Central Asia Struggles With the Consequences of Russia’s War

Vijay Prashad

Kyrgyzstan’s second-largest city, Osh. Photograph Source: Ninara from Helsinki, Finland – CC BY 2.0

During the Antalya Diplomacy Forum in Antalya, Turkey, which took place from March 11 to March 13, 2022, the Kyrgyz Republic’s Foreign Minister Ruslan Kazakbaev told Helga Maria Schmid, the secretary-general of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), that his country would be happy to host Russian-Ukrainian talks and serve as the “mediator for re-establishment of peace and mutual understanding” between the two countries.

On the sidelines of the forum, Kazakbaev also met with the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Azerbaijan Jeyhun Bayramov and the State Secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Slovenia Stanislav Raščan and told them that the Kyrgyz Republic wanted the Russian-Ukraine conflict to end, reiterating that his country was willing to play a role to achieve this outcome.

Why is the Kyrgyz Republic so keen to get involved in Russia’s war in Ukraine? Because this landlocked Central Asian country of more than 6.5 million people is reliant on its economic ties with Russia through the Eurasian Economic Union, “an international organization for regional economic integration,” which includes Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and the Kyrgyz Republic. Any Western sanctions on Russia will directly impact the Kyrgyz Republic, where 20 percent of the population lives below the national poverty line, according to 2019 figures. The conflict between Russia and Ukraine has already begun to have a negative economic impact on the five Central Asian republics of Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, which were once a part of the former Soviet Union.

Oil, Remittances and Food

Sanctions on Russia have sent shock waves from Nur-Sultan, the capital city of Kazakhstan, to Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan, as each of the countries in Central Asia struggles with the fallout of these sanctions and the impact they will have on their economies.

Kazakhstan, which “exports two-thirds of its oil supplies through Russian ports,” hastily raised its baseline interest rate from 10.25 percent to 13.5 percent and intervened in the currency markets to protect the tenge, its currency, which “sank alongside the Russian… [ruble] after Moscow launched attacks on Ukraine,” according to Reuters. Kazakh officials held talks with the U.S. embassy in Nur-Sultan thereafter to minimize the impact that the Western sanctions imposed on Russia could have on Kazakhstan’s economy.

Meanwhile, no major Russian city can function without seasonal migrants, particularly in the construction trade; roughly 5.2 million migrant workers entered Russia between January and September 2021 from the Central Asian countries of the Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, according to data provided by the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs. Many of these migrants send money they earn as remittances back to their home countries. This accounts for a significant percentage of the gross domestic product (GDP) of the Central Asian states like the Kyrgyz Republic, where these remittances accounted for 31 percent of the GDP in 2020, and Tajikistan, where these remittances made up 27 percent of the country’s GDP during the same year. As the ruble continues to fall against the dollar, as Russia places capital controls on the currency transfers, and as economic tightening sets in within Russia, migration and remittances will slowly dry up in Central Asia. Kazakhstan’s tenge and Uzbekistan’s som are already struggling to hold their value. The continued Western sanctions against Russia are going to have a serious long-term impact for the Central Asian republics.

On top of the crises of oil and remittances being faced by the countries in Central Asia, Russia also recently announced that it will no longer be able to supply Kazakhstan and the Kyrgyz Republic with grain and sugar. These republics rely on grain and sugar imports in normal times, but with the drought in the central belt in 2021, these imports have become fundamental for the survival of the people in these republics. For now, the governments of the region say that they have enough stocks of grain and sugar, but the “temporary ban” of these items by Russia will become a problem if the situation runs into the summer.

It is important to point out here that Russian speakers comprise significant sections of the population of each of the republics of the former USSR and also form a large part of the population in many of the Eastern European countries. As nationalist attitudes thrive in Russia—something that Vladimir Lenin warned against in 1914—worries percolate about witnessing similar destabilization among those countries that share a border with Russia, especially where Russian speakers are in some cases a majority (in Belarus, where 70 percent of the population speaks Russian) and in others are a substantial minority (in Kazakhstan, where 20 percent of the population speaks Russian). It did not help that Vyacheslav Nikonov, from Russian President Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party, said on “The Great Game” program on Russian television in December 2020 that “Kazakhstan simply did not exist”; this statement irked the government in Nur-Sultan, which demanded a retraction.

For now, relations between Russia and many of these states have been largely fraternal, with Russia providing security, when necessary, mostly through the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO)—a military alliance comprising Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Armenia and Tajikistan—that was formed as a result of a treaty signed in 1992 by these post-Soviet states. It was through the CSTO that Russian forces intervened in Kazakhstan in January 2022 and helped the government put an end to a protest movement against them, and the CSTO forces agreed to “reinforce” the shared borders of Afghanistan with the Central Asian states that are members of the organization, after the U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan in August 2021. Belarus could also support and join Russia in the Ukraine war as a consequence of its membership in the CSTO; no other CSTO member state has joined this war so far.

The Chinese Connection

Across Central Asia, the governments are scrambling to take hold of the instability resulting from the Russian war in Ukraine. Kyrgyzstan, for instance, hastily set up an Anti-Crisis Committee. On February 25, Russian President Vladimir Putin called Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev to discuss the war and the crisis produced by the Western sanctions; that same day, Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin visited Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev to talk about the decrease in trade between the two countries and what this will likely mean. Russia is concerned about the impact of the Ukraine war on the countries of Central Asia, largely because Russia has no solutions to the problems that they will face.

China, on the other hand, is well-positioned to play a key role in Central Asia in the years to come. China has already built up a number of institutional arrangements that will become important for strengthening this relationship in the region, two important ones being the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). On January 25, the “China Plus Central Asia” meeting took place virtually between China’s President Xi Jinping and the heads of state from Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan; this was to commemorate the growing ties between China and these countries over the past 30 years since the USSR collapsed. In this period, China-Central Asia trade grew by 100 percent, with the largest volumes being in China’s purchase of energy from the post-Soviet republics. But this virtual conversation, which took place before the Russian intervention in Ukraine, extended beyond trade along China’s Health Silk Road (set up in 2016) and the creation of a regional trade hub in Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. During the height of the pandemic, Chinese investment in Central Asia slowed down; now there is an expectation in the region that not only will it return to its pre-pandemic levels but that it will also make up for any losses north of the borders.

Central Asia has other options, notably to increase trade with India, Iran and Turkey. In January 2022, India held the first biennial virtual summit with the five Central Asian republics, and there are expectations for these ties to deepen over time. However, India—unlike China—does not share a land border with any of these states, and its trade turnover ($2 billion) is much less than China’s trade volume with Central Asia ($9.2 trillion between 2013 and 2020). The trade relations of Iran and Turkey with Central Asia are significant, but also minimal, and what trade relations are important to these countries have already been integrated into China’s BRI project.

The economies of the Central Asian republics are fundamentally integrated into that of Russia. China can provide some investment support, but it cannot so easily supplant the 100-year-old Russian institutions that have played an important economic role in Central Asia. The Central Asian republics will struggle as the sanctions tighten on Russia, but they will get some relief from the BRI and their regional partners (including Iran and Turkey).

No wonder that Kyrgyz Foreign Minister Kazakbaev eagerly called for mediation in Ukraine. His country wants this conflict to end and for the harsh sanctions to be withdrawn. Otherwise, economic distress will increase in a region that continues to be plagued with instability as a result of the 20-year U.S. occupation of Afghanistan, and the economic hardship might lead to political unrest that could set the entire Central Asian rim on fire.

War and a “Hurricane of Hunger” – Transforming Food Systems

Colin Todhunter

hunger

On Monday, 14 March, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned of a “hurricane of hunger and a meltdown of the global food system” in the wake of the crisis in Ukraine.

Guterres said:

“Food, fuel and fertilizer prices are skyrocketing. Supply chains are being disrupted. And the costs and delays of transportation of imported goods – when available – are at record levels.”

He added that this is hitting the poorest the hardest and planting the seeds for political instability and unrest around the globe.

Poorer countries had already been struggling to recover from the lockdowns and the closing down of much of the global economy. There is now rising inflation and interest rates and increased debt burdens.

Ukraine is the world’s largest exporter of sunflower oil, the fourth largest exporter of corn and the fifth largest exporter of wheat. Together, Russia and Ukraine produce more than half of the world’s supply of sunflower oil and 30% of the world’s wheat. Some 45 African and least-developed countries import at least a third of their wheat from Ukraine or Russia with 18 of them importing at least 50%.

Prior to the current crisis, prices for fuel and fertilizer had been rising. It was clear before COVID and the war in Ukraine that long global supply chains and dependency on (imported) inputs and fossil fuels made the prevailing food system vulnerable to regional and global shocks.

The coronavirus lockdowns disrupted transport and production activities, exposing the weaknesses of the system. Now, due to a combination of supply disruption, sanctions and Russia restricting exports of inorganic fertilisers, the global food regime is again facing potential turmoil, resulting in food price increases and possible shortages.

Aside from it being a major producer and exporter of natural gas (required for manufacturing certain fertilizers), Russia is the world’s third-largest oil producer and the world’s largest exporter of crude.

The fragility of an oil-dependent globalised food system is acutely apparent at this particular time, when Russian fossil-fuel energy supplies are threatened.

Writing in 2005, Norman J Church stated:

“Vast amounts of oil and gas are used as raw materials and energy in the manufacture of fertilisers and pesticides and as cheap and readily available energy at all stages of food production: from planting, irrigation, feeding and harvesting, through to processing, distribution and packaging. In addition, fossil fuels are essential in the construction and the repair of equipment and infrastructure needed to facilitate this industry, including farm machinery, processing facilities, storage, ships, trucks and roads.”

The Russia-Ukraine conflict has also affected global fertilizer supply chains, with both countries moving to suspend their fertilizer exports. The major markets for Russian fertilizers include Brazil and the EU and US. In 2021, Russia was the largest exporter of urea, NPKs, ammonia, urea/ammonium nitrate solution and ammonium nitrate and the third-largest potash exporter. Fertilizer prices for farmers have spiked and could lead to an increase in food costs.

It all indicates that regional and local community-owned food systems based on short(er) food supply chains that can cope with future shocks are required. How we cultivate food also needs to change.

A recent article on the Agricultural and Rural Convention website (ACR2020) states:

“What we urgently need now to invest in is a new local and territorial infrastructure for food production and processing which transforms the agro-industrial food system into a resilient decentralized food supply system. The war in Ukraine reveals the extreme vulnerability of food supply, far from the food security of actual food sovereignty.”

The agri-food and global trade system is heavily reliant on synthetic fertilizers and fossil fuels. However, agroecological and regionally resilient approaches would result in less dependency on such commodities.

The 2017 report Towards a Food Revolution: Food Hubs and Cooperatives in the US and Italy offers some pointers for creating sustainable support systems for small food producers and food distribution. These systems would be based on short supply chains and community-supported agriculture. This involves a policy paradigm shift that prioritises the local over the global: small farms, local markets, renewable on-farm resources, diverse agroecological cropping and food sovereignty.

An approach based on local and regional food self-sufficiency rather than dependency on costly faraway imported supplies and off-farm (proprietary) inputs.

The 2020 paper Reshaping the European Agro-food System and Closing its Nitrogen Cycle says an organic-based, agri-food system could be implemented in Europe that would reinforce the continent’s autonomy, feed the predicted population in 2050 and allow the continent to continue to export cereals to countries which need them for human consumption.

The question is how can this be achieved, especially when influential agribusiness and retail conglomerates regard such an approach as a threat to their business models.

The 2021 report A Long Food Movement: Transforming Food Systems by 2045 offers useful insights. Authored by ETC Group and the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES), the document says grassroots organisations, international NGOs, farmers’ and fishers’ groups, cooperatives and unions need to collaborate more closely to transform financial flows, governance structures and food systems from the ground up.

During times of war, sanctions or environmental disaster, systems of production and consumption often undergo radical transformation. If the past two years have told us anything, it is that transforming food systems is required now more than ever.

Harvests of Fear: The Emerging Global Food Crisis

Joseph Grosso

wheat

        As the Russian military’s aggression against Ukraine remains bogged down in the face of Ukrainian resistance and poor logistics, attention has turned to the invasion’s greater effects on the global economy. Given that global supply chains are still sluggish and with the specter of further COVID variants already haunting world trade, the war in Ukraine has only added stress. The price of oil, the largest commodity market in the world, reached $128 a barrel on March 8th before plummeting 30 percent this week on the hope that UAE and Saudi Arabia will increase production. Still with the U.S. cutting off imports of Russian oil (albeit Russian oil made up only 3 percent of U.S. imports, 5 percent of Russian exports) and Europe exploring ways to wean itself off Russian fossil fuels (Russian gas accounts for 40 percent of Europe’s gas consumption), prices do not seem to be in more a larger drop. The World Street Journal recently reported that the largest fracking companies in the U.S. are choosing to return more money to shareholders rather than to increase output. Many analysts see the price of oil hovering at $125 in the coming months.

Perhaps of even greater consequence is wheat. Ukraine has long been known as the ‘breadbasket’ of Europe. Its chernozem soil (known as ‘Black Earth’) is among the richest in the world. Agricultural land covers 70 percent of the country. Russia is also a major exporter, in fact the largest in the world. Together the two countries export about a third of the world’s wheat and half of is sunflower products. The International Food Policy Research Institute estimates their exports represent 12 percent of all food calories traded in the world. Since the start of the Russian assault, ports on the Black Sea have come to a virtual standstill. Ukraine is facing a fuel shortage for its tractors and trucks. While well-stored wheat can last for several months, wheat prices have hit a 14 year high.

This at a time when the global food supply is already precarious. Prices are high across the board. David Beasley, the head of the World Food Program (WFP), recently told the BBC that the number of people facing potential starvation worldwide had already risen from 80 million to 276 million in the four years prior to Russia’s invasion due to what he calls a ‘perfect storm’ of climate change, conflict, and COVID. The WFP was already facing a 30 percent price increase in the wheat it purchases due to lackluster harvests in the U.S. and Canada. The first assessment of food crops published by the U.S. Department of Agriculture since the war began projected that wheat exports from Russia and Ukraine would fall by at least 7 million metric tons this year.

Among the long list of countries that are dependent on Ukrainian wheat include some unstable characters already facing food insecurity. Lebanon gets a majority of its wheat from Ukraine and has introduced rations. Yemen normally imports 22 percent of its wheat consumption from Ukraine. Libya 43 percent. Ukraine also supplies 21 percent of Bangladesh’s wheat, 28 percent for Indonesia and Malaysia. Ukraine’s largest customer is Egypt, the world’s biggest wheat importer, which imported over 3 million metric tons in 2020. Egypt also purchases a similar amount from Russia. Russia’s other large customers include Turkey, where inflation has been spiking for months, and Kazakhstan, recently the site of an uprising against its ruling dictatorship. This dependence probably explains why 35 UN members voted not to condemn the Russian invasion.

Throughout history the price of bread has been a harbinger for unrest. Bread shortages sparked the fuse of the French Revolution. As Scott Reynolds Nelson shows in his new book Oceans of Grain: How American Wheat Remade the World, the boom in American wheat from the Great Plains after the Civil War flooded Europe with cheap imports leading to the decline of the Hapsburgs and Ottomans and the rise of Germany and Italy. The effects lasted up to World War I. Closer to our own time, the last big surge in wheat prices underpinned the Arab Spring. In 2011, Egyptian protestors called for ‘bread, freedom, and social justice’, echoing the san-culottes of Paris in the 1790s. Rioting also occurred in Haiti, South Asia, and South America.

Predictively, instability in the global market is spurring protectionist policies. Earlier this month Hungary’s agricultural minister announced that Hungary is banning grain exports. Argentina, a major grain exporter, is creating a mechanism to guarantee local supply and Turkey, a top flour exporter, is giving its agricultural ministry greater authority over exports. Bulgaria announced a similar initiative. The Russian government itself has declared a ban on grain and sugar exports to other members of the Eurasian Economic Union (Belarus, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan) until August. If the war in Ukraine drags on these measures risk driving prices up further. The World Bank estimates that by next year the average individual in Sub-Saharan Africa will spend about 35 percent of their income on food, up from just over 20 percent in 2017. The percentages for South Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East will just about double.

A sane world would rely on planning and international coordination to deal with the food crisis and not on market forces. As the world has witnessed the past two years with the COVID pandemic, whether it is with vaccines, testing kits, or masks, a reliance on the market leads to inefficiency, hoarding and shortages- particularly for the poorest people. It is obvious that in a globalized world crisis cannot be solved locally. Attempts to do so inevitably bring about poisonous, counterproductive nationalism. The effects of global warming promise to increase the number of refugees, already at an all-time high. As industrial agriculture continues to expand, worse pandemics than COVID cannot be ruled out. Ocean conservation, the continuing emergence of artificial intelligence, these all demand global management.

A majority of poor people on Earth are still not vaccinated against COVID. The same people will be the greatest victims of the approaching food crisis. The world should expect to hear from them one way or another.

Turkish doctors, health workers on nationwide strike for wages, safety

Ulaş Ateşçi

Striking doctors and other health care workers in Istanbul, March 14, 2022. [Credit: @ttborgtr on Twitter]

As tens of thousands of physicians and other health care workers went on a two-day national strike on Monday, public hospitals were almost completely empty except for emergency rooms, intensive care units, maternity wards and COVID-19 polyclinics. Mass demonstrations were held in Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir, Adana, Mersin, Diyarbakir and other cities.

The Turkish Medical Association (TTB), a professional organization of physicians with over 100,000 members, described the two-day strike as its largest work stoppage to date. The Hekimsen union also organized a three-day strike starting Monday. It has recently reached nearly 20,000 members after starting with a few thousand, as anger grows at rapid declines in real wages, poor benefits, and increasing violence in health facilities.

The strike, which started on March 14, “Doctor’s Day” in Turkey, comes after strikes of physicians and health care workers last December, January and February. In previous strikes, health care workers had warned that they would expand their actions if President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government did not meet their demands.

According to the pro-government Türk-İş union confederation, the poverty line for a family of four in Turkey reached 15,140 Turkish lira (currently $1,030) in February. Physicians are demanding a significant increase in their salaries and pensions, which are now well below the poverty line. Besides better benefits and working conditions, physicians are demanding legal measures to deter assaults against them in health facilities, as 40 acts of violence against health care workers take place in Turkey each day.

The TTB replied to an official letter sent by the Health Ministry, which threatened physicians for repeatedly striking. It declared, “Especially those who have caused preventable deaths during the pandemic cannot tell us about the requirements of the right to health. Our strike actions are for a healthier society, and for health policies that prioritize public health.”

Doctors protested that patients had only five minutes for physical examination in hospitals due to the privatization of the health system and the cutting of its resources. Another demand was that COVID-19 be officially recognized as an occupational disease.

Physicians and other health care workers in Turkey, as well as around the world, have fought the pandemic on the front lines and have been deeply impacted by the government’s policy of mass infection and death.

The TTB held a protest in front of the Health Ministry in Ankara on March 11, the second anniversary of the first official announcement of a COVID-19 case in Turkey. While “hundreds of thousands of health care workers who had to work without day offs, in conditions of drudgery, without adequate and appropriate protective equipment” were infected, it noted, “553 health care workers, 504 of whom were active,” died of COVID-19.

The TTB stressed that the government is responsible for this health disaster, which has occurred after it lifted mitigation measures against the pandemic. “Even according to official figures, the death toll is more than 95,000, and the real figures are over 250,000,” it said, before adding, “The pandemic has continued due to [the government’s] insistence that ‘The wheels will turn, production will continue,’ notwithstanding calls to stop non-essential production. It supported business as working people starved and died.”

President Erdoğan’s increasing attacks against physicians have provoked anger among health care workers. Speaking on March 8 on the growing emigration of physicians abroad, he said, “Let them go, if they go. Then we will employ our newly graduated doctors.” According to the Hekimsen union, “approximately 9,000 doctors have resigned from the public service in the last 20 months, nearly 2,000 of them have gone abroad or are about to leave.”

As tens of thousands of physicians and their supporters protested Erdoğan’s statement on social media, the growing social opposition found expression in the wide participation in the strike and popular support for it.

A chemotherapy patient told the daily Evrensel: “Doctors are right. Who will look after us without them? We have to make much of doctors at all times,” before adding that “Every hospital is full. You can’t get a doctor appointment. The government says, ‘The hospitals are better now,’ which is not true. They say you should come one month later to get an appointment. When can I get an appointment? When I died?”

The determination of the health care workers and the public support they have received led Erdoğan to take a step back. Speaking on Monday, he said, “This country owes a debt of gratitude to its doctors and needs them,” declaring that his government will make legal regulations to meet some demands of the health care workers.

Erdoğan’s very partial retreat reflects the worsening position of his government amid an escalating economic, social and political crisis. Criminal policies that have infected millions and killed hundreds of thousands during the pandemic have gone hand-in-hand with an unprecedented transfer of wealth from the working class to the capitalist ruling elites.

In the same period, the collapse of the Turkish lira was followed by a surge in the prices of basic necessities. Official annual inflation reached 54 percent in February, while the real inflation rate was 123 percent, according to the independent Inflation Research Group (ENAGroup). The prices, which have increased worldwide due to the effect of the pandemic, have skyrocketed even more during the war in Ukraine.

Under these conditions, Erdoğan’s popular support has fallen to the lowest rate in 20 years, according to polls. Intensifying this crisis and worrying the entire political establishment, there is also a growing strikes wave in 2022.

From metal to healthcare, textiles to cargo, mines to warehouses and ship-breaking yards, thousands of workers have gone on strike against the rising cost of living and the devastating consequences of pandemic policies. According to data compiled by the Labor Studies Group, at least 106 wildcat strikes occurred in just the first two months of 2022. The average annual number of wildcat strikes in the previous five years was only 97.

Lancet report shows pandemic death toll is triple the official total

Benjamin Mateus

Tracking critical public health statistics like death and their causes is intended, at least in theory, to assist governments in addressing their population’s social needs and assess the response to various measures employed. Public health statistics function as a sort of cartography to locate on a social map the life and wellness of the community and chart a safe course for the inhabitants.

Deliberately shutting down the collection of such statistics, as is now being done in the United States, is like a mariner trying to steer his ship blindfolded. It demonstrates that the essential goal of public health measures is being perverted by censorship, not to ensure the wellbeing of the population, but to maintain something even more vital—under capitalism—the profitability of the ruling class. It is determined by political considerations based on class interests.

As medical historian and public health giant Dr. George Rosen observed, “There can be no real comprehension of the history of public health at any period without a thorough understanding of the political, economic and social history of that period in its relation to the contemporary public health situation.”

These words, written more than six decades ago, remain very relevant today, as the world has entered the third year of the pandemic, and the leaders of capitalist nations have shed all pretense of concern for the well-being or even the physical survival of humanity. They have abandoned any attempts to mitigate against the repeated outbreaks of infections and deaths caused by ever more contagious versions of the coronavirus, which will have significant consequences.

Instead, they have turned their attention to war to deflect the ever-growing internal tensions accelerated by their disastrous response to the pandemic. The third year of the pandemic may well prove to be a decisive period in world history and one of the most dangerous for mankind.

In this context, the recent peer-reviewed study published in the Lancet on global estimates of excess deaths offers a window into the criminal policies that have been employed in country after country for the last two years, with the ruling elite placing profit over life at whatever the cost to their populations. The breadth and scale of the loss of life is immensely revealing, and the reader is encouraged to review the scientific document linked above.

Stacked bar chart of regional distribution of excess deaths for 2020–21 (Credit: Lancet study on excess deaths, Creative Commons)

It is no hyperbole to compare the devastation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic to World War I, with each wave of infections akin to another bloody and pointless battle slaughtering tens of thousands. Except, in this instance, rather than trenches and frontlines, the battlelines were drawn in the neighborhoods of densely populated cities and towns. In both instances, war and pandemic have been foreseeable, preventable, and, in the final analysis, completely unnecessary.

The scale of death during the last two years has been mind boggling, especially as the means to bring the pandemic to an end in mere weeks has always been within grasp. All the resources, technological, scientific, and medical, have been available to end the public health emergency and suppress the virus within weeks of taking that decision. Instead, the mantra continues to be “learn to live with the virus” indefinitely.

In the Lancet report, the authors collected data on all-cause mortality from 74 countries and territories and 266 subnational locations, including 31 locations in low- and middle-income nations that had reported the data either on a weekly or monthly basis since the beginning of 2020. These observed mortalities were then compared to expected mortality based on complex “ensemble” modeling that also accounted for regions where mortality records were incomplete.

From January 1, 2020, to December 31, 2021, before the Omicron variant had begun its global assault, there were 5.94 million COVID-19 deaths reported worldwide. The new study estimates that excess mortality, above and beyond what would have been seen in a normal period, was more than three-fold higher, at 18.2 million.

Global distribution of estimated excess mortality rate due to the COVID-19 pandemic, for the cumulative period 2020–21 (Credit: Lancet study on excess deaths, Creative Commons)

Co-author Dr. Haidong Wang, an associate professor of health metrics sciences at the University of Washington, said, “Our estimates of COVID-19 excess mortality suggest the mortality impact from COVID-19 pandemic has been more devastating than the situation documented by official statistics … [which] provide only a partial picture of the true burden of mortality.”

The report notes, “The cumulative global excess deaths from the pandemic makes COVID-19 potentially one of the leading global causes of death during the period of the pandemic, given the rates and trends in other causes of deaths before the pandemic.”

At the country level, India suffered the largest loss of life, with an estimate of more than four million deaths. The US was second with 1.13 million followed by Russia with 1.07 million deaths. Mexico (798,000), Brazil (792,000), Indonesia (736,000), and Pakistan (664,000) were also countries that incurred a massive loss of life. In addition, six more countries, Bangladesh, Peru, South Africa, Iran, Egypt, and Italy, all had more than a quarter-million in excess deaths.

On a per capita basis, the highest estimated excess mortality rate due to COVID-19 was in Bolivia with 735 deaths for every 100,000 population. Peru saw 500 deaths per 100,000. The two South American countries are adjacent, sharing a border in the Andes Mountains.

Russia’s excess mortality rate reached 375 deaths per 100,000. Mexico saw 325 deaths per 100,000. Brazil and the US were on the same order of magnitude with 187 and 179 deaths per 100,000, respectively.

Global distribution of the ratio between estimated excess mortality rate due to the COVID-19 pandemic and reported COVID-19 mortality rate, for the cumulative period 2020–21 (Credit: Lancet study on excess deaths, Creative Commones)

In sharp contrast, countries that adhered to a Zero-COVID strategy actually experience negative excess deaths, with people living longer than “expected,” even under conditions of a global pandemic by a killer virus.

When excess deaths were compared between regions based on per capita income, high-income regions saw excess deaths rates near the global average of 126 deaths per 100,000. Poorer Eastern Europe averaged 345 deaths per 100,000 while wealthier Western Europe averaged “only”140 deaths.

The authors note, “At the regional level, the highest estimated excess mortality rates were in Andean Latin America, with several locations outside these regions having similarly high rates, particularly Lebanon, Armenia, Tunisia, Libya, several regions in Italy, and several states in Southern USA.”

Figures for individual states in the US offer a comparison to countries around the globe. Some of the poorest states in the US—Alabama (294), Arkansas (256), Kentucky (242), Louisiana (257), Mississippi (330), Oklahoma (249), South Carolina (248), New Mexico (240), and West Virginia (278)—had rates comparable to Mexico and Russia.

Exceptionally noteworthy are the findings on China. Estimated excess deaths are only 17,900 total, for a country of 1.4 billion people, a per capita rate of excess deaths at 0.6 per 100,000 people, a figure 300 times lower than in the US.

The BA.2 variant of Omicron creates a perilous situation for China, but this is not a result of moving away from a policy of Zero-COVID. Rather, it is caused by the malign policy of ruling elites in most other countries, who have allowed the virus to persist, spread and mutate, generating new and more transmissible and dangerous variants.

The third year of the pandemic will only continue the mass killing of the poorest and most vulnerable people. Since the New Year, 600,000 COVID-19 deaths have been reported in the course of the Omicron wave. Multiplying this by three, upwards of two million more excess deaths are likely to have occurred worldwide in the first three months of 2022, underscoring the deadliness of the Omicron strain.

In a recent compelling commentary published in the journal Nature Reviews Microbiology, the authors, who include renowned virologist Dr. Aris Katzourakis, argue that evolutionary pressures will select for higher intrinsic transmissibility and immune escape.

They write:

The notion that viruses will evolve to be less virulent to spare their hosts is one of the most persistent myths surrounding pathogen evolution. Unlike viral immune escape and transmissibility, which are under strong evolutionary pressure, virulence is typically a by-product, fashioned by complex interactions between factors in both the host and the pathogen. Viruses evolve to maximize their transmissibility and sometimes this may correlate with higher virulence, for example, if high viral loads promote transmission but also increase severity. If so, pathogens may evolve towards higher virulence. If severity manifests late in infection, only after the typical transmission window, as in SARS-CoV-2, but also influenza virus, HIV, hepatitis C virus and many others, it plays a limited role in viral fitness and may not be selected against. [Emphasis added] Forecasting virulence evolution is a complex task, and the lower severity of Omicron is hardly a good predictor for future variants.

The SARS-CoV-2 virus continues to undergo “antigenic evolution” as it responds to the pressures placed on it by greater population immunity due to mass vaccination. The direction of these mutations towards immune escape implies, on a population level, a rising rate of reinfection and overall severe illness.

Additionally, these “antigenic evolutions,” like overall population health, are a political phenomenon, driven not simply by automatic biological processes, but by the policies of governments that allow the virus access to the conditions it needs to survive and adapt—namely, the human host.

The working class should heed the scientific knowledge that has accumulated in only a short time on the nature of the pandemic and support a global effort to eliminate the virus worldwide. This includes defense of China’s efforts to suppress new outbreaks coming in to that huge country from outside. It is the war against COVID-19, not the imperialist war against Russia, that is the urgent necessity confronting working people.

Mask mandates end in nearly every US school district as pediatric death toll climbs

Kayla Costa

As the more infectious BA.2 Omicron subvariant ignites a new surge of COVID-19 infections around the world, the entire United States political establishment has committed to the lifting of basic mitigation measures that have been in place for much of the last two years.

This shift in policy has led to the dropping of mask requirements in nearly every school district across the country, even as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has recorded the loss of 616 children to the virus since the start of 2022.

Kindergarten teacher Karen Drolet, left, works with a student at Raices Dual Language Academy, a public school in Central Falls, R.I., Wednesday, Feb. 9, 2022. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

The last three states, except for Hawaii, with mask requirements in schools allowed them to expire on March 12, following a joint statement by their three Democratic governors last week. Hawaii’s mask mandate for schools is now set to expire two weeks later, on March 26.

Some 7.5 million school children in the three states along the Pacific Coast went to school Monday without any masking requirement, although those living in Los Angeles and San Diego counties were still under local mandates due to higher community infection rates. California has also dropped its requirement for unvaccinated people to wear masks in public indoor locations.

Just two months ago, during the mountainous peak of 1 million daily Omicron-fueled infections, nine states maintained statewide indoor mask mandates for the general public, and 16 states required universal masking in schools that applied to about half of the 53 million children in the country. This list included California, New York, Illinois, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Mexico, Oregon, Washington and other Democratic Party-led states.

New York, New Jersey and most New England states abandoned mask mandates by last Monday, March 7. All other Democratic-controlled states have now done so except Hawaii.

Republican-controlled states dropped mask mandates months ago, if they even had them. Many of these states have enacted bans on mask mandates by local school districts, following the examples of Florida and Texas. The Arizona state legislature was considering such legislation this week, after the Tucson school district continued its mandate due to the rate of infection in the city.

In many of these areas, political and health officials have previously followed a set of insufficient but important mitigation measures to slow down transmission rates, while accepting widespread infection in order to keep workers on the job and kids in classrooms.

Now every state and district is in the process of tossing out the most basic public health measures, given the green light by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) updating its risk assessment metrics based on hospital ICU capacity and raising the definition of “low” risk settings to anything below an average of 200 daily cases per 100,000 people. This alteration of standards shifted 70 percent of the US population from a substantial or high risk setting to low risk, leading to the dropping of indoor mask recommendations for these areas.

Local and state officials have proclaimed the beginning of the “endemic” phase where the population must learn to “live with” the virus, sweeping the reality of the pandemic under the rug as the corporate media focused attention on war propaganda against Russia and virtually ended reporting on COVID-19 data.

These claims are not founded on epidemiological science, in which the term endemic generally describes a disease that is localized to a region and has predictable case patterns. Nor do the policies abide by the principles of public health, which hold at their core the protection of the population and especially those most vulnerable.

Rather, the Democratic Party has fully signed on to the blatant “herd immunity” policies that the Republican Party, far-right groups and Donald Trump have been advocating since the beginning of the pandemic.

After most states across the Northeast and West Coast ended statewide indoor mask requirements by the end of last week, Hawaii will be the final state to end its mandate by March 26. The term “mask optional” is being used to encourage an individualist attitude toward COVID-19 safety, as if one can protect themselves on their own without a proven public health program like China’s Zero Covid elimination strategy.

Furthermore, these policies are lifting mask requirements while at the same time scaling back data reporting, contact tracing and requirements to quarantine if exposed to someone with COVID-19. The entire population will be left without the tools and knowledge required to protect themselves and their loved ones, thrown into the fires and told to accept whatever consequences may come.

New York City, the largest city in the country with over 1 million school children, announced a “mask optional” policy for all those aged six years and older starting March 7. The United Federation of Teachers (UFT) supported the decision saying that it was “the right time to safely move to an optional mask system as long as all testing remains in place,” even as BA.2 cases are increasingly supplanting BA.1 cases in the city and a growing number of children are falling ill from the virus. Six children have died from COVID-19 in the city in 2022 alone.

Tom, a high-school teacher in Manhattan, reported that since the mask mandate was lifted for public schools, roughly one-third of staff and administrators are no longer wearing them, with nearly all students continuing them. “There are high absences but hard to know why,” Tom continued, “We have one confirmed case this week, but with less testing it’s hard to know why kids are out. School administrators definitely are no longer keeping us informed about cases.”

Linda, a parent in the Bronx, told the World Socialist Web Site, “All I know is this pandemic is not over at all. If that's the case, three kids wouldn’t have died in the first place. I truly believe that my kids and everybody else’s kids and all the peoples’ lives are worth it, but instead they [the government] wanna lie to us. I strongly feel that schools should be shut down because they’re lying to all of us.” Linda has three children and a grandson, adding “I wanna be here to see them grow up and someday get married.”

She continued by saying that the media coverage of Ukraine is designed “to distract us from what’s really happening right now. If we are the ones keeping this world afloat then why lie, cheat and steal from us, or want to kill our children?”

Mayor Lori Lightfoot unilaterally changed the protocol in Chicago Public Schools, bypassing the contract negotiated by the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) and voted on by its members last year, in order to make masks optional for all students beginning this week.

Similar last-minute and unilateral decisions to go “mask optional” were made in the cities of Seattle and Portland, as well as the US territory Puerto Rico, with the new policies starting March 14. A group of two dozen high school students protested the change outside the district headquarters in Portland on Friday, and tens of thousands of Puerto Rican teachers joined public employees in a mass strike last month against austerity and poor conditions.

Rather than mobilizing educators in an active struggle against the districts’ imposition of requirements that violate previous contracts, the unions have pursued only legal arguments. The CTU filed an unfair labor practice lawsuit on Monday, a move which will likely be rejected by the courts and is ultimately designed to suppress strike action and protests by teachers. In Seattle and Portland, the teacher unions have argued that nothing can be done since previous agreements state the school safety measures will follow state and county health department guidance for K-12 schools.

Washington DC’s public school district will begin “mask optional” guidelines starting on Wednesday, with many of the district’s charter schools soon to follow suit. The city’s health department also recommends the end to most contact tracing, and they will use an “honor system” to encourage only those who are not vaccinated to stay home if they are exposed to a positive case. Only 25 percent of the 5- to 11-year-old children in the district are fully vaccinated, according to a recent Washington Post article.

The Washington Teachers’ Union has publicly supported lifting the mask mandate, with its President Jacqueline Pogue Lyons stating that it’s a good thing so long as the district will reinstate the requirement if case numbers rise, not providing any sort of metric to determine what constitutes concerning levels of transmission. The DC COVID-19 dashboard has not been updated since February 27, at which the 7-day average case rate was 55.5 per 100,000 residents, which constituted a substantial transmission level under previous CDC metrics.

In one of the wealthiest cities in the country, health officials in Boston, Massachusetts will keep school mask mandates in place until the daily case count falls to 10 per 100,000. The current data shows a 7-day per capita average of 13.

The efforts to get workers back on the job, raise productivity to ensure higher profit margins and increase economic activity requires the lifting of any safety protocols which may have reduced attendance or slowed down production. It is also dependent on generating within the population dangerous delusions that the pandemic will be here for years to come, so when cases drop from prior waves of infection, it is safe to lift restrictions until the next variant-fueled surge arrives. Such a policy means accepting mass infection and death of the human population for years on end, including both children and adult survivors suffering from Long COVID.

Perhaps more importantly, the American ruling class desperately seeks to suppress mass working-class opposition to its handling of the pandemic and increasingly dire social conditions through the methods of make-believe fantasies about COVID-19 and the relentless media hysteria around the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The disorienting impact of the policies will be short lived, as the impact of the looming BA.2 wave, runaway inflation and the reckless US-NATO path to world war fuels the class struggle.