that “all education professionals be vaccinated, regardless of age group,” which is far from guaranteeing minimal control of the pandemic.

Since the partial reopening of schools in São Paulo in February, the APEOSP has subordinated the teachers’ struggle against in-person classes to the capitalist courts. On Thursday, the full São Paulo Court of Justice confirmed the overturning of a late January decision that banned in-person classes in the “red” and “orange” phases. However, the union has relied on another court decision, from early March, to do nothing to promote a broader struggle against the murderous reopening of schools. For its part, the São Paulo government is claiming that Thursday’s decision also overturned the March ruling.

The APEOESP has impotently insisted that the “Government has to comply with the court decision ... and there can be no in-person classes until all education professionals are vaccinated.” It has repeated that the union’s “priority” is for teachers “to file warrants for compliance with the court decision.” The union shut down the state teachers’ strike with the beginning of the “emergency” phase in mid-March and failed to prepare a broader struggle against the foreseeable government offensive. Now, its decision to limit the struggle to individual actions by teachers in the courts only exposes the APEOESP’s complicity with the reopening of schools.

Meanwhile, teachers in São Paulo’s municipal public schools continue to strike against in-person classes. The strike, which has already lasted 70 days, has also been isolated by the municipal teachers’ union, the SINPEEM, which, like the APEOESP, fears that the movement will develop outside of the control of and the limits imposed by the union bureaucracy.

This month, the state and city governments of São Paulo began to deduct teachers’ wages for every day on strike. Even though this was easily foreseen as early as February, the APEOESP and SINPEEM failed to organize strike pay in advance, forcing many teachers to return to schools.

On social media groups, municipal teachers have expressed their outrage: “Who can handle going on strike without getting paid?” one questioned. Another teacher wrote that unions need to “distribute the strike pay,” while another suggested disaffiliating from the union to “save the amount and make their own strike fund.” One teacher summed up the union’s strategy: “Divided and weakened. We have the ‘with’ and ‘without wages,’ as well as those ‘in remote’ work and those ‘in-person.’ Soon we will have the ‘vaccinated’ and the ‘unvaccinated’ ... And the unions acting through repudiation notes and timid actions that don’t effectively solve anything.”

São Paulo teachers should be aware that this is not just one more traitorous action of the union bureaucracy, but rather the expression of a long process of the unions’ transformation from working class organizations into instruments used by the national ruling elites to divide workers and prevent a unified struggle of the working class. Now, with the pandemic, this struggle is in defense of the most alienable right of all: the right to life itself.

Hospitals in Germany on the brink of collapse

Markus Salzmann

Although coronavirus infections are rising dramatically and scientists and doctors are urgently warning of an overload of the health system, the federal and state governments continue their unscrupulous profits-before-lives policy. Even the completely inadequate federal “ emergency brake ” is being deliberately watered down and delayed. Now, hospitals are on the verge of being overloaded.

The situation in Thuringia is particularly dramatic. Hospitals in Jena and the hotspot Greiz, where the incidence level has been over 500 per 100,000 for weeks, can no longer treat coronavirus patients who need intensive care. Initially, five patients seriously ill with COVID-19 will be transferred to intensive care units in other German states, as Professor Michael Bauer, head physician of the Jena Clinic for Anaesthesiology and Intensive Care Medicine, announced.

Intensive care bed (Photo: Lacu Schienred / CC-BY-SA 4.0)

According to the German Interdisciplinary Association for Intensive and Emergency Medicine (DIVI), 220 COVID-19 patients are currently in intensive care units in Thuringian hospitals. Of these, more than half (128) are receiving invasive ventilation, 638 of 701 intensive care beds are occupied, 63 beds are vacant, of which only 29 are specifically equipped for the treatment of COVID-19 patients, and the number of admissions is increasing daily.

On Friday, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) reported a further 1,190 new infections in Thuringia and an increase in the incidence rate to 259. Already by the end of 2020, several COVID-19 patients had to be transferred from Thuringia. The rising numbers are the result of the policies of the state government under Bodo Ramelow (Left Party), opening up businesses and the education system. Despite the foreseeable development, it had decided on further relaxations before Easter.

In Bavaria, too, most hospitals are already in emergency mode. On average, the number of COVID-19 patients in Bavarian hospitals has doubled in the last three weeks. Roland Engehausen, managing director of the Bavarian Hospital Association (BKG), said a new peak in hospitals could certainly be expected at the end of the month. He went on to warn, “If the number of newly infected people doesn’t go down, we’ll be in an area we don’t know from May.”

Currently, more than 2,500 COVID-19 patients are being treated in Bavarian hospitals; 700 are receiving intensive medical care. A week ago, there were almost 200 fewer. In the entire state, there are only 340 intensive care beds with the option of invasive ventilation.

A spokeswoman for the health ministry had to admit that if the increase continued, there would be “an impairment of hospital care, especially regular emergency care.” A spokeswoman for Nuremberg Hospital said Friday that all intensive care beds in the region had been occupied for a short time on Thursday evening.

Nurse Rali Guemedji, who works in the intensive care unit at Nuremberg Hospital, posted a video account of working conditions there. “Every day, every hour, the staff of the hospital—the cleaners, the nurses, the doctors—are working at the limit. Many have sleepless nights because they are seeing that even young people without any previous illness suffer and die,” Guemedji said.

The consequences of a further increase in patient numbers in hospitals are quite clear. Michael Hallek from the Cologne University Hospital told the Kölner Stadtanzeiger that a “hard triage” in the university hospital was not far away. In such circumstance, doctors would have to decide which patient received potentially life-saving treatment and which did not, due to a lack of resources. “If the numbers go up too fast, it may not be avoidable. In the next few weeks, it could happen. The system is at its limit,” the doctor explained.

Other doctors have reported that so-called “soft triage” was already commonplace as a result of the high workload. The necessary rejection of patients or postponement of operations often resulted in massive health disadvantages, even for non-coronavirus patients. Emergencies “cannot always be comprehensively cared for with us,” said Hallek. Even COVID-19 patients with life-threatening illnesses could no longer be helped in all cases. “We’ve never had that before.”

Steffen Weber-Carstens of Berlin’s Charité Hospital pointed out that in many regions there was only 10 percent or less free capacity in intensive care units. For an intensive care unit with 12 beds, this meant just one bed. He warned against “walking into a peak workload with open eyes” and risking the health system “drowning.”

Gernot Marx of the DIVI warned that of the almost 30,000 infected people reported on Thursday, around 300 to 600 would become seriously ill in a fortnight at the latest and would have to be treated in intensive care units.

Because of the spread of several virus strains and the slow progress of the vaccination programme, it is no longer only the elderly and those with previous illnesses who have to be treated in intensive care units, as was the case last year, but much younger people, most of whom have no previous illnesses worth mentioning.

According to Martin Kreis from the Charité, the age range here is between 30 and 60. In Berlin alone, 40 new intensive care beds currently must be made available every week to be able to care for patients. Across Germany, 50 to 100 additional patients are admitted to intensive care units every day. One in two patients who must be ventilated dies.

Government adviser Rolf Apweiler told broadcaster ntv that he assumed there were far higher coronavirus case numbers than currently being reported. Because of the drop in testing over the Easter holidays, he said, one should assume a 30–40 percent higher incidence. We were still at the beginning of the wide spread of the B.1.1.7 virus strain; “The worst is yet to come for many districts. This risk situation cannot be explained away,” said Apweiler.

The head of the DIVI, Christian Karagiannidis, again appealed to state and federal governments to finally take effective measures against further spread. “We are used to death, but there has never been anything like this,” he told the Tagesspiegel. Even after a drastic tightening of protective measures, it would take at least two weeks for the number of patients in the clinics to decrease, he said.

Hospital employees have been working at their limit for more than a year. This is not without consequences. Even now, many available beds in German hospitals cannot be utilized because of a lack of qualified staff.

According to the Federal Employment Agency, 9,000 nurses left the profession between April and July. A survey by the German Professional Association for Nursing Professions showed that 32 percent of almost 3,600 respondents were more likely to think about leaving the profession than stay. Almost one third of respondents work in an intensive care or COVID-19 ward. The federal government’s nursing commissioner, Andreas Westerfellhaus, has already warned of “catastrophic consequences.”

Despite the imminent collapse of the health system, the federal and state governments are sticking to their herd immunity policies. They continue to keep workplaces and schools open by any means necessary to secure the profits of corporations and the super-rich. This criminal policy cannot be countered with appeals to the politicians who are responsible for it. Only the broad mobilisation of the working class on an international, socialist programme can counteract it.

France joins “Asian Quad” Indian Ocean naval drills, threatening China

V. Gnana

On April 5-7, for the first time, Indian as well as Japanese and Australian warships took part in a French naval exercise codenamed “La Pérouse,” in the Bay of Bengal.

This provocative drill took place after a March summit and naval drills by the anti-Chinese “Asian Quad” alliance of the United States, India, Japan and Australia, as well as visits to India by US Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin and South Korean Defence Minister Suh Wook. During the “La Pérouse” exercise, warships carried out 90 drills including helicopter and resupply operations. Another Indian-French naval war game, the Varuna exercise, is scheduled for April 25-27.

The PHA Tonnerre and the FLF Surcouf deployed as part of the Mission JDA 21 in the Bay of Bengal, (Image credit: Twitter/MarineNationale)

Arnaud Tranchant, the captain of France’s amphibious assault ship Tonnerre, which headed the “La Pérouse” drill, told Indian media it aimed to strengthen interoperability between the two navies.

Indian Navy Spokesperson Commander Vivek Madhwal said, “Participation by the Indian Navy in the exercise demonstrates the shared values with friendly navies ensuring freedom of seas and commitment to an open, inclusive Indo-Pacific and a rules-based international order.”

These drills highlight mounting war tensions as the Biden administration takes office and calls on the European Union (EU) to “work together” with Washington against alleged “expansionist” Chinese policies in Asia. Last year, the “Quad” countries carried out “Malabar” naval exercises in the Bay of Bengal. Now, as the EU powers continue boosting their collective military spending amid the pandemic, even after it hit $300 billion in 2019, they are also developing an aggressive policy in Asia.

These exercises are in line with a new strategy document recently rolled out by French armed forces chief General Thierry Burkhard, signaling a turn by French imperialism to preparations for large-scale “state against state” wars.

“The world is evolving quickly enough and badly enough,” he said, pointing to growing conflicts and “uninhibited re-militarisation.” The army “imagined a situation in 2035 … But in 2020, a certain number of check-boxes are already ticked.” France now confronted “the end of a stage of conflicts” involving wars in the Sahel and Afghanistan, in which French forces enjoyed overwhelming military superiority against the targeted populations. The army expects new, “symmetric” conflicts, Burkhard said, “state against state,” that is, between major, nuclear-armed powers.

This comes after France spent €49.7 billion on its defence budget for 2021, as planned in the 2019-2025 military program law, with plans to raise this to €54 billion by 2024.

In March, only weeks before the Franco-Indian naval drills were to begin, the European Parliament issued a report titled “The Quad: An emerging multilateral security framework of democracies in the Indo-Pacific region.” It noted that the adoption of Indo-Pacific strategy papers by France, Germany and the Netherlands “has stepped up expectations about the forthcoming strategy for the region by the EU as a whole.”

The EU powers, while not lining up entirely with Washington against Beijing, are nonetheless signaling increasing hostility to China. While calling US policy “the expression of a strategic US-China rivalry,” the EU parliament report noted: “The EU, on the other hand, looks at China as an economic partner and a systemic rival, but also as a partner for negotiation and cooperation on key issues (including climate change).”

However, it also echoed rising war propaganda falsely blaming China for having allegedly triggered the COVID-19 pandemic. It claimed, “The appetite for engagement with China may have subsided in some European capitals,” provocatively asserting that Beijing aims “to distract public opinion from China’s responsibility for the pandemic.”

This aggressive policy is connected to a deep crisis of the capitalist system bound up with the emergence of Asia as a centre of world economy, soon to have 62 percent of world Gross Domestic Product and buy 35 percent of EU exports. France and the EU as a whole are reacting by pouring tens of billions of euros into their military machines. Financed by austerity against the working class and “herd immunity” policies on COVID-19 that have claimed over 1 million lives in Europe, these funds are preparing catastrophic wars.

Paris and New Delhi are escalating long-standing strategic ties. After the 1991 Stalinist dissolution of the USSR, both French imperialism and India sought to promote notions of a “multi-polar” world order. Then-French Foreign Minister Hubert Védrine criticized the United States as a “hyper-power,” and Indian governments responded positively to attempts by Paris to market itself as a somewhat more reliable and less unpredictable and threatening partner than Washington.

France was supportive of India’s nuclear tests in 1998, when most of the imperialist powers reacted by imposing sanctions. Franco-Indian cooperation has grown over the last two decades to cover nuclear, space, defence, cyber security, intelligence-sharing and counter-terrorism cooperation. Bilateral military exercises, beginning with the navies in 2001, followed by the air forces in 2004 and the armies in 2011, have now became a regular feature.

What this history shows is that none of the imperialist powers, including Washington’s supposedly less aggressive European allies, have any alternative to the accelerating drive to war and police-state rule.

France has stepped up its involvement as it became increasingly concerned over China’s growing economic influence abroad. China set up its first overseas military base in Djibouti in the Horn of Africa in 2017 and has invested in developing, managing or acquiring strategically located ports in countries surrounding India, including Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Myanmar. This cuts across not only US but also European and French interests, notably the interests of Paris in maintaining its fading domination of its former colonial empire in Africa.

Paris and New Delhi have repeatedly moved closer to a military alliance, with France signing a basing deal giving it access to facilities in India in 2018. In February 2020, the French and Indian navies, for the first time, conducted joint patrols from the Indian Ocean island of Reunion Island.

The Hindu last November reported that visiting French Navy Chief Admiral Christophe Prazuck had stated that Paris is “looking forward to organising joint patrols with the Indian Navy” in 2020 and working on the precise objectives. Speaking at an event, he said the region of the patrols could be the North Western Indian Ocean or Southern Indian Ocean “around the islands that are part of France.”

At the same time, Paris and New Delhi have moved closer based on the anti-Muslim policies of both French President Emmanuel Macron and India’s Hindu-supremacist Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Indian media and officials have tweeted their support for France’s “anti-separatist” law, which aims to restrict Muslims’ freedom of religion and expression by claiming that certain Islamic practices amount to separatism against the French Republic.

France has also supported India in Kashmir, a Muslim-majority region Modi has stripped of its autonomy and subjected to violent police-state rule. Thousands of Kashmiris and prominent politicians have been detained, communication lines cut and mobility in the Kashmir Valley has been severely restricted with the deployment of tens of thousands of additional Indian troops in one of the world’s most militarised zones.

In January, Emmanuel Bonne, a diplomatic adviser to French President Emmanuel Macron, visited India for a strategic annual dialogue and insisted that France supports India on Kashmir. He said, “Even if it is Kashmir, we have been a strong supporter of India in the Security Council, we did not let China play any kind of procedural game. When it comes to the Himalayan regions, you should check our statements, we have been completely clear. There is no ambiguity in what we say in public.”

Three million dead from the coronavirus pandemic

Bryan Dyne

The world has passed another grim milestone: Three million dead from the coronavirus pandemic. This staggering loss of life, after little more than a year, is a devastating indictment of the ruling elites of every major country and of the capitalist system as a whole.

And even as this latest barrier is surpassed, the pandemic is accelerating and is poised to produce even more deaths in the months to come.

A nurse holds a phone while a COVID-19 patient speaks with his family from the intensive care unit at the Joseph Imbert Hospital Center in Arles, southern France, Wednesday, Oct. 28, 2020. (AP Photo/Daniel Cole)

Globally, the average number of daily confirmed cases is at the highest rate during the entire pandemic. It has more than doubled from a low in mid-February of 361,000 to more than 752,000. During that same period, more than 520,000 men, women and children died, and the official count of daily deaths, at nearly 12,000, is climbing toward the peak seen this past January of just over 14,000.

The pandemic has accelerated with extraordinary rapidity in countries such as Brazil and India. In Brazil, the daily cases have increased by about 50 percent to more than 65,000. The real toll, however, can be seen in the daily death counts, which have nearly tripled since February to almost 3,000 per day, the highest rate in the country since the pandemic began and second only to this past winter in the United States, when daily deaths at times reached nearly 3,500.

In India, the situation is even more dire. In the past two months, the number of daily cases has rocketed from a low of 11,000 to more than 200,000, an 18-fold increase. Correspondingly, the number of active cases has grown from 138,000 to more than 1.8 million, and the daily death rate has shot up from less than 100 to more than 1,100. India currently has the highest number of confirmed new cases each day and is well on its way to surpassing the records set by the United States.

Such dramatic explosions of the virus are not just confined to nations that have already had previous waves of the pandemic. In Papua New Guinea, where public officials had been able to limit the total number of infections to just 900 since the pandemic began, there has been a tenfold increase in the number of known coronavirus cases over the past two months, with total cases now more than 9,500. Deaths have similarly spiked from less than 10, out of a population of nine million, to nearly 90.

Countries in Eastern Europe have also faced new waves the contagion. Daily new cases in Bulgaria spiked sharply in February, reaching a height of more than 3,600 new cases a day in March, with more than 110 new deaths every day. In Hungary, the daily case count only recently dropped below 5,000, and the death rate is still at more than 250, triple what it was two and a half months ago.

The official number of coronavirus deaths in Germany reached 80,000 yesterday, and many more will die in the coming days because of the refusal by the government to close schools and factories despite a massive third wave of the virus. There are currently around 30,000 new infections every day, and the health care system is overwhelmed.

Among German workers, there is a growing sense that the federal and state governments bear full responsibility for the catastrophe. Many workers and youth reacted with protests and scorn at yesterday’s official state event to commemorate the dead and President Frank-Walter Steinmeier’s proposal to put up a candle in every window.

Instead, many people put up candles in front of government buildings all over the country. Protesters accused the state and federal governments of carrying out a de facto policy of social murder in the interests of the corporations and the banks. “Each candle stands for people who, because of your hesitation and your policies, are no longer alive,” one poster read. Another stated: “You do everything to protect profits, dividends and gains. Shame on you.”

The accelerating spread of the virus is compounded by the spread of new and more infectious variants of the virus, which have been allowed to mutate innumerable times throughout the now nearly 142 million officially recorded coronavirus infections. In India, a variant that is a combination of one that originated in South Africa and the US West Coast is spreading ferociously, along with the UK variant. In Brazil, the P.1. variant is suspected to be the reason behind the high death rate. In both countries, underfunded hospital systems, unable to provide the necessary care for the new influx of hundreds of thousands of patients, are on the brink of collapse.

In the face of the accelerating pandemic, governments throughout the world are rejecting the necessary measures to contain the spread of the disease. An editorial in the Times of India, articulating the position of the ruling class, proclaimed that any lockdown measures would be “a cure truly worse than the disease.” One of the heirs of the Ambani family, one of the richest in Asia, called lockdowns “totalitarian” and claimed that they would “destroy the very backbone of our society and economy.”

Such is the language of the ruling elite in every country. When they speak of “society” and the “economy,” they mean the interests of the rich. They are not concerned with the colossal loss of human life that has already occurred, and the even greater number of deaths to come, but with ensuring that the accumulation of their private profit continues unabated. The tens of trillions handed out by every government to bail out the banks must be paid for with the lives of the working class.

Moreover, the panacea that coronavirus vaccines were promised to be at the beginning of the year has proven to be a lie. The vaccine distribution globally has been extraordinarily unequal, with Reuters estimating that 55 percent of those who have received at least one dose of the vaccine are from high income countries. And within those countries, various local reports make clear that the richest individuals are much more likely to have been vaccinated than the poor.

In addition, countries have taken to hoarding vaccines, as well as the raw materials to make vaccines. The worst culprit is the US, now under the administration of Joe Biden. A study by Duke University estimates [the US] will have more than 300 million excess doses of the vaccine by July, even when accounting for vaccines set aside for children, none of which the Biden administration is currently offering to other countries for their vaccination programs.

The Duke study also notes that, “even if COVAX, the global COVID-19 vaccine mechanism, were to be fully funded this year, it would still vaccinate only 20-25 [percent] of the population of the world’s 92 poorest countries. At the current rate, these countries may not reach 60 [percent] coverage until 2023 or later.”

There have also been calls for the Biden administration to lift the embargo on the raw materials to make the vaccine so that more vaccines can be made in other countries. According to the South Asian news source IANS, India’s China expert Brahma Chellaney lambasted this policy, “As if Biden’s vaccine hoarding policy during a global crisis wasn’t bad enough, he also has restricted export of key raw materials, affecting vaccine production in India.”

Only about one percent of India’s population has been fully vaccinated, and less than 0.1 percent have been given even one dose in Papua New Guinea. Countries ravaged by decades of US military interventions, such as Honduras and Guatemala, have vaccinated less than a percent of their population, and Mexico and Brazil, have only been able to vaccinate 8.6 percent and 11.7 percent of their respective populations.

From the beginning of the pandemic, a rational and scientific response has been blocked by two interrelated factors: the prioritization of personal wealth over social need and the subordination of the necessary global response to national geopolitics.

Ample resources exist to both produce enough vaccines for the nearly eight billion members of the human race, as well as to distribute them in a timely manner. There is also more than enough money to close schools and nonessential businesses, which are necessary measures to stop the transmission of the coronavirus, and to provide compensation for all the workers and small business owners who would lose their income during such lockdowns.

The working class must take the resolution of the pandemic into its own hands. The emerging strikes across the US and internationally must be coordinated among all sections of workers in every country. The working class must intervene to enforce a policy that places human life above private profit. That is, the fight against the pandemic must be developed as a political struggle against the entire capitalist order, which has killed millions and caused untold suffering for billions.

Canada’s governments refuse to protect workers’ lives as pandemic’s third wave surges

Roger Jordan

Canada’s governments are refusing to shut down schools and nonessential businesses amid a dramatic worsening of the COVID-19 pandemic across the country. Last Thursday, there were 9,561 new infections, a record since the start of the pandemic. In Ontario, where new cases are averaging more than 4,300 per day, hospitals and intensive care units (ICU) are buckling under a flood of new patients.

By prioritizing corporate profits over workers’ lives, the Justin Trudeau-led federal Liberal and Ontario Conservative governments are ensuring that the virus and its new and more lethal variants will continue to spread, threatening the lives of thousands and indeed tens of thousands of people in coming weeks and months.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford has adamantly opposed shutting down schools and non-essential workplaces. (Photo credit: Ontario government)

The ruling elite’s callous indifference to the lives of workers and their families was epitomized in Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s emergency announcement on Friday, the third such announcement in as many weeks. Despite the horrifying projections made public immediately prior to his statement, including a worst-case scenario of 1,800 ICU patients and 18,000 daily cases by the end of May, Ford unveiled a series of totally ineffectual measures.

They included the extension of a “stay at home order” from four to six weeks, the reduction of capacity limits for retail outlets to 25 percent, a ban on outdoor meetings apart from gatherings consisting of one household and one other person who lives alone, and restrictions on inter-provincial travel.

Ford also gave draconian emergency powers to the police, empowering them to stop anyone outside of their home, demand details of where they were going and impose fines of up to $750 for violations of the province’s stay-at-home order. After a public outcry, with many rightly noting that they would be used disproportionately against low-income workers, Ford was forced to retreat Saturday and announce that the new policing powers were being dropped.

One of the sharpest condemnations of the government came from University of Toronto epidemiologist David Fisman, who told Global News, “The reason it’s so frustrating to hear stuff like this is he’s (Ford) got the science absolutely upside down. … We know in Ontario that the huge drivers right now of transmission are workplaces, particularly industrial workplaces, warehouses, Amazon distribution centres, post offices. We know a lot of the folks who are getting sick are lower income or have poor job security, can’t stay home if they feel sick. And I didn’t hear any of that today. I didn’t hear any of that in today’s press conference … It’s so ridiculous.”

Underscoring that the ruling class’ policy is to let the virus rip through workplaces and working class communities, Ford contemptuously brushed aside appeals from medical professionals that his government provide paid sick-leave for workers, even if only for the remainder of the pandemic. He also refused point blank to impose any new restrictions on worksites, other than a toothless ban on “nonessential construction,” which most contractors will simply evade by declaring their operations “essential.” In effect, the “stay at home” order exists only on paper, or more accurately only for those who can afford to do so.

In light of the well-known fact that workplaces are the main driver of the pandemic, Ford’s policies amount to a death sentence for hundreds of workers and their relatives. As the latest update from the government’s own Ontario Science Table noted prior to Ford’s announcement, “Without stronger system-level measures and immediate support for essential workers and high-risk communities, high case rates will persist through the summer.”

The update noted that the province-wide test positivity rate is 7.9 percent. The World Health Organization considers any test positivity rate above 5 percent to indicate that a pandemic is out of control.

Ontario’s hospitals are also showing signs of collapse as the number of patients continues to steadily rise. Over the weekend, the province surpassed the threshold of 2,000 COVID-19 patients in hospital and 700 patients in intensive care. This is more than double the rate that the government cited during the winter as the upper limit for guaranteeing regular health care for all.

Doctors acknowledge that a triage-type system in which care is rationed is already in effect, with some patients who normally would be hospitalized told to stay at home and others who normally would have been placed on ventilators receiving oxygen via a technique called high-flow nasal cannula. Triage describes a situation in which due to a lack of resources, medical personnel must determine who receives treatment and who is left to die.

At Sunnybrook Health Science Centre in Toronto, a field hospital is being brought into service to cope with the overflow of patients. Other field hospitals are expected to begin operating across the province in the coming days. The Ford government has made a desperate appeal to the federal government to help it mobilize 600 medical personnel from elsewhere in Canada to cover a staff shortage produced by decades of austerity and over a year of punishing pandemic-related workloads. Underscoring the fact that the catastrophic situation in Ontario is by no means unique, the Quebec, Saskatchewan and Alberta governments promptly responded that they have no medical personnel to spare. British Columbia is likewise confronting a mounting threat of equipment and personnel shortages, fueled by the spread of the P1 variant. First identified in Brazil, the P1 variant is highly transmissible and appears to be less impacted by, if not resistant to, existing vaccines.

In response to the calamity in Ontario, which will be repeated in most other provinces in the coming weeks unless an independent working class-led movement enforces a change in policy, the federal Trudeau government has all but washed its hands of any responsibility. Speaking like a disinterested external observer, Trudeau said at a Friday press conference, “Canada continues to face an incredibly serious situation with this third wave, cases are rising rapidly in many cases, in many places, numbers are higher than they have ever been before and many hospitals are stretched way too thin.”

In reality, Trudeau and the trade union-backed Liberal government bear chief responsibility for Canada’s ruinous response to the pandemic, including for its second and third waves, which have already claimed well over 10,000 lives. They spearheaded the reckless back-to-work/back-to-school campaign last summer, ruled out comprehensive lockdowns in last fall’s throne speech, and have refused to provide the necessary resources to strengthen the health care system and provide the social supports that would allow working families to shelter at home till the spread of the virus is halted. The “open economy” policy created conditions in which the more infectious and deadlier COVID-19 mutations, the B.1.1.7 or UK variant, the B.1.351 or South African variant, and the P1 variant, could take root and are now spreading widely in communities across the country.

The Trudeau government’s advocacy of a strategy based on “profits before lives” has been backed from the outset by the corporatist trade unions. Even now, with the health care system in the early stages of a terrible collapse, the union bureaucracy is refusing to call for any closures of industrial, manufacturing, logistical and other workplaces. Instead, the unions are offering their services, including to the hard-right Premier Ford, to ensure that the economy remains open throughout a deadly third wave in the face of deepening popular outrage.

In a pathetic “open letter” to Ford and other members of his cabinet last week, the Ontario Federation of Labour pleaded with the government to abide by the very labour relations laws and union/corporate management structures that have facilitated the spread of COVID-19 throughout the province, especially in industrial centres like Peel Region. The union federation, which ostensibly represents over 1 million workers, made not a single demand for the closure of businesses or schools. Instead, it urged the government, which even before the pandemic was shredding what worker rights remain, to ensure the enforcement of the existing toothless Occupational Health and Safety Act. The letter concluded with an appeal to Ford to “open the door” to enhanced cooperation with the unions, i.e., to create a new mechanism to enforce the profits before lives policy against worker opposition.

To resist this anti-worker agenda, bring the pandemic under control, and save lives, workers across Canada must intervene independently with their own political program and unite their struggles with their brothers and sisters internationally. Rejecting the capitalist imperative of protecting corporate profits, they should fight for the closure of all nonessential production with full pay for workers until the pandemic is over, and an end to all in-person learning in schools with comprehensive social support to families. These demands require a frontal assault on the vast wealth hoarded by the ruling elite, which must be expropriated as part of a socialist program to fund a global response to the pandemic based on the health and social needs of all.

Scrapping of the ambulance car in Dorset as NHS services slashed across UK

Rory Woods

Dorset Clinical Commissioning Group’s (CCG) decision to remove the ambulance car in Purbeck peninsula reveals the callous indifference of health authorities to the lives of patients.

The privatization of the National Health Service (NHS) and slashing of vitally needed health provision has leapt during the pandemic as the Conservative government, using its emergency coronavirus legislative powers, dispensed with nominal consultative processes, competitive tendering and public scrutiny.

Ambulances stationed at the Emergency Department of the Royal Bournemouth Hospital (credit: WSWS media)

People living on the Isle of Purbeck in Dorset, located on England’s south coast, were told last year that their ambulance car was going to be scrapped. The paramedic car, along with a trained crew, was introduced in 2008 following the closure of the minor injuries unit in Swanage, Purbeck’s main town.

The service is provided by the South Western Ambulance Service Foundation Trust (SWAST) in collaboration with Dorset CCG. The purpose of the service was to reach remote areas quickly, carry out initial assessment of patients, and attend time critical calls promptly. Those attending could then seek further assistance from a ground or air paramedic crew to avoid unnecessary deaths and suffering.

Removal of this vital service will have catastrophic consequences for patients who will have to wait longer to access ambulance services. More than 45,000 people live in the area and each year three million tourists visit the Isle of Purbeck.

A freedom of information request submitted by the Defend Dorset NHS group found that there were 996 callouts, with the majority dealt with by 999 emergency calls in 2019. A significant number of patients called emergency services with life threatening conditions like heart attacks.

The imminent withdrawal of the ambulance car from Purbeck is all the more criminal as the emergency department, paediatric services, maternity and emergency stroke services in the relatively closer Poole General Hospital are being shut down. Patients in remote villages in Purbeck will have to be transported nearly 30 miles to access these crucial services either at The Dorset County Hospital in Dorchester or The Royal Bournemouth Hospital (RBH) in Bournemouth. Longer journeys to access emergency care and treatment will inevitably lead to excess deaths.

Residents opposing the removal of the ambulance rapid response service have gathered nearly 8,000 signatures.

The Dorset CCG and the SWAST issued a joint statement to placate opposition, claiming, “No changes will be made to the existing service until we've had the opportunity to engage and work with local stakeholders and representatives."

This is part of an ongoing slashing of services in the county. In 2016, the Dorset CCG launched the Clinical Service Review (CSR) to streamline, i.e., reduce services.

CCGs across the country have been forced to make massive savings through rationing and slashing services, while Tory-led governments kept yearly funding increases for the NHS at historically low levels over the last decade. Dorset CCG forecasted a £19.3 million budget deficit in July 2020.

Embarking on the CSR, Dorset CCG claimed that their aim was to deliver “care closer to home.” Well paid PR experts for the CCG presented this as a golden opportunity to “increase the number of people supported in the community as an alternative to major hospitals,” and “increase the range of services in the community.”

The CCG’s claimed during the CSR consultation that longer ambulance transport times would be offset by the presence of trained professionals. The real objective of the CSR, however, was not only to cover a £158 million budget shortfall in the CCG created by years of underfunding but to accelerate the privatisation process. All three major hospitals in the county set up private patient units, creating a two-tier system with preferential treatment.

As a result of the CCGs plan, Dorset’s population of 765,680 have already lost St. Leonards Community Hospital and two other community hospitals, Alderney and Westhaven, are earmarked for closure.

The Royal Bournemouth Hospital (RBH), in east Dorset, is to become the Major Emergency Hospital while Poole General Hospital (PGH) will be turned into a major planned care hospital. These two hospitals merged last October to become University Hospitals Dorset. The changes mean that many people in the Poole conurbation will face increased travel times to reach the emergency services and treatment in Bournemouth.

The pandemic has proved that the destruction of NHS services costs lives. Health workers of RBH and PGH who spoke out during the first and second surge of COVID-19 cases pointed out the perilous conditions facing health workers and the terrible impact on patients due to the rundown of services. 

Nationally, over the last decade dozens of Accident and Emergency (A&E) units, NHS walk in centres, sexual health clinics, mental health facilities and GP surgeries were downsized or totally shut down. Substantial parts of NHS provision have been handed over to private companies such as Virgin Healthcare, Circle and Serco who are piling up profits.

NHS Trust leaders, with the blessings of the government, carried out temporary closures or downsizing of A&E departments, Intensive Care Units, paediatric wards and community hospitals during the pandemic. Many such shutdowns and downsizing will be made permanent.

·       Using the pretext of maintaining a COVID-free hospital, United Lincolnshire Hospitals Trust (ULHT) dress rehearsed its previous long hatched plan to downsize its A&E unit at Grantham Hospital in Lincolnshire last summer. ULHT indicated that they would “restore” the services at the Grantham hospital. Campaigners opposed to the plans have raised concern that the A&E department will not be fully restored and that the “restoration plan” includes a reduction of medical beds.

·       Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (LTH) closed the doors of Chorley and South Ribble Hospital’s part time A&E department at the end of March 2020. Well before the pandemic broke out, the CCG planned to convert the Chorley A&E into an urgent treatment centre which can treat minor cases like boils and grazes. In April 2016, the 24-hour department closed due to staff shortages. It was only reopened in January 2017 as a 12-hour service.

·       In March 2020, Birmingham and Solihull CCG announced the temporary closure of the Children’s A&E at Good Hope Hospital.

·       During the first wave of the pandemic, Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals NHS Trust (BHRUT) in London closed the children’s ward at King George Hospital saying that the measure was temporary.

·       In May last year, Leicestershire Partnership Trust shut down its Lutterworth Community Hospital saying it could not maintain a COVID secure environment. Over the last five years, the closure of hospital was prevented as people in the area fought against it.

These cuts are the tip of an iceberg. In March, documents accompany the budget revealed a planned cut of £30 billion in day-to-day in health and social care spending from April this year. Spending will fall from £199.2 billion to £169.1 billion. This is under conditions in which an estimated 4.7 million people were waiting for routine operations and procedures in England in February, the most since 2007.

The White Paper launched by Health Secretary Matt Hancock in February is based on an “overhaul” of the NHS to streamline privatisation.

All experiences over the last decade shows that health workers and the wider public who are confronted with escalating attacks on the pay, terms and conditions and loss of vital health services cannot rely on the pro-capitalist trade unions and Labour Party to defend them.

Philippine government eases lockdown amid continued COVID surge

Isagani Sakay

Beginning April 12, the Philippine government lowered the lockdown over Metro Manila, the national capital region, and the four adjacent provinces of Bulacan, Cavite, Laguna and Rizal, to the second highest level. The order rejected the advice of medical experts to extend the stricter protocol imposed on March 29 amid a COVID-19 surge.

With infections at over 900,000 and rising at ten to twelve thousand a day, the highest rate since the pandemic began more than a year ago, the decision to lift restrictions is a death sentence to thousands of Filipino people. The fatality rate for COVID-19 cases in Metro Manila rose over the past month from 1.82 percent to 5.36 percent.

Workers wearing protective suits disinfect a public market to help prevent the spread of the coronavirus in Marikina city, Philippines during the start of a stricter lockdown in Monday, March 29, 2021. (AP Photo/Aaron Favila)

In the 11 days preceding the decision, confirmed new cases in the quarantined capital and provinces rose to 53,714. This is a severe under-count. Contact tracing was already at an abysmally low three contacts traced for every infected person since March, and only four out of 17 cities in the National Capital Region were in compliance with government’s contact tracing protocols. Now tracing has all but collapsed inside the lockdown area as President Rodrigo Duterte’s administration scrambled to hire 5,000 contact tracers for the capital.

Moreover, the positivity rate averaged 20 percent nationwide, indicating a dangerous increase in community transmission and the spread of the virus. The testing rate is one of the lowest in the world, just ahead of Indonesia, Bangladesh and Pakistan, where the virus is out of control. While the government is targeting 50,000 a day, and largely not meeting its target, the positivity rate indicates that the required testing should be at least 200,000 a day to be able to trace the spread of the virus.

The COVID-19 surge in the national capital and the provinces has flooded the COVID-19 allocated capacity of hospitals, both public and private, and the isolation centres. According to Rappler, as of April 12, of the 14 hospitals it checked across Metro Manila and Cavite, 310 COVID-19 infected patients were waiting for beds and were being treated in the emergency departments. Some have been reported to have died waiting for a vacant ICU or isolation bed.

A story published by ABS-CBN in late March is doubtless representative of the state of the crisis. The account detailed how a COVID-infected father died in the early hours of the morning outside a hospital emergency room “after hours of frantic search for any hospital that would accept COVID-19 patients.”

In a tweet, Angelo Barrera stated: “My brother was wailing and crying outside with my mother in shock and unresponsive next to him. My dad died in the cold.”

As ABS-CBN recounted, Barrera’s father tested positive for COVID-19 on March 16 and was isolated at home and had a doctor monitoring his vitals and prescribing medicine via text message. He began struggling for breath by the weekend.

“We started shipping him to nearby hospitals and calling in advance,” Barrera said. “This was the worst part. Every single hospital, every one of them, was full. Be it admission, ER, even the wait list for the ER, every single one was full. You name it, from Asian Hospital to St. Luke’s. At 2 a.m. we gave up on hospitals and opted for home care.”

But then Barrera’s father stopped breathing and they rushed him to a primary care hospital, which was also in full capacity.

“At 5:20 a.m., he flatlined. They used the defibrillator and everything. He was next to the door of the ER, a few minutes away from being able to enter the (intensive care unit).”

The doctor on duty, Anna Victorino, interviewed by ABS-CBN, confirmed that they could not admit the patient in the ICU because they were understaffed.

In her own tweet, Victorino urged the public to hold the government accountable:

Screen capture of Twitter Account: Anna Victorino

Medical care workers have been severely impacted as well. Doctors and nurses are forced by under-staffing to work 12- or even 24-hour shifts. The Philippine Star reported on COVID-19 wards where a nurse tended to 12 patients and a nursing aide had 35 patients under her care. From April 4 to April 10, ABS-CBN reported 399 new COVID-19 cases among health workers, including 170 nurses and 53 doctors. A nursing assistant is also reported to have died. Since the pandemic began, 16,510 heathcare workers have been infected, with over 86 dead, including 33 doctors and 21 nurses.

The new lockdown, like previous lockdowns, imposes all the restrictions and hardships on the poor, including curfews and checkpoints, while lifting all meaningful restrictions on business operations, including, significantly, public and privately-owned mass transportation to facilitate herding workers back into factories and offices. Far from aiming to prevent transmission of the virus, the militarized lockdowns terrorize, detain and even kill the working poor.

The sign reads “It’s too much, we’re tired! We need mass hiring!” [Screen Capture from Alliance of Health Workers Facebook page]

According to Rappler, 28-year-old Darren Peñaredondo of Cavite died of a heart condition after being forced by police to do 300 squats as punishment for violating the curfew to buy drinking water. In Laguna, 26-year-old Ernanie Jimenez was allegedly beaten to death by the barangay, or local government, guards. In addition, according to the police, 6,603 persons were warned, fined, and arrested for violating lockdown restrictions.

These horrendous conditions are stoking immense social anger. The Manila Standard reported on April 11 that residents in a Taguig city barangay, excluded from the limited government financial handouts, confronted and threw stones at government officials and their police escorts. On April 9, the overworked and underpaid health care workers and members of the Alliance of Health Workers staged an online protest and demanded the immediate release of their hazard pay and the hiring of more regular health care workers to handle the COVID-19 patients.

Screen Capture of Alliance of Health Workers Facebook page

The government’s vaccination program has stalled as vaccine nationalism and geopolitical tensions between China and the US intensify. India’s decision to stop exports of its locally-produced vaccines has hampered supplies worldwide, including to the Philippines, while rising anti-Chinese sentiments, stoked up by local political factions allied with US imperialism, have led to widespread rejection of Sinovax, the Chinese-produced vaccine.

To date, according to Rappler, over 3 million dosages have been delivered to the country, of which 2.5 million are Sinovac, but just half the available dosages have been delivered and only 162,000 people, mostly health workers, military and police, have been fully vaccinated, just 0.23 percent of the 70 million needed to achieve herd immunity.

Biden and Suga ramp up confrontation with China over Taiwan

Ben McGrath & Peter Symonds

Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga met with United States President Joe Biden Friday in Washington for a summit aimed at strengthening the US-Japan military alliance amid Washington’s escalating confrontation with China. The meeting was the first Biden has held in-person with a world leader since taking office, indicating the importance Washington places on Japan for its agenda.

In their joint statement, Biden and Suga accused China of destabilizing the Indo-Pacific region. The two leaders, the statement said, “exchanged views on the impact of China’s actions on peace and prosperity in the Indo-Pacific region and the world, and shared their concerns over Chinese activities that are inconsistent with the international rules-based order, including the use of economic and other forms of coercion.”

Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga delivers remarks in a meeting with Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III, Japanese Minister for Foreign Affairs Toshimitsu Motegi and Defense Minister Nobuo Kishi, Tokyo, March 16, 2021. (DoD photo by Lisa Ferdinando)

Washington insists that China bow to the “international rules-based order”—that is, the post-World War II framework established by the US in which American imperialism was the dominant power and set the rules. Driven by the fear that China could undermine its global position, the US has for the past decade—first under Obama, then Trump and now Biden—

sought to undermine China economically and strategically, including through a massive military build-up in the Indo-Pacific.

The most significant aspect of the Biden-Suga statement was a reference to Taiwan, which has been thrust to the fore by Washington, particularly in the past year. The statement declared “the importance of peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait” and encouraged “the peaceful resolution of cross-Strait issues.” This is the first time that US and Japanese leaders have directly mentioned Taiwan since Richard Nixon and Eisaku Sato made such a declaration in 1969.

While the reference might appear innocuous, it further undermines the “One China” policy that both the US and Japan accepted as the basis for establishing diplomatic relations with China, following Nixon’s visit to Beijing in 1972. Under the “One China” policy, the two countries effectively recognized Beijing as the legitimate government of all China, including Taiwan. Previously they had recognized the Kuomintang (KMT) dictatorship in Taipei, established after it fled the Chinese mainland following the 1949 Chinese Revolution, as the government-in-exile of all China.

In the protracted discussions before the establishment of US diplomatic relations with China in 1979, Taiwan had been the most difficult obstacle to overcome—a measure of how sensitive it is today. While President Jimmy Carter oversaw the process, he also signed into law the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act that ensured the sale of US military hardware to Taiwan and gave a vague guarantee of US support for Taiwan against alleged Chinese aggression.

The Trump administration significantly boosted arms sales to Taiwan and stepped up contacts between Taiwanese and US officials. In his final days in office, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo dispensed with longstanding diplomatic protocols limiting such contacts and thereby undermined the “One China policy”—a move that Biden has largely continued. At the same time, top-level US officials have been warning of a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan as a means for justifying even closer relations with Taiwan, including possible military ties.

The Biden administration had been pushing Japan to take a tougher stance against China over Taiwan. The fact that it was even mentioned in the joint statement indicates that behind closed doors Biden and Suga discussed closer collaboration over Taiwan in some detail. The issue is particularly delicate for Japan as it was the colonial ruler of Taiwan (Formosa) from 1895 to 1945 when it reverted to China after Japan’s defeat. Japan is also heavily dependent on its economic relations with China.

Beijing immediately criticized the joint Biden-Suga statement. The Chinese embassy in Washington accused the two countries of “stoking division and building blocs against other countries… under the banner of ‘free and open’.” The embassy’s statement reiterated that Taiwan, along with Hong Kong and Xinjiang, were internal Chinese affairs and warned that Beijing would “firmly safeguard its national sovereignty, security and development interests.”

Beijing has repeatedly warned that it would use force if the government in Taipei were to declare formal independence from China. In response to the Biden-Suga statement, Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Le Yucheng said: “We are prepared to do everything we can for a peaceful reunification (with Taiwan). That said, we don’t pledge to give up other options. No option is excluded.”

The Biden administration is deliberately raising tensions with China over what is potentially the most dangerous flashpoint for war in Asia. The current Taiwanese administration is headed by President Tsai Ing-wen from the Democratic Progressive Party, which advocates a more independent stance for Taiwan. By forging closer ties with Taipei, the US, aided by Japan, is encouraging Tsai to push for independence and risk conflict.

Under Biden, the US navy has already sailed through the Taiwan Strait four times, on track to pass the annual record of 13 such voyages set under Trump last year.

At the same time, Biden and Suga restated their opposition to China in other flashpoints. “We reiterated our objections to China’s unlawful maritime claims and activities in the South China Sea and reaffirmed our strong shared interest in a free and open South China Sea governed by international law, in which freedom of navigation and overflight are guaranteed, consistent with the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.”

Biden has continued “freedom of navigation” operations, provocatively sending US warships into Chinese-claimed waters in the South China Sea. The US has not signed the UN convention that it accuses China of breaching.

Biden also reaffirmed that the US-Japan Security Treaty applies to the uninhabited rocky outcrops in the East China Sea, known as the Senkaku or Diaoyu Islands, that are controlled by Japan but also claimed by China. In other words, the US would back Japan militarily in the event of war with China over these islets, “using its full range of capabilities, including nuclear.”

The Biden-Suga talks are part of a US diplomatic offensive to strengthen its strategic partnerships in preparation for conflict with China. Last month, Biden held the first-ever leaders’ summit of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue that included Suga along with prime ministers Scott Morrison and Narendra Modi of Australia and India respectively. The “Quad” is a quasi-military alliance aimed against China.

This was followed by the first overseas trip by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to Japan and South Korea. South Korean President Moon Jae-in is due to meet Biden in Washington early next month.

Biden and Suga also pledged to deepen their economic cooperation. At a joint press conference, Biden prefaced the announcement of the new US-Japan Competitiveness and Resilience Partnership (CoRe) by again declaring that the two countries would work “together to take on the challenges from China.”

In particular, the US and Japan plan to spend $2.5 billion and $2 billion respectively to develop 5G mobile networks, as well as future “6G” networks. A White House statement said the two would also “cooperate on sensitive supply chains, including semiconductors, and on the promotion and protection of critical technologies.”

These communication networks and technologies are crucial for US war efforts. Semiconductors are essential for military equipment like warplanes and missile guidance systems. The fact that the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company dominates the global production of chips, particularly the most advanced, is a factor in the US focus on Taiwan.