Malaria vaccine: Vital addition to toolkit for preventing malaria but no magic bullet

Bobby Ramakant

It is indeed a breakthrough scientific achievement that will now have the first-ever and only malaria vaccine to prevent malaria in children. This is an important (and long-awaited) addition to existing range of scientifically proven effective methods to prevent malaria. While we celebrate this moment of yet another milestone scientific feat we must remind ourselves that this new and only vaccine is a complementary malaria control tool which needs to be added to the already proven measures for malaria prevention.

Malaria vaccine is a vital addition to malaria prevention options such as routine use of insecticide-treated bed nets, indoor spraying with insecticides, and the timely use of malaria testing and treatment. But we have to also acknowledge that access to these proven methods to save lives from malaria has been far from satisfactory, as a result of which, as per the latest data, 229 million people got malaria in 2019 (compared to 228 million in 2018), and 409,000 died of malaria in 2019 – most of them children (compared to 411,000 deaths in 2018). Children under 5 are at greatest risk of its life-threatening malaria complications. Despite unprecedented progress in in the recent two decades in the fight against this ancient disease, malaria remains one of the world’s leading killers, claiming the life of one child every two minutes; and most of these deaths are in Africa.

Let us celebrate this turning point – as there is no doubt that malaria vaccine is going to be one of the blessings in the global fight to end malaria by 2030. Clock is ticking! As 110 months are left to end malaria worldwide, let us also make doubly sure we scale up the rollout and access to all the science-backed methods to save lives from malaria.

DYK about first-ever malaria vaccine?

The United Nations health agency, World Health Organization (WHO), has recommended the first-ever malaria vaccine for children, in regions with moderate to high transmission of deadliest malaria parasite (Plasmodium falciparum). This vaccine acts against this malaria parasite which not only causes the most lethal malaria globally, but also is most prevalent in Africa. The WHO recommendation of this vaccine is based on results from an ongoing pilot programme in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi that has reached more than 800,000 children since 2019.

This malaria vaccine (RTS,S/AS01) is the first, and to date the only, vaccine that has demonstrated it can significantly reduce malaria in children.

The scientific research for this malaria vaccine has been going on since past 30 years. Phase-3 clinical studies were conducted between 2009 and 2014 in African nations. Children receiving 4 doses of this vaccine, experienced significant reductions in malaria and malaria-related complications in comparison to those who did not receive the vaccine.

In clinical studies, the vaccine was found to prevent 4 in 10 malaria cases, including 3 in 10 cases of life-threatening severe malaria. In addition, the vaccine also prevented 6 in 10 cases of severe malaria anaemia, the most common reason children die from malaria. Significant reductions were also seen in overall hospital admissions and the need for blood transfusions, which are required to treat severe malaria anaemia. These and other benefits were in addition to those already seen through the use of insecticide-treated bed nets, prompt diagnosis, and effective antimalarial treatment.

This malaria vaccine (RTS,S/AS01) is to be provided in 4 doses to children from 5 months of age up to 2 years. First 3 doses are given between 6 to 9 months of age, and 4th dose is given at 2 years of age.

The pilot of this malaria vaccine has been going on in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi since 2019. This malaria vaccine pilot began first in Malawi in April 2019, then in Ghana in May 2019, and finally in Kenya in September 2019. This Malaria Vaccine Implementation Programme generated evidence and experience on the feasibility, impact and safety of the RTS,S malaria vaccine in real-life, routine settings in selected areas of these three African nations: Ghana, Kenya and Malawi.

The pilot has proven that:

– Feasible to deliver: Vaccine introduction is feasible, improves health and saves lives, with good and equitable coverage of RTS,S seen through routine immunization systems. This occurred even in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.

– Reaching the unreached: RTS,S increases equity in access to malaria prevention. Data from the pilot programme showed that more than two-thirds of children in the 3 countries who are not sleeping under a bed net are benefitting from the RTS,S vaccine.

– Layering the tools results in over 90% of children benefitting from at least one preventive intervention (insecticide treated bed nets or the malaria vaccine).

– Strong safety profile: To date, more than 2.3 million doses of the vaccine have been administered in 3 African countries – the vaccine has a favourable safety profile.

– No negative impact on uptake of bed nets, other childhood vaccinations, or health seeking behaviour for febrile illness. In areas where the vaccine has been introduced, there has been no decrease in the use of insecticide-treated bed nets, uptake of other childhood vaccinations or health seeking behaviour for febrile illness.

– High impact in real-life childhood vaccination settings: Significant reduction (30%) in deadly severe malaria, even when introduced in areas where insecticide-treated nets are widely used and there is good access to diagnosis and treatment.

No one-size fits all

Let us hope this malaria vaccine along with all proven methods to save lives of malaria will be fully rolled out without any delay in every part of the world, driven by the local needs, contexts, and national/ subnational strategies to end malaria. Financial crunch or inequitable rollout or other forms of unjust programming will not be an obstacle in ensuring universal access to all range of healthcare services.

Iraq elections held as Washington’s puppet state nears collapse

Jean Shaoul

Iraq’s elections for its 329-seat parliament that will choose the president and prime minister-typically after months of horse trading between the multiple political blocs—are set for October 10. Voter turnout is expected to be lower than the 44 percent of the 25 million eligible voters that cast their ballot in the 2018 elections as calls to boycott the elections grow.

Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi (Wikimedia Commons)

The elections take place amid increasing hostility towards the political setup established after the 2003 US-led invasion and overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime, simmering protests over endemic corruption, the terrible social and economic conditions and water and power outages. These conditions are exacerbated by low oil prices, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the fallout from the US withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi, Washington’s man in Baghdad who lacks both popular support and a political base, is seeking a second term as prime minister in Saturday’s elections that have been brought forward to appease protesters.

The former intelligence officer became prime minister in May 2020. He did so after months-long mass protests, starting in October 2019 against inequality, poverty, corruption, the sectarian-ethnic political system and its rival external backers Washington and Tehran, that swept across Baghdad and Iraq’s southern region, brought down the government of Adil Abdul-Mahdi.

The government sought to put down the protests, the largest since 2003 and known as the Tishreen (October) movement, with lethal force. It deployed the security forces and paramilitary groups to shoot down more than 600 protestors, further inflaming tensions until the pandemic and the accompanying restrictions emptied the streets.

The repression has continued under al-Kadhimi, with militias affiliated to the various political parties assassinating 34 political activists, local leaders and outspoken journalists and critics, including Hisham al-Hashimi, a critic of Iraq’s militias.

Key demands of the youthful and largely leaderless protest movement included early elections based on new legislation that would overturn Iraq’s sectarian political system and an investigation into the killings by the security forces. Neither these nor any social demands have been met.

Al-Kadhimi’s economic measures have devastated workers’ incomes. The Central Bank devalued the country’s currency that is pegged to the dollar by 23 percent as a means of raising government income, since oil prices are denominated in dollars and oil revenues provide almost all government income. His government has sought to halve the public sector wage bill by cutting salaries and slashing benefits, in a bid to secure loans from the International Monetary Fund.

The economy contracted by a massive 11 percent last year, equivalent to a 15 percent GDP per capita reduction, far higher than its regional counterparts. Some 31 percent of Iraq’s 39 million population are now poor, according to a report by the World Food Programme (WFP). More than 1.4 million families receive social security assistance, while a further million have applied for social security. Unemployment is around 40 percent, up more than 10 percentage points on pre-pandemic levels. Young people are particularly badly affected as every year more than 180,000 graduates enter the job market with little hope of anything other than casual or day work.

Iraq, once a middle-income country, is a social tinder box. There have been sporadic demonstrations in the last six months, most recently on October 1, denouncing the political assassinations, demanding an overhaul of the entire political system, and calling for an election boycott. Graduates have rallied in front of government buildings, demanding jobs.

The established Iraqi parties have refused to introduce any changes that would encroach on their privileges, patronage and wealth. In November 2020, parliament enacted legislation that increased the number of constituencies from 18 to 83, giving better regional representation; eliminated the list-based voting system and replaced it with a Single, Non-Transferable Vote, thereby enabling voters to choose an affiliated or an independent candidate; and reserved one quarter of the seats for women. It thus maintains the power of the existing, sectarian, and ethnic-based parties and the kleptocrats.

Iraq, with its strong trading and commercial links with Iran, has become a key political battleground in US imperialism’s confrontation with Tehran. Washington, under both the Trump and Biden administrations, has insisted that Baghdad rein in the Iran-backed Shi’ite militias that have repeatedly fired rockets into the Green Zone, the heavily fortified area that houses the US Embassy, military forces and contractors.

Last month, the New York Times reported that the US would deploy around 2,000 troops to Iraq for a nine-month period despite the Biden administration’s earlier announcements that it would end its combat mission by the end of the year with a task force remaining in a training and advisory capacity.

Although US combat troops withdrew from Iraq in 2011 after the Iraqi government refused to renew its agreement to station US troops in the country, a smaller force returned in 2014 as part of the coalition against the Islamic State (IS) group. It has remained there ever since despite the defeat of IS in 2017 and the call by Iraq’s parliament for all US troops to leave the country after the Trump administration assassinated General Qassem Soleimani, the leader of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s Quds Force. Soleimani, the second most powerful figure in Tehran, was killed—along with five Iraqi nationals including the deputy chairman of Iraq's Popular Mobilization Forces and commander of the Iran-backed Kata'ib Hezbollah militia, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, and four other Iranian nationals—at Baghdad airport in January 2020.

According to The Gazette, the force will provide security and protection, assist and advise Iraqi security forces, as well as air defence and training “partner” forces in the country. According to Pentagon spokesperson Commander Jessica L McNulty, US forces would support operations against IS, which the US claims still launches attacks.

Washington has been urging its regional allies, including Saudi Arabia, to renew their links with Iraq as a means of containing Iranian influence and bolstering al-Kadhimi’s political legitimacy. Earlier this year, Egypt’s military dictator Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and Jordan’s King Abdullah met with Iraqi leaders in Baghdad, the first such meeting in years, to cement a “new Levant” that would also try to draw Syria back into the Arab camp. It follows the signing of 15 agreements with Baghdad for major reconstruction projects in sectors including oil, roads, housing, construction, and trade, as well as plans for an oil pipeline connecting Iraq’s southern city of Basra with Egypt via Jordan’s port of Aqaba in the Red Sea. Egypt is seeking to trade its construction materials for Iraq’s oil, as part of broader plans to become an energy and refinery hub in the eastern Mediterranean, following the discovery of significant offshore oil and gas reserves. In return, Iraq is expected to import natural gas from Egypt, reducing its reliance on Iranian gas for its electricity supplies.

The London-based Amwaj.media reported that Baghdad had hosted high level talks between Iran and Saudi Arabia aimed at ending the war in Yemen, which Saudi Arabia invaded in April 2015 to suppress a rebellion by the Iranian-backed Houthis and restoring diplomatic relations between Baghdad and Riyadh. Riyadh closed its embassy in Tehran after protesters stormed the embassy over the execution of dissident Saudi Shiite cleric Nimr Al-Nimr in January 2016. An anonymous Iraqi source was reported as describing the talks as fruitful on both fronts, with Iranian and Saudi officials agreeing to curb their acrimonious media campaigns against each other and resume diplomatic relations.

At the end of last month, al-Kadhimi organized and hosted the Baghdad Conference on Partnership and Cooperation, attended by leaders from neighbouring countries and French President Emmanuel Macron, who conceived of the project. France has 800 troops in the country, second only in number to those of the US, and its energy giant TotalEnergies recently signed a $27 billion contract to invest in oil, gas and solar production. Macron, who pledged that France would continue to deploy troops to counter terrorism even if the US withdrew its forces, views this as an opportunity to extend French influence in Iraq as part of a wider effort to expand its position in the Middle East, following his intervention in Lebanon after last year’s port blast in Beirut.

Macron lifts mandatory masking in French primary schools

Samuel Tissot

Beginning last Monday, masks for primary school children in 47 French departments are no longer compulsory. Classes will also no longer be closed for seven days following the detection of a positive case. Instead, all class members will be tested, with only those who are positive or who refuse the test sent home.

A school in Strasbourg, eastern France, on September 2, 2021. (AP Photo/Jean-François Badias)

For now, these measures are being implemented in departments that recorded incidence rates of less than 50 cases per 100,000 inhabitants in the preceding week. However, in 23 of the 47 departments selected for these measures the incidence rate among primary school-aged children is above 50 cases per 100,000. This shows that even with mandatory masking, schools have already become primary vectors for the spread of the virus since reopening in September.

Masks greatly reduce the chance of infection and are one of many crucial measures for stopping contagion. They should be worn in all crowded environments until there are no cases. However, the wearing of masks will not end the spread of the virus in schools. Even with masks thousands of children are being infected at school every week in France and internationally, some of whom will needlessly die.

So far, at least 10 French children have died of COVID-19, including six since June. Eight thousand youth under the age of 19 have also been hospitalized from COVID-19, including 2,000 since June.

Announcing the new policy last week, Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer told France Info, “we are launching an experiment in dozens of departments.” The government is fully aware that infections will grow en masse. The “experiment” is whether a policy of “immunity by infection” amongst children who are unvaccinated will provoke mass social opposition.

The Macron government’s policy continues the de facto herd immunity policy it has pursued throughout the pandemic. Although the capitalist media widely presents the pandemic as over, opposition to this deadly policy remains widespread.

On Tuesday, Le Monde published an open letter against the move to remove masks in schools, signed by a number of leading scientists, individual parents and parent groups in France, such as Forgotten Families and Schools. Citing data from the effects of school re-openings in the UK, Canada and the US, it stressed that the removal of masks will accelerate infections amongst children and their families. It also drew attention to the long-term consequences of COVID-19 infections for children, including damage to vital organs and cognitive development.

Undoubtedly the Macron government is looking enviously at England, where schools returned in September without mandatory masking or class closures following a positive case. This has led to at least 10 child deaths from COVID-19 since September. In America, where similar conditions dominate, 22 children died from COVID-19 in the last week alone.

While the authors undoubtedly intend to save children’s lives, their conclusions are a political and scientific dead-end; they accept the government’s diktat that schools must remain open at all costs, even though schools cannot be opened safely amid mass transmission of the virus. Yet the letter states: “In the face of the highly contagious Delta variant, it is crucial to keep schools open and safe by adopting and maintaining measures to minimize the transmission of SARS-CoV-2.”

Macron’s policy has nothing to do with a scientific fight to eradicate the virus. His professed concern for the psychological well-being of children—thousands of whose relatives have died from the pandemic due to the official policy of spreading the virus—is a fraud. Macron’s policy is driven by French corporations’ demands for business operations to continue as usual, and thus for students to be in classrooms so that their parents can work.

The authors call for the maintenance of compulsory mask-wearing for all age groups and investment in high ventilation equipment for all classrooms. While these measures are necessary to contain the virus, they will not by themselves eradicate the virus and stop infections in schools.

The infectiousness of COVID-19 and the Delta variant make it essential that schools be closed as part of a society-wide lockdown to eradicate the virus. Even with the measures proposed, the virus will still spread, mutate into new strains and kill students, teachers, and their families.

Implicit in the open letter’s argument is the false notion that keeping schools open will protect children’s mental health. Mental health and educational quality are critical concerns, but a policy of mass infection or even one of partial mitigation of the virus cannot address them. What could be worse for children’s mental health than constant fear of being infected with coronavirus and transmitting it to loved ones?

The best way to ensure children’s physical and mental health is by implementing stringent scientific measures to end the pandemic once and for all, as quickly as possible. This can also rule out future disruptions to their education and the further degradation of children’s mental and physical health.

Speaking to the WSWS webinar in August, “For a Global Strategy to Stop the Pandemic and Save Lives!”, Dr. Malgorzata Gasperowicz of the University of Calgary explained that aggressive public health measures could eradicate the virus in two months. In this short period, all children must have access to high-quality computers and internet and their parents receive full income. This has been shown to be viable in practice by China, where scientific policies led to the suppression of multiple outbreaks of the Delta variant in recent months.

Since the pandemic began, the French government, like its counterparts across Europe, has been guided by nothing but the profit interests of the corporations and billionaires. In January and February 2020, when reports from China showed how deadly the virus was and that basic social distancing restrictions were halting the spread of the virus, the Macron government ignored basic scientific advice.

Similarly, schools were proven to be major vectors for transmission of the virus during the first wave. Nevertheless, in September 2020, January 2021, and May 2021 the Macron government reopened schools, fueling further resurgences of the virus. From September 1, 2020, to the end of the school year, an additional 80,000 people died from COVID-19 in France.

The Pasteur Institute warned in early September that even with higher rates of vaccination than at present, the infectiousness of the Delta variant coupled with the tendency of respiratory viruses to thrive in colder conditions could lead to a peak of hospitalizations exceeding those reached in 2020. In August, the World Health Organization warned of 236,000 additional COVID-19 deaths in Europe by December 1.

In the coming months, hundreds of thousands of lives, including those of many children, depend on the struggle for a scientific policy to eradicate the virus. Throughout the pandemic, the education unions and nominally “left” opposition parties have actively supported the Macron government’s herd immunity policy.

Over 140,000 US children have lost a parent or caregiver to COVID-19

Evan Blake

A study released Thursday in the journal Pediatrics found that “from April 1, 2020 through June 30, 2021, over 140,000 children in the US experienced the death of a parent or grandparent caregiver” due to COVID-19. The results follow the July release of a study in The Lancet by the same lead author, Dr. Susan Hillis, which estimated that the same figure globally stood at 1.56 million children through the end of April 2021.

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)

These staggering figures underscore the immense scale of the tragedy that has swept across the globe during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the US, nearly one in four of the 621,656 deaths from COVID-19 by June 30 were those of parents or caregivers to children.

The latest study notes, “the lives of these children are permanently changed by the deaths of their mothers, fathers, or grandparents who provided their homes, needs, and care,” adding, “Loss of parents is associated with mental health problems, shorter schooling, lower self-esteem, sexual risk behaviors, and risks of suicide, violence, sexual abuse, and exploitation. Loss of co-residing grandparents can impact psycho-social, practical, and/or financial support for grandchildren. After a caregiver’s death, family circumstances may change, and children may face housing instability, separations, and lack of nurturing support.”

The level of trauma inflicted on an entire generation of young people is unfathomable. While the ruling elite and their media endlessly repeat the mantra that everyone must “learn to live with the virus,” in reality more and more families are being ripped apart as nearly 7,000 people continue to die from COVID-19 worldwide each day.

Every child’s needless loss of a parent is a life-altering event, the vast majority of which have not been written on or covered by the corporate media. Some of those which have been covered offer a glimpse into the social crisis confronting these youth.

In late August, five children from Yucaipa, California, were orphaned after both their parents, Davy and Daniel Macias, died from COVID-19 in the same week. Their entire family was infected with the virus during a vacation, with the children recovering but their parents becoming steadily more ill. The children, with the eldest only 7 years old, now live with their grandparents. Terry Seri, Daniel Macias’s sister-in-law, told local press that they “spend a lot of time at night looking for mom and dad.”

Also in August, in Mississippi, a 32-year-old mother of a newborn child died from COVID-19 only months after her husband succumbed to the virus, leaving the baby girl orphaned. In neighboring Alabama, a single mother of seven is now raising 12 children on her own after her sister and brother-in-law died from COVID-19 in the same month, orphaning their five children. In Michigan, seven children were orphaned in early September after their mother, Charletta Green, died from COVID-19, and their father Troy, who also had COVID-19, died from a heart attack that began shortly after he learned that his wife was taking a turn for the worse.

Given the lack of comprehensive testing and contact tracing, there is no way to measure the precise number of infections that have been caused by the reopening of schools before COVID-19 was contained. However, multiple studies and analyses of government data have shown strong correlations between school reopenings and surges of the virus in their surrounding communities. Undoubtedly, a substantial number of the parents and caregivers who have died from COVID-19 were infected by their children who had been compelled to return to unsafe schools.

Capitalist politicians throughout the world have pushed to reopen schools by cynically professing their concern for the mental health and well-being of children who struggled with remote learning. In reality, school reopenings were always driven by the needs of the corporations to have parents back at work producing profits. Just as these same politicians continuously cut education and social spending and never cared about the well-being of children before the pandemic, so, today, they have no concern for the mental health of millions of children whose parents and caregivers have died from COVID-19.

There is enormous opposition within the international working class to the pandemic policies implemented by the ruling elites, and a growing desire to fight for the eradication of COVID-19 worldwide. This found powerful expression in the October 1 global school strike initiated by British parent Lisa Diaz. Throughout the week leading up to and including October 1, the primary hashtag for the event—#SchoolStrike2021—was used over 26,000 times in dozens of countries around the world.

Asked about the studies on children who have lost parents and caregivers to COVID-19, Diaz told the World Socialist Web Site, “The governments and those who need us to keep working go on and on about mental health. But there’s a severe risk of the parents dying, which will have a far greater impact on children’s mental health than remote learning for a couple months. These children now have to live with the thought that they might have accidentally killed their parents. If schools can’t be open and safe, if there’s going to be any kind of transmission in schools, they need to be shut down.”

In addition to the loss of their parents and loved ones, children themselves can be severely impacted and die from COVID-19. Recent studies indicate that roughly one in seven infected children develops Long COVID, suffering debilitating symptoms months after infection. Last week, 22 children died from the virus in the US, bringing the cumulative pediatric death toll to 520. COVID-19 is now the leading cause of death among children in Brazil, with 1,518 children ages 10-19 dying from the virus in the first half of 2021. During a major surge of the Delta variant in Indonesia this summer, over 700 children died from COVID-19 in July alone.

It is no exaggeration to state that the future of an entire generation now hangs in the balance. If the strategies of “herd immunity” or its variant of enacting limited mitigation measures remain dominant worldwide, COVID-19 will continue to spread through schools, factories and other workplaces, with millions more people dying and masses of children scarred for life.

The only scientifically-grounded and viable strategy for putting an end to this needless suffering and death is one which aims at the global eradication of COVID-19. This entails a globally-coordinated vaccination program, mass testing, contact tracing, the safe isolation of infected patients, masking and the deployment of all other public health measures in every country. Wherever the virus is spreading, schools and nonessential workplaces must be temporarily closed until daily new cases are brought to zero, with workers and small business people guaranteed full income protection during lock-downs.

Kellogg’s mobilizes scabs to break strike of 1,400 workers

Carlos Delgado

Food manufacturer Kellogg’s announced Wednesday that it plans to use white collar workers and “third-party resources” as scabs in a strikebreaking maneuver against the 1,400 workers who have launched a strike at its four US cereal plants this week.

Picket line in Omaha, Nebraska (source: BCTGM Facebook page)

The company announced on its “Kellogg's’s Negotiations” website that they are “implementing contingency plans to mitigate supply disruptions, including using salaried employees and third-party resources [hiring scab labor] to produce food.”

Workers on social media expressed outrage at the company’s actions. Several pointed to an incident that occurred in 2014 during an illegal lockout of the workforce at the company’s Memphis, Tennessee plant in which a scab worker recorded video of himself urinating on a conveyor belt of the puffed rice used to make Rice Krispies Treats.

Other workers noted the inherent safety hazard of bringing in workers unfamiliar with dangerous production equipment. Mark Gregory, a third shift mechanical operator, told a local news reporter, “They can try to run the plant. I know they think it's easy for us to run the plant, but it takes a lot of skill to run the facility. I hope nobody gets hurt. Equipment in there is very dangerous, we spend a lot of time learning how to run the equipment.”

Workers launched the strike Tuesday morning, shutting down four plants which account for all production of Kellogg's cereals in the United States: Battle Creek, Michigan (also the location of the company’s global headquarters); Omaha, Nebraska; Lancaster, Pennsylvania; and Memphis, Tennessee. Kellogg's is one of the largest producers of cereals and snack foods, with products including Frosted Flakes, Rice Krispies, Pop-Tarts, and Pringles.

Kellogg’s workers are fighting against cuts to jobs, wages and benefits, and the expansion of the hated two-tier structure, which forces new hires to labor for less pay than their co-workers on the same line. The Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union (BCTGM) agreed to the provision that created the second tier, which is currently capped at 30 percent of the workforce. The company is seeking to lift that cap and expand the number of ultra-exploited “casual” workers who receive a poverty wage.

In addition, workers have been forced to work under a brutal overtime regime during the pandemic, during which the company’s revenues have soared amid rising demand for snack products. According to its 2020 annual report, the company made $1.76 billion in profit on $13.8 billion in sales in 2020. Kellogg’s CEO Steve Cahillane received $11.6 million in total compensation in 2020, a nearly $2 million increase from his 2018 package of $9.9 million.

In a widely shared Facebook post, one Kellogg’s worker wrote, “Imagine if you started working at a job that proclaimed to have the best benefits. Then come to find out you will never ever see those benefits because you were hired in after a certain time...Then explain to your family that you put in for a day off months in advance for a special occasion only to be denied that day off...Explain to your family that Santa is going to be late cause you just got forced over 10 minutes before the end of your shift to work another 8 hours. Oh, and after you get home you only get 4 hours of sleep because you have to be back to work...This isn't about employees being greedy. This is about equality and quality time with family.”

The wife of another worker posted a picture listing the multi-million dollar compensation packages of Kellogg’s’ top executives, commenting, “Kellogg’s thinks it’s ok to pay new employees significantly less, and give them less benefits because the men and women who work SEVEN DAYS A WEEK YEAR ROUND cost the company too much money...let’s take a look at who is really costing the company too much money.”

The BCTGM union, meanwhile, has offered workers no serious strategy for victory. Earlier this year, the BCTGM forced through sellout agreements to shut down strikes of Nabisco and Frito-Lay workers, isolating Kellogg’s workers before their strike even began.

A Nabisco worker in Chicago warned Kellogg’s workers, “Make sure they count the votes in front of them. Because they didn’t count the votes In front of us, we all know that the union just wanted us to go back to work. At the end of the day is all about money. Do you really think that the union wanted to keep paying us? And also ask for more than $105 [in strike pay] that we got.”

After the sellout contract was forced through, he said, “We’re all still working about 20 plus hours overtime for nothing.”

Another Nabisco worker in Richmond expressed his support for Kellogg’s workers and said, “Fight for what you deserve.” He added, “Sixteen-hour days is the normal [shift] being forced over [on] us. The company does what it pleases,” while the union did nothing to stop the sweatshop conditions.

The BCTGM has been promoting reactionary nationalism to undermine the solidarity of workers at precisely the moment when international unity is most needed. Kellogg's is a multi-national corporation with factories in 18 different countries outside of the United States. Any serious strategy to defeat the company requires the international unity of US workers with their brothers and sisters around the world.

The BCTGM, however, is promoting “America First,” anti-Mexican chauvinism, claiming that workers must unite along national lines to prevent the company from relocating operations to Mexico. In a blatantly racist comment to Yahoo Finance, BCTGM Local 3G President Trevor Bidelman claimed, “You’re told quite rightly not to drink the water in Mexico. So I don’t know why you would want to eat the food that was made from that water.”

In fact, Bidelman and the union did nothing when Kellogg’s announced plans in September to cut 212 jobs from its Battle Creek workforce by 2023. According to a local news report at the time, Bidelman claimed he was “blindsided” by the proposed cuts and offered only the hope that the union could provide “input” on the company’s decision.

The BCTGM is promoting GoFundMe pages to “crowdfund” resources for striking workers, signaling to workers that they are going to be largely on their own to survive during the strike, even as the union sits on $32 million in assets and $11 million in income built from workers’ dues money. Both the union and the company fear the outbreak of a genuinely militant and independent struggle by workers, and they are no doubt working behind the scenes to shut the strike down as quickly as possible.

The gravest warning must be made against any illusions in the BCTGM. As at Nabisco, Frito-Lay, and countless other struggles in recent decades, the unions follow a tried-and-true strategy of isolating strikers, starving them out with meager strike pay, and ramming through a company-backed concessions contract when workers have reached the breaking point.

10,000 Alberta Superstore workers vote overwhelmingly in favour of strike action

Alexandra Greene & Roger Jordan

Ten thousand workers employed at Alberta’s Real Canadian Superstore grocery stores voted 97 percent in favour of a strike last week, with a strong province-wide voter turnout.

A Real Canadian Superstore in Alberta (WSWS)

Workers are determined to secure better wages, improvements to unpredictable scheduling practices and protection against COVID-19 infection.

The decisive vote comes as grocery store workers have endured months of highly unsafe conditions during the pandemic, while receiving only poverty wages as compensation. Of Alberta’s 40 Superstore locations, there have been COVID-19 outbreaks in at least 30 stores over the course of the pandemic. Several grocery store workers have died after contracting COVID-19 on the job.

The situation has dramatically worsened over the past two months following the July decision by hard-right United Conservative Party (UCP) Premier Jason Kenney to dismantle all remaining public health measures. This reckless move has exposed grocery store workers, and all other sections of the working class, to a horrifying fourth wave of the pandemic that has overwhelmed the province’s hospitals and resulted in some patients being denied life-saving care.

Loblaws Inc., the nationwide food retailing giant that owns Real Canadian Superstore, as well as several other retail and pharmaceutical chains, announced it would be giving its employees “hero pay” at the start of the pandemic. The measly $2 per hour wage increase was infamously clawed back just three months later in June 2020.

All the while, Loblaws executives have lavished themselves with gargantuan salaries and bonuses. The 2020 compensation package for Loblaws Executive Chairman Galen G. Weston Jr. amounted to a whopping $3.55 million, while departing company President Sarah Davis earned an obscene $6.4 million.

The Superstore workers in Alberta are members of the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) union, which stated that negotiations with Loblaws have been ongoing for more than a year. Despite this, the union has made no public indication that it intends to follow through on the strike mandate. On the contrary, it has all but ruled out job action. “Ironically, the point of taking a strike vote is to attempt to avoid a strike,” remarked Local 401 Secretary-Treasurer Richelle Stewart.

When interviewed by the Edmonton Journal, UFCW Local 401 President Thomas Hesse stated that bargaining was to resume between the union and Loblaws on September 27 and conclude on October 1. In a bargaining update released September 30, Local 401 said talks were progressing slowly.

A September 24 press release by UFCW Local 401 declared, “If the strike commences, your union will be asking you and your family not to shop at Superstore, nor any of the Loblaws-owned businesses such as No Frills, T&T Supermarket, or Shoppers Drug Mart. Unity and solidarity among Local 401 members will be a vital component of running a strong strike campaign.”

Such pathetic appeals have nothing to do with “unity and solidarity” but are aimed at giving the union cover in the event of a strike to isolate it and sell it out. “Unity and solidarity” among workers cannot be built by proposing a toothless consumer boycott that will have virtually no impact on a multibillion-dollar corporation like Loblaws, which controls more than a quarter of the grocery retail industry in Canada. Rather, it must be fought for politically.

Superstore workers, who face the daily threat of COVID-19 infection and earn miserably low wages, are in a strong position to take up such a struggle. An appeal by the Superstore workers for a unified fight against attacks on wages and working conditions would find a powerful response from the thousands of nurses in Alberta whose wages are being cut by the UCP government by 5 percent amid the pandemic, or from teachers forced to risk infection on a daily basis in unsafe classrooms. It would be enthusiastically welcomed by the tens of thousands of mostly low-paid public sector workers across the country, especially in New Brunswick, who have just voted by 94 percent in favour of a strike.

The UFCW’s record over the past year confirms its bitter hostility to the emergence of a mass working-class movement for better wages and conditions. At every point during the pandemic, the union has endeavoured to keep workers on the job under dangerous conditions and sabotage working-class opposition to the ruling elite’s “profits before lives” COVID-19 policy.

In March of this year, the UFCW refused point blank to defend Olymel meatpacking workers, who were recklessly herded into plants plagued by COVID-19 outbreaks of catastrophic proportions. A massive COVID-19 outbreak at Olymel’s Red Deer, Alberta plant saw at least 515 workers infected and 4 workers lose their lives.

When the Kenney government greenlighted the re-opening of the Red Deer slaughterhouse and meatpacking operations after a brief shutdown, even as the workforce still grappled with 91 active cases, the union raised no demands for additional safety measures to be taken. In comments to the media at the time, UFCW Local 401 President Thomas Hesse bandied around militant phrases, stating that the company was putting “pigs ahead of people.” He claimed to be grieving for the dead workers as much as the other workers in the Red Deer plant but proposed no action to confront the pandemic.

Hesse is employing a similar tactic this time around, posturing as a friend of the workers but proposing absolutely nothing to wage a successful struggle. “I’m seeing people terrified going to work in crowded public places,” he told the Edmonton Journal. “Their billionaire bosses gave them so-called hero pay and then took that away. It’s almost like the employer saw it as a calculation error in their enormous profits.”

Hesse’s sudden outrage at “billionaire bosses” is for public consumption alone. He calculates that striking a militant pose will place the UFCW in a better position to ram through a rotten concessions contract that has almost certainly already been cooked up with Loblaws behind the scenes.

He is a master at protecting the UFCW’s relations with the corporate elite and the state. In the spring of 2020, after three meatpackers died at Cargill’s High River plant and over 900 were infected, Hesse refused to support the highly exploited workforce in taking any job action to prevent a premature return to work. Under conditions where the virus was still spreading, Hesse asserted that any job action would be “illegal” under the workers’ collective agreement. Given the choice between protecting the “legality” of collective bargaining, i.e., the corrupt partnership between corporate bosses and union officials, or workers’ lives, Hesse and the UFCW bureaucracy chose the former.

As for its role in the food retail sector, the UFCW has been instrumental in allowing a steady worsening in workers’ wages and conditions. In 1990, the union set the bar for the destruction of full-time grocery jobs when it allowed Loblaws in Ontario to do away with across-the-board wage increases in favour of a new wage structure tied to hours worked.

In 1993, union executives convinced workers it represented in Alberta’s Safeway grocery chain that the company would close stores if they did not accept wage and job cuts and concede to the company’s right to employ a virtually unlimited number of part-time workers.

Far from being exceptional, the UFCW’s record of imposing low wages and precarious conditions over the past 30 years in the food retail sector is of a piece with what the trade union bureaucracy has done throughout all sectors of the economy. This is why Superstore workers must break from the UFCW if they are to take their struggle forward.

India to provide pittance in “compensation” to families of COVID-19 dead

Wasantha Rupasinghe

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s far-right Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government has announced that a paltry 50,000 rupees (about US$670) in disaster relief compensation will be paid to the families of Indians who have died from COVID-19.

Health workers screen residents for COVID-19 symptoms at Deonar slum in Mumbai, India, Saturday, July 11, 2020. (AP Photo/Rajanish Kakade)

The compensation plan, which the government only brought forward after being sued in court, is akin to rubbing salt in a gaping wound.

Millions who watched in horror as their relatives died during India’s second pandemic wave last spring because of shortages of hospital beds, oxygen, drugs, and trained personnel will now have to jump through various bureaucratic hoops to prove to the satisfaction of Indian authorities that they succumbed to COVID-19. And all for a princely sum that in most cases will not even cover a fraction of their loved one’s medical and cremation (or burial) expenses, let alone provide them compensation for the loss of a breadwinner or their mental anguish.

The 50,000 rupee payment is one-eighth of what disaster victims are entitled to under India’s National Disaster Management Act, 2005. Yet on Monday, Indian’s Supreme Court gave its approval to the compensation scheme. Grotesquely, Indian’s highest court went out of its way to praise the government’s generosity and its calamitous response to the pandemic. “We are very happy that something is being done to wipe out the tears of those who suffered,” declared Justice M.R. Shah. “We have to take judicial notice of the fact that what India has done, no other country could do.”

In reality, Modi and the Indian ruling class have perpetrated a crime against humanity. Officially, India with just under 450,000 COVID-19 deaths has the world’s third highest COVID death toll. But a spate of scientific studies of excess deaths in India during the pandemic have demonstrated that COVID-19 has killed 5 million or more Indians.

Like the North American and European imperialist powers, Modi and his BJP government have systematically prioritised corporate profits over saving human lives. In the spring of 2020, they imposed a short-lived, ill-prepared lockdown which, by depriving tens of millions of migrant workers of any livelihood overnight, helped spread the dearly virus across rural India, where most of the population lives. They then pivoted to recklessly reopening the economy and continued to do so as infections and deaths rose exponentially for the next five months.

India’s even more devastating second wave of the pandemic, from March through June 2021, was, if anything, even more manifestly criminal. For weeks, the government dismissed the warnings of scientists, including its own medical experts, about the emergence of the Delta variant and a burgeoning tsunami of new infections, and bitterly resisted calls for urgent measures to halt the virus’s spread. As India was setting new records for daily infections and deaths, Modi went on national television to vow he would “save” the country “from lockdown,” not COVID-19.

The Modi government has vehemently condemned the studies that show India’s COVID-19 fatalities are a gross—and it should be added, deliberate—undercount. In this they have been assisted by the corporate media, which has helped it bury the issue, and the opposition parties, which have implemented the profits-before-lives policy wherever they form the state government.

However, as part of its efforts to get the Supreme Court to sanction compensation payments one-eighth the statutorily mandated amount, New Delhi has agreed that payments should be made to more than just the families of those who have COVID-19 or mucormycosis (black fungus, a COVID-related disease) listed on their death certificates as the cause of death. Under the court-approved plan, the families of anyone who died within 30 days of a positive COVID-19 test will be eligible for the meagre 50,000 rupee payment.

No doubt this was based on a macabre calculus—that to somewhat expand the eligibility for a “compensation” payment that is only one-eighth the legally mandated sum of 400,000 rupees ($5,345) will prove less costly than paying the full amount to the families of those currently recognised as having died from COVID.

The government knows full well that its expanded eligibility criteria will make little difference to the families of the vast majority of the 5 million COVID-dead. Even in pre-pandemic times, proper death certificates were issued in less than one in four deaths. Moreover, the overwhelming majority of those infected were never tested by India’s dilapidated health care system, which has been systematically underfunded by successive governments, whether headed by the BJP or Congress, for decades. According to seropositive studies carried out by health authorities, just one in every 100 infections were detected in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, and just one in 120 in Bihar, the third most populous.

Cynically, the National Disaster Management Agency, which is personally headed by Modi, cited the likelihood that the number of COVID dead will grow to argue that compensation payments should be slashed. “Financial prudence,” it wrote, “demands that we plan in a manner that assistance can be provided to larger number of people should the number of deaths rise.”

This is, in effect, an admission the government knows that its current drive to remove what few COVID restrictions remain and reliance on a disorganised vaccine rollout as the sole defence against the virus are creating conditions for a massive third wave of infection and deaths.

On May 25, in the wake of India’s disastrous second wave, advocates Gaurav Kumar Bansal and Reepak Kansal petitioned the Supreme Court to order the government, which had declared the pandemic a national disaster under the National Disaster Management Act, to provide the 400,000 rupee compensation stipulated in the Act’s Section 12 (iii) to all families of those who had died from COVID or mucormycosis. By rejecting their petition, the Supreme Court has created a precedent that will allow India’s government to reduce compensation payments to families affected by future disasters.

Time and again, India’s highest court has given its legal imprimatur to the Modi government’s authoritarian actions and Hindu communalist provocations, from its August 2019 constitutional coup stripping Jammu and Kashmir, India’s only Muslim majority state, of its semi-autonomous status, to the building of a temple to Lord Ram, on the site of the razed Babri Masjid mosque. But even more fundamentally, the court is a bulwark of capitalist rule. The court’s sanctioning of the government’s sham COVID-19 compensation scheme is part of a series of judgments it has made that have upheld and enforced the Indian ruling elite’s criminal pandemic policy.

Even if the court-sanctioned 50,000 rupee payment were made to the families of all 450,000 official COVID-19 dead or for that matter such compensation paid for all 5 million of India’s pandemic deaths, it would still represent little more than a drop in the ocean compared to the vast wealth accumulated by India’s super-rich during the pandemic.

In the first case, such compensation would total barely US$300 million, and in the latter US$3.35 billion. By contrast, the wealth of India’s billionaires has increased by several hundred billion dollars since March 2020.

Syrus Poonawalla, who heads the Serum Institute of India, India’s largest vaccine manufacturer, is a case in point. According to the Hurun India 2021 Rich List, which was published last week, he has seen his fortune shoot up by over $9 billion over the past year—a 70 percent increase. Much of this increase is attributable to the BJP government’s decision not to use India’s state-owned medical sector to manufacture vaccines and its stubborn months-long refusal to provide free COVID-19 vaccines to all, forcing people to pay for the life-saving jab out of their own pockets and for a higher price.

Hurun reports that over the past year, the ranks of India’s billionaires swelled by 58 to 238. Earlier in the pandemic, Oxfam’s “Inequality Virus Report” released at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, showed that India’s billionaires had increased their wealth by 35 percent or US$185 billion, during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.

For the Modi government, which has pumped billions of dollars into the banks and financial markets, helping pave the way for the massive increase in the wealth of India’s rich and super-rich, it is unthinkable to appropriate even a tiny fraction of these ill-gotten gains to support the millions of people who have been devastated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

While state funds have flowed seamlessly into the bank accounts and stock portfolios of the super-rich during the pandemic, the Modi government is ensuring that the process of accessing the derisory COVID-19 disaster compensation payments will be as cumbersome as possible. It has ordered the state governments to provide the ex-gratia assistance from the State Disaster Response Fund (SDRF) rather than allocating money from the National Disaster Relief Fund. This will put an additional burden on the already cash-strapped states.

This decision has been denounced by some states governed by opposition parties. In Rajasthan, Congress Party state president and Minister of State for Education Govind Singh Dotasara told the Indian Express, “You can’t impose [the ex-gratia payment] on states. … It should be done by the Centre through their relief fund. ... It’s not that only one state has been affected by it, it’s a pandemic. It should be covered under the National Disaster Relief Fund.”

The truth of this statement is itself a damning indictment of Congress, which has marched in lockstep with Modi in the implementation of a “herd immunity” pandemic policy. While Congress politicians may squabble with the Centre over who should pay the bill for the sham compensation scheme, they are similarly culpable for the waves of mass infection and death that have swept across the Indian population.

Paris demands aggressive EU policy after AUKUS treaty signed against China

Alex Lantier

After Australia’s sudden repudiation of a €56 billion submarine contract with France as it made its AUKUS alliance with the UK and the United States against China, French President Emmanuel Macron is intensifying calls for an independent European Union (EU) military policy.

French President Emmanuel Macron visits a call centre of the French Social security insurance dedicated to Covid-19 vaccinations, Monday, March 29, 2021 in Creteil, outside Paris.

Arriving at an October 5 EU summit at Brdo castle outside Lubljana, Slovenia, Macron pointed to the signing of the AUKUS treaty and the humiliating US withdrawal from Afghanistan in August. While calling for “clarification and re-engagement” from Washington in the NATO alliance, he added: “But we must be clear with ourselves on what we want for ourselves, our borders, our security, and our energy, industrial, technological and military independence.”

Macron made clear the signing of the AUKUS treaty had caused lasting damage to EU relations with America. “We must be realistic about the decisions that have been taken by our allies. There were choices that were made which I cannot say were signs of respect [for] France or Europe,” Macron said. He said the EU’s goal at the Lubljana summit was to “continue to work in good faith with its historic partners and allies, but also to increase its independence and sovereignty.”

This means that, even as the EU countries insist they do not have money needed for critical public health policies to eradicate the coronavirus and halt the COVID-19 pandemic, leading EU powers are pledging to massively increase military spending to further their geopolitical ambitions. Both Berlin and Paris, which will hold the EU’s rotating presidency for six months at the beginning of 2022, have aggressively pushed for an EU military build-up.

The Lubljana summit underscored that US threats against China are intensifying US-EU tensions and the European imperialist powers’ aggressive moves in the Balkans and the Mediterranean.

The same day, just before arriving at the summit, Macron had received in Paris US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, for talks on improving US-French relations.

Prior to Blinken’s arrival, Macron made clear that Blinken’s visit would not by itself resolve the crisis over AUKUS. He said, “We are obliged to observe that, for somewhat over 10 years, the United States first have concentrated more on themselves and on refocusing their strategic interests on China and the Pacific. That is their right, it is their own sovereignty. And I respect popular sovereignty, but there too, we would be naive, or rather we would commit a terrible error, if we did not draw our own conclusions from this.”

“This is a crisis which is set to last, from which we can get out only by concrete actions,” an anonymous French official told Le Monde.

Blinken also met his French counterpart, Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, but no joint press conference was held. Explaining this unusual decision, a French official curtly said: “The two ministers will speak once they have something to say.”

Macron is scheduled to have a telephone call with Biden in the middle of the month, before meeting him in person at the October 30-31 G-20 summit in Rome.

The debacle of decades of escalating US-led wars of aggression in Iraq, Afghanistan and across the Middle East and Central Asia has not resolved but has intensified international conflicts and the danger of war. Thirty years after the 1991 Stalinist dissolution of the Soviet Union deprived the NATO powers of a common enemy, US-EU tensions are deep and growing. The US withdrawal from Afghanistan, leaving a power vacuum in Central Asia, is intensifying great-power rivalries across Eurasia and the danger of a new, US-led war.

After Washington and the EU clashed over US attempts to arm far-right Ukrainian militias for war with Russia in 2014-2015, however, there is growing opposition in EU ruling circles at US war threats against China. In a briefing titled “France’s Indo-Pacific ‘Third Way,’” the Carnegie Foundation for International Peace think tank points to differences between Washington and the EU powers revealed by the AUKUS treaty.

“Despite statements about rallying like-minded democratic countries, the Biden administration failed to anticipate France’s reaction. This will have long-term negative consequences on the United States’ image and on transatlantic relations, already damaged by Donald Trump’s presidency,” it wrote, adding, “there is a growing sentiment—including in France’s neighbor Germany—that Washington’s new focus on the Pacific is not in line with EU interests.”

The French Institute for International Relations (IFRI) think tank criticized the escalating danger of war, including nuclear war, provoked by the AUKUS treaty targeting China.

The IFRI warned that the signing of “AUKUS may trigger an (nuclear) arms race and that the move dangerously exacerbates tensions in East Asia.” It listed Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore, as well as Thailand, Laos and Cambodia, as regional powers angered by the AUKUS deal. It cited the Indonesian government’s statements that it was “deeply concerned over the continuing arms race and power projection in the region” and calling on Australia to “maintain its commitment towards regional peace, stability and security.”

Pointing to France’s position in the Indo-Pacific region via its island possessions such as Réunion or New Caledonia, the IFRI concluded, “France is not the only country in the Indo-Pacific which doesn’t want to follow the US blindly and unconditionally on its risky path against China.”

The drive to war and great-power conflict is, however, not only the product of aggressive US foreign policies but, more fundamentally, of the capitalist nation-state system itself. The geopolitical methods of the EU imperialist powers are not fundamentally different from the more openly aggressive policy of Washington.

With the more limited but still substantial military forces at their disposal, they laid out a policy of consolidating their strategic influence in Europe’s southern and eastern periphery. This includes moves to absorb former Yugoslav states bombed by Washington and the EU powers in the 1999 NATO war in Yugoslavia, to arm Greece against Turkey, and to escalate France’s neocolonial war in the African country of Mali.

The Lubljana summit called to prepare to “enlarge” the EU into the former Yugoslavia. The summit communiqué declared, “The EU reaffirms its unequivocal support for the European perspective of the Western Balkans.”

After the summit, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic suggested that Serbia would likely not be able to join the EU without first recognizing the breakaway republic of Kosovo, which unilaterally declared independence with NATO backing in 2008. Vucic said, “Without resolving issues with Pristina [the capital of Kosovo], Serbia would not be able to join the EU.”

Nonetheless, the EU powers stepped up calls for an aggressive intervention. Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz said enlarging the EU to include former Yugoslav republics was geopolitically critical. “If the European Union does not offer this region a real perspective, we have to be aware that other superpowers—China, Russia or Turkey—will play a bigger role there. The region belongs to Europe geographically, and it needs a European perspective,” Kurz said.

France also has announced a €3 billion deal to sell three naval frigates to Greece as part of its continuing conflict with Turkey in the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean Seas. This sale, criticized by Turkey as a threat to “regional peace and stability,” was ratified yesterday by the Greek parliament. The deal also reportedly commits the Greek armed forces to sending forces to the French war in Mali and across the Sahel region.