One in five Americans previously infected with SARS-CoV-2 report lingering symptoms of Long COVID

Benjamin Mateus

According to a recent survey conducted by the federal government, one in five Americans with a previous COVID infection may be suffering from symptoms of Long COVID, also known as post-acute COVID syndrome (PACS).

The Household Pulse Survey of more than 62,000 adults found that 40 percent had previously been infected with SARS-CoV-2. Of these, 19 percent reported they are currently having persistent and lingering symptoms of “Long COVID.” This means 7.4 percent of the adult population, or nearly 20 million people, are suffering the effects of Long COVID now!

People wait in line to test for COVID-19 on Monday, Jan. 3, 2022, in Long Beach, Calif. (AP Photo/Ashley Landis)

The 20-minute online survey, conducted every four weeks, was established in partnership between the Census Bureau and the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) in late April 2020 to assist the federal government in obtaining relevant information on the impact of the pandemic in the US.

Beginning on June 1, 2022, the NCHS added a question to the survey about symptoms associated with COVID that have lasted for three months or longer. Overall, NCHS found that one in 13 adult Americans have Long COVID symptoms that they didn’t have before their initial infection.

A separate CDC study last month confirmed the main finding of the NCHS survey, that 20 percent of COVID survivors develop Long COVID, lending it enormous credibility.

The CDC study was based on a comprehensive review of electronic health records that assessed the incidence of 26 conditions often attributable to post-COVID and compared the records of those infected with COVID and those who had not been infected. It found that one in five COVID-19 survivors aged 18 to 64 (20 percent) and one in four aged 65 and older (25 percent) had experienced at least one incident condition that might have been attributable to the previous COVID-19.

The NCHS survey had found that younger adults are more likely to have Long COVID than the elderly, which contradicts the CDC finding. Such differences arise from the different methods used: a simple question posed on an online survey for the NCHS, a detailed review of medical records by the CDC.

However, what is astounding is the corroboration by the CDC study and NCHS survey of the scale of the chronic mass debilitating event underway as the COVID pandemic is allowed to rage unopposed by any public health interventions.  

The assault on the health and well-being of the population continues unabated. Even after a million Americans have died from acute COVID infections, the long game of Post-Acute COVID Syndrome is beginning to play out mercilessly.

It bears translating these percentages into actual numbers.

On April 26, 2022, the CDC published a report on the seroprevalence of infection-induced antibodies and found that by February 2022, the proportion of the overall US population that had previously been infected had reached almost 58 percent, or nearly 192 million people, of whom 132 million are 20 years old or more. This would mean over 25 million Americans (7.4 percent) possibly carry the diagnosis of Long COVID.

As the Solve Long COVID Initiative noted, “Long COVID is a complex, multi-system illness that increases medical needs … [it is] a collection of lingering symptoms devastating the lives of many COVID-19 survivors. The most frequent prolonged symptoms—persistent fatigue, brain fog, and depleted energy after minimal effort—profoundly impact everyday functioning.”

Three main theories explain Long COVID: dysregulation of the immune system, viral persistence, or micro-clots due to the injury to small blood vessels after infection. Some have argued that these three processes can be interrelated. However, additional and urgent research is necessary to begin identifying the complex nature of the disease process, and to develop treatments to help the afflicted millions worldwide.

The main limitation of the Household Pulse Survey is that it does not raise any questions about the population's health after COVID. The CDC Long COVID study, which followed the health status of those with Long COVID for one year after their acute infection, found that both the elderly and young had a significant deterioration of the lungs, with the risk of pulmonary embolism (a blood clot to the lungs) doubling when compared to non-infected individuals.

Terrifyingly, even among the younger adults, the risk of abnormal heart rhythms and muscle and joint pains was significantly higher. At higher rates, the elderly suffer from worsening kidney failure, blood clot disorders, strokes, diabetes, anxiety, and other neurological and mental health dysfunction. These medical disorders also lead to higher death rates, meaning if COVID didn’t kill the patient, Long COVID might.

More than a debilitating mass event, Long COVID has the potential for culling the oldest and feeblest in society—an outcome expressly desired by the financial aristocracy, which regards Social Security, Medicare and end-of-life medical care as a drain on its potential profits.

However, because the PCR tests of Long COVID sufferers will be “negative” for SARS-CoV-2 at the time of death, their families will not know that COVID was responsible. Only epidemiological reports on these conditions will offer a window into the truth behind their deaths.

Evidence is mounting that vaccines, though protective against severe disease, hospitalization and immediate death, do little to reduce the risk of Long COVID and its complications. Additionally, reinfection with SARS-CoV-2 appears to bring additional risks of “all-cause mortality” even after symptoms subside and the person is declared recovered.

And, in perhaps the most sinister conclusion, the current subvariants of Omicron, specifically the BA.4 and BA.5 versions, seem to have considerable ability to escape antibody responses among people who have been previously infected with COVID or who have been vaccinated and boosted. The two strains are quickly becoming dominant across the US.

Dr. Dan Barouch, the lead author of a recent study on immune escape by the latest Omicron subvariants, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, wrote to CNN in an email, “Our data suggest that COVID-19 still has the capacity to mutate further, resulting in increased transmissibility and increased antibody escape. As pandemic restrictions are lifted, it is important that we remain vigilant and keep studying new variants and subvariants as they emerge.”

The statement demonstrates that the failed pandemic policy that insists that humanity must “live with the virus” is truly criminal. High levels of antibodies in the population, whether from prior infection or vaccination, will do little to impede the ongoing transmission of the endless waves of COVID.

One in five reported Long COVID symptoms today will in a few short years mean that most, if not all, of the population, will report these symptoms and face the consequences of multiple reinfections. The day-to-day consequences can mean fighting to collect disability and facing impoverishment, or dealing with dangerous working conditions while struggling with Long COVID symptoms.

Based on their seroprevalence models, Solve Long-COVID Initiative has placed the number of adults suffering from Long COVID as between 22 and upwards of 43 million, or 7 to 13.4 percent of the population.

They write, “of these cases, seven to 14 million (two to four percent of the total US population) are expected to result in long-term disability—placing individuals at risk of lifelong complex health problems and economic ruin from health care costs, unemployment, denied benefits, eviction, and homelessness.” Their estimate of the financial burden on American adults ranges from $386 to $511 billion just through January 31, 2022.

In conjunction with the rise in the number of people reporting Long COVID symptoms, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics monthly employment surveys have been demonstrating an upward trend in the number of people reporting disability since the middle of 2021.

Nicole Maestas, an associate professor of health care policy at Harvard, who has been watching for signs of the impact of the pandemic on disability, speaking with The Atlantic, observed that these population surveys might be the first indication of a rise. “As you watch them keep going up each quarter, it’s starting to look like maybe there is something going on,” she said.

The implications for the working class are ominous. There is a preponderance of evidence for the dangers of SARS-CoV-2 and its long-term sequelae, though many workers persevere with mild symptoms out of sheer necessity to put food on the table and care for their families.

US heat wave endangers lives of most vulnerable, especially growing homeless population

Alex Findijs

Millions of Americans are experiencing the second severe heat wave in two weeks across the United States. Around 70 percent of the population is expected to see temperatures in the 90s Fahrenheit and 20 percent will experience temperatures in excess of 100 degrees. 

People ride their bikes past a homeless encampment set up along the boardwalk in the Venice neighborhood of Los Angeles (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

The extreme heat will be most severe for the homeless, who have little access to protection from the scorching heat. Heat-related fatalities in the United States total more than hurricanes, flooding, and tornadoes combined, with extreme heat responsible for around 1,500 deaths every year. An estimated 50 percent of these deaths are those without shelter. 

Pheonix, Arizona, the hottest city in the United States with highs that reached 118 degrees last year, bares a significant portion of these deaths. In 2021, there were 339 heat-related deaths in the city, of which 130 were homeless individuals. 

This many deaths of homeless people in a single city is astonishing. “If 130 homeless people were dying in any other way, it would be considered a mass casualty event,” Kristie L. Ebi, a professor of global health at the University of Washington told the Los Angeles Times. Such high casualty rates are reflective of the fact that homeless individuals are 200 times more likely to die from heat-related issues than those with shelter.

Deaths this summer are only likely to increase after economic hardships during the pandemic destroyed livelihoods and the expiration of a federal moratorium on evictions expired last year, resulting in a massive increase in the number of people thrown out onto the street. 

According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, there are as many as one million people without shelter on any given night in the US. Cities like Dallas, Seattle, and Portland have seen double-digit growth in homelessness over the past couple of years. For the first time ever since the Department of Housing and Urban Development began to conduct point-in-time counts, the number of homeless people sleeping on the street in 2021 exceeded the number of single homeless adults staying in shelters. 

Worryingly, the demographics of homelessness are increasingly shifting towards an older population in retirement. With the rising cost of living and limited incomes, many elderly people are finding themselves priced out of their homes and lacking the ability to find new ones. 

During the pandemic, rent prices have skyrocketed in major cities across the country. Nationally, the average rent price grew by 11 percent, while in many major cities prices surged even further into the double digits. The increase in prices and stagnation of wages resulted in precarious financial situations for millions of individuals and families. This was especially true for those in retirement, who only make an average of $1,658 per month from Social Security. Seniors from minority and poor communities often make significantly less than that amount. 

In May 2021, the LeadingAge LTSS Center at the University of Massachusetts Boston found that more than 100,000 people aged 65 or over and 450,000 people aged 55 to 64 reported they would likely be evicted within the next two months. More than 300,000 people ages 65 and older and one million people aged 55 to 64 reported that they were behind on rent. 

A study by the University of Pennsylvania in 2019 predicted that the number of elderly homeless would triple from 40,000 to 106,000 by the year 2030. 

Homelessness for older individuals during extreme heat events can be deadly. Older unsheltered individuals are more likely to have health complications that can be severely exasperated by the extreme heat, and mobility issues can make it difficult to find appropriate shelter. Homeless people with disabilities are also at heightened risk of health complications from extreme heat and are limited in their access to necessary supplies, support and medications. 

Many cities and organizations have attempted to mitigate the heat problem with limited programs. Las Vegas has teams deliver bottled water to homeless encampments, some of which are located inside the city’s network of storm drains. In Oregon last year, officials opened 24-hour cooling stations and volunteers handed out water and popsicles to homeless people around Portland. Other cities, like Boston, have developed heat control programs that include establishing cooling areas and planting more trees for shade. 

Cities suffer from what is called the “heat island effect,” which is when urban areas become hotter than the surrounding countryside because of the heat-absorbent materials that cities are constructed of, like asphalt and glass. Higher densities of vegetation can help offset this effect, but researchers have found that poor neighborhoods are less likely to have trees or similar vegetation and so often see average temperatures several degrees hotter than wealthier areas. 

Mitigation measures like handing out water and planting trees can help, but ultimately the problem still remains and is likely to only worsen as millions of people struggle to afford to stay in their homes and capitalist-created climate change fuels more frequent extreme weather events.

Chinese government seeks to head off outrage over human trafficking

Jerry Zhang

For months, the Chinese government has been trying to contain widespread anger over human trafficking. The issue erupted at the end of January, when a woman’s plight in Feng County of Xuzhou, in the eastern province of Jiangsu, sparked social media attention.

Chinese President Xi Jinping, left, and Premier Li Keqiang vote during the closing session of China's National People's Congress (NPC) at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, Friday, March 11, 2022. (AP Photo/Sam McNeil)

At a State Council meeting on March 29, Premier Li Keqiang declared: “Trafficking and trafficking in people is harmful and must be brought to justice as soon as possible, and officials who neglect their duties must be severely punished.”

This was Li’s third statement on human trafficking in a month. The Chinese police earlier also announced an anti-trafficking operation, to continue until the end of the year.

In January, a video began circulating on the Chinese internet, showing a middle-aged woman wearing thin clothes, locked in a dilapidated house with a long iron chain around her neck. The video was released by a social work volunteer, and although it was not explicitly stated, online public opinion quickly pointed out that the woman was likely to have been abducted.

The video garnered nearly 2 billion views on social media, causing much online discussion. Local officials issued several inconsistent announcements, which only further aroused doubts and concern.

With China’s news media heavily censored, people had to dig into the story for themselves and constantly questioned the official statements.

On February 17, at the instigation of the central government, Jiangsu Province established an investigation, which issued a series of five notices, some correcting earlier ones, finally admitting that the woman was a victim of human trafficking.

The authorities said the woman, known as Yang Qingxia, had been trafficked out of the southwestern province of Yunnan in 1997 and sold twice by human traffickers in Feng County.

As a result, 17 officials from Feng County and Xuzhou City were punished to varying degrees. That has been officially defined as the final result of the incident, and discussion online has been strictly censored. But the central government has felt compelled to launch an anti-trafficking campaign.

At the National People’s Congress meeting on March 5, Li proposed to “severely crack down on the phenomenon of abduction and trafficking of women and children, and protect the rights and interests of women and children.” On March 11, at a press conference at the conclusion of the congress, he said: “We are not only heartbroken for the victims, but also angry about such a thing.”

Nevertheless, the public concern has continued. On social media platforms, a number of literary or artistic works related to trafficking have received renewed attention and discussion. These include “Black Vortex,” a reportage about a large-scale abduction of women, “Ancient Sins,” a documentary that investigates trafficking in China, and “Blind Mountain,” a film based on the true story of a female college student being abducted. By discussing these works, people evaded the censorship.

The anger over the human trafficking case in Feng County was intensified by the official cover-up of the truth. Reports and information from journalists and others were removed, and investigators who visited the site were threatened and harassed by police and government officials.

According to a United Nations report, China cracked 208 cases of human trafficking in 2017. But the large number of missing persons that occur each year has led to the widespread belief that this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Proponents of middle-class identity politics have attributed the problem to “a patriarchal society.” But the root cause lies in the restoration of capitalism in China. As the WSWS has previously analysed and reported:

“The rapid expansion of capitalist production and market relations in China is being accompanied by the revival of a myriad of social evils abolished or mitigated by the 1949 Revolution—prostitution, sale of women, drug trafficking, child labor, corruption at every level of the state.”

Reports and research essays have pointed out that the large-scale revival of human trafficking in China began in the 1980s, and the 1980s and 1990s became the period with the most cases of human trafficking in contemporary China. It has been called the “Twenty Years of Trafficking.” The WSWS drew attention to this historic regression in the 1990s:

Another pre-revolutionary relic which has made a comeback is the sale of women as brides and concubines. This feudal practice was outlawed after 1949 and largely disappeared, but began to revive in the late 1970s with the turn to market relations under Deng Xiaoping. Women are either sold by their parents, usually desperately poor peasants in the more remote and backward regions, or kidnapped by gangs who act as middlemen, transporting the women hundreds of miles and then selling to them to prospective husbands. Retarded women are especially targeted because of their greater docility in the role of domestic slaves.

Press reports indicate that the price of a woman ranges from 2,000 yuan to 5,000 yuan (about $400 to $900), and that the number sold must be in the hundreds of thousands yearly. In 1990 alone, according to official government figures, 10,000 women were rescued after being kidnapped and sold. Far more are unable to escape, as most are illiterate and unable to communicate with their families. Some 65,000 people were arrested for trafficking in women in 1989 and 1990 combined. Until 1991 kidnappers of women generally received a sentence of five years in prison, the same penalty meted out for stealing two cows.

During this period, agriculture was almost entirely privatised following the dissolution of rural communes in 1978, and this led to high levels of rural poverty and unemployment. Under these conditions, Zongzu forces in the countryside began to revive. Zongzu is a movement connected by blood and family relations. It was part of the rural order of Chinese feudal society, in which family or individual property and social rank were attached to clans.

In many areas, Zongzu directly influenced the election of village committees. In order to maintain their rule in rural and township areas, local Chinese Communist Party (CCP) bureaucrats cooperated with Zongzu forces.

These relations have been strengthened since President Xi Jinping took office in 2013. He has put forward the concepts of “cultural revival of rural sages” and “construction of family traditions” as a part of his program of “national revival.” “Rural sages” refers to the figures in feudal Chinese society who had Zongzu-related status in rural areas.

In October 2014, when Xi Jinping presided over the 18th collective study of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee, he stated: “To govern China today, we need to have a deep understanding of our country’s history and traditional culture, and we also need to have a deep understanding of our country’s ancient state governance and governance wisdom and make positive summaries.”

This instruction has resulted in the restoration of backward ideas from the feudal era, and has become the ideological source of many human trafficking cases, as well as explaining why many local bureaucrats do not act or even acquiesce in such cases.

At the same time, the extreme imbalance of regional development has increased the demand for population migration from economically underdeveloped areas to economically developed areas. According to official data, from 1990 to 1999, the average annual income of farmers in Yunnan Province was 964.88 yuan, while that in Jiangsu Province it was 2,166.69 yuan—more than twice as much. Such huge economic disparities contributed to the main routes of human trafficking during this period, from rural areas in the southwestern provinces to rural areas in the eastern regions.

From the late 1980s to the 1990s, the peak period of the “migrant worker wave” into the cities also became the peak period of trafficking cases, with female migrant workers and children being the main victims.

Report points to corporate price gouging amid soaring inflation in US

Shannon Jones

As household budgets stagger under the impact of soaring prices for fuel, food, rent and other necessities, the oil companies and other sections of big business are enjoying massive profits, in part through gouging consumers.

Gas prices in downtown Los Angeles, California on Monday, March 7, 2022. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)

According to a new report issued by the liberal think tank Roosevelt Institute, a review of data from 3,698 US-operating companies found that both markups and profits soared to their highest level since the 1950s.

In 2021, the average markup reached 1.72, meaning that the typical price charged by a company was 72 percent higher than their costs. That is up from a markup of 1.56 throughout the 2010s. Last year saw the largest rise in markups since the 1950s and two and a half times higher than the next largest annual markup. Among the sectors that the study found having the largest markups were oil and gas, real estate, quarrying and mining. The study found that the financial sector had the largest single markup overall, pointing to massive profiteering by the Wall Street banks.

The report also looked at net profit margins, net income divided by net sales. “Here we see a more consistent range, with net profit margins increasing from a yearly average of 5.5 percent from 1960 to 1980 to averaging 6 percent during the 2010s. In 2021, it jumped to 9.5 percent—again its highest value on record. Profits were consistently up across definitions.”

Oil companies in particular enjoyed massive profits in the first quarter of 2022, bolstered by the price rises triggered by the war in Ukraine. Oil giant ExxonMobil alone saw $5.5 billion in profits, double its results in the first quarter of 2021. Shell raked in $9 billion during the first quarter, its best single quarter result ever. BP reported $6.2 billion for the quarter, not counting a loss for offloading its holdings in a Russian-controlled oil company. It was BP’s best quarter in 10 years and Shell also reported a significant rise. Chevron saw a rise and Conoco’s profits showed a more than fivefold increase since 2020. All told, the Big Five oil giants raked in $35 billion in the first quarter. The 25 top oil companies made $205 billion in profits in 2021.

According to a recent New York Times article, profits in the S&P 500 were up 70 percent in 2021 from 2020 and 33 percent higher than in 2019 before the pandemic. The same report noted that on the whole companies made an “estimated $200 billion in additional operating profits last year because of that increase in margins.”

These figures further debunk the pro-business claims that inflation is the result of a “wage-price spiral” where supposedly excessive wage increases are driving up the prices of goods. The Roosevelt Institute study concluded, “We find that 2021 was largely driven by increased sales, with costs (including wages) increasing only slightly. This is inconsistent with any indication of a wage-price spiral.”

It added that “changes to labor and worker compensation are not driving factors in recent markups. Indeed, workers are not the only economic agents that affect business pricing decisions.”

The claim that wage demands are a driving force of inflation is further undermined by the fact that real hourly earnings fell 3.0 between May 2021 and May 2022, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Inflation rose at an 8.6 percent annual rate in May. The Consumer Price Index, a more realistic measure of inflation based on a sampling of goods and services purchased by typical urban customer, rose 9.2 percent. Wage increases were far below that level, ranging from between 2 and 4 percent for most contracts negotiated by unions in 2021, which were below the average increase for nonunion workers.

Last February, a day after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the United Steelworkers (USW) announced it had reached a new contract settlement for 30,000 US oil refinery workers, blocking a strike. USW President Tom Conway boasted that it was a “responsible” settlement, which “did not add to price gouging and inflationary pressures,” as though the crass profiteering of ExxonMobil et al. was somehow the fault of workers. The deal imposed a minuscule 2.5 percent raise in 2022, ensuring a massive further cut in the living standards of oil workers, whose wages have already been slashed by inflation.

Despite the sabotage by the unions, strikes are on the rise as workers struggle to keep pace with inflation. According to the Cornell University School of Industrial Relations Strike Tracker, there have been 153 strikes involving about 73,500 workers from January through May of this year, compared to 78 strikes involving some 22,500 over the same time period in 2021. That is a near doubling in the number of strikes and a threefold increase in the number of workers on strike

The fiction of an “overheated” labor market is being used to justify a series of sharp interest rate increases by the US Federal Reserve aimed at undermining workers’ attempts to defend their living standards by provoking a recession and increasing unemployment. The rate hikes will further hit the budgets of working-class families by increasing the amount they must pay for credit cards, car loans, mortgages and other debt.

While there is no question that powerful corporations have used the crisis to further gouge the public, surging global inflation is fundamentally the result of the financial policies both parties have conducted since the crash of 2008. Central banks have poured literally trillions of dollars into the financial markets and directly into the coffers of the corporations. In addition, the criminal decision to allow the pandemic to spread unchecked in every country but China has led to the disruption of supply chains and chaos more broadly in the economy. This has been aggravated by the imperialist-provoked Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Add to this the staggering cost of the arms buildup underway in the US and the countries of Western Europe, absolutely nonproductive from the standpoint of social needs. This will be paid for by the working class through cuts in social spending and the further driving up of prices.

Biden has blamed Russia for surging inflation calling rising living expenses “Putin’s price hikes.” At the same time, he has wagged his finger at the oil companies for price-gouging “in a time of war.” But the president will do nothing to stop the profiteering by Big Oil. Meanwhile, working with unions, he has imposed a de facto cut in real wages on workers.

While the authors of the Roosevelt Institute study document corporate price gouging, they offer only tepid solutions, suggesting stepped-up antitrust enforcement or an excess profits tax. Along these lines, US Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden of Oregon has introduced legislation for an excess profits tax on gas and oil companies with more than $1 billion revenue.

Aside from the fact that these measures are political theatre and stand little to no chance of being enacted, they do not tackle the fundamental problem, which is the private ownership of banking, oil and gas, transport and other vital economic pillars. The oil companies will evade an excess profits tax just as they use an army of accountants to avoid paying corporate taxes now.

Inflation is part of a broader catastrophe being inflicted on mankind by the failure of the capitalist profit system, which has allowed the unchecked spread of a preventable pandemic and is now threatening to unleash a global war.

Afghanistan earthquake exposes disaster caused by decades of US occupation

Jean Shaoul

A 6.1-magnitude earthquake in a remote area of Afghanistan has killed at least 1,000 people and injured at least 1,500. While the worst affected area is the mountainous Paktika province, deaths have also been reported in the eastern provinces of Khost and Nangarhar. Many more bodies are thought to be buried in mud as heavy rain hampers rescue efforts.

The quake is the deadliest since 2002, when a 6.1 magnitude tremor killed about 1,000 people in the north of the country. It struck early Wednesday morning about 30 miles southwest of Khost, southeast of the capital Kabul, according to the United States Geological Survey. Its relatively shallow depth of six miles worsened its impact, with “strong and long jolts” felt in Kabul and tremors felt as far away as Lahore in Pakistan, 300 miles from the epicentre.

Thousands have been forced to sleep outside in unseasonable, near freezing temperatures as entire villages, largely built from clay and straw, have collapsed. The severely limited infrastructure in the country is making it very difficult to provide relief. Afghanistan’s skeleton health care system is unable to cope under normal circumstances, let alone handle the natural disasters that plague the country. With few airworthy planes and helicopters, the government had to call off the emergency search and rescue after 24 hours and issue an urgent appeal for international aid.

These appalling conditions are the result of the catastrophic encounter of Afghanistan with American imperialism. This began, in 1979, with the intervention of the Carter administration and the CIA to finance and arm Islamic fundamentalists, including Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, in a proxy war against the Soviet-backed government.

US imperialism believed it could use the Stalinist bureaucracy’s dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 as an opportunity to overcome its economic decline abroad and its social conflicts at home, using its military might to oversee a “New World Order” in the interests of its corporate and financial elite.

In October 2001, following the attacks of September 11, the United States launched a war and occupation, undertaken in pursuit of economic interests concealed from the public under the guise of the “war on terrorism” against a government it claimed was harbouring bin Laden.

The human and social costs of the war in Afghanistan have been catastrophic and are ongoing today. According to official figures that undoubtedly understate the casualties, 164,436 Afghans were killed during the war, together with 2,448 US soldiers, 3,846 US military contractors and 1,144 soldiers from other NATO countries. Hundreds of thousands of Afghans and tens of thousands of NATO personnel were wounded. The war and occupation have cost the American public some $2 trillion, with a further $6.5 trillion to be paid out in interest payments over the years.

The war has produced one of the largest refugee populations in the world. As of the beginning of this year, before the war in Ukraine, about 1 in 10—that is, 3 million—refugees are Afghan by birth, mostly living in neighbouring Pakistan and Iran. Three in four Afghans have suffered internal or external displacement in their lifetime.

According to the World Bank, Afghanistan is the sixth poorest country in the world, with a gross national income per capita of only $500. The United Nations estimates that 23 million Afghans, or more than half of the population, suffer from acute hunger. An estimated 8.7 million are at risk of famine, while 5 million children are on the brink of starvation. And this is before the surge in the prices of basic commodities over the past several months.

The Afghan war, bizarrely named Operation Enduring Freedom, spawned a whole new lexicon of criminal activities: extraordinary rendition, Guantanamo Bay, drone warfare and waterboarding, to mention but a few.

It was WikiLeaks publisher and journalist Julian Assange who, by publishing the Afghan war logs in 2010, a vast trove of leaked US military documents, brought to the world’s attention evidence of the criminality of the war. The Afghan war logs exposed the myth that the occupation of Afghanistan was a “good war,” supposedly waged to defeat terrorism, extend democracy, and protect women’s rights.

They revealed the mass killings of civilians by both US and UK forces, the underreporting and cover-up of civilian deaths and war crimes, including numerous occasions when US and British troops opened fire on civilians. But not one of the criminals responsible for the war has been prosecuted, much less punished. Instead, it is Assange who has languished in London’s maximum security Belmarsh Prison for the last three years, awaiting extradition to the US on charges under the Espionage Act that carry 175 years in prison.

Afghanistan’s plight has been further exacerbated by Washington’s theft of Afghanistan’s financial assets and imposition of an economic blockade—tantamount to starving the country to death—on the country after the Taliban took control last summer amid the US military’s humiliating withdrawal from its longest-ever war.

The White House left the country in ruins facing an enormous humanitarian catastrophe. Throughout the 20 years of occupation, the US and its allies did nothing to develop Afghanistan. Instead, its economy was shattered, its agriculture undermined by aid. This, along with the insecurity, drought, and natural disasters, played into the hands of Afghanistan’s warlords and drug dealers as impoverished farmers turned to poppy cultivation and the opium trade.

The disastrous state of Afghanistan underscores the devastating impact of US imperialism’s four decades of covert operations, war, and occupation on what was already one of the poorest countries on the planet. It must serve as a warning to workers throughout the world about what the US and NATO have in store for Ukraine.

In her last piece for the New York Times, published on February 23, the late Madeleine Albright, US Secretary of State under President Bill Clinton from 1997 until 2001, warned—as did several other commentators—that if Russia invaded Ukraine, “It would be far from a repeat of Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014; it would be a scenario reminiscent of the Soviet Union’s ill-fated occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s.”

She was referring to the US’s use of proxy forces during the 1980s, supported, hosted, and trained by Pakistan and funded by the US and Saudi Arabia, to unseat the Soviet Union-aligned Afghan government and undermine Moscow’s influence in the Caspian basin and the Persian Gulf. Afghanistan itself is a treasure trove of untapped minerals, variously estimated at $1 to $3 trillion.

In the conflicts and mass destruction that followed, the Taliban was nurtured and brought to power with Washington’s blessing in the belief that the Taliban would help stabilize Afghanistan after 15 years of war while at the same time exert increasing pressure on China and Russia.

Albright’s words should be taken seriously. In 1996, when as US ambassador to the United Nations, she was asked by the 60 Minutes news show whether she thought about the price to the Iraqi people of the devastating sanctions imposed by the US on Iraq following the 1991 Gulf War that had starved Iraq of medicines and food and killed at least 500,000 Iraqi children at that time. Albright replied, without disputing the figure, “We think the price is worth it.”

After two decades of US-backed proxy wars and military occupation, Afghanistan has been brutalized and impoverished. Its fate is a warning for what US imperialism holds in store for everything it touches, whether its nominal “allies” or the targets of US regime-change operations.

With the ever-expanding US war against Russia, the US is preparing to bring the type of devastation wrought upon Afghanistan and Iraq to Europe, at an even greater cost in lives and treasure.

German Ford factory faces closure, with the collusion of the union

Dietmar Gaisenkersting

Ford workers demonstrate after the announcement of the closure of the Saarlouis plant, June 22, 2022 [Photo: WSWS]

The result has come that many workers had feared. On Wednesday, Ford Motor Company officially announced its decision to build its next generation of electric vehicles in Almussafes, Spain, and not its German plant in Saarlouis. The 4,600 workers employed in Saarlouis, plus around 1,500 workers in the adjacent supplier park, face redundancy when production of the Ford Focus ceases at the end of 2025, when the factory is slated to close.

At the same time it was made clear to the 6,000 workers in Spain that they will also suffer as a result of the decision: with wage cuts, longer working times, increased flexibility and, above all, three-digit job cuts.

Many workers in Saarlouis, with whom the WSWS was in contact before, during and after the works meeting, were angrier with the union and the hypocritical charade by works council Chairman Markus Thal than with the company announcement. “This is nothing but lies and deception,” one worker declared directly after the works meeting.

Last September the company announced it would close either the German plant in Saarlouis or the Spanish factory in Almussafes near Valencia. At that time the WSWS warned that the works councils of both plants were outbidding one another with offers to make cuts, thereby “trying to prove to the company board that their respective site could produce more profitably than the other.” The losers would be Ford employees in both plants.

The works councils in Germany are now pretending they fought to keep the plant open. “We were lied to, cheated and fooled,” claimed Saarlouis works council Chairman Thal. The works councils refer to a “stitch-up” and “sham procedure.”

This turns reality on its head. Yes, it was a “stitch-up,” but the works council and the IG Metall union were and are part of the game. The works council had sent out notice of the works meeting Wednesday to inform workers about the “status of the bidding competition” more than two weeks ago. Then, allegedly, shortly before the meeting, the works council was informed that the company had decided in favour of the Spanish plant—but nobody believes this.

The works council’s notices informed the workforce they should prepare for an extended meeting Wednesday beginning at 2:00 p.m. that would then reconvene at 7:30 a.m. the next day, “depending on the decision.” It is clear the works council already knew the decision.

While the works meeting was still in progress, flyers were distributed under the heading “breach of promise,” calling for a demonstration and rally. Everything was prepared, the police and the public order officials were informed about the action and were waiting for workers when they left the factory.

“You can’t organise and do something like this in a quarter of an hour,” said one Ford worker. “They knew about it beforehand. I feel like I’ve been had, by the company and the works council.”

The version of the bidding process put forward by IG Metall and the works council at the meeting, the protest rally and in leaflets prepared beforehand can only be described as bold-faced lies. The leaflet of the general works council, signed by its chairmen Benjamin Gruschka and Thal, claims in its very first sentence that the works council had only been informed on the same day.

As if they take the workers for idiots, the pair declared they had “roundly” condemned the bidding competition they had themselves spent months organising! They even had the nerve to claim they had tried to act in concert with their Spanish colleagues. In fact, they did everything they could to ensure the closure of the Spanish plant by offering job and wage cuts and subsidies in Germany, instead of organising a common struggle against Ford.

It was this spineless and submissive attitude, oriented solely towards the company’s profits, that encouraged management to demand even more cuts in Spain and wind up production in Saarlouis.

The works council is now boasting it would have offered up wage cuts not only in Saarlouis but in all of Ford’s German plants. According to the twisted thinking of the union bureaucrats, allowing workers in other factories to suffer in the bidding competition amounts to a “declaration of solidarity.” Instead of a joint struggle, the joint renunciation of jobs and livelihoods is the new type of solidarity IG Metall is trying to impose.

Thal and Co. are now huffing and puffing about the fact that the company failed to take into account the cuts the union had organised and that Valencia was unfairly awarded the new contract. Their cries of “scandal,” “breach of promise” or “fraud” are akin to the pickpocket who shouts, “Stop thief!” They themselves organised the bidding process, hid it from workers and sabotaged any serious struggle to defend jobs.

Even now, the works council and the unions reject any struggle to keep the plant open and are offering their services to Ford management to organise the smooth liquidation of the factory. Employees were due to be informed about further plans on Thursday.

“We will now have to work on alternatives for the Saarlouis plant.” This, Thal said, was the most important task for the coming weeks and months. “We, as the general works council, will do that just as intensively as we have done in the last few months.” At Wednesday’s press conference Thal announced he planned to negotiate social plans and tariffs. He said that workers may strike to achieve these ends, i.e., strikes for more favourable redundancy payments instead of defending the factory.

Wednesday’s rally gave a foretaste of the toothless protests the union now plans to organise. The workers were given whistles to blow and let off steam, and the protest was deliberately organised far away from the factory gates, in other words, to prevent workers from contemplating occupying a gate or even the plant and actually going on strike. Instead they were told that after 2025 the production of a model would end and were then carted off to a demonstration and rally where once again Thal and another representative of IG Metall feigned their surprise and anger just as they had done prior to the factory meeting.

Workers must draw the lessons from the past few years and especially the last six months. If the workforce in Saarlouis allows the works councils and IG Metall to continue where they have now left off, it will lead to a disaster. The gradual closure of the plant will impact the entire region, leading to a rapid decline in wages and prospects. Workers have reported that when they apply for alternative jobs, they are offered very low wages, such as 12 euros an hour working in logistics. This is the future the works council is organising.

Child hospitalisations rise as new UK COVID wave begins

Liz Smith & Margot Miller

Behind the Johnson government’s pretence that the pandemic is over and we should “live with the virus”, the number of COVID cases is surging in Britain. Infections shot up last week by 43 percent, with 425,800 new cases. According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), one in 50 people in England had the virus.

The rise may be driven by new variants BA.4 and BA.5. Alongside another variant, BA.2.12.1, these variants replicate more effectively in the lungs than BA.2, indicating they could be more lethal.

Total daily hospital admissions for all age groups in England rose gradually from 443 on June 4, to 842 on June 15.

Parents take children to a primary school in Bournemouth, UK following the reopening of schools nationally. March, 2021 (WSWS media)

In the week from June 5-June 11, hospital admissions among children (0-17) rose 50 percent from 147 the previous week to 220, after falling steadily since April. For the youngest children (0-5), for whom a vaccine has not been approved in the UK, the rise was 60 percent, from 94 to 150.

On June 17, 39 children aged 0-17 were admitted to hospital, of whom 33 were aged 0-5 and 6 aged 5-17. There were 978 new child (0-19) COVID cases, 8.1 percent of the total 12,065 new cases in England.

On June 16, 36 children were admitted overnight, including 22 in the 0-5 age bracket and 14 aged 6-17. Total child cases in 0-19 age range rose by 914, or 7.5 percent of total new cases in England of 12,080.

The figures for the day before were 40 children (0-17) hospitalized overnight, including 31 aged 0-5 and 9 aged 6-17. Total new child cases were 1,053, that is 7.8 percent of the 13,401 total new infections.

Total child (0-17) hospital admissions due to COVID were 25,971 on June 16. By June 21, total hospital admissions of child COVID cases rose to 26,207, a rise of 56 overnight. This included 44 aged 0-5, and 12 aged 6-17. On that date there were 1,565 new child COVID cases. These figures are extrapolated from coronavirus.data.gov.uk by Twitter user Tigress.

Total UK child COVID deaths stand at 188 and cases among children well over 3 million.

In the US, National Centre for Health Statistics, based on data from March 1, 2020-April 30, 2022, reported COVID as the leading cause of death among children aged 0-19.

The British Medical Journal (BMJ) noted as early as January a rise in hospital admissions in young children who contracted Omicron. The “proportion of children admitted to hospital with covid-19 who were aged under 1 was 42.2% in the four-week period studied (14 December 2021 to 12 January 2022), much higher than earlier in the pandemic.” Children hospitalised with Omicron were not as sick as those admitted during the Alpha and Delta waves. The fear is the new Omicron subvariants may prove far more dangerous.

After prevaricating throughout 2021, the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) advised in February 2022 that all children in the 5-11 age group be offered two 10 microgram doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID vaccine.

Introducing the roll-out as a “non-urgent offer of the vaccine,” the Johnson government downplayed the dangers, leading to a situation where nearly three months on only 346,924 or 7 percent out of five million eligible children aged 5-11 have been inoculated.

Pulse magazine noted, “NHS England had previously said that primary care networks (PCNs) would not be expected to lead on the vaccine rollout for five-to-11-year-olds, due to ongoing workforce pressures.”

The JCVI and the Royal College of Paediatricians and Child Health were at pains to stress that COVID is mild in children and the benefits of vaccination minimal.

While vaccines are a valuable tool in preventing serious illness, they do not prevent transmissibility.

A joint study across 130 countries conducted by a team from the University of Manchester and Imperial College London—with results published in BMC Public Health—found the closure of schools and workplaces the most effective measure in reducing deaths during the first wave of the pandemic.

The example of China, with a population of 1.4 billion, underlines this. China pursued a strategy of elimination, and consequently managed to limit the number of COVID fatalities to just 5,226, implementing a gamut of public health measures including mass testing and lockdowns whenever an outbreak occurred.

In UK schools all mitigation measures were lifted as in the wider community, with the virus given free rein. Schools are instructed to record all absences including due to COVID as non-specific illness. Prior to the lifting of all mitigations, headteachers informed parents if someone tested positive in their child’s class. The government did not make public which schools had outbreaks and neither did the trade unions.

Parent and grassroots campaigner Daniella Modus-Cutter took it upon herself to collate data showing a list of schools with outbreaks, to warn Clinically Extremely Vulnerable families like her own so they could shield their children at home. With the ditching of mass testing, there is no longer any reporting of infections in the education sector, making even such efforts made by Daniella impossible and putting more lives at risk.

The full implications of infection and repeated infections with COVID are still emerging. The virus can cause widespread damage, and its assault on the immune system is a possible causative factor in the otherwise inexplicable rise in hepatitis in children after infection. Last week UK child hepatitis cases passed 250 (251 confirmed cases), and 12 children, mostly under-fives, needed a liver transplant.

Children may also develop the rare, but life-threatening condition known as PIMS or MIS-C. The prognosis for those suffering Long COVID is still unknown. But for the education unions COVID is a non- issue.

The press releases of the National Education Union (NEU) makes no mention of COVID after April, when Joint General Secretary Kevin Courtney made a hypocritical statement regarding Long COVID, as he commented on motion 44 passed at the NEU’s annual conference.

Courtney acknowledged that the pandemic “is far from over” and that the prevalence of Long COVID was “highest among those working in teaching and education.” Declaring “employers owe these staff a duty of care” he outlined a series of demands regarding safety which he and the NEU have no intention of fighting for. This would mean mobilising its membership for online learning and the closure of schools until the virus is suppressed. This is anathema to the NEU leader who spent much of the pandemic insisting that children and staff remain in school as he ranted against “education disruption”.

Courtney never mentioned the prevalence of Long COVID among children. On June 16, the i newspaper reported the comments of clinical epidemiologist Dr. Deepti Gurdasani that Long COVID affects “2 percent of young children in the community to a level that is causing restriction of day-to-day activity… A small proportion of millions is still tens of thousands of children… I can’t think of another childhood illness that has had the same impact on children…we’ve done so little to prevent this from mitigations in schools to vaccination.”

The unions played a vital role keeping workplaces open before the virus was suppressed, allowing the emergence of more transmissible variants resistant to antibodies whether through prior infection or vaccination. The education unions were key to keeping schools, colleges and universities open, sharing responsibility for the deaths of over 500 educators.

In January 2021, the NEU released its Education Recovery Plan January 2021, urging the government “to create the conditions to sustain education throughout and beyond the pandemic.”

This was predicated on the fiction that it was possible to reopen schools safely before the virus was eliminated, smoothing the way for the government to end lockdown restrictions then in place. At the time, the UK passed the milestone of 100,000 COVID deaths. Within 18 months that figure has doubled.

Emboldened by the cooperation of the unions, and despite cases of COVID-19 rising among school children, the government is pushing ahead with its threats to fine parents for non-attendance.

In the past week, new measures were announced beginning in September that track electronic attendance records centrally to streamline the issuing of fines for non-attendance, currently up to the head teacher or Local authority.