Two months into school reopenings in the US: a balance sheet

Emma Arceneaux

Two months into the fall semester, the reopening of schools across the United States has been a horrifying disaster. Both children and educators are dying of COVID-19 at a rate of at least three per day nationwide. In the last five weeks, 100 children have died, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). According to an unofficial tracker on Twitter, at least 311 educators have died since July 1, with the majority occurring since late July once schools began reopening.

The latest AAP report states that last week 225,978 children tested positive for COVID-19, and childhood cases have been steeply rising in every region of the country since July. Nationwide, the 7-day average of pediatric hospitalizations stands at 301.

Data from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) showing COVID-19 cases among children in each part of the US through September 16, 2021 (Source: AAP)

In every region—from the South, where multiple governors are nakedly pursuing the “herd immunity” strategy and outlawing basic health measures, to the Northeast and West Coast where there are relatively high vaccination rates and the media and unions tout limited mitigation measures in schools—pediatric cases have rapidly spiked since schools reopened.

Contrary to the claims by the Biden administration that unvaccinated individuals are responsible for the current fourth wave of the pandemic, the AAP data, combined with local reports, prove that school reopenings are driving the terrible surge of COVID-19 in every corner of the US. The chorus of Democratic Party officials who promised that schools would be safe with proper mitigations are actively relaxing such measures and undermining the means for tracking the spread of COVID-19 in schools.

An essential element of the strategy to eradicate COVID-19 globally, which is the only viable and scientific response to the pandemic, must include the closure of in-person education until the virus is eliminated. Combined with the closure of nonessential workplaces, mass vaccinations, universal masking and testing, contact tracing, the safe isolation of infected patients, and other public health measures, COVID-19 could be eradicated worldwide within two to three months.

South

In Georgia, a total of 47 educators have died this school year alone and an average of one educator has died each day since August 11. At least 15 children have died from COVID-19 in the state since the start of the pandemic, including four in August alone. Earlier this month, state epidemiologist Dr. Cherie Dreznik said that 60 percent of all outbreaks in the state were occurring in K-12 schools.

Two educators in Georgia died on September 21, Sharon McClellan and Joe Harris. McClellan, 50, taught STEM at Welch Elementary. Her death follows that of Welch’s School Resource Officer Frankie Guitterez, who also died of COVID-19 two weeks earlier. Harris, 35, was a teacher at Lyman Hall Elementary School in Hinesville and the mayor of Riceboro.

Florida, which has five of the 10 largest school districts in the US, is once again deliberately falsifying its pandemic data. A backlog of 1,213 deaths from COVID-19 was reported yesterday, including 189 that occurred prior to August 26, according to the Miami Herald.

On Wednesday, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, Ron DeSantis’ newly appointed surgeon general and a signatory of the Great Barrington Declaration, announced changes to school quarantine protocols. Under the false pretense of allowing parents to decide what is best for their children, students who have been exposed to COVID-19 can go to school “without restriction” and students who choose to quarantine may only do so for seven days if asymptomatic.

In August, at least 15 school personnel died in the Miami-Dade school district in a 10-day period. From July 30 to September 9, the state’s pediatric deaths more than doubled, with 10 children below 16 years of age dying in that period. The state obscures pediatric cases by including 16- and 17-year-olds in an adult category.

Since the start of the semester, over 22,000 children have tested positive for COVID-19 in Mississippi. The state recently surpassed New Jersey for the highest cumulative per capita COVID-19 death rate in the US, with roughly one in 312 people dead. There have been seven pediatric deaths in the state since the start of the pandemic, and four of those have occurred in the last two months.

Last week, the Board of Trustees for the Mississippi Institutions for Higher Learning became the first higher-ed governing body in the country to ban public universities and colleges from mandating COVID-19 vaccination for faculty, staff and students.

There were 6,382 K-12 cases recorded last week in Alabama. The state does not publish a cumulative tally of cases over the school year, preventing the weekly figures from being examined over time.

The quarantine and contact tracing protocols in place last school year have been reduced or eliminated. Last year, school officials had to notify families when their children came into contact with anyone who tested positive. This year, schools are only required to report known cases to the state.

Dr. Karen Landers of the Alabama Department of Public Health bluntly told local news, “Based on widespread community transmission and the number of daily positive COVID-19 cases and close contacts... the Department of Public Health is unable to investigate, contact trace or issue quarantine orders for all positive cases and close contacts.”

According to state health officer Dr. Scott Harris, a recent drop in hospitalizations is due in large part to an increase in deaths, which exceeded 100 per day this week. The state also made national news after an unofficial announcement that there were more deaths than births in 2020, a first in the state’s record that dates back to 1900. A study by the University of New Hampshire Carsey School of Public Policy, published in May, found that deaths exceeded births in twenty-five states in 2020, up from only five in 2019.

Nearly half of Louisiana’s 16 pediatric deaths have occurred in the past two months. The seventh child to die since mid-July was announced on Wednesday, only five days after the sixth.

Days before Hurricane Ida, there were 453 cases reported in New Orleans Public Schools, leading to 4,657 students and staff in quarantine, or nine percent of the combined student and staff population. After returning to school following a three week closure, there are 34 active cases in the district.

There have been at least 126,687 students and over 25,000 educators infected since August 8 in Texas. Major outbreaks are ongoing throughout the state, including more than 4,400 infections total in the Fort Bend district in Houston.

Midwest

In Michigan, where about 60 percent of students attend districts that require masks, there were 98 new outbreaks reported in K-12 schools on Monday, accounting for 56 percent of total outbreaks in the state. Another 14 percent of outbreaks occurred in a category that includes childcare, after school programs and youth sports. Schools have only been open one month.

Across Illinois, there have been 206 outbreaks in K-12 schools over the past month. Pediatric cases have steadily increased since July, with infections in ages 5-11 jumping from 391 the week ending July 17 to 3,300 the week ending September 11, an increase of 843 percent.

In Minnesota, there have been over 1,600 cases in K-12 settings in the first two weeks of school and health officials announced Thursday that two school staff members have died in the same period.

Northeast

New York City, the largest school district in the country with 1.1 million students, is touted as having some of the strongest mitigation measures in the country. Yet Democratic mayor Bill De Blasio announced Monday that unvaccinated children will not be required to quarantine after close contact with a student who tested positive if they were both masked and three feet apart.

The Situation Room, the inter-agency body that is responsible for tracking cases and deciding on quarantines and closures in the district, has slashed its operating hours since last year, leading to a dangerous lag between infections and quarantines.

Educators have shattered any illusion that even these inadequate measures can be maintained. An internal survey done by the United Federation of Teachers found that 92 percent of respondents said that students cannot maintain three feet of distance throughout the day; 89 percent said students are not following mask protocols; and 98 percent believe neither the mayor nor the Department of Education have a proper safety plan in place.

While the UFT estimates that 90 percent of teachers in the district are vaccinated, there have been 1,689 confirmed cases among staff and students and 1,294 classroom closures in the first 10 days of school.

There have been school outbreaks across the state of Maryland, leading to thousands of students being quarantined and at least one school shutting down entirely. In Hartford County, 1,100 students are in quarantine or isolating after 158 students and 44 staff tested positive. In Baltimore City Public Schools, 240 students tested positive last week, up from 185 the previous week. In Carroll County, 6 percent of the student body is currently quarantined.

West

Across California, a state run by the Democratic Party, efforts are being made to relax testing and quarantine protocols in schools and hide the spread of COVID-19 in workplaces.

Citing a low test positivity rate, Long Beach Unified School District has paused all student testing for a week. Still, roughly 650 students and 25 staff tested positive in the first three weeks of school.

The Los Angeles County health director recently said that school districts in Los Angeles may now adopt loose quarantine protocols for unvaccinated students, as long as they were wearing a mask when exposed. Already, vaccinated students are not required to quarantine. As of September 17, there were 1,465 active cases and six outbreaks in Los Angeles Unified School District, the second largest in the US with over 600,000 students.

Meanwhile, the California Senate unanimously passed a bill on Friday that would allow for outbreak data to be hidden from workers. The bill would expand the employers exempt from the COVID-19 outbreak reporting requirement to various entities including community clinics, adult day health centers, community care facilities, and child day care facilities. The bill will go into effect immediately if signed by Governor Gavin Newsom.

In the school districts surrounding Seattle, Washington, two weeks into the semester there have already been 195 cases among students and 73 among staff. While Washington has one of the highest vaccination rates in the US (at 62 percent) as in Alabama, a recent decline in hospitalizations is at least in part due to an increase in deaths, according to Washington State Hospital Association CEO Cassie Sauer.

The accounts above represent a summary of the catastrophe unfolding across the country.

From the ultra-right wing DeSantis/Ladapo duo in Florida to the liberals in New York and Los Angeles, politicians from both capitalist parties are reducing quarantine requirements despite pediatric cases near or exceeding all-time highs. In Washington, run by Democrats, and in Alabama, run by Republicans, hospitalizations are declining in large part due to an increase in deaths.

Far from pursuing a more scientific and humane pandemic policy compared to the Republicans, the Democratic Party, backed by the teachers unions, is essentially following the same playbook. The mitigation strategy has been exposed for what it really is—herd immunity with palliative care.

Biden administration sends migrants in chains back to Haiti, prepares Guantanamo camp

Chase Lawrence

The Biden Administration is deporting refugees to Haiti in an airlift where many are being held in chains, some of those arriving in the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince have told reporters. Multiple Haitian refugees described having been deported by plane by Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to Haiti in chains. One refugee stated, “They chained me like a slave.”

A man carries a boy across the Rio Grande river as migrants, many from Haiti, leave Del Rio, Texas to return to Ciudad Acuna, Mexico, early Wednesday, Sept. 22, 2021, some to avoid possible deportation from the U.S. and others to load up on supplies. (AP Photo/Fernando Llano)

Refugees, many of whom have not set foot in Haiti in decades, are left with little more than the shirts on their backs after leaving the airport. No provision for housing has been provided, leaving many with the immediate prospect of homelessness and poverty in the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.

Haiti has been beset by a stream of crises. A devastating earthquake killed more than 2,200, destroying or damaging more than 137,000 homes and 212,000 people having lost access to safe drinking water, with half of those in need still awaiting aid, according to the United Nations. This is in addition to the coronavirus pandemic, a presidential assassination and extreme poverty, as well as a general disintegration of society with widespread crime where much of the country is essentially run by crime lords.

The ongoing repression of Haitian immigrants is so ferocious and the conditions to which they are forced to return so terrible that Biden’s own special envoy to Haiti resigned in protest.

Daniel Foote called the policy of migrant expulsions “inhumane.” He wrote, “I will not be associated with the United States’ inhumane, counterproductive decision to deport thousands of Haitian refugees and illegal immigrants to Haiti, a country where American officials are confined to secure compounds because of the danger posed by armed gangs to daily life,” calling the US approach to Haiti “deeply flawed.”

Given the standards of the State Department, which routinely apologizes for barbaric regimes like those of Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Thailand, it is remarkable that the Biden administration policy is so brazenly cruel and antidemocratic that an American diplomat feels compelled to object.

It was also revealed Thursday that Biden’s DHS is currently seeking a contractor to operate a concentration camp for refugees in Guantanamo Bay. The contract requires at least ten percent of the guards to speak Spanish and Haitian Creole, according to government records.

The concentration camp’s contract solicitation states, “The service provider shall be responsible to maintain on site the necessary equipment to erect temporary housing facilities for populations that exceed 120 and up to 400 migrants in a surge event”

As many as 12,000 Haitians were sent to Guantanamo Bay between 1991 and 1993 by the George H. W. Bush administration. This was following the US-backed military coup of September 30, 1991, which resulted in military rule until 1994, as well as the subsequent murder of 3,000 Haitian political activists between 1991 and 1993.

The White House Press Secretary Jennifer Psaki, as well as the DHS, claimed that Haitian immigrants would not be sent from the southern US border to the camp, and that it was for immigrants detained at sea.

A DHS spokeswoman claimed that the camp at Guantanamo is a separate facility from that housing supposed terrorists, and it is maintained to house people fleeing the Dominican Republic, Haiti and Cuba in small boats that are intercepted by the US Navy. She added that the contract was a “routine renewal” posted last week and had no connection to the border crisis at Del Rio, Texas.

The ongoing Border Patrol operation at Del Rio has provoked widespread protests after agents were photographed on horseback in the Rio Grande, whipping and herding migrants as they sought to cross the river. The Biden administration’s response was to suspend the use of horses, as though brutality and violence dealt out on foot was acceptable.

There are several reports of Haitian refugees rebelling against the illegal and clearly fascistic attempts by the US government to expel them. Along the border, Haitian migrants in custody hijacked multiple buses attempting to displace or deport refugees from the Del Rio camp, forcing out drivers in incidents that threatened to disrupt the deportations.

Both the rebellions and the alleged release of Haitians in Texas—rather than their deportation—have been widely reported in the right-wing, pro-Trump media, such as Fox News and the Washington Examiner, which are seeking to discredit the Biden administration as too soft, and to justify in advance the use of deadly force by the Border Patrol or the Texas state police.

The Washington Examiner quoted a “senior administration official” declaring, “They’ve been basically overpowering the drivers and they’ve actually hijacked a couple of the buses and driven them down the road a little ways and escaped. This happened multiple times.”

The official complained about the lack of chaining of refugees, who are protected under international law: “They’re moving the detainees, but they’re not shackled—they’re not restrained in any way. Yesterday some detainees kicked a window out and 22 escaped,” referring to an incident on Monday.

A bus to San Antonio, Texas was taken over by migrants, who broke out of the bus and escaped. The refugees were later recaptured by law enforcement.

The camp in Del Rio, Texas once comprised 15,000 Haitian refugees from the Americas who gathered under an overpass after crossing the US-Mexico border over the course of a few days. Biden’s DHS has already deported or moved to detention camps a total of 4,000 refugees, it claims, while an estimated 4,000 remain at the overpass.

There has been no explanation of where the remaining 5,000 to 7,000 refugees have gone, whether back to Mexico, released into Texas or “disappeared” into the vast gulag of US immigration detention facilities.

United Nations refugee chief Filippo Grandi and 38 American civil rights groups have called on Biden to stop deportations. Grandi urged the US to lift its Title 42 health-related restrictions, which were used by the Trump and extended by the Biden administration to deport immigrants, stating they “deny most people arriving at the southwest U.S. land border any opportunity to request asylum.”

He continued, “The summary, mass expulsions of individuals currently underway under the Title 42 authority, without screening for protection needs, is inconsistent with international norms and may constitute refoulement.”

According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights: “Under international human rights law, the principle of non-refoulement guarantees that no one should be returned to a country where they would face torture, cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment and other irreparable harm. This principle applies to all migrants at all times, irrespective of migration status.”

DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said Tuesday that the public should “expect to see dramatic results within the next 48 to 96 hours” in the coming days on Haitian immigrants, essentially stating that they are going to break up and deport the refugee camp along the border, and that “Our goal is to do so within the next 10 days or nine days.”

When Mayorkas, a former top official in the DHS under the Obama administration, was appointed to head the agency, the identity politics crowd and pseudo-left sang his praises as the first immigrant to oversee the department and as a savior who was to reverse the policies of the previous administration.

Janet Murguía, the president of UnidosUS, a Latino advocacy organization, praised him at the time saying, “After four long, dark years … [and] a general contempt for Latinos from the highest office in the land, Mayorkas’s nomination signals a new day for the Department of Homeland Security and for all our country.”

Erika Andiola, chief advocacy officer for RAICES, a nonprofit that provides legal services to low-income immigrants, went even further, stating, “We hope that as the first Latino and someone who has advocated for immigrant rights, [Mayorkas] will change the direction of DHS once and for all.”

For all the attempt to push the “systemic racism” narrative down the public’s throat, to blame white people for racism, Biden himself shows the real source of the racism: the capitalist system and the capitalist state, and its ruling parties, both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party.

Barbaric experiments with “COVID-19 drug kit” killed hundreds in Brazil

Eduardo Parati

Last Saturday, a G1 report was published showing that the private health insurance provider, Prevent Senior, was involved in a sinister experiment in March-April 2020, secretly medicating hundreds of COVID-19 elderly patients with hydroxychloroquine and erythromycin without their knowledge, resulting in the deaths of at least nine people.

Bolsonaro with HCQ boxes in one of his live Facebook videos.

The report showed a company director, Fernando Okinawa, in a WhatsApp group explicitly demanding that medical staff hide their prescriptions of a combination of hydroxychloroquine and erythromycin from patients. Meanwhile, cardiologist Rodrigo Ester, Okinawa and others distorted the patients’ data, erasing information on the deaths of seven out of nine patients, to publish a paper promoting the drugs as effective treatment for COVID-19 patients. With these alterations, they could claim that no one died when using their “early treatment.”

The report about the macabre experiment was published after the Brazilian Senate’s inquiry commission (CPI) on Bolsonaro’s handling of the pandemic received a formal complaint in late August signed by 15 doctors stating that a deal was made between the Bolsonaro government and the company to distribute medications of the so-called “COVID-19 kit,” which includes hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin and other unproven or since discredited medications. The doctors’ complaint also described how they were forced not to use masks to “disseminate” the virus among patients who would be used as “human guinea pigs.”

Last Thursday, the complaint was substantiated by a leak of medical records of patients. Another executive director from Prevent Senior, Pedro Benedito Batista Jr., was called by the CPI to testify on the revelations.

A resemblance of this episode to the barbaric eugenic experiments undertaken by the Nazis was promptly recognized. Comments were made in the media making references to Josef Mengele, a Nazi SS officer who coordinated horrific experiments on camp prisoners in the Auschwitz concentration camp during the Second World War.

The disturbing nature of these practices was made even clearer this Wednesday during a CPI session with Batista, when it was revealed that Anderson Nascimento, a former Prevent Senior director, made regular references to the SS themes of “obedience and loyalty” and tried to promote them inside the company. He was discretely removed from the company in 2017 and now works in the even bigger Hapvida, a health insurance provider for 4.8 million people.

Workers Party (PT) Senator Rogério Carvalho said during the session that he had received information that Prevent Senior went through the social network profiles of their employees looking to fire “‘left party’ sympathizers and followers of groups critical of the Bolsonaro government.”

Far from being an exception, the episode is “only the tip of the iceberg,” stated Bruna Morato, the lawyer representing the doctors at Prevent Senior. On Wednesday, Morato revealed that hundreds of patients died as a result of the “experiments” carried out by the company until April 2021. In fact, an April report by G1, Prevent Senior doctors recounted being forced to continue going to work after being diagnosed with COVID-19 and prescribe “COVID-19 kits” for patients without the consent of their families. Hospital coordinators threatened to fire doctors who refused to prescribe kits and enforced informal quotas for kit prescriptions.

Director Batista, who himself became a target of the CPI investigation after his testimony on Wednesday, expressed the apparent regularity with which fascist-minded individuals are taken under the wing of the company and put in administrative positions. In one tweet, he encouraged doctors to “test as much as possible,” meaning to use unproven or discredited medications for COVID-19 treatment to “test” the response of elderly people.

The data distortions themselves were not isolated to the company’s macabre experiment, but adopted as part of its general protocols. Company officials oriented medical staff in WhatsApp groups to alter patient charts for those diagnosed with COVID-19 14 or 21 days after the beginning of their symptoms, removing them from the COVID-19 case list. Such a blatant distortion would allow the company to declare a higher rate of successful treatment for COVID-19 cases by shifting the cause of death for those patients who died after the two or three week period to kidney failure, heart failure, or any other complications which are expected in severe COVID-19 cases.

The demand that doctors prescribe COVID-19 treatments without scientific evidence is not isolated to Prevent Senior. A doctor from Hapvida in the state of Ceará stated anonymously that “It is known by all doctors who work in the clinical staff of [Ceará’s capital] Antônio Prudente Hospital that there is pressure to prescribe the [COVID-19] kit.” According to a report by Repórter Brasil, both companies continued to force medical staff to prescribe hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin and other unproven or discredited medications to their patients at least until April of this year, while archiving multiple complaints by doctors who refused to prescribe the medications to their patients.

Bolsonaro promotes Prevent Senior’s unapproved human trials

Since the beginning of the pandemic, Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro has been at the center of an anti-scientific campaign to justify the full reopening of the economy without any restraints on the virus’s spread. He aggressively promoted the use of hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19 throughout the pandemic.

In April 2020, the fascistic president, his family members and a federal attorney close to the president, Ailton Benedito, started promoting the Prevent Senior pre-print article on Twitter days after it was published. Bolsonaro also received the company director Batista during a live meeting to promote false COVID-19 treatments.

A video obtained by Metrópoles shows Batista stating he shares Prevent Senior medical data “all the time” with the federal government. Meanwhile, one of Bolsonaro’s medical advisors, Paolo Zanotto, helped the company in developing its COVID-19 medical protocols.

At the time, the president’s anti-scientific declarations in favor of discredited drugs to treat COVID-19 patients were already a critical component of his campaign to cultivate a far-right movement. His Twitter post promoting the Prevent Senior study was published one day before a fascist rally outside the Army headquarters in Brazil’s capital, in which he appeared demanding the shutdown of Congress and the Supreme Court for supporting partial shutdowns of economic activities to contain the pandemic decreed by governors and mayors.

That such barbaric experiments were imposed on multiple hospitals can only be described as an appalling crime against humanity.

The use of “COVID-19 kits” was systematically enforced by Prevent Senior without the consent of thousands of families and with direct support from President Bolsonaro. Ominously, this barbaric experiment on the elderly was directly defended by this same president at the United Nations.

Demonstrating his readiness to unabashedly continue a deliberate policy of herd immunity through mass infection, Bolsonaro defended “early treatments” during the opening session of the UN General Assembly and suggested he would not finance any more vaccine purchases after November. This was five days after Globo’s Prevent Senior report exposed the barbaric experiments on the elderly. On Tuesday, the president’s cabinet sent suggestions of questions for Wednesday’s CPI session with Batista, which would promote the advantages of “early treatments.”

When the company’s “study” was made during March-April of 2020 and published as a pre-print version, it was soon retracted by the National Research Ethics Commission (Conep). The clinical trials with human subjects had been completed without ever receiving approval to even start. Since then, Bolsonaro has never recognized their ethical implications, much less apologized. Quite the opposite, he continued and doubled down on his campaign against lockdowns and in favor of “early treatments.”

The fascistic ideology being developed under Bolsonaro’s open herd immunity policy finds its breeding ground in the diseased state of the capitalist system in Brazil and internationally and the criminal response of the world’s ruling classes to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Around the world, millions of children are being sent back to schools with the expected consequence that they will be infected, develop “Long COVID” and other symptoms and die in mass. In the UK, the Boris Johnson administration sent 10 million children back to school even as its deputy Chief Medical Officer stated, “I think it’s quite inevitable that they will be [infected] at some point.”

American capitalism normalizes mass death

Andre Damon

Twenty-two months since the emergence of COVID-19, there is no end in sight to the pandemic, which continues to kill on a massive scale.

A procession of vehicles drive past photos of Detroit victims of COVID-19, Monday, Aug. 31, 2020 on Belle Isle in Detroit. (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio)

The center of the pandemic is again in the United States, where the official death toll this week surpassed 700,000. More than 9.1 million years of life have been lost to COVID-19 in the US, according to a study published this week in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

On Monday, 935 people lost their lives; on Tuesday, 2,152; on Wednesday, 2,228; and on Thursday, 1,944. Since the start of the week, in just four days, a staggering 7,000 died. In the past month alone, 51,000 have perished in overcrowded hospitals, homes and nursing centers.

On July 4, US President Joe Biden declared “independence” from the COVID-19 pandemic, saying, “We can live our lives, our kids can go back to school, our economy is roaring back.” Biden discouraged mask wearing and urged vaccinated people not to social distance, claiming that the pandemic was all but over. Since that time, more than 80,000 Americans have died from the pandemic.

Even in the most optimistic scenarios, such as one released by the COVID-19 scenario hub based on anticipating a dramatic decline in cases, the death toll will hit over 800,000 by the spring.

But at the present rate of death, with an average of 1,726 people dying each day, more than 300,000 people will die in the next six months, bringing the official US death toll to well over one million.

Among the dead are 480 children, including 20 in just the past week alone. And more than 100,000 children have lost a caregiver to the pandemic, according to a study published in July.

Throughout the country, from Wisconsin to California, hospital intensive care units are filled to capacity. Hospitals are issuing emergency protocols for nurses and doctors to make the horrific decision to determine who will live and who will die, due to a shortage of respirators and other life-saving equipment.

One in three people who are infected with COVID-19 will get “long COVID,” with symptoms lasting for more than two weeks. For hundreds of thousands, this means permanent debilitation: chronic fatigue, pain and long-term cognitive impairment, including among an entire generation of children.

But with more than 2,000 people dying each day—a rate greater than any war the United States has ever fought—the US political establishment is declaring that the pandemic is all but over. “As we end this pandemic, we must get ready for the next,” tweeted US Vice President Kamala Harris on Thursday.

To talk about the “end” of the COVID-19 pandemic as two thousand people die day after day is insane. But in the twisted logic of the American ruling class, “ending” the pandemic simply means ignoring it. The level of death being witnessed in the United States is to be treated as the “new normal.”

What is taking place is a horrifying normalization of death.

In the wealthiest and most powerful capitalist country in the world, close to one million people are dead from a preventable disease. These deaths were the result of lies and cover-ups by the Trump administration and Congress, which deluded and disarmed the public as the disease spread throughout the country in January and February.

On May 14, 2020, the Subcommittee on Health of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce held a hearing on “Scientific Integrity in the COVID-19 Response,” in which whistleblower Rick Bright excoriated the Trump administration’s response to the pandemic. Bright declared that “public health officials were fully aware of the emerging threat of COVID-19 by early January 2020.” But the US government was “intent on downplaying this catastrophic threat.”

It would be the first, last and only hearing of its kind. While Congress would continue to call public health officials to testify, it would be within the framework of accelerating plans to reopen schools and businesses. There was no effort to investigate Bright’s allegations: that a systematic cover-up, involving both the Democrats and Republicans, disarmed the United States’ response to the pandemic.

The failure to investigate the response to the pandemic continued under the Biden administration, which made its appeal to the American public on the basis of popular hostility to the Trump administration’s disastrous handling of the pandemic.

Notwithstanding the scale of the disaster, it has not been the subject of any serious public investigation, even where there was clear evidence of wrongdoing, such as the sale of stock by members of Congress briefed on the pandemic, the revelations of which forced Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Richard Burr to resign from his post.

The failure to hold anyone to account for the disastrous response to the pandemic is intentional. From the standpoint of the ruling class, the actions that contributed to the massive death toll were not mistakes. This is why there have been no investigations and no one has been held to account, because this is the policy advocated by the entire ruling class and the entire capitalist system.

To the extent that blame can be assigned, it must be on the basis of a myth that does not indict the US policy response. This is the origin of the “lab leak” lie, which seeks to blame China for the COVID-19 pandemic.

The US government’s cover-up was part of the policy of “herd immunity,” which remains the policy to this day. “Infants, kids, teens, young people, young adults, middle aged with no conditions etc. have zero to little risk… so we use them to develop herd… we want them infected,” wrote Trump administration official Paul Elias Alexander.

This was the same policy that led UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson to declare last year, “no more fucking lockdowns—let the bodies pile high in their thousands.”

To the extent that the ruling class has a strategy for responding to the pandemic, it is to allow the mass infection of the population, which, combined with the immunity generated from vaccines, will supposedly prevent major new surges of the disease. This means that COVID-19 will become endemic in the population, killing perhaps several hundred thousand people each year.

This “optimistic” scenario relies on the prayer that a new COVID-19 variant does not emerge that, like the Delta variant, leads to a surge in cases and deaths.

American capitalism’s ability to accept and “normalize” mass death must be treated as a warning. All arguments that a nuclear war is inconceivable because society is not prepared to accept the loss of millions of lives have been refuted by the response to the pandemic. If the American ruling class is prepared to accept the loss of a million lives from a preventable disease, it will accept the deaths of tens of millions in a nuclear war. As Bloomberg News commented last year:

Yes, the US has botched its response to COVID-19. At the same time, its experience shows that America as a nation can in fact tolerate casualties, too many in fact. It had long been standard Chinese doctrine that Americans are “soft” and unwilling to take on much risk. If you were a Chinese war game planner, might you now reconsider that assumption?

While the entire capitalist order stands behind the “herd immunity” policy, the working class cannot accept the continued wave of mass death. It must intervene, in the US and throughout the world, to put an end to the pandemic, to demand and enforce the necessary public health measures to eradicate the virus.

Pandemic and surge in food prices deepens global hunger

Jean Shaoul

Global food prices have risen 33 percent in the last 12 months, according to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). Basic staples such as vegetable oil, grains and meat have shown some of the highest increases.

Coming on top of the economic catastrophe visited on billions by the pandemic, these pressures will fuel inflation making it difficult for workers to feed their families as hunger surges across the globe.

With the world’s poorest countries lacking the resources to provide food subsidies or social support; rising grain, oil and sugar prices threaten masses of people already living a hand to mouth existence with malnutrition and starvation.

Analysts are expecting prices to continue rising, as extreme weather, the surge in fertiliser and freight costs, shipping logjams, supply chain blockages, export bans on key foodstuffs by some producer countries, stockpiling by others, and labour shortages compound the problems. They also point to the growing demand for corn and vegetable oils for biodiesel as well as China’s rising demand for grain imports.

Women wait in line for food donated by the Covid Without Hunger organization in the Jardim Gramacho slum of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Saturday, May 22, 2021. (AP Photo/Silvia Izquierdo)

While climate change and unfavourable weather conditions have played a role in driving up food prices, this does not explain the fact that lumber prices have also reached record highs and metals, such as iron ore, tin, copper, palladium and silver, have risen along with oil.

What most analysts will not mention is the role of market manipulation, profiteering and speculation in pushing up prices. Speculation has been fueled by the supply of ready cash provided by capitalist governments, particularly in the US and Europe in response to the financial market meltdown of March 2020 at the start of the pandemic.

The US has kept interest rates close to zero, while expanding the money supply via “quantitative easing”, currently running at $120 billion a month, and bought up corporate debt via its “asset purchasing programme.” These measures, along with Congress’s giant $2 trillion package for support to US corporations, including funds to cover the Federal Reserve’s losses and enable it to lend more than $4 trillion, flooded the market with cash and fueled speculation in basic commodities.

When inflation is taken into account, food prices are higher than at almost any time in the last 60 years, including during the 2008 and 2011 food crises. Consumer price inflation for food rose 6.3 percent in 2020, with the most affected regions being South America facing 21 percent food price inflation, Africa and South Asia 12 percent and Oceania 8 percent.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) said the impact would be “felt most by consumers in emerging markets and developing countries still wrestling with the effects of the pandemic.” The UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) pointed out that whereas the 2008 and 2011 food crises that triggered dozens of riots across Asia, the Middle East and Africa were caused by either price increase or falling incomes, both are a feature of the current crisis.

According to the WFP, 270 million people could face potentially life-threatening food shortages this year, up from 150 million before the pandemic. It estimates that the number of people on the brink of famine, the most acute phase of a hunger crisis, has risen to 41 million people, compared to 34 million last year.

According to a report just published by the FAO, the UN Development Programme (UNDP) and the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), more than 800 million people experienced chronic hunger in 2020, while 3 billion—more than a third of the world’s population—could not afford a healthy diet. This increase was equal to that of the previous five years combined. Almost 1 billion were food insecure, a 20 percent increase on 2019.

Last month, the WFP and FAO warned that “conflict, the economic repercussions of Covid-19 and the climate crisis are expected to drive higher levels of acute food insecurity in 23 hunger hot spots over the next four months.”

Lebanon’s food inflation soared to 400 percent last year due to its plummeting currency as the government defaulted on its debt amid continuing economic turmoil exacerbated by US sanctions on Syria—to which Lebanon’s economy is closely linked—the pandemic and the after-effects of the Beirut port explosion. Both Lebanon and Syria have seen food prices double this year, with cooking oil in Syria quadrupling in price and forcing the government to limit the import of foodstuffs to preserve its dwindling foreign currency reserves and safeguard wheat imports.

The situation is particularly bad in Africa, where many countries are engulfed in wars and conflicts and others have experienced climate-related floods, drought and locust-swarms that have exacerbated the growing food crisis. Ethiopia, where there is a civil war raging in Tigray that has spilled over into Amhara and Afar, as well as other conflicts in the south-west of the country, has more people affected by famine than anywhere in the world.

The price increases will hit hardest those countries dependent on imports for their staple foodstuffs. In West Africa, the price of staples is up 40 percent over a five-year average, with Nigeria experiencing food inflation of 23 percent, the highest level in 15 years. In Sudan, workers face food inflation of more than 200 percent.

Since the start of the year, protests have raged in Sudan, while the rising cost of food contributed to protests in Lebanon, Iraq, Tunisia, Cuba and South Africa. In this last week, Aden, Yemen’s southern port city, has been rocked by five days of mass protests. These are over the lack of basic services and the more than fourfold decline in Yemen’s currency against the US dollar since the start of the Saudi Arabia-led invasion and war that has led to soaring food prices in a country where 80 percent of the population rely depend on aid.

But it is not just poor countries that have seen the impact of rising food prices. In the US, the world’s richest country, a recent survey revealed that 8.6 percent of people said they sometimes or often didn’t have enough to eat in the previous week. According to the Food Research and Action Center, more than 38 million Americans (11.8 percent) lived in households that struggled against food insecurity, or lack of access to an affordable, nutritious diet, a 9 percent increase on 2019. One in 25 (3.9 percent) of households experienced very low food security, forcing them to regularly skip meals or reduce their food intake because they could not afford more food.

In middle income countries such as Turkey, a major food producer, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s popularity has slumped as food inflation increased for a fourth month in August to 29 percent. Russia, the world’s top grains exporter, introduced a wheat export tax in February to curb exports, reducing its market share and foreign currency earnings, while doing nothing to limit rising food prices at home that are now at a five-year high. Romania, despite being the EU’s top grain exporter this year, has seen prices soar at a double-digit pace, with inflation this year set to be the highest in eight years.

Arif Husain, the WFP’s chief economist, warned that rising food insecurity could fuel migration as people from poorer countries flee to richer ones in search of the means to feed their families. Joe Glauber, a senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington and a former chief economist at the US Department of Agriculture, said that food insecurity was often a trigger for unrest.

What can be expected from a red-green federal government in Germany?

Christoph Vandreier

At the last three-way debate between the candidates for German Chancellor on Sunday, Olaf Scholz (Social Democrats) and Annalena Baerbock (Greens) went to great lengths to promote a government coalition made up of the SPD and the Greens as a progressive alternative. Both politicians spoke out in favor of such an alliance and engaged in friendly back-and-forth exchanges on the minimum wage and tax increases.

Scholz and Baerbock in the last three-way debate (screenshot)

But a coalition between the SPD and Greens, a so-called red-green government, would be nothing of the kind. It would continue and exacerbate the hated policies of social spending cuts, mass infection with COVID-19 and militarism. This can already be seen in the absurd election promises. After all Bundestag parties forked over hundreds of billions of euros to the super-rich at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, the SPD and the Greens are calling for a marginal increase in the top tax rate of just 3 percent, and only for extremely high incomes. They promise to raise the minimum wage by €2.40.

The last time there was a red-green change of government in 1998, the two parties rolled out far bigger guns in the election campaign. The SPD advertised en masse for health care, the protection of social welfare systems, an action program for jobs, higher pensions and against poverty. The Greens called for the “demilitarization of international politics.”

In reality, the red-green government of Gerhard Schröder then carried out the most violent social attacks in West German history in every single political area. With Hartz IV and the Agenda 2010 reforms, the red-green government created a massive low-wage sector. With the so-called Riester pension, it lowered pensions and privatized provision, and with the deregulation of the financial markets it organized a veritable orgy of enrichment on the stock exchanges.

In addition, the former pacifists of the Greens and their Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer waged the first German war of aggression since the Second World War with the bombing of Serbia. This was followed by the barbaric war of occupation in Afghanistan and countless other war missions in which German soldiers again committed atrocities all over the world.

Since then, the SPD and Greens have shifted even further to the right. For the past 16 years, with the exception of four years, the SPD ruled the country together with the conservative Christian Democrats/Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU). The party made the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) the official opposition in parliament, organized a massive rearmament drive, strengthened the regime of refugee deportations, and implemented the “Profits before life” policy in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

The Greens not only supported the billions gifted by the government to banks and corporations, they implemented deportations and the policy of mass infection in 11 of the 16 federal states in which they are involved in the government. On foreign military interventions, they regularly criticized the government from the right and called for participation in the wars against Libya and Syria.

A new edition of the red-green coalition would implement policies that would eclipse anything adopted by the previous federal government and the Schröder red-green government.

Like the Left Party, the SPD and the Greens have ensured that an unprecedented redistribution of wealth from the bottom upwards has taken place during the coronavirus pandemic. Because hundreds of billions of euros were handed over to the banks and corporations, the 10 richest Germans alone were able to increase their wealth by $178 billion in 2020. At the same time, 40 percent of the population was affected by a loss of income.

A red-green federal government would aim to squeeze the money to pay for the corporate bailouts out of the working class. Even the measly campaign demands are not worth the paper they are written on. Real wages are already being massively reduced due to the horrendous inflation of up to 5 percent. A red-green government would also slash social welfare spending and attack all workers’ rights.

The pandemic policy of the SPD and the Greens provides particularly clear confirmation of this. For the last year and a half, the federal government, in cooperation with all state governments, has pursued a policy that tramples corpses under foot in order to guarantee the profit interests of banks and corporations. Instead of carrying out life-saving lockdowns, businesses were kept open, producing one wave of the pandemic after another. In the three-way debates between the chancellor candidates, both Scholz and Baerbock spoke out repeatedly against limited lockdowns in order to break the fourth wave of infections.

The politics of death go hand in hand with the politics of war. During a debate on RTL television in August, Scholz emphasized that international military operations by the German army would also be necessary in the future. He boasted, “the greatest increase in the military budget had taken place” since he became Minister of Finance. “We are now over 50 billion (euros). I worked very hard to make this possible, and I will continue to do so in the years to come,” he said. Without a social democratic finance minister, such a large increase would not have taken place.

Baerbock attacked this policy from the right. She accused the grand coalition of constantly ducking out of the way when things get difficult and placing domestic political motives above foreign policy responsibility. “I would change that,” she declared. “As Germans, we have a responsibility in the world.” The NATO target of spending 2 percent of GDP on defence is not enough, she continued, adding “If economic power declines, then we have no more security, but nominally we have achieved our goal.”

With this outrageous rearmament policy, the SPD and Greens are reacting to the Western powers’ debacle in Afghanistan and the growing conflicts between the great powers. They want to enforce German economic interests militarily across the globe and are thus heading for a third world war. This will result in levels of brutality that far exceed those witnessed during the Afghanistan war.

A red-green government would implement a reactionary program in domestic and foreign policy and is therefore increasingly being promoted. Since the SPD and the Greens currently enjoy the support of only between 25 to 26 percent and 15 to 17 percent respectively, according to the latest polls, they would probably have to rely on another coalition partner to form a government.

On Sunday, Free Democrats (FDP) leader Christian Lindner extended an olive branch to the Greens. After avoiding any concrete coalition statement at the FDP party congress, he had a friendly exchange with the Greens chairman Robert Habeck on Sunday evening on the talk show “Anne Will.” The FDP, which represents the interests of the financial oligarchy most openly, is predicted to secure 10 to 13 percent of the vote.

The Left Party has also been offering its services to secure a majority for a red-green federal government for weeks. Their involvement would not change the character of the alliance in the least. This is already evident in Berlin, Bremen and Thuringia, where the Left Party is in coalitions with the SPD and the Greens and is implementing the same ruthless policy in the interests of the financial oligarchy. Over the past few weeks, the leaders of the Left Party have repeatedly emphasized that they support NATO, the German army and missions abroad.

That is why even the house organ of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, the FAZ, finds such a government constellation attractive. “It’s not just cynics who say: If in doubt, social cuts can be implemented better and more credibly by left-wing governments—see the red-green agenda reforms from 2003 to 2005,” the newspaper stated with regard to a possible red-red-green federal government.

College football season continues in front of full crowds, risking massive COVID-19 super-spreaders

Andy Thompson

With the college football regular season continuing into its fourth week of games, a major public health disaster is looming. Despite the continued spread of the more infectious Delta variant, colleges and universities have essentially removed any safety measures and are allowing games to resume with full audience capacity.

The motivating factor for the schools to allow these deadly events is profits. In the last year’s season, limitations on in-person attendance, imposed in piecemeal fashion by state and local governments, as well as a handful of game cancellations due to outbreaks in teams caused schools to lose out on hundreds of millions in anticipated revenue.

Arkansas fans call the hogs during the first half of an NCAA college football game Saturday, Sept. 4, 2021, in Fayetteville, Ark. (AP Photo/Michael Woods)

College football in the United States is among the most-attended sporting competition in the world, with more than 42 million tickets sold to Division 1 games in 2019, according to the National Collegiate Athletic Association, the governing body for college sports. The top 25 college stadiums all have a capacity of 69,000 people or more, and seven stadiums hold over 100,000. The largest is Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor, home to the University of Michigan Wolverines, with a capacity of 107,601.

Most major programs, including Michigan, Penn State, Ohio State and Texas A&M, are not requiring fans to show any proof of vaccination or enforcing mask wearing. Some schools like Louisiana State University are requiring guests either show proof of vaccination or a negative COVID-19 PCR test.

However, these limited measures are only intended to save face, not prevent the spread of the virus. They are fully in line with the Biden administration’s insistence that the population must “learn to live with the virus,” or in plain language, to live with constant infection and death as all measures necessary to end the pandemic are being rejected out of hand by both Democratic and Republican politicians.

It has been well documented that tens of thousands of “breakthrough cases,” or infections of vaccinated individuals, have taken place each day for the last several months, driven by the surge of the more aggressive Delta variant. In an environment of tens of thousands of people who are encouraged to scream and yell, mass transmission is practically guaranteed.

In Georgia, where the University of Georgia has held two home games with over 90,000 fans in attendance, COVID-19 cases are higher than they have ever been. The state has seen a seven-day average of over 5,000 new cases since August 9, reaching a high of 15,000 new cases on September 13. Deaths in Georgia continue to rise and are at their highest point since the previous peak last winter, with a current seven-day average of 125 deaths per day.

But the danger of holding these massive events is not limited to the surrounding school community. Last year ESPN published an interactive article, Mapping College Football Crowds and Covid Risks, using information gathered from epidemiologists and anonymous cell phone data which mapped out out how far the virus could potentially spread after being contracted at a game.

For example, after a game in front of 99,590 fans at Alabama’s Bryant-Denny Stadium, within just 18 hours fans traveled back to their homes throughout the region in neighboring states, including Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee and others. At another game in Nebraska, fans traveled from southern Florida, Illinois, Oregon and Connecticut.

The amount of wealth caught up in college football is staggering. The annual revenues generated by the top NCAA schools has exceeded $4 billion. In 2019, 39 schools saw revenues of over $100 million with the top 3 richest football programs, University of Texas, Texas A&M and Ohio State, each bringing in over $200 million.

While the financial data for the 2020 season has not yet been made publicly available, initial reports suggest that many teams earned millions less than expected due to game cancellations and reduced ticket sales due to COVID-19 restrictions. Another significant loss of revenue came from the cancellation of almost all non-conference games last year for major programs.

In non-conference games, schools make agreements directly with one another for large sums paid to the visiting team, frequently a weaker team brought in for an easy win, while the home team earns money off ticket sales, TV deals and advertising. According to a report in USAToday, the non-conference direct payments alone for 2021 add up to over $171 million. Kent State is earning the most off these deals, bringing in over $5.2 million for its non-conference guest appearances. Forty-five other schools will bring in over $1 million from these contracts.

There are 50 non-conference games planned this year that have at least a $1 million contract agreement, and 289 non-conference contract games in total planned for the 2021 season. In one of these games, played on September 11, Ohio State paid $3.5 million to the University of Oregon.

In order to recover their losses from last year’s cancellations, teams are planning as many non-conference games as they can. Some canceled games, like that between Kent State and Penn State, have been “rescheduled” several years in the future to make up the millions in lost payments.

Mario Moccia, the New Mexico State University athletics director, told USA Today that in the last year the school ended with a $3.5 million loss. “Those [non-conference] games alone added up to $2.725 million,” he said. “It just shows, if you’re just going to play those two games, the economic impact wouldn’t have been nearly as drastic for us.”

Any interests of the health and well-being of students, athletes, fans and ultimately the population as a whole have been totally abandoned in favor of the profit interests of the billion-dollar college football industry. The colleges and universities with major athletic programs have been completely transformed into businesses, with financial resources monopolized by athletic departments. At some schools, such as Louisiana State, the athletic department receive more in alumni donations, which are then squandered on expenses such as futuristic locker rooms, coaching salaries and stadium expansions, than the university itself.

As with other major industries the decision has been made by the schools that not a single dollar more can be spared to protect human life. The continuation of the massive super-spreading games will have a devastating impact on the population already reeling from the pandemic.