Poland Government Banach Scholarship Programme 2023

Application Deadline:

31st March 2023 3:00:00 pm of the local time (Warsaw)

Tell Me About Poland Government Banach Scholarship:

The objective of the Programme is to promote socio-economic progress of developing countries by raising the level of knowledge and education of their citizens in the form of scholarships for second-degree studies in Polish or in English at Polish universities supervised by the Minister of Education and Science in the field of engineering and technical sciences, agricultural sciences, exact sciences, and life sciences.

The NAWA scholarship may be applied for by citizens of the following countries: Albania, Angola, Argentina, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Colombia, Ethiopia, Georgia, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Iran, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kosovo, Lebanon, Mexico, Moldova, Montenegro, Nigeria, North Macedonia, Palestine, Peru, the Philippines, Senegal, Serbia, South Africa, Tanzania, Tunisia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam.

In addition, the citizens of Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Montenegro, Moldova, North Macedonia, Serbia, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan can complete second-degree studies in the fields of humanities and social sciences under the Programme, with the exception of philological studies in the field of the beneficiary’s native language.

The Programme is a joint initiative of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange in the form of Polish development aid.

In 2021, the existing scholarship programmes that are a joint initiative of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the National Agency for Academic Exchange NAWA in the form of Polish development aid, i.e. the Banach Scholarship Programme and the Lukasiewicz Scholarship Programme, had merged into one scholarship programme for young people from developing countries who wish to take up studies in Poland.

Which Fields are Eligible?

Engineering and technical sciences, agricultural sciences, exact sciences, and life sciences.

It shall not be possible to participate in the Programme within other fields of science.

What Type of Scholarship is this?

Masters

Who can apply for Poland Government Banach Scholarship Programme?

Foreigners who meet all of the following criteria at the time of the call for proposals may apply for a scholarship under the Programme:

1. are citizens of one of the following countries: Albania, Angola, Argentina, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Montenegro, Ethiopia, Philippines, Georgia, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Iran, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Colombia , Kosovo, Lebanon, North Macedonia, Mexico, Moldova, Nigeria, Palestine, Peru, South Africa, Senegal, Serbia, Tanzania, Tunisia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Vietnam;

2. do not have Polish citizenship and have not applied for Polish citizenship;

3. are planning to start second-cycle studies or a preparatory course in the academic year 2022/23;

4. at the time of submitting the application to the Programme are students of the last year of first-cycle studies in the field of engineering and technical sciences, agricultural sciences as well as exact and natural sciences, or have a first-cycle studies diploma in the above-mentioned fields obtained in a country covered by the Programme not earlier than in 2020. For candidates from Europe, Central Asia and the South Caucasus, first-cycle studies diplomas obtained in the field of social sciences and humanities shall also be allowed;

5. have not obtained a diploma of completion of second-cycle studies or long-cycle  master’s studies; If there is no system of two-cycle studies commonly applied in the candidate’s country of origin, candidates with a diploma of master’s studies or equivalent shall be admitted;

6.  have a documented knowledge of the

a)      Polish language:

·        minimum at the A2 level in case if applicant is planning firstly start the one-year preparatory course and after course continuing education at the second-cycle degree studies in Polish language;

·        minimum at the B1 in case if applicant is planning to start the second-cycle studies in Polish language without one-year preparatory course;

or

b)     English language minimum at the B2 level in case if applicant is planning to start studies in English language.

How are Applicants Selected?

• Recommendation by a diplomatic and consular mission, non-governmental organization or university = 40%
• The arithmetic average of grades for the first-cycle studies on the diploma of completion of the first-cycle studies or on the certificate confirming the arithmetic average of grades = 60%

Which Countries are Eligible?

The NAWA scholarship may be applied for by citizens of the following countries: Albania, Angola, Argentina, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Colombia, Ethiopia, Georgia, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Iran, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kosovo, Lebanon, Mexico, Moldova, Montenegro, Nigeria, North Macedonia, Palestine, Peru, the Philippines, Senegal, Serbia, South Africa, Tanzania, Tunisia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam.

Where will Award be Taken?

Poland

How Many Scholarships will be Given?

Not specified

What is the Benefit of Poland Government Banach Scholarship Programme?

The scholarship shall amount to:

1. PLN 1700 per month during the preparatory course (the scholarship holder shall not have the status of a student, which shall prevent him/her from taking advantage of discounts applicable to students, e.g. in public transport);

2. PLN 1,500 per month during second-cycle studies.

During their studies, the scholarship holders shall also receive:

1. in the first year of studies, the first monthly scholarship increased by PLN 500,

2. in the last year of studies, the last monthly scholarship increased by PLN 500.

In the event of a documented fortuitous event, the NAWA Director may, upon a written request of the Scholarship Holder, increase the scholarship by PLN 500 once.

The NAWA Director’s scholarship shall be paid through the centre which conducts the course or the university where the Scholarship Holder is studying.

How to Apply for Poland Government Banach Scholarship Programme:

• Only in electronic form in the Agency’s ICT system, // FILL IN THE APPLICATION //
• The application shall be prepared in Polish or in English
• It is important to go through all application requirements before applying.
• The results of the call for proposals shall be announced by 15 July 2023

Visit Award Webpage for Details

Study finds people suffering Long COVID have higher rates of cardiovascular events and excess deaths

Benjamin Mateus

As the Biden administration attempts to rapidly draw the curtains on the COVID pandemic, a critical study published last week in the Journal of the American Medical Association has only offered further confirmation that infection with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, has dire long-term implications.

The study in JAMA Health Forum conducted by Dr. Andrea DeVries and colleagues from Elevance Health, Inc. Indianapolis, Indiana, utilizing a large commercial insurance database, found that people who developed the post-acute phase of COVID-19 (Long COVID) suffered increased risk of “cardiovascular events and excess all-cause mortality.”

To conduct their study, the authors compared and contrasted two groups. One comprised 13,435 individuals who had experienced post-COVID conditions and the other 26,870 without evidence of COVID-19. Additional analyses were performed on a subgroup of persons who had experienced Long COVID after severe acute infections that required them to be hospitalized within a month of their infection.

What is significant about their study is how well its subjects matched the US population, allowing one to generalize its findings to the US population.

The compelling investigation conducted by Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly and his team at Washington University in St. Louis last year among veterans highlighted the increased risk of heart attacks associated with COVID infections but had been criticized for the predominance of an older male population (median age 60 and 90 percent male), inevitable given the population from which the data was drawn.

Supporters of the Long Covid awareness organization demonstrate at the White House, Monday, September 19, 2022. [Photo: Kate Travis]

In the latest study, all adult age groups (mean age of 50) are well represented from every region of the country. Women account for 58 percent of the study population. 

The largest age-group is represented by those who are 45 to 64 years-old, comprising nearly 52 percent. More than 40 percent were in the lower socioeconomic indices and over half the subjects had two or more health co-morbidities. Also, approximately 27 percent of those with post-COVID syndrome had been hospitalized after their infection.

The findings were staggering. Among those with Long COVID one month after their infection up to twelve months from first testing positive, rates of cardiac arrhythmias were 2.35-fold higher. Pulmonary embolism, which is a blood clot that travels to the lungs, occurred in eight percent of the Long COVID patients, a rate that was 3.64 times higher than purportedly non-infected individuals. Ischemic strokes occurred at nearly twice the rate, affecting almost 4 percent. Coronary artery disease affected 17 percent of the Long COVID group, nearly twice the rate. Rates of heart failure, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and asthma had all doubled.

Beside the morbidity associated with Long COVID and higher utilization of medical care, there was a pronounced jump in mortality associated with COVID 30 days after the acute phase of infection, with the curves diverging more slowly after day 90 from first infection. One year later, among the Long COVID group, 2.8 percent had died, compared to 1.2 percent in the non-COVID group. This translates to an excess death rate of 16.4 per 1,000 or a rate, more than 2.3 times higher than those that remained uninfected.

Some of the most prevalent symptoms of Long COVID [Photo: WSWS]

The authors note in their summary, “Results from this study [indicate] a statistically significant increased risk for a range of cardiovascular conditions as well as mortality. While these risks were heightened for individuals who experienced a more severe acute episode of COVID-19, it is essential to note that most individuals (72.5 percent) in the cohort did not experience hospitalization during the acute phase. Many of these conditions will have lasting effects on quality of life.” 

Many who died from complications associated with their post-acute COVID syndrome initially were either asymptomatic or had only mild to moderate COVID. It also becomes clear that their death although not characterized by the health system and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as a “COVID” death, when it actually was directly related to complications caused by COVID infection.

Arguably, the alarming findings from this study alone should compel the government and the entire public health structure to resume population-based testing and tracking, including the critical variant sequencing to detect viral evolution. Such information is vital for researchers, epidemiologists, and the medical community as a whole such that they can continue quantifying the impact of COVID. More than funding Long COVID studies, long-term observational studies on the impact of the pandemic over the next several decades will be instructive. 

In light of the present discussion, the relevance of the Al-Aly et al., study in November 2022 on the impact of COVID reinfection has particular significance. A second infection with SARS-CoV-2 caused more harm to organ systems and in the post-acute phase, was more lethal than the first infection, regardless of vaccination status. The accumulating evidence bears out the warnings made by principled scientists early in the course of the pandemic to observe the precautionary principle.

Most egregious and criminal is the part played by the Trump and Biden administrations to dismiss and minimize the conclusions of these evidence-based studies. They sought to ensure business operations and schools returned to normal operations as expeditiously as possible regardless of the dangers it posed to the public. 

In a recent study published in Nature Cardiovascular Research that reviewed excess cardiovascular (CVD) deaths in the US from March 2020 to March 2022, the authors wrote, “That the COVID-19 pandemic indirectly led to increased CVD deaths has been reported in many countries during the initial phase of the pandemic … After more than two years of living with the pandemic we found that, nationwide, increased CVD deaths have persisted throughout the two years and the trajectory of excess CVD deaths was almost coincident with the COVID-19 death waves in the United States.”

Cardiologist and researcher at Scripps Research Translational Institute Dr. Eric Topol recently reviewed the evidence behind heart attacks and strokes following after COVID. In a table format, he summarized six large population-based studies that, when combined, conclusively demonstrate the late impact COVID has on the heart, well after the initial phase of the infection has cleared.

According to a Kaiser Family Foundation report published on January 26, 2023, on the latest Long COVID figures, the number of people currently suffering from Long COVID has declined in the last seven months from 19 percent to 11 percent. Among those who have ever had Long COVID, over half are no longer reporting symptoms. 

Still, if we assume that the vast majority of the population has been previously infected, this roughly amounts to possibly more than 20 million of whom 27 percent characterize their symptoms as “significantly limiting.” This remains on par with the estimates provided by the Brookings Institution in August 2022 that as many as four million people are out of work due to their long-term COVID condition. 

In an opinion piece published in early February in the New York Times, David Wallace-Wells asked why so many Americans were still dying. After taking account that about 1.1 million had officially died during the pandemic, he remarked that the CDC estimated “more than 300,000 additional Americans [had] died over the past three years whom we would not have expected to in more normal times.”

He added, “Over the last three years, the country’s large excess mortality has been mostly attributed to COVID-19. But perhaps a quarter of the total, and at times a larger share than that, has been chalked up to other causes.” This gap Wallace-Wells call the “excess” excess mortality or extra “unexpected deaths.” After explaining that although COVID-19 death tolls have declined due in part to immunity acquired from vaccination and even “natural” immunity from surviving COVID infections, he notes, “But the gap between COVID-19 mortality and overall excess mortality has proved remarkable, and mystifyingly, persistent.”

Although Wallace-Wells offers multiple hypotheses and favors undiagnosed COVID deaths as the most likely cause, the evidence cited by these ongoing studies suggest that the COVID pandemic as a mass-debilitating event destroyed even more lives than publicly acknowledged.

That is why the Biden administration is shutting down all metrics to track COVID infections and ending any mitigation measures against its spread. Having declared COVID a “forever” disease, they now proceed to pretend it no longer exists.

Financial parasitism and the war drive against China

Nick Beams

A recent publication on the Institute for New Economic Thinking web site has provided some important information on how financial parasitism in the high-tech sector of the US economy is a key driving force for the developing war of US imperialism against China.

A worker assembles electronic devices at an Alco Electronics factory in Houjie Town, Dongguan City, in the Guangdong province of China. [AP Photo/Ng Han Guan]

The political establishment, both the Democrat and Republican parties, as well as state intelligence agencies and numerous imperialist think tanks have made it clear that high-tech development in China is an existential threat to the position of the US and must be countered by all means necessary, including war.

The question which immediately arises is why the US is in danger of falling behind?

The article by Marie Carpenter and William Lazonik on the history of the major US corporation, Cisco Systems, described by the authors as “once the global leader in telecommunications systems and the Internet,” provides some answers to this question.

They note that the US has fallen behind global competitors in mobile communication infrastructure and what they call this “national failure” has created socio-economic and geopolitical tensions.

Lazonick has long carried out research into the way in which giant US corporations have engaged in financial operations to boost the profits of shareholders and investors, starving their industries of the necessary funds for research and development.

His basic perspective is that if this process can be slowed or even reversed, then US industry can resume the dominant economic position it held in the past. However, notwithstanding this outlook, based on the conception that the wheel of capitalism development can be turned back so that the US recovers its glory days, the article provides significant information.

The authors maintain the key reason the US has fallen behind is the “dereliction of key US-based corporations to take the lead in making the investments in organizational learning required to generate cutting edge communication-infrastructure products.”

No company in the US “exemplifies this deficiency more than Cisco Systems, founded in 1984 and which had explosive growth in the 1990s” to become “the foremost global enterprise networking vendor in the Internet revolution.”

In the last 20 years, however, the modus operandi of the company has changed significantly.

“Since 2001, Cisco’s top management has chosen to allocate corporate cash to open-market share repurchases—aka stock buybacks—for the purpose of giving manipulative boosts to the company’s stock price rather than make the investments in organizational learning required to become a world leader in communication equipment for the era of 5G and IoT (Internet of Things).”

From October 2001 to October 2022, Cisco spent $152 billion, some 95 percent of its net income over the period, on stock buybacks to prop up its share price.

In addition to the funds spent on “maximizing shareholder value,” Cisco paid out $55.5 billion in dividends to shareholders, representing another 35 percent of net income. Such were the extent of these operations that the company had to sometimes go into debt to finance them.

The boosting of the company’s stock price after 2001 became an important means through which it could take over other companies and pay its top employees and executives.

The article noted that Cisco has not been the only communication-based technology company to go down the road of financialization. Lucent Technologies, at one time an industry leader, went in that direction but failed and was acquired by the French-based firm Alcatel in 2006.

There was a significant incident in the development of high-tech financial parasitism in March 2018 when president Trump issued an executive order on the grounds of “national security” that banned the takeover of the tech giant Qualcomm by Broadcom.

The objection to Broadcom was not that it was a foreign company—it had started operations in Singapore but then relocated to the US—but its record showed that it would further “financialise” Qualcomm operations and drastically reduce spending on research and development.

The authors conclude that “the impact of financialization in the sector has left the United States without the capacity to innovate in the development of a communication infrastructure network.” US policymakers “have chosen to respond to the US loss of competitiveness with aggressive protectionist measures against Chinese competitors.”

These measures started under Trump but have been considerably accelerated under the Biden administration The strategy centres on the banning of vital chip technologies aimed at crippling companies such as Huawei as well as seeking to impose global industry standards favouring US, Japanese and Korean companies.

The authors maintain, however, that this mounting confrontation could have been avoided, saying: “Given its trajectory at the turn of the century, Cisco could have played a central role in an industry policy aimed at maintaining and enhancing US global strength in this critical sector.”

US policymakers “could have recognised the need to develop these innovative capabilities in an era that one might now call America’s ‘lost decades.’ A company such as Huawei did not impose this loss of global leadership on the United States. Hundreds of billions of dollars wasted on stock buybacks did.”

The basic flaw in this analysis, which presents the issue of share buybacks as the result of bad “choices” made by top company officials, is that it ignores the dynamic forces operating in the US economy and its financial system as a whole.

As Lazonick in particular knows well, because he has documented it, the type of parasitic operations carried by Cisco go across broad sections of the US corporate world. This cannot be put down to choices, just as a cancer cluster in any area cannot be ascribed to the health problems of individuals.

Parasitism is the outcome of the domination of finance capital over all sections of the US economy. Corporations are faced with the “choice” that unless they meet its demands for increased shareholder value, they will be the subject of hostile takeovers or restructuring operations.

These parasitic activities express at the highest level the essential logic of the capitalist system which, as Marx drew out, is the transformation of money into still greater quantities of money, not the development of the productive forces or new technologies per se.

This predatory activity, lodged within the very DNA of the capitalist system and the drive for private profit, has consequences as can be seen in the further erosion of the economic position of the US—a decline which it seeks to overcome through military means against what it sees as potentially its greatest rival, China.

US Supreme Court hears case challenging Section 230 online liability shield

Kevin Reed

On February 21, the US Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of Gonzalez v. Google. The lawsuit seeks to hold Google’s YouTube responsible for the death of Nohemi Gonzalez, a 23-year-old college student who was killed during a terrorist attack in Paris in November 2015.

The suit—which was dismissed by the Northern District Court of California and the dismissal then upheld by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals—was brought by the Gonzalez family in 2016. The family asserted that videos produced by ISIS and posted on YouTube were promoted by the platform’s algorithms and, therefore, violated US laws against aiding and abetting terrorists.

The lawsuit asserts that YouTube helped to spread the ISIS video content, contributed to the radicalization of users and their recruitment as terrorists and, therefore, assisted the deadly attack in Paris that killed Nohemi Gonzalez.

For its part, Google has argued that the Gonzalez family’s claims that YouTube gave support to terrorists are based on “threadbare assertions” and “speculative” arguments. The Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union have filed amicus briefs supporting Google on the grounds that the lawsuit represents a threat to First Amendment rights and freedom of speech online.

The legal issue at the heart of the case is the federal law known as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act—part of the Telecommunications Act of 1996—which protects online services from liability for the content posted by users of their platforms. The 1996 law was an update to the Communications Act of 1934 that created the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and regulated telephone, telegraph and radio communications in that era.

The core language of Section 230 is as follows: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” To the extent that the courts have adhered to this aspect of the law, Section 230 has functioned as a shield that protects internet companies from being liable for establishing the legal or illegal character of speech on their platforms.

While the law has significant First Amendment implications, its original intent was to ensure that the opportunity of online and internet technical innovation did not become stifled by costly litigation. The law was passed at a time when the World Wide Web was in its infancy, and proprietary messaging boards and online services such as CompuServe, Prodigy and America Online (AOL) dominated the internet. In 1996, there were 36 million users of online services or 0.9 percent of the world’s population.

The 1996 law was influenced by an environment when information and news distribution were still dominated by print media. In that era, a liability line had been drawn between “publishers” and “distributors” of content such that a publisher was legally responsible for the material being printed while a distributor would be unaware of it and immune from any liability.

During the ensuing 27 years, new forms of online communications have revealed significant contradictions within Section 230. For example, the categories of “interactive computer service,” “publisher or speaker” and “information content provider” have undergone a profound transformation brought on by the wireless and mobile technologies used by more than 5.5 billion people or 69 percent of the world’s population.

In this environment where nearly every individual on earth is an online consumer as well as a “publisher” or “content provider”—with added facilities for “sharing” and/or “liking” the content of others—the rules established by Section 230 have become obsolete. Meanwhile, the demarcation between an “internet computer service” and a “publisher” has been blurred by algorithms that recommend content to users and accelerate circulation, or throttle it, based on what brings in the most advertising revenue.

What the transformation of global online activity and technology since 1996 has demonstrated—and this can never be addressed by the US Supreme Court or Congress—is the need for platforms such as Google, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter to be made public utilities. The continued ownership of these advanced technologies by a handful of billionaires for the purpose of increasing their personal wealth threatens both free speech and the transformation of the platforms into tools of authoritarianism.

The provisions of Section 230 that are the subject of conflict within the political establishment and being argued by the Supreme Court are what are known as “Good Samaritan” protections. Contradicting the shield portion of the law, this requirement demands that online services “remove” or “moderate” content that is deemed “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected.”

In other words, according to this broad definition of what is “objectionable” material, online services are expected to violate the First Amendment and censor content on their platforms—with the proviso that they act “in good faith”—without fear of being prosecuted for acts against free speech.

Along these lines, an aspect of the Gonzalez v. Google case before the Supreme Court is the assertion that YouTube failed to find and remove the objectionable ISIS content. The case says that the platform recommended the terrorist videos through its “user-persuasion” algorithm. These attention-getting-and-holding techniques are not based on an evaluation of the content itself but preoccupied with the advertising revenue they generate.

While the lower courts have upheld the immunity shield of Section 230 in Gonzalez v Google, the decision of the right-wing dominated Supreme Court to hear the case comes at a time when political censorship and control of online content is being sought by all factions of the political establishment.

On this question, one faction of the ruling establishment considers the content moderation rules part of the old, buccaneering, freewheeling and early “Wild West” internet that have become insufficient and need to be abolished in favor of a more effective regime of censorship.

Another faction of the political establishment that is more closely aligned with the tech giants—especially the massive profits they generate for billionaires on Wall Street—is saying that Section 230 can and should be utilized more effectively for censorship. They are arguing that the law does not need to be abolished because the tech platforms are more than capable of doing the job of imposing the regulation and control being demanded by the entire ruling class. These objectives are also behind the various congressional and regulatory initiatives aimed at “taking down big tech.”

The political offensive against both Section 230 and the technology monopolies is directed, above all, against the growth of anti-war, anti-imperialist, left-wing and socialist politics online. It is additionally focused on blocking the working class from using the social media platforms to organize their struggles against the capitalist system.

The major reasons for the ongoing public campaigns against “big tech” are that sections of the intelligence and political establishment are dissatisfied with the progress of self-imposed censorship and fear that large numbers of their employees are sympathetic to left and socialist politics.

Significant in this regard is the censorship by Google, beginning in the spring of 2017, that suppressed socialist, left-wing and alternative news sources. After a campaign was mounted by the WSWS against it, the CEO of Google Sundar Pichai admitted during congressional testimony that the number one search engine was indeed censoring socialists online.

Meanwhile, in the atmosphere of the “fake news” hysteria whipped up during the first year of the coronavirus pandemic and the 2020 presidential elections, far-right Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas said it “behooves” the court to find a case to review Section 230.

Thomas said the courts have broadly interpreted the law to “confer sweeping immunity on some of the largest companies in the world.” In a 2021 opinion, Justice Thomas suggested that Donald Trump’s Twitter account, shut down by the platform after he used it to attempt the overthrow of the US Constitution on January 6, 2021, resembles “a constitutionally protected public forum.”

The news coverage of the arguments before the Supreme Court on February 21 emphasize that it is difficult to determine how the majority will decide on the crucial case or if it will rule at all. As with the original intent of Section 230, several of the justices expressed concerns about the financial impact on the corporations of lifting the liability shield.

A report on CNBC entitled, “Supreme Court justices in Google case express hesitation about upending Section 230,” said, “Justices across the ideological spectrum expressed concern with breaking the delicate balance set by Section 230,” and some justices suggested, “a narrower reading of the liability shield could sometimes make sense.”

Eric Goldman, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law, told CNBC he felt more optimistic that the high court would uphold Section 230 while he was concerned for the future of the law. “I remain petrified that the opinion is going to put all of us in an unexpected circumstance,” Goldman said.

Leaked UK government messages confirm pandemic crimes

Thomas Scripps

Britain’s Daily Telegraph has begun publishing The Lockdown Files, a series of articles based on over 100,000 WhatsApp messages between former Health Secretary Matt Hancock and other leading figures in the government during the first two years of the pandemic.

The messages were given by Hancock to journalist Isabel Oakeshott in an act of supreme political idiocy. He wanted her help writing his autobiography, The Pandemic Diaries, presenting himself as an advocate for public health measures to control the spread of COVID-19—rather than the criminal responsible for tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths.

Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, Matt Hancock gives a live press conference from number 9 Downing Street. 19/05/2021. London, United Kingdom. [Photo by Tim Hammond/No 10 Downing Street/Flickr / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]

But Oakeshott was one of the most vocal anti-lockdown campaigners in the UK and is the partner of Richard Tice, leader of Reform UK—the former Brexit Party “relaunched”, in the words of Nigel Farage in November 2020, “to fight this cruel and unnecessary lockdown.” In an interview with the right-wing GB News platform last March, she described protective masks as “completely unnecessary symbols of fear and repression.”

Oakeshott writes in the Telegraph that she released the messages to “short-circuit” the UK’s “never ending inquiry” into the pandemic response and “avoid a whitewash”—by which she means anything which does not condemn such restrictions as were implemented as a “disaster”. Her primary target is the closure of schools—“Those responsible for school closures should now admit their mistake – and vow never to inflict such harm in the future.”

Allister Health, editor of the Sunday Telegraph, sums up the purpose of The Lockdown Files, insisting that governments should never again “panic, dig out their catastrophically flawed Covid playbooks, and seek to terrorise us into another lockdown, guaranteeing our final moral and financial degradation.”

But the conclusions Oakeshott and the Telegraph want to be drawn are far removed from those the working class will draw from these messages. They so far provide more detail of the decisions which turned care homes into killing fields and reveal the constant efforts of sections of the Tory party to pursue an even more socially murderous course than that which has produced a death toll of over 200,000 people. All that stood in their way was fear of popular opposition.

Nearly 46,000 care home residents were killed by COVID during the first two years of the pandemic, close to a quarter of the total. On March 17, 2020, the government ordered the discharge of thousands of patients from hospitals into care settings. There was no requirement to test for COVID before doing so until April 15. But no policy of blanket testing of care home residents and staff was implemented, despite Hancock being advised to do so.

One of his messages dated April 14 reads, “Chris Whitty [the UK’s Chief Medical Officer] has done an evidence review and now recommends testing of all going into care homes, and segregation whilst awaiting result.” Later the same day, he set out a policy which limited testing only to those coming into a care setting from hospital, not the community: “I do not think the community commitment adds anything and it muddies the waters.”

Testing for those entering from the community was only recommended on August 14. There was no recommendation to care homes to segregate incomers from the community until given the all-clear. Testing of asymptomatic staff and residents only began at the end of April, with regular testing of staff only getting underway in early July.

The brutal ideology underlying this and other failures is made clearest by the leaked messages from Prime Minister Boris Johnson. His words fill in the details of the anti-public health policy he championed, and which were summed up by his angry declaration in October 2020, “No more f**ing lockdowns! Let the bodies pile high in their thousands!”

In one chat with Whitty and the Chief Scientific Officer Sir Patrick Vallance on August 26, 2020, Johnson misreads an article from the Financial Times as saying the overall fatality rate of COVID was 0.04 percent (in fact this was a probability figure, equating to 4 percent). He writes sneeringly that this is about “one in two thousand. And I seem to remember that when the plague began we thought the fatality rate was one in a hundred.”

He goes on stupidly, “So if all 66 m[illion] people in the UK were to be infected we could expect 33,000 deaths. And we have already had 41k. Is that why the death rate is going down? Is it possible that covid is starting to run out of potential victims?”

Informed that the overall mortality rate was between 0.4 and 1 percent, rising to 6 percent for older age groups, Johnson is unmoved. “If I were an 80 year old and I was told that the choice was between destroying the economy and risking my exposure to a disease that I had a 94 percent chance of surviving, I know what I would prefer.”

The callous disregard for the lives of thousands of elderly people was a running theme. Earlier in the month, Johnson had written exasperatedly, “If you are over 65 your risk of dying from covid is probably as big as your risk of falling down stairs. And we don’t stop older people from using stairs.”

He made this point to argue for an article published in the Spectator, “Herd immunity is still key in the fight against Covid-19,” written by the anti-lockdown advocate and Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) signatory Martin Kulldorf, who later that year defended President Trump’s “let it rip” COVID adviser Scott Atlas.

Johnson had met with other signatories to the pseudo-scientific, anti-public health GBD in September 2020—Professor Sunetra Gupta and Sweden’s state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell. The messages show he stayed in close contact with these circles. In November that year, he sent a note that he was “on a call” with Carl Heneghan, who sits with GBD authors Gupta, Kulldorf and Professor Jay Bhattacharya on the scientific advisory board of the anti-lockdown Collateral Global.

Johnson used their authority in an ultimately failed attempt to stop the November lockdown—though it was limited to the point it allowed a massive winter wave of infections to develop immediately afterwards. Over 56,000 people died in the two months from December 2020 to the end of January 2021.

It might have been even worse. With cases skyrocketing at the end of December, Education Secretary Gavin Williamson was, in Hancock’s words, fighting “tooth and nail” and “going absolutely gangbusters” to have schools open for the new term. The health secretary worried about “a policy car crash when the kids spread the disease in January.”

In the end, schools were closed after just one partially attended day when it became clear educators would overwhelmingly refuse to go in, and many parents refuse to send their children. Williamson and Hancock had complained to each other a few months before, “What a bunch of absolute arses the teaching unions are”-“I know they really really do just hate work” after battles over school reopenings and delaying A-Level tests.

Messages refer to polling showing more than “50 percent of the public want the same *or stronger* lockdown” in April 2020, and that “80 percent of the public support the lockdown—there is no public clamour to start lifting measures,” in January 2021. When Johnson pushed to relax the first lockdown in the summer of 2020, he was warned “the whole package will be too far ahead of public opinion.”

The Telegraph cynically reports on concerns raised in government about the hardships caused by lockdowns—particularly to the elderly left isolated and children who education and social development was impeded—using these to decry the measure.  

But the leaked messages show that these costs of implementing restrictions were exacerbated precisely because the government was so determined to avoid any public health measures at all, meaning those that were forced to be enacted by catastrophic rates of infection were poorly implemented and under-resourced. Schools had to be repeatedly closed because the government never took the necessary action to fully suppress and control the virus.

Inequality in Sweden reaches highest level in decades

Bran Karlsson

New data from the Swedish government’s statistics agency—Statistics Sweden—shows that income inequality in the country is now higher than at any other point in time since the agency began collecting this information in 1975.

Election posters of the Sweden Democrats are put up by a party member in Stockholm, Sweden, in 2018. The poster for the Sept. 9, 2018 election read 'Welfare must work' and 'law and order'. (AP Photo/Michael Probst)

Sweden’s Gini-coefficient in 2020 was 0.31. Then in 2021—the most recent year the agency has released data for—it rose to 0.34. The Gini-coefficient is a measure used to calculate inequality. Its scale ranges from 0, complete equality, to 1, complete inequality. For comparison, Sweden’s Gini-coefficient was just 0.2 in the late 1970s.

The significant year-on-year increase in 2021 was the result of a surge of profits for the Swedish ruling class and upper-middle class, which was directly tied to the Swedish ruling elite’s spearheading of the criminal “herd immunity” response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

In 2021, as the pandemic raged around Europe and the United States, major central banks pursued a combination of ultra-low interest rates and cash injections into financial markets. This policy of easy money inflated stock portfolios, greatly benefiting the wealthy and super-rich.

While this was a global trend, in Sweden it was particularly pronounced. The top ten percent of Swedish society increased their income by more than 16 percent in 2021, largely due to selling stock market shares and other equity.

While the Swedish Social Democratic government promoted the uncontrolled spread of COVID-19, the Swedish central bank—the Riksbank—funneled 700 billion kronor (about €63 billion) into the financial markets by means of asset purchases. The Social Democratic government, ruling with the support of the Greens and Left Party, defended both measures—the cash injections and the policy of “herd immunity”—as necessary to protect the economy.

The gains of those at the top of Swedish society during the pandemic stand in stark contrast to the devastating impact of COVID on poorer sections of the population.

Sweden had—relative to its Nordic neighbors—one of the highest death rates due to COVID-19. The government has effectively stopped tracking the pandemic in any meaningful way, as part of global efforts to pretend it is over.

Meanwhile, the increasing cost of living weighs heavily on the population. In December of last year, the inflation rate in Sweden stood at 12.3 percent, year on year. Food and energy price increases have hit workers particularly hard. For example, in 2022, the cost of butter increased by about 25 percent, and that of meat by 24 percent.

The pandemic accelerated a steady growth in social inequality that has been under way in Sweden over the past four decades. As early as 2011, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development noted that Sweden had experienced the fastest growth in income inequality in the OECD since the mid 1980s.

The working class in Sweden, as in many other relatively wealthy, small northern European countries, achieved significant concessions from the ruling class in the post-war period. Sweden’s comprehensive social welfare programmes, referred to as the “folkhemet” or “people’s home,” were bound up with the restabilisation of capitalism under the auspices of US imperialism, which created temporary conditions for the implementation of reforms within the framework of the nation state.

However, for decades Sweden’s public services and social programmes have been under relentless attack by successive social democratic and conservative governments. Following the Nordic banking crisis of the early 1990s, a right-wing Moderate Party-led coalition under Karl Bildt and a Social Democrat-Green coalition between 1994 and 2006 enforced major attacks on pension rights and the privatisation of public services.

The right-wing parties returned to power in 2006, unleashing the largest wave of privatisations in the country’s history and undermining unemployment insurance. When the Social Democrats returned to power in 2014, they entered an agreement with the right-wing parties to implement their budgetary framework for public spending austerity in exchange for a commitment from the right not to bring down the Social Democrat-Green minority coalition government.

In 2022, the Guardian estimated that about 14 percent of the country’s 10.5 million inhabitants live below the official poverty line—measured as 40 percent of the median income. A 2018 estimate from the European Anti-Poverty Network placed the real poverty rate, what they call the “social exclusion” level, at 18.3 percent. However, when looking just at those who live in Sweden but were born in another country, this rose to nearly 40 percent—reflecting the large number of immigrants and refugees who live in poverty, especially in Sweden’s larger cities.

Last year, the head of Oxfam in Sweden, Suzanne Standfast, said, “Sweden is one of the OECD countries whose economic inequalities have increased the most in recent decades.”

She explained that while Sweden had a high tax burden, “assets are taxed considerably lower in Sweden than in most other countries. This means that people with a low income sometimes pay a higher percentage of tax than people with greater assets.”

Standfast also noted that in 2019, the Social Democratic government, under the so-called January Agreement, abolished the värnskatt—a tax on high income earners.

The growth of income inequality in Sweden, and the declining conditions of its working class, will only be exacerbated as the Swedish government, with the full support of the Social Democratic opposition, takes measures to dramatically increase military spending. Sweden plans to increase its military budget by 64 percent between 2022 and 2028 as part of plans to join NATO and support the US-NATO war on Russia in Ukraine. 

The country’s new right-wing government, which relies on the far-right Sweden Democrats for a parliamentary majority, has significantly increased military aid to Ukraine. In January, Sweden announced it would send its high-tech Archer artillery system to Ukraine—one of the most advanced mobile artillery weapon systems. This was part of a larger package, valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars, of anti-tank missiles and armored vehicles.

The Swedish government has so far passed 10 military support packages for Ukraine. On the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which was provoked by the Western powers, Swedish Defence Minister Pål Jonson announced that Stockholm will send up to 10 Leopard II tanks as part of its 11th military aid package. Sweden is also cooperating closely with Germany to supply components for the IRIS-T anti-aircraft system.