German coalition government adopts far-right AfD's coronavirus policy

Tamino Dreisam

On the issues of militarism and rearmament for war, the coalition government of the Social Democrats (SPD), Greens and Liberal Democrats (FDP) has adopted the programme of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD). With its €100 billion special defence budget fund, the coalition even surpassed the AfD's demand for armaments’ expenditure of two percent of gross domestic product. Now, with the rejection of a vaccine mandate in a parliamentary vote, it is apparent that the government's pandemic policy also aligns with the AfD's demands.

Significantly, AfD parliamentary deputy Stephan Brandner praised the official coronavirus policy even before the vote, saying, “This time for coronavirus measures is over, if it ever was there. That you have recognised this—and respect for that—you have documented in the last amendment to the Infection Protection Act. People should be released back into freedom...”

In the Bundestag (federal parliament) debate before the vote on Thursday, AfD deputy Martin Sichert appealed, “I call on all of you: join us! Show that democracy is worth something to you and vote against vaccine mandates!”

SPD candidate for chancellor Olaf Scholz, second from right, Green Party leaders Annalena Baerbock, second from left, and Robert Habeck, left, and FDP leader Christian Lindner, right, at a joint news conference in Berlin (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)

His call was heard. In the end, a clear majority in the Bundestag voted against the motion from the ranks of the SPD and the Greens for vaccine mandates for those over 60. Some 378 deputies heeded the AfD's call and voted no. The Christian Democratic Union’s (CDU) “Vaccination Prevention Act,” to establish a vaccination register and possible compulsory vaccination in autumn, was also clearly rejected with 496 no votes.

In the debate, numerous government and opposition representatives repeated the narrative of the AfD and other far-right coronavirus deniers that a vaccine mandate would be an unacceptable state encroachment into fundamental rights and personal freedom.

Christian Democratic Union politician Tino Sorge said, “It has irritated me for weeks that we always so succinctly pass over the question of encroachment, saying: Well, it is an encroachment on fundamental rights. We are talking about weighing up fundamental rights. We are talking about encroachments on bodily integrity.”

Max Lucks of the Green Party justified his rejection of vaccine mandates by saying, “I'm worried that the exclusion of confinement for contempt of court won't stand up to constitutional challenges and individual health reasons may fall through the normative categories.”

Well-known Left Party politician Sahra Wagenknecht called on the government to “stop patronising people! Coronavirus vaccination must remain a personal decision!”

To applause from the AfD, FDP deputy federal leader Wolfgang Kubicki claimed that the pandemic was now harmless, stating, “If we can agree on these points, there must be no vaccination mandates on constitutional grounds. After all, it is not the task of the state to force adults to protect themselves against their will.”

In an earlier statement on the campaign against vaccination, the World Socialist Web Site noted, “It is always the most right-wing forces that oppose the protection of social rights by raising the banner of ‘individual rights,’ the most notorious of which is the ‘right of profit.’” This is exactly the point. The deliberate mass infection of the population in the interests of capital.

The WSWS has always stressed that vaccination alone cannot stop the virus, but only in conjunction with all other scientifically necessary measures. But it is an important tool to save lives. By rejecting vaccine mandates, the coalition government once again underlines that it is prepared to accept mass deaths. Since the SPD, Greens and FDP have formed a majority in the Bundestag, 33,800 people have already died of coronavirus—a result of the systematic dismantling of protective measures:

• On 25 November, even before the coalition government was in office, the coalition leaders ended the designation of a “national epidemic emergency' and thus took away the legal basis for lockdowns, school and business closures, as well as other life-saving measures. At the same time, the president of the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), Lothar Wieler, warned of 400 deaths per day and hospitals were already reaching occupancy rates of up to 95 percent.

• After presenting the government programme at the end of November, Chancellor Scholz (SPD) again explicitly spoke out against lockdowns and school closures. The only measure he proposed was a general vaccination obligation until the end of February. At that time, the death toll in Germany had just passed the 100,000 mark and hospitals were preparing to ration health treatments using a triage system.
• In its first months in office, the criminal inaction of the coalition government led to Omicron becoming the dominant variant, driving infection figures to record levels. Despite this, on January 7, the government reduced the quarantine period from 14 to 10, then seven, and then five days. Contact tracing and public testing were also greatly reduced.
• In early February, with 250,000 people being infected daily, the upper limit for spectators at major events was raised to 10,000 nationwide. Individual states began to lift the 2G rule limiting attendance at public venues/events to those who have recovered from COVID or are fully vaccinated.
• On February 16, at the height of the omicron wave at the time, the federal-state conference decided to lift the 2G rule as well as the compulsory wearing of an FFP2 mask to catering establishments and clubs from March 4, and to increase the maximum capacity at large events to 25,000. At the end of March, all “extensive protective measures” were to end.
• On March 18, the new Infection Protection Act was passed, reducing coronavirus measures to “basic protection”—mandatory mask wearing on local and long-distance transport, as well as in nursing homes and hospitals.
• On April 4, Lauterbach announced that the quarantine obligation would be lifted completely. He later had to withdraw this proposal due to massive public outrage. This does not change anything about the “profits before lives” policy of the ruling class, which means between 200 and 300 COVID deaths every day.

The Left Party also supports the murderous herd immunity policies. Both the motion on vaccine mandates for those over 60 years old and the motion to create a vaccination register were rejected by a majority of their deputies. Numerous leading Left Party politicians, including Gregor Gysi and Sahra Wagenknecht, even supported Kubicki's motion, which explicitly opposed vaccine mandates, calling this an encroachment on fundamental rights in the style of the AfD.

Open Society Foundations OSF – Africa Grants 2022

Application Deadline:

13th May 2022

Tell Me About Open Society Foundations OSF – Africa Grants:

OSF works globally to build vibrant and tolerant democracies whose governments are accountable and open to the participation of all people. OSF’s work is committed to Expression, Justice and Equity, with cross-cutting work around climate and intersectional justice. OSF-Africa seeks to advance similar priorities on the continent, rooted in and framed from an African perspective to meet present-day, interconnected challenges to open society.

Vision: An integrated, vibrant, self-respecting and globally-respected Africa, characterized by democratic governance, sustainable development and economic systems that deliver more just, inclusive and accountable outcomes with and for the people and the environment in Africa.

Mission: To advance gender justice and women’s rights, deepen democracy, accountable governance and inclusive development in Africa through participatory and strategic grantmaking and advocacy.

OSF-Africa supports innovative interventions with effective strategies that respond to the broader deep-seated political, justice and socio-economic roadblocks to open society in Africa. In addition to the tools of grant making, research and advocacy, we seek to seize new opportunities and deploy novel tools such as arts and culture, technology, strategic litigation and impact investment to address open society challenges.

OSF-Africa’s priority countries are Angola, Cameroon, Chad, Cote d’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Eswatini, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guinea, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe. OSF-Africa is now seeking proposals from these countries under the following strategic pillars (NB: Pan-African and sub-regional proposals are also welcome)

What Type of Scholarship is this?

Grants

Who can apply for Open Society Foundations OSF – Africa Grants?

OSF-Africa primarily awards grants to African organizations. OSF-Africa may provide funding to Africa-based international organizations committed to African leadership, voice and agency on exception. OSF-Africa can grant to public institutions as well as sub-regional and continental organizations. We may support work undertaken by unregistered movements and/or individuals. Interested organizations must submit, in PDF format, a completed application proposal and budget (in English, French or Portuguese) and other documents stipulated in the application form. Applications not submitted with all relevant documentation may be delayed.

How to Apply for Open Society Foundations OSF – Africa Grants:

Proposals should be sent via e-mail to OSF-Africa-Proposals@osisa.org. Proposals will be accepted until May 13, 2022. OSF-Africa encourages early submission of proposals. Proposals received after the due date will not be considered.

OSF-Africa receives thousands of proposals a year and the time required to review a proposal varies according to the complexity of the proposal. It may take three to six months from the time a proposal is received to the date a final decision is made. You will be advised accordingly.

The application documents are available below:

OSF Africa Proposal Submission

OSF Africa Project Budget Template

It is important to go through all application requirements before applying.

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Global protest movement grows on every continent amid worsening commodity shortages

Eric London

The US/NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine has triggered a wave of social protests against the rising cost of living, tapping into deep working class anger over social inequality and the devastating impact of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Day by day, this wave of protest grows, as the working class responds to the social impact of the war and US and EU sanctions, which have crippled supply chains and closed the Black Sea to exports of Russian, Ukrainian and Belorussian cooking oil, grain and fertilizer.

A worker restocks shelves at Heinen's Fine Foods store, Thursday, Jan. 13, 2022, in Pepper Pike, Ohio. (AP Photo/Tony Dejak)

On Friday, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) announced that the March global Food Price Index increased 12.6 percent from February, which was already the highest since 1990. FAO Deputy Director Josef Schmidhuber told reporters that food shortages threaten to spark protests on a global scale. “This is really remarkable,” Schmidhuber said. “There is a massive supply disruption.”

Imperialist concerns over growing wave of social protests

Concerns are growing in the imperialist capitals that the war drive is triggering social discontent that threatens to derail the plans to subjugate Russia, even at the risk of triggering World War III.

An April 6 article in Politico, titled “US struggles to contain a deepening global food crisis,” cited a senior US Senate staffer as saying, “We see the storm coming and we feel unprepared to deal with it.” The Politico report noted that “US diplomatic posts are in close contact with countries where people are at risk of increased food insecurity,” out of concern over the growing protest movement.

However, Washington’s efforts to stem the movement have been rendered ineffective. This is because many Republicans oppose any aid funding and because none of the major US allies has been willing to contribute from its own food reserves, out of concern that rising prices are triggering strikes and protests in the imperialist metropoles.

An April 5 letter sent to Joe Biden by a bipartisan group of senators warned of the political implications of “a grave global food security crisis that threatens to push millions of people into hunger and destabilize regions of strategic importance to the United States.”

On April 6, the US House Subcommittee on Agriculture held a hearing on the emerging food crisis. Sarah Charles, a leading official with CIA-linked United States Agency for International Development (USAID), testified.

She said: “The impacts of the current crisis on poverty, hunger, and malnutrition could be even more significant than those seen in the global food crisis of 2007-08 and the subsequent civil unrest, as the last crisis followed a period of strong global economic growth, whereas the years since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic have been characterized by an increasingly worse global economic downturn.”

Appearing at the same hearing, UN World Food Program Chief Economist Arif Husain stated: “Steep rises in international prices for basic staples—notably wheat and maize—in recent weeks have resulted in a food price environment that resembles the 2008 or 2011 crises.”

Husain warned that if the war lasts another two months, “Ukraine’s grain and wheat harvests as well as Russia’s fertilizer export ban will further constrain food production and throw hundreds of millions into starvation.”

Nor are the concerns limited to Washington. French President Emmanuel Macron and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau have issued similar warnings about the growing global food shortage, while a report from the German government-linked Friedrich Ebert Institute put the matter more bluntly, calling the emerging protests “a new phase of massive destabilization that would ultimately affect governments as well as the socially weaker population.” It continued, “As was said in the days of the French Revolution, if the population has no bread, those in power are threatened with disaster.”

As the war drags on, protests and strikes continue to grow on every inhabited continent.

Latin America

Protests continued across Peru as broader sections of workers, poor farmers and urban youth joined the ongoing strike by truckers over the rising cost of living. Protests continued despite President Pedro Castillo’s imposition of a curfew, a move he then revoked, only to announce a national state of emergency later in the week. Social anger reached a crescendo Thursday when Castillo’s Prime Minister Aníbal Torres praised Adolf Hitler at a speech in Huancayo, the center of protests.

“On one occasion,” he said, “Hitler visited the north of Italy, and Mussolini showed him a highway built from Milan to Brescia. Hitler saw this and went to his country and filled it with highways and airports and turned Germany into the first economic power in the world. We have to make an effort, make sacrifices to improve our roads.”

This week, protesters also began gathering outside of Argentina’s Department of Social Development in Buenos Aires, demanding the Peronist government address the rising cost of living. Peronist Federal Deputy Natalia Zaracho told El País Thursday that non-profits and associated pseudo-left organizations were working to prevent a social explosion. “If everything doesn’t explode, it’s because the social organizations are present in the working class neighborhoods,” she said.

In an interview with the BBC, the director of the corporate Eurasia Group think tank warned:

With this inflation, there is a high risk that the protests in Peru will repeat themselves in other Latin American countries. And the governments don’t have the money to provide subsidies. The risk is that these protests surge across the entire region and also outside of Latin America, where the increase in prices of food and gas is also generating protests, like in the Middle East and Asia.

Citing the mass protests of 2018 and 2019, he said, “The pandemic put a pause to the problem, but at the same time it was just a pause, and now the situation is far more explosive.”

Adding to regional concerns, the Bank of Mexico yesterday announced that the country hit its highest inflation rate in 21 years. It warned of the “high social cost of rising food prices” in the country.

A strike wave has also begun to develop in Brazil and is now spreading into heavy industries, including steel production.

Middle East and North Africa

Food and gas shortages have had the most immediate effect on the population of the Middle East and North Africa. Middle East Eye reported yesterday, “In Tunisia, supermarket shelves have been empty for several weeks. Flour, rice, semolina, sugar and eggs are almost impossible to find.”

The Carnegie Center for the Middle East warned recently that “this situation has the potential to become explosive.”

In Lebanon, where the explosion of a Beirut grain storage depot means the country can store only one month of food reserves, the price of the basic food basket has risen 351 percent in the last year. Yesterday, the country announced it was bankrupt and had agreed to a ruthless IMF austerity regimen that would include mass privatizations and cuts to social programs.

In Egypt, the country’s food reserves are beginning to run low, and the country has turned to short-term influxes of cash from the EU and Gulf sheikdoms to stave off the imminent prospect of mass strikes and protests.

Asia

The most politically advanced breakdown has taken place in Sri Lanka, where shortages are acute and demonstrations against the government of President Gotabhaya Rajapakse are consistent and growing.

The resignation of the president’s cabinet failed to stem the protests, as the ruling class struggled to negotiate for an IMF bailout, even though the country lacks a finance minister. Strikes have spread among nurses and doctors, teachers, electricity workers and students.

The Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka) issued a statement Thursday titled “Bring down Sri Lanka’s Rajapakse government! Abolish the executive presidency! No to austerity and starvation! Form action committees to fight for a socialist program of action to secure food, fuel and medicine for all!”

There are also growing warnings of social discontent in Indonesia, the world’s fourth largest country, with a population of 274 million. According to NHK Japan, a massive increase in the cost of cooking oil coinciding with Ramadan has raised the specter of protests in the largely Islamic country.

“A spike in the price of cooking oil has hit Indonesia, where the Islamic fasting month started on Sunday. Behind the price hike is an increasing global demand for palm oil produced in Asia amid concerns of a shortage in the supply of sunflower oil, which is made mainly in Ukraine and Russia,” NHK Japan noted.

Sub-Maghreb Africa

The region with the fastest growing industrial working class is also hardest hit by food and gas shortages. Mass demonstrations have continued across Sudan over inflation and shortages, while protests have begun to develop among Kenyan motorcycle taxi drivers over the cost of gas and food. One worker told Africanews, “If I don’t get fuel, I won’t return home because my children won’t have anything for food.” Another worker said, “Some are repaying loans, some are feeding families with this job. We have been here for three days [waiting for gas], and we cannot bring anything home.”

In Madagascar, the government has frozen the price of sugar, flour, rice, gas and cement for fear of social protests. Zimbabwe’s central bank raised its interest rate from 60 percent to 80 percent in a desperate attempt to stop inflation. A corporate think tank warned that South Africa is on the verge of a social explosion for which the state is not prepared.

“South Africa is likely to have entered a phase of ongoing, violent instability,” read the report from the Institute for Security Studies. The report noted that the ANC “has fewer resources for patronage politics” and warned that “the number of protests staged annually in the country has doubled to more than 1,000 since [President Cyril] Ramaphosa took office in early 2018.”

North America and Europe

Strikes and protests continue to develop across North America and Europe, engendered by the spiraling rate of inflation. Substantial demonstrations against the rising cost of living took place across the United Kingdom last week, where the number of strikes grew to the highest level in five years.

The Guardian noted that “workers are increasingly prepared to challenge inadequate pay offers and take strike action to ensure wages keep up with the sharply rising cost of living, amid signs that workplace militancy is growing in parts of the economy.”

In Germany, the cost of basic food staples has increased dramatically over last year, including eggs (16 percent), butter (20 percent), vegetables (15-30 percent) and cheese (5 percent). In the US, the rising cost of living has produced a new wave of strikes and strike votes among teachers, oil workers, shipyard workers, nurses, public employees and hotel workers, largely on the country’s West Coast, where the cost of living is highest.

Pakistan’s Supreme Court orders no-confidence vote, paving way for change in government

Sampath Perera

Pakistan’s Supreme Court has ordered parliament to meet Saturday and remain in session until a vote on an opposition motion of “no-confidence” in Prime Minister Imran Khan and his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI)-led government is concluded.

Pakistan's Prime Minister Imran Khan, center, arrives to attend a military parade to mark Pakistan National Day, in Islamabad, Pakistan, Wednesday, March 23, 2022. (AP Photo/Anjum Naveed)

According to all reports, the motion is all but certain to pass. Such an outcome would legally compel Khan and his cabinet to resign, paving the way for the opposition parties to form an alternate government, which would aim to hold office until the next regularly scheduled general election in 2023.

With the military, the power behind the throne in Pakistani capitalist politics, signaling that it no longer supports Khan, the government has suffered significant defections in recent days. Both PTI coalition partners and PTI legislators have crossed over to the opposition.

The National Assembly had been due to act on the opposition no-confidence motion last Sunday, April 3. However, capping weeks of desperate manoeuvres to prevent a vote or exclude those who had defected from the government from participating, Khan prevailed on Deputy Speaker Qasim Khan Suri, a staunch Khan loyalist, to void the motion and shut down parliament. Khan then instructed the largely ceremonial president, Arif Alvi, to dissolve parliament and call a snap election. But the PTI leader retained his full powers as Prime Minister pending the setting of an election date and the formation of an interim election-campaign government.

Suri justified his suppression of the opposition motion—on the face of it a flagrant violation of basic constitutional norms—by claiming Khan and his government were the victim of a “foreign conspiracy.” This only echoed the assertions of Khan, including in a televised address to the nation, that a foreign power—understood to be the United States—is determined to remove him from office.

Over the course of four days last week, a five-judge bench of the Supreme Court heard the petitions from the opposition parties challenging the legality of Deputy Speaker Suri’s actions.

In a short ruling issued Friday evening, the court unanimously declared Suri’s voiding of the no confidence motion “contrary to the Constitution and the law and of no legal effect.” It further declared parliament “to have been in existence at all times, and continues to remain and be so,” thereby annulling the presidential dissolution order. Making clear that no further delay in acting on the opposition’s no-confidence motion should be brooked, the court stipulated parliament must meet no later than 10.30am on Saturday and remain in session until the vote on the motion is taken.

The Supreme Court ruling has received enthusiastic backing from the establishment press, further indicating Khan’s loss of support within the capitalist elite. In an editorial highly critical of Khan, Dawn, the country’s most-widely read English daily, welcomed the court ruling, which it said had “defeated a most egregious assault on the country’s democratic order.”

The political-constitutional donnybrook in Islamabad is unfolding amid a massive economic crisis that compelled the Khan government to again seek International Monetary Fund (IMF) support at the beginning of the year and has fueled seething popular anger over soaring inflation, mass joblessness and endemic poverty.

As of April 1, the country’s foreign reserves had declined to $11.3 billion, which is not even sufficient to pay the country’s import bill for the next two months. Yet the IMF has announced that it will halt its bailout program until a new government is formed and presumably recommits to the massive austerity program the PTI coalition government agreed to implement.

The COVID-19 pandemic and now the NATO-Russia war over Ukraine have dealt body-blows to an already crippled economy.

Pakistan’s central bank has said inflation in March was higher than expected, acknowledging a major spike in the cost of food, diesel and other essentials. Persistent double-digit inflation has already substantially increased food insecurity across the country, including among salaried workers. As part of the IMF bailout package, subsidies have been slashed and sales taxes, whose burden fall far heaviest on working people and the poor, hiked.

The economic crisis, coupled with the government’s privatization and austerity policies and its ruinous mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic, have drastically eroded the popular support for Khan and his PTI.

Prior to coming to power, Khan had demagogically denounced his opponents’ repeated implementation of IMF austerity and “structural readjustment” programs. But once in office, he quickly reneged on his claim he would never turn to the IMF and has worked with it to impose the full burden of the country’s economic crisis on the backs of the masses.

Khan’s indifference to the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic worsened the already unbearable living conditions for the vast majority of the population. His government has only officially acknowledged 30,361 pandemic deaths. A study published in the medical journal The Lancet in March estimated the true death toll to be more than 664,000.

The opposition parties are exploiting the mounting popular anger against Khan. Moreover, the Islamabad elite is aware of the increasing danger that the simmering popular anger erupting against the government could rapidly develop into an open rebellion against the utterly corrupt political establishment as a whole. Sections of the ruling elite are no doubt following the emergence of mass protests in Sri Lanka with increasing alarm.

Ultimately, however, it is the military, the real powerbroker in Islamabad, which has directly ruled the country for over half of its existence and controls its foreign and security policy, that is playing the decisive role in the almost certain ouster of Khan. Two main issues are at stake in the power struggle unfolding in Islamabad.

The opposition campaign, which is led by the PML-N and PPP, the two parties that dominated parliamentary politics from the late 1980s to Khan’s election in 2018, is animated by more than just lust for pelf and power. Large sections of the ruling class have concluded that Khan is incapable of implementing highly unpopular policies dictated by the IMF. After Khan attempted to slash prices of fuel and electricity to placate growing mass anger, the IMF criticized the government’s “one step forward, two steps back” approach in March. Khan had just received a $1 billion loan tranche in February. Khan’s critics fear that the country’s economy will be in freefall if it fails to secure IMF support.

Secondly, serious differences over foreign policy are being bitterly fought out in Islamabad. Khan’s professed policy of “neutrality” in the US-NATO war with Russia over Ukraine has been sharply condemned by the US and other Western powers and opposed by the Pakistani military.

Addressing a security conference in Islamabad on April 2, the day before parliament was originally to debate the no-confidence motion, the Army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa contradicted Khan. “Sadly, the Russian invasion against Ukraine is very unfortunate,” Bajwa said. “Despite legitimate security concerns of Russia, its aggression against a smaller country cannot be condoned.”

The military top brass hope to patch up Pakistan’s seriously frayed relations with the US, which have deteriorated sharply over recent years as Washington has made India—Pakistan’s regional rival—a frontline state in its diplomatic, military, and economic offensive against China. Pakistan’s military believes it can take advantage of India’s significant economic and military dependence on Russia to present Islamabad as a more dependable ally to the US than Delhi.

Broad sections of Pakistan’s elite, which have found themselves ever more economically reliant on China under conditions in which Washington has made India its principal South Asian ally, are hoping to restore some type of precarious balance in its relations with its two principal traditional partners.

After the vote on the no-confidence motion was scheduled, Khan publicly accused the US of demanding his ouster. He stated that a diplomatic communication in Washington he received through his ambassador warned of “dire consequences across the world” for Pakistan if he is not voted down in the parliament. There is no doubt Washington would welcome his ouster. However, Khan’s rage did not extend to the military establishment that was clearly opposing his foreign policy and tacitly allowing the challenge of the opposition to gain steam.

The military has a long history of close ties to Washington and the Pentagon that were always separate from the relations of the civilian government with the US. The military is widely acknowledged to have orchestrated Khan’s 2018 election victory from behind the scenes, but later distanced itself from the government, especially over the past year.

Sixth wave of pandemic underway in Canada as governments dismantle COVID reporting and last protective measures

Dylan Lubao

All signs point to Canada being in the midst of a developing sixth wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, triggered by the emergence of the BA.2 subvariant of Omicron and fueled by government let-it-rip policies at the federal and provincial level.

In this Thursday, April 29, 2021, photo, Sherry Cross Child, a Canadian resident of Stand Off, Alberta, receives a COVID-19 vaccine at the Piegan-Carway border crossing near Babb, Mont. (AP Photo/Iris Samuels)

Across the country, case numbers, hospitalizations and deaths are surging after hitting an ebb less than three weeks ago. The fifth wave of the pandemic, triggered by the BA.1 subvariant of Omicron, produced the highest number of infections and hospitalizations on record, and the third-highest death toll of any wave of the pandemic. Over 6,500 Canadians succumbed to the disease during the first Omicron wave, which the corporate-controlled media has incessantly declared to be “mild.”

Some parts of the country, such as the Maritimes and the northern territories, are experiencing their worst phase of the pandemic. Prince Edward Island, with a population of just 157,000, recorded over 2,200 cases per million people on April 2. This rate of infection is higher than any other province or state in Canada and the United States. The Northwest Territories, with a population of just 45,000, was a close second at almost 2,000 cases per million.

On April 6, over 13,500 new infections were officially recorded across the country. This figure is certainly a vast undercount due to the decision of provincial governments to withhold public PCR testing from all but the most clinically vulnerable. In the province of Quebec alone, epidemiologists estimate that between March 24 and March 29, 18,000 to 32,000 people were infected on a daily basis by BA.2.

Dr. Tara Moriarty, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Toronto, estimates that on March 31, over 136,000 people across the country contracted the disease. Comparing official government figures to Dr. Moriarty’s estimates, the former is an undercount of infections by at least a factor of 10. She previously co-authored a Royal Society of Canada report released in mid-2021 documenting the vast government undercount of COVID-19 deaths.

Dr. Moriarty estimates that in the country’s most populace province, Ontario, with a population of 14.5 million, around 40,000 people were infected with BA.2 on March 31. In Alberta, Dr. Moriarty estimates 37,000 people were infected on March 31, in a population of 4.3 million. The province’s hard-right United Conservative Party government led by Premier Jason Kenney has spearheaded the dismantling of public health measures and the downplaying of the threat posed by COVID-19.

Even the Ontario Science Table, a government COVID-19 advisory group that regularly downplays the severity of the pandemic, raised the alarm of a “tidal wave” of infections on the order of 100,000 to 120,000 new infections per day, based on wastewater surveillance. Given this figure, half of the province’s population could be infected in just over two months. Wastewater surveillance figures across the country corroborate Dr. Moriarty’s projections as well as those of other principled epidemiologists.

The aggregator website covid19tracker.ca has daily hospitalizations nationwide at 4,957 as of April 8, a more than 16 percent increase over the previous week. This figure is almost as high as the peak of the second wave of the pandemic in the winter of 2020, and is on track to surpass the peak of 10,000 hospitalizations during the previous BA.1 wave. On April 4, Quebec reported a 40 percent increase in COVID-19 hospitalizations over the previous two weeks.

Daily deaths are inching up again after three weeks of holding relatively steady at 40 per day. Since deaths are a lagging indicator of the severity of the pandemic, daily fatalities are set to skyrocket in the coming weeks. Dr. Moriarty’s estimates underscore that the official death toll continues to be a gross undercount, with an estimated 165 COVID-19 deaths on March 31 versus an official count of 39.

This immense discrepancy between reported and estimated COVID-19 deaths is due to the limited testing of the deceased. Only Quebec systematically performs COVID-19 testing on those suspected of succumbing to the disease, while the other provinces sweep the growing number of excess deaths under the rug.

The potential long-term impact of Long Covid, which affects an estimated 10 to 30 percent of all those who contract the disease, is mind-boggling. Preliminary studies of Long Covid show debilitating effects on major body organs, such as the brain, as well as the cardiovascular, gastrointestinal, and even reproductive systems. With an estimated one-third of the total Canadian population infected with COVID-19 since the pandemic began, anywhere from 1.25 million to 3.76 million people will live and die with the chronic effects of the disease for years and decades to come.

With the approval of the federal Trudeau government, all provincial governments responded to the emergence of the far-right Freedom Convoy in early February by embracing its fascistic demands for the elimination of all public health measures. As a result, widespread public testing and contact tracing, indoor capacity limits, isolation protocols after infection, and mask mandates have been scrapped in the majority of provinces.

Schools across the country have always been incubators for the pandemic. Nevertheless, the vast majority of provinces and school boards have discontinued mask mandates. Only Quebec, Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland and Labrador, and the northern territories of Yukon, Nunavut, and the Northwest Territories still require children to wear masks. In addition, parents have been discouraged from informing their child’s school of a positive case in their household. Self-isolation requirements have been scaled back to the point that some children can return to class almost immediately following infection.

Similarly, workplaces across the country allow infected workers to return to work within five days of infection, meaning they are still infectious. Because provincial governments have removed widespread testing, thousands of workers undoubtedly go to work while infected, some without evident symptoms, ensuring that the pandemic will continue in perpetuity.

The next stage of the government plan to implement the corporate-backed “profits before life” program is to methodically dismantle even the collection and publication of data, while lying outright about the continued impact of the virus on individuals and society.

Only Quebec and Ontario continue to provide daily pandemic reports, although the governments at the Parliament Building and in Queen’s Park are undoubtedly working feverishly to overturn this. British Columbia this week ended daily reporting, and the rest of the provinces transitioned to weekly reports soon after the end of the fifth wave.

The corporate press, which throughout the pandemic uncritically reported lies about the virus to justify allowing it to spread throughout the population, is also winding down its coverage. This trend is exemplified by the decision by CBC News to end its popular daily COVID-19 tracker with no legitimate justification.

Political leaders at the provincial and federal level continue to downplay the severity of the current stage of the pandemic. Theresa Tam, the country’s Liberal-appointed Chief Medical Officer, declared that hospitalizations and admissions have been “levelling off,” before proclaiming that “Canada’s health system is … expected to withstand this uptick.”

Similar language has been used by Ontario’s hard-right Premier Doug Ford, who called the resurgence of the pandemic just weeks after the fifth wave a “little spike” that the province would be able to “manage.”

Quebec’s conservative Premier, François Legault, who recently contracted COVID-19, dismissed the disease as “a cold, pretty much,” before insisting that “we will have to learn to live with the virus.” By “we,” the former Air Transat CEO was not referring to the corporations, millionaires, and billionaires he and his government represents, which have been lavished with tax breaks and subsidies throughout the pandemic. Rather, he was referring to the working class, which has suffered unprecedented declines in its life expectancy and socioeconomic position over the past two years.

Shanghai lockdown extended indefinitely as COVID-19 cases continue to climb

Benjamin Mateus

Regarding the global COVID-19 pandemic, all eyes have turned towards China, where the lockdown in Shanghai has been extended indefinitely to battle the highly infectious and immune-resistant Omicron BA.2 subvariant that has caused a record surge of infections in the country.

Health workers in protective suits prepare for coronavirus testing for residents at a compound near residential buildings, Thursday, April 7, 2022, in Beijing. (AP Photo/Andy Wong)

Since mid-March, COVID-19 cases have been continually rising in Shanghai, the financial center of China. On March 28, Shanghai health officials initiated a two-stage lockdown whereby the city east of the Huangpu River would be placed in lockdown for five days, followed by the western half of the city. However, late last Thursday health officials opted to lock down the entire city until cases are brought to zero.

Beijing is mobilizing all its resources to assist Shanghai during an outbreak on the verge of spinning out of control. More than 38,000 medical workers from 15 provincial-level regions have been deployed to assist in infection control, including building makeshift hospitals that can accommodate at least 50,000 patients. On Friday, the city underwent a second round of citywide testing.

Despite concerns about supplies reaching neighborhoods under lockdown and delays in coordinating food deliveries, the situation seems to have improved recently. As Bloomberg confirmed, “Officials have ramped up assistance in recent days, and some residents have begun receiving food packs from the government that include eggs, milk, vegetables, and luncheon meat.”

The efforts being employed in Shanghai have been compared to that in Wuhan city in Hubei province, which emerged out of a 79-day lockdown precisely two years ago on April 8, 2020. As happened then, the initial foray into lockdown has been chaotic and complex. Establishing such a vast, previously nonexistent logistics network means delays, setbacks, and social apprehension. However, the commitment to these efforts has been unwavering.

Yesterday, China’s National Health Commission (NHC) reported 24,224 new COVID-19 cases (including 91 imported cases), of which 22,648 were asymptomatic. However, the bulk of daily COVID-19 cases continues to be counted in Shanghai, and the city reported 21,222 new cases yesterday, of which 824 were symptomatic infections.

Daily COVID cases China March 1 to April 8, 2022. (WSWS Media)

By comparison, there were only 3,001 COVID-19 cases in the rest of mainland China, with 716 symptomatic cases. Most of these cases continue to be identified in the northeast province of Jilin. There were 2,266 COVID-19 cases, with 2,027 in Changchun, a city of nine million known locally as China’s “City of Automobiles” or the “Detroit of China.” Lockdowns in Jilin city have drastically reduced new infections, with only 228 reported Friday.

The apparent rise in COVID-19 cases across Shanghai is a product of mass citywide PCR testing to ascertain the location of every infection. In other words, the testing has uncovered the actual extent of the silent community transmission contributing to the rise in infections.

Many in the population who have supported elimination complained that the somewhat laissez-faire approach in Shanghai until late March contributed to the avoidable onerous outbreak. After criticizing the Chinese government’s policy, even the New York Times had to admit that the support for Zero-COVID remains high in China.

Chen Daoyin, a former assistant professor at the Shanghai University of Political Science and Law, told the Times, “Beijing had clearly doubled down on Zero-COVID and was bringing Shanghai in line with the rest of the country. In a system like China’s, where politics determines everything, it’s impossible for you to walk a different road.”

In contrast, the US is doubling down on “living with the virus.” COVID-19 surveillance systems are being rapidly dismantled, adhering to fascistic former president Trump’s infamous quip, “If we didn’t do any testing, we would have very few cases.” These efforts have had full bipartisan support and approval from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Additionally, the numerous reported infections among high-level Washington politicians, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, mislead Americans to believe that COVID-19 is harmless.

More than one million Americans have needlessly perished from COVID-19, and life expectancy in the US has declined by more than 2.2 years during the pandemic. In stark contrast, fewer than 5,000 have died in China and life expectancy has now surpassed that of the US.

In contradistinction to the unscientific measures employed in the US and much of the rest of the world, the Chinese authorities have shifted from a mitigation strategy in Shanghai to implementing the strictest standards to eliminate COVID-19 and preserve life and livelihood. The sudden shift and resoluteness have been met with savage attacks in the Western press against the Zero-COVID policy, decrying its impact on the global markets.

On March 29, the Editorial Board of the Financial Times, the mouthpiece of finance capital, wrote, “Ultimately, China will need a strategy to exit Zero-COVID-19 and live with the virus … As the world slowly returns to business as usual, the policy will come at a higher and higher cost to China.”

On April 3, The Economist remarked, “The pain will be felt abroad too just as it was amid the lockdowns in Shenzhen, another city deeply entangled in global supply chains … One team of economists estimates that a one-month lockdown of Shanghai and its spillover effects would knock a staggering four percent off China’s GDP in that period.”

On April 6, the Washington Post Editorial Board wrote, “For two years, China’s leadership has bragged to anyone who would listen that its authoritarian system did a better job fighting the pandemic than the undisciplined and chaotic democracies. Pointing to the towering death toll in the United States, Beijing expressed pride that its policy of clamping down mercilessly whenever an infection was discovered, a policy called ‘Zero COVID,’ was working.”

The Post added, “For the most part, it did, and China’s population was spared the sacrifices and misery seen elsewhere. But now, China’s dictatorship is on the ropes in its battle with the virus.” Evidently, in this battle the Post is rooting for the virus to win.

Bloomberg provocatively opened its April 7 report, “Pets beaten to death. Parents forced to separate from their children. Elderly folks unable to access medical care. Locked up residents chanting ‘we want to eat’ and ‘we want freedom.’” No mention was made of efforts being made to alleviate these concerns, which affect a tiny minority of those under lockdown.

On April 8, the Wall Street Journal complained that the lockdowns are strangling manufacturing operations and placing undue strains on “stretched global supply chains.” They wrote, “Stringent government measures to contain the country’s COVID-19 outbreak, the worst in more than two years, are locking down tens of millions of people, mostly in and around the industrial heartland of Shanghai.”

Regarding these fiery statements and rumors being purported about the plight of Shanghai, the WSWS had the opportunity to speak to Dr. Y in Shanghai on condition of anonymity.

Commenting on the concerns raised in the media about children being separated from their parents, she said, “Yes, that was true and made a lot of people very angry and verbal. COVID-positive children were quarantined at a center away from their negative parents. Positive parents, however, could stay with their children. However, after the outrage, the authorities adjusted their policy and allowed parents to stay with their children.”

Regarding the issue of food and supplies, Dr. Y explained that food distribution was being handled locally by communities. “Locking everyone in their homes and closing all the supermarkets to prevent clustering [of people] obviously creates food shortages. People are forming WeChat groups in their community to bulk order things, and they also try to order groceries and have them delivered through different apps. The success is based mainly on luck.”

A box of vegetables delivered to a family in Shanghai. (WSWS Media)

She added, “Keep in mind that the cry for lack of food is very loud. However, there are reports that the authorities are going to start to take over the whole city’s food distribution instead of relying on local communities.”

Dr. Y and other healthcare workers in China have corroborated that the elimination strategy had allowed them to return to normal life routines until recently. They all expressed concern about the threat that Omicron poses and supported the current efforts.

Authorities’ recent imposition on freedom of movement stems directly from the dangers posed by allowing the virus free rein in the population without enough immune protection. The let-it-rip policy that international financial markets insist on would be socially catastrophic and politically destabilizing for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) authorities.

The purpose of the Western media’s attack on China’s Zero-COVID policy is to incite anger and reaction among the Chinese population. Utterly indifferent to concerns for the life and well-being of their own population or that of any other country, the ruling elites are weaponizing the virus as an existential threat and a political weapon against the Chinese.

Sri Lanka at centre of growing debt and inflation crisis

Nick Beams

Sri Lanka, now engulfed by ongoing demonstrations and protests, is at the centre of a debt storm ripping through a swathe of lower-income countries. This is bringing social devastation for hundreds of millions of people as capitalist governments, banks, financial speculators and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) demand their pound of flesh.

Sri Lankans wait at a fuel station after spending hours to unsuccessfully buy kerosene oil in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Thursday, April 7, 2022. (AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena)

This crisis has been building for years but reached a new peak of intensity because of the COVID-19 pandemic and now the explosion of the prices of basic commodities, including foodstuffs, gasoline, fuel and cooking oils, flowing from the US-NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.

Yesterday, the United Nations announced that its food price index for March had reached a record high, increasing by 34 percent from a year ago. The index was 12.6 percentage points higher than in February. The UN described this as a “giant leap.”

The crisis is about to be further exacerbated by the drive by central banks around the world, led by the US Federal Reserve, to sharply lift interest rates over the next months in response to rising inflation.

Sri Lanka’s foreign currency reserves are plunging, with doubts about whether it will be able to pay any of the estimated $8.6 billion in debt repayments due this year. On Thursday, the Sri Lankan central bank reported that the country’s foreign currency reserves had fallen to $1.93 billion in March, down 16 percent from $2.3 billion in February.

The Sri Lankan situation is the sharpest expression of a global process that has developed over the past decade. At the end of January, a report by the British-based Jubilee Debt Campaign estimated that developing country debt payments increased by 120 percent between 2010 and 2021. Average government external debt was estimated at 14.3 percent of government revenue in 2021, compared to 6.8 percent in 2010.

In January, the World Bank estimated that lower-income nations would have to pay $35 billion to official and private sector lenders in 2022, an increase of $10.9 billion over the previous year and a rise of 45 percent since 2020.

Since those estimates were issued, barely two months ago, the financial position of these countries has dramatically worsened because of the further boost to inflation by the war in Ukraine.

The debt crisis has been intensified by the ending last December of the Debt Service Suspension Initiative (DSSI) introduced by the G20 group of nations in April 2020. The DSSI has proved to be, in the words of the Financial Times, a “damp squib.”

It aimed to defer $20 billion in debt, but the relief was only $12.7 billion, and countries have had to resume payments this year and recognise debts suspended under the scheme.

The biggest beneficiaries of the DSSI were the commercial banks, commodity traders and bond holders, which received $14.9 billion while suspending only $24 million, or just 0.2 percent, of the amount due. Tim Jones, the head of policy at Jubilee, said the DSSI had “effectively become a bailout scheme for private lenders.”

An analysis by the Bretton Woods Project published earlier this month observed that “countries in debt distress like Zambia are being forced to make payments to private creditors like BlackRock [the world’s biggest asset management company], at the expense of their own population’s wellbeing.”

As part of the US push against China, there has been a growing campaign to blame its loans for the mounting debt crisis.

But Jubilee reported that of the debt repayments due this year, 47 percent are to private lenders, 27 percent to multilateral institutions, 12 percent to China and 14 percent to other governments. The Chinese loans were either on terms in line with those of the IMF and other multilateral lenders, or better.

There is no solution to the debt crisis under so-called debt restructuring. Any such measures will be employed as they have been in the past—to impose even further austerity measures on the population, with much of the money used not to finance productive investments or social spending but to pay off the holders of past debts.

In Sri Lanka, the Socialist Equality Party has raised the necessity for debt repudiation and the expropriation of the wealth of the banks and the ultra-wealthy as an immediate first step in tackling the crisis and for a turn to the working class in other countries in a common struggle.

The conditions for the development of this orientation—a unified global struggle against the financial octopuses starving and strangling hundreds of millions of people—have been created by the eruption of strikes and protests around the world over the past few weeks.

These developments have sent a shiver of fear through sections of the US political establishment.

Members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee this week sent a letter to President Biden warning that the “grave global food security crisis” flowing from the Ukraine war was threatening “to push millions of people into hunger and destabilize regions of strategic importance to the United States.”

But assistance in alleviating the food crisis will not come from the US. Politico reported that while US officials have been working to alleviate shortages they are running into problems. Wheat reserves, including in the US, are running lower than normal as the result of a drought and “governments with grain surpluses have been reluctant to release too much of their supply, including Canada.”

In other words, on the food crisis, poorer countries will receive the same treatment as they have had when a global rollout of COVID vaccines was blocked by the vaccine nationalism of the major powers.

Sarah Charles, a leading official of USAID, testified to a Congressional subcommittee that the “impacts of the current crisis on poverty, hunger, and malnutrition could be even more significant than those seen in the global food price crisis of 2007–2009 and the subsequent civil unrest, as the last crisis followed a period of strong economic growth, whereas the years since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic have been characterized by an increasingly worse global economic downturn.”

In the Yemeni city of Aden, she noted, the price of a piece of bread increased by 62 percent between February 25 and March 3. In Lebanon, domestic food inflation had reached 483 percent.

In South Africa, protests had doubled to more than 1,000 a year since 2018 amid warnings that the country was “likely to have entered a phase of ongoing violent instability.”

In an interview with the BBC on Thursday, the Eurasia Group think tank director Daniel Kerner was asked whether there could be a wave of social explosions in Latin America, such as took place at the end of 2019.

He replied: “Yes, in 2019, we were seeing much discontent in many places, and it’s true that the pandemic put a pause to the problem. But at the same time it was just a pause and now the situation is much more explosive.”

Summing up the fears in ruling circles, a report by the German Friedrich Ebert Institute said: “As was said in the days of the French Revolution, if the population has no bread, those in power are threatened with disaster.”

The crisis is not confined to poorer countries. Workers in the major economies, including Britain, the US and Australia, are starting to initiate action to secure wage rises in the face of rampant inflation, which the Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey has said will deliver a “historic shock” to incomes.