End of COVID-19 Emergency Declarations is Shortsighted and Premature

Haley Brown & Tori Coan

In January 2023, the Biden administration announced its plans to end two COVID-19-related emergency declarations — a “public health emergency” declaration and a “national emergency” declaration — on May 11, 2023. That same month, the Administration also opposed two GOP-led resolutions to end both declarations before May 11, calling the resolutions “a grave disservice to the American people”. Last week, on April 10, 2023, the Administration changed course, as President Biden signed a GOP-led resolution to end the COVID-19 national emergency. The related, but distinct, public health emergency remains in effect until May 11, 2023. Ending either emergency is premature and shortsighted given the lingering threat of COVID-19 to public health. Doing so also lends legitimacy to pandemic minimization efforts, instead of reckoning with the danger COVID-19 continues to pose.

The national and public health emergency declarations are among the few remaining formal components of the US’ strategy to combat COVID-19. Both declarations have granted federal, state, and local governments significant flexibility to expand, and more inclusively administer, social programs for the duration that the orders are in effect. The end of the national emergency means an end to extended COBRA healthcare coverage, which will sunset on July 10, 2023. The end of the public health emergency next month, meanwhile, will have a wider reaching impact on programs like Medicaid/CHIP, Medicare, SNAP, and many others. Ending the public health emergency could also impact access to telehealth services, and will end the requirement that private insurers cover COVID related healthcare costs such as vaccines, tests, and treatment.

COVID-19 continues to kill, disable, and disrupt to an extent that would not have been tolerated prior to the pandemic. The CDC reports that over 3,000 people in the United States died from COVID-19 in the last two weeks, and more than 40,000 people have died in 2023 thus far. To put this in perspective, nearly two and half times as many people have died of COVID-19 in just the last month than died in the 9/11 attacks over twenty years ago. While the death rate has come down from its peak in January 2021, it is still at a level that would have been considered alarming and unacceptable in 2019. Meanwhile, worrying rates of excess mortality and shifts in reporting mean that official statistics may be undercounting COVID-19’s impact. Research increasingly implicates COVID-19 as a contributing factor in deaths attributed to other causes, and repeat infections may be especially dangerous.

The focus on acute deaths also discounts the disease’s lingering impacts, which can be debilitating. Experts increasingly acknowledge the COVID-19 pandemic as a mass disabling event. Symptoms that appear or persist after an acute COVID-19 infection are colloquially referred to as “Long COVID.” Commonly reported Long COVID symptoms include difficulty concentrating or thinking (“brain fog”), difficulty breathing, crushing fatigue, post-exertional symptom exacerbation, and muscle and joint pain, among others.

As of January 2023, 28 percent of people in the United States who have ever had COVID-19 have experienced Long COVID symptoms. Studies suggest that the risk of Long COVID increases with each reinfection. In Fall 2022, nearly 17.2 million adults in the US said they were experiencing Long COVID symptoms. Of these, 13.7 million reported that their symptoms disrupted their daily activities, a measure commonly used as a proxy for disability. Long COVID may explain the rising tide of disability among working-age adults in the United States. And despite the tendency to dismiss COVID as something only “the vulnerable” need fear, the truth is that all of us are vulnerable. The dismissal of our shared risk and responsibility is a disservice to everyone, especially those whose health problems persist.

If the focus were on protecting the health of the population, the end of both the national emergency and the public health emergency would coincide with the neutralization of the threat to which they were meant to respond. This is not what has taken place. Policymakers are attempting to end a public health crisis by decree rather than taking meaningful steps to address the problem.

Some progress has undoubtedly been made with vaccines and antivirals like Paxlovid. Other pharmaceutical tools, like monoclonal antibodies, have fallen in the face of variants and are no longer authorized as effective treatments. This includes Evusheld, which once offered immunocompromised people some additional protection against COVID-19 infection but lost effectiveness as the virus mutated. Variant-proof non-pharmaceutical forms of mitigation, such as respirators and improved indoor air quality, have remained lacking or been phased out in many places, even in medical facilities.

The end of the public health emergency will further shrink the toolbox for many by turning COVID-19 vaccines, tests, and treatment over to the commercial market. This will put these lifesaving medical items out of reach for many, and especially for the 27.2 million uninsured and 50 million underinsured people in the US. The rush to end the declared emergency jeopardizes the security of even the minimal policy gains enabled by the emergency orders.

The premature ending of the national and health emergency declarations threatens the health and safety of millions of US residents. It also undermines the progress made in response to the pandemic in many areas of social policy that are a testament to what is possible when the force of the US government is aimed at improving the lives of everyday working families. Research finds huge benefits resulting from COVID-related social policy reforms like expanding SNAP benefits, implementing continuous Medicaid enrollment, expanding the Child Tax Credit, and eviction moratoria. The decision by the Biden administration to accede to Republican demands to end the national emergency adds legitimacy to GOP efforts to roll back these milestone achievements.

Despite this disappointing news, there are some bright spots. State and local governments with unspent American Rescue Plan State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds (SLFRF) still have time to invest those resources to fortify their public sectors. This includes, but is not limited to, state and local public health infrastructure. The Biden Administration has also announced a new initiative to expedite the development of next generation COVID-19 vaccines, ones that are better equipped to reduce transmission and harder for new variants to outpace.

These promising new developments are a great start, but lawmakers must do more to ensure everyone can be ‘Davos safe’. Following the lead of the Biden Administration’s Clean Air in Buildings Challenge, stricter indoor air quality standards would reduce transmission of SARS-COV-2 and other viruses in shared indoor spaces, with a host of other health benefits besides. Paid family and medical leave would cut down on workplace transmission and allow people to fully recover from illnesses and to safely care for loved ones. Better access to vaccines, tests, and treatments — regardless of ability to pay — would help control transmission and ensure equitable medical treatment for those who contract COVID-19. Treatment and care for those with Long COVID and other complex chronic conditions must become more of a priority, and Long COVID research must include patient voices. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but collectively these things would go a long way towards keeping people safer and healthier.

Further dismantling the US’ limited public health infrastructure and rolling back pandemic policy gains leads to a harsh new normal: one that bakes in more suffering and more marginalization in a country that has already seen tremendous slides in life expectancy. A better way forward is possible. The United States can and should do more to protect people and invest in public health. Prematurely sunsetting some of the few remaining pandemic countermeasures is a step in the wrong direction.

What’s Driving the Conflict in Sudan

Alex de Waal

Dozens have been killed in armed clashes in the Sudanese capital Khartoum following months of tension between the military and the powerful paramilitary group Rapid Support Forces (RSF). Behind the tensions is a disagreement over the integration of the paramilitary group into the armed forces – a key condition of a transition agreement that’s never been signed but has been adhered to by both sides since 2021.

General Mohamed Hamdan Dagolo, better known as Hemedti, is the leader of the RSF. He is a key mover in the fast-escalating civil war, as he has been in other key moments in Sudan’s recent history.

Hemedti’s Rapid Support Forces is led by Darfurian Arabs known as Janjaweed. The term refers to the armed groups of Arabs from Darfur and Kordofan in western Sudan. Drawn from the far west of the country’s periphery, they have – in a mere decade – become the dominant power in Khartoum. And Hemedti has become the face of Sudan’s violent, political marketplace.

I have been a scholar of Sudan for decades. During 2005-06, I was seconded to the African Union mediation team for Darfur and from 2009-11 served as senior adviser to the African Union High-Level Implementation Panel for Sudan, in the lead-up to the independence of South Sudan. My most recent book, co-authored with Justin Lynch, examines Sudan’s unfinished democracy.

Hemedti’s career is an object lesson in political entrepreneurship by a specialist in violence. His conduct and (as of now) impunity are the surest indicator that politics of the mercenary kind that have long defined the Sudanese periphery, have been brought home to the capital city.

Coming in from the periphery

Hemedti is from Sudan’s furthest peripheries, an outsider to the Khartoum political establishment. His grandfather, Dagolo, was leader of a subclan that roamed across the pastures of Chad and Darfur. Young men from these camel-herding, landless and marginalised group became a core element of the Arab militia that led Khartoum’s counterinsurgency in Darfur from 2003.

A school dropout turned trader, Hemedti has no formal education. The title ‘General’ was awarded on account of his proficiency as a commander in the Janjaweed brigade in Southern Darfur at the height of the 2003-05 war. A few years later, he joined a mutiny against the government, negotiated an alliance with the Darfurian rebels, and threatened to storm the the government-held city of Nyala.

Soon Hemedti cut a deal with the government. Khartoum would settle his troops’ unpaid salaries and compensation for the wounded and killed. He got promotion to general and a handsome cash payment.

After returning to the Khartoum payroll, Hemedti proved his loyalty. President Omar al-Bashir who ruled Sudan from 1993 to April 2019 when he was deposed became fond of him, sometimes appearing to treat him like the son he had never had.

But, in the days after Bashir was overthrown, some of the young democracy protesters camped in the streets around the Ministry of Defence embraced him as the army’s new look.

A country in his pocket

Back in the fold, Hemedti ably used his commercial acumen and military prowess to build his militia into a force more powerful than the waning Sudanese state.

Al-Bashir constituted the Rapid Support Forces as a separate unit in 2013, initially to fight the rebels of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army-North in the Nuba Mountains. The new force came off second best. But, with a fleet of new pickup trucks with heavy machine guns, it soon became a force to be reckoned with, fighting a key battle against Darfurian rebels in April 2015.

Following the March 2015 Saudi-Emirati military intervention in Yemen, Sudan cut a deal with Riyadh to deploy Sudanese troops in Yemen. One of the commanders of the operation was General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan who has chaired the Transitional Military Council since 2019. But most of the fighters were Hemedti’s RSF. This brought hard cash direct into Hemedti’s pocket.

And in November 2017, Hemedti’s forces took control of the artisanal gold mines in Jebel Amer in Darfur — Sudan’s single largest source of export revenues. This followed the defeat and capture of his arch-rival Musa Hilal, who rebelled against Al-Bashir.

Suddenly, Hemedti had his hands on the country’s two most lucrative sources of hard currency.

Hemedti is adopting a model of state mercenarism familiar to those who follow the politics of the Sahara. The late President Idriss Déby of Chad rented out his special forces for counter-insurgencies on the French or U.S. payroll in much the same manner. One can expect to see RSF troops deployed to Libya some day.

On the other hand, with the routine deployment of paramilitaries to do the actual fighting in Sudan’s wars at home and abroad, the Sudanese army has become akin to a vanity project. It is the proud owner of extravagant real estate in Khartoum, with impressive tanks, artillery and aircraft. But it has few battle-hardened infantry units. Other forces have stepped into this security arena, including the operational units of the National Intelligence and Security Services, and paramilitaries such as special police units — and the RSF.

Reaping the whirlwind

But there’s also a twist to the story. Every ruler in Sudan, with one notable exception, has hailed from the the heartlands of Khartoum and the neighboring towns on the Nile. The exception is the Khalifa Abdullahi “al-Ta’aishi” who was a Darfurian Arab. His armies provided the majority of the force that conquered Khartoum in 1885. The riverian elites remember the Khalifa’s rule (1885-98) as a tyranny. They are terrified it may return.

Hemedti is the face of that nightmare, the first non-establishment ruler in Sudan for 120 years. Despite the grievances against Hemedti’s paramilitaries, he is still recognised as a Darfurian and an outsider to the Sudanese establishment.

When the Sudanese regime sowed the wind of the Janjaweed in Darfur in 2003, they least expected to reap the whirlwind in their own capital city. In fact the seeds had been sown much earlier. Previous governments adopted the war strategy in southern Sudan and southern Kordofan of setting local people against one another. This was preferred to sending units of the regular army -— manned by the sons of the riverain establishment — into peril.

Hemedti is that whirlwind. But his ascendancy is also, indirectly, the revenge of the historically marginalised. The tragedy of the Sudanese marginalised is that the man who is posing as their champion is the ruthless leader of a band of vagabonds, who has been supremely skillful in playing the transnational military marketplace.

Anti-China AUKUS pact fuels tensions in the Pacific

John Braddock

A group of former leaders of Pacific island nations has condemned the AUKUS security pact between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States which, along with other US-led “architecture” including the Quad (Australia, India, Japan and US), has been formed to prepare for war against China. 

Former Kiribati President Anote Tong, spokesperson for the Pacific Elders' Voice, and former Palauan President Thomas Esang "Tommy" Remengesau Jr. during a visit to Australia, September 8, 2022. [Photo: Pacific Elders' Voice Facebook]

Washington views China as the major obstacle to its global imperialist hegemony and intends to roll back China’s growing influence using military force. Warmongering by the US and its allies is destabilising the Pacific region, where small and impoverished island nations rely heavily on trade and economic aid from China. Bloody battles were fought across the Pacific during World War II and now the region is being dragged into an approaching Third World War.

In a damning criticism of AUKUS issued on April 11, the Pacific Elders’ Voice, which includes ex-leaders of Kiribati, the Marshall Islands, Tuvalu and Palau, said Canberra was deliberately exploiting a loophole in the anti-nuclear agreement, the Rarotonga Treaty. Signed in 1985, the treaty formalises a nuclear weapons-free zone in the South Pacific but permits the transit of nuclear-powered craft.

The group declared that AUKUS signals a greater militarisation by joining Australia to the networks of US military bases in the northern Pacific. It is “triggering an arms race, by bringing war much closer to home,” they stated.

Under the deal, Canberra will pay up to $368 billion over the next three decades to establish a fleet of nuclear-powered submarines. The former Pacific leaders said that the “staggering” amount of money committed to AUKUS “flies in the face of Pacific islands countries which have been crying out for climate change support.”

Addressing the current crop of Pacific politicians, the group warned: “We are urging the Pacific Island Leaders to take a decisive and ethical stand on this important matter and not to be subsumed by the AUKUS nations. This does not only put our region at greater risk of a nuclear war but the real environmental impacts arising out of any incidents will be huge.” 

Former Kiribati president Anote Tong told Radio NZ it was disappointing that Australia will commit such vast sums to military expansionism. For the Pacific, the “threat that we see challenging our future existence… is climate change,” he said. “It is not China or what is happening on the other side of the world.”

Tong added that attempts by the Australian government to reassure regional leaders that AUKUS would not breach the Rarotonga agreement demonstrated a “lack of consultation” on Canberra’s part. Former Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) secretary general Meg Taylor added her voice, saying there was a “serious lack of consultation” within the region as it is caught between the superpowers.

The Pacific Elders’ Voice also raised concerns about New Zealand’s ambitions to join the trilateral security deal, saying the PIF should discourage it from doing so. The New Zealand Labour government is considering joining AUKUS as a non-nuclear partner, which will include sharing advanced military technologies such as artificial intelligence.

Australia and New Zealand are ramping up military co-operation amid US-led escalations. Last week, the two nations’ army chiefs signed a “Plan ANZAC” agreement, described as a “broader defence relationship” enhancing combat “interoperability,” joint operations and regenerating “land combat capability.” The pair are heading to Fiji and Vanuatu to discuss with their counterparts how to “confront security challenges in the region.”

The AUKUS deal has fueled tensions and divisions among current Pacific leaders. A few have publicly supported Australia’s plans, including Fiji’s recently elected Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka and Palau’s pro-US President Surangel Whipps Jr.

PIF chairman and Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown said he had been reassured by US officials that AUKUS will “honour” the Treaty of Rarotonga after he initially said it would contravene it. Brown earlier told the Cook Islands News the treaty, which includes Australia and New Zealand, was framed to de-escalate “Cold War tensions between the major superpowers. This AUKUS arrangement seems to be going against it.”

The Cook Islands and China are preparing to sign a bilateral strategic partnership this year, with key areas of cooperation to include support for economic recovery following the crisis triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic, inter-island transport and air connectivity and future “economic and political cooperation.” 

The Solomon Islands government is also pushing for the Melanesian Spearhead Group of Vanuatu, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and New Caledonia’s pro-independence FLNKS movement, to create a sub-regional “security” framework which would also involve Beijing.

Any such moves run directly counter to the plans of the US administration for the region. Last September, US President Joe Biden convened a summit with 14 Pacific leaders at the State Department to push through a “partnership” agreement designed to undermine Beijing and advance Washington’s campaign to reassert its imperialist hegemony. Biden bluntly told the gathering: “The security of America, quite frankly, and the world depends on your security and the security of the Pacific islands.”

With the PIF summit due to be held in the Cook Islands in July and reports that Biden might attend, a diplomatic full-court press is under way to cajole and bully any dissent over AUKUS. Visits to the region were conducted last week by Australia’s Foreign Minister Penny Wong, New Zealand’s Deputy Prime Minister Carmel Sepuloni and Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta, as well as UK Foreign Secretary James Cleverly.

Wong was visiting the remaining two of 17 Pacific nations she had not already been to in her first year in office: New Caledonia and Vanuatu. Respective leaders of both have been vocal opponents of AUKUS. 

New Caledonia’s Kanak President Louis Mapou said AUKUS raised “many questions” among Melanesian nations who advance a “friends to all, enemies to none” foreign policy. Tuvalu’s Foreign Minister Simon Kofe bluntly declared: “The 2011 Fukushima disaster highlighted the danger of nuclear power to human health and the environment. As we discuss nuclear powered submarines in the Pacific we must also address concerns about increased militarisation of the region.”

Speaking to New Caledonia’s Congress on Thursday, Wong urged the Pacific countries to “stay united” in the face of great power competition, emphasising “we believe a united Pacific Islands Forum is central to protecting our shared interests.”

At the Australian National Press Club days before her departure Wong had been more direct. She portrayed her visits to the Pacific “family” as liberating missions to free the region from alleged Chinese domineering and spoke aggressively of “shaping” the region in the interests of Australian imperialism. 

The focus of Sepuloni’s visit was the Solomon Islands, which last year caused alarm in Washington, Canberra and Wellington by signing a strategic agreement with Beijing. The pact saw threats by Washington to stage an armed intervention in the event that a Chinese military base was opened in the strategically significant country.

Solomon Islands’ Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare continues to come under strong pressure. Cleverly’s own two-day visit there was the first ever by a UK foreign secretary and came as NATO powers are asserting their interests in the region on the back of the escalating war in Ukraine. Cleverly had earlier signed a new defence agreement with Papua New Guinea, whose military forces the UK is already training.

The Solomon Islands and Kiribati have meanwhile been identified in a new “Defund China’s Allies Act” put before the US Congress by a group of far-right Republican lawmakers this month. The measure aims to prohibit foreign assistance, including humanitarian aid, to countries not recognising “sovereignty” of Taiwan or who offer political support to the People’s Republic of China.

Tens of millions at risk as new COVID-19 cases explode in India

Wasantha Rupasinghe & Benjamin Mateus

Shattering the lies promulgated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s far-right BJP government that the pandemic in India has been “successfully controlled,” new COVID infections have been accelerating across the country with daily cases consistently exceeding 10,000 all last week.

Healthcare workers prepare for surge of COVID-19 cases at a hospital in Mumbai, India, Monday, April. 10, 2023. [AP Photo/Rafiq Maqbool]

On April 20, India recorded 12,580 new COVID cases, the highest figure in over eight months. With this, the total official number of COVID cases has reached 44.85 million. Currently, there are 65,286 active cases being followed. 

These figures represent a colossal under-reporting of the actual toll of the virus, given that the entire surveillance apparatus for tracking and reporting on the pandemic has been dismantled. Even during previous waves of COVID-19, when there was some testing infrastructure, subsequent serological surveys revealed that the vast majority of cases were never officially detected.

The present increase in the number of COVID-19 cases is directly bound up with the rapidly proliferating lineage of the Omicron virus labeled XBB.1.16. This sub-variant first drew international attention in India earlier this year. It was placed on the WHO’s list of variants “to watch” on March 22. Along with India, it has been detected in over 33 countries. 

Last week, the World Health Organization (WHO) upgraded the new variant to the status of a “variant of interest,” given both its more infectious nature compared to other Omicron subvariants and its highly immune-evading characteristics. 

The international health agency noted, “At present, there is no early signal of an increase in severity. The initial risk assessment is ongoing and is expected to be published in the coming days.” 

Data on the XBB.1.6 from Seito Labs did indicate a higher rate of death and serious illness with this variant. However, due to the high vaccination rates and previous infections, the impact of the virus is blunted for much of the population.

But it leaves those unvaccinated, those in poor health, and the elderly at high risk of severe disease. For India, those endangered number hundreds of millions of people—most desperately poor, living in isolated rural areas or urban slums, and with little or no access to even barebones health care services.

The rising infection numbers in India threaten not only the people of the subcontinent, but the entire world. Hundreds of millions of new cases mean hundreds of millions of new opportunities for SARS-CoV-2 to mutate into new, more infectious and more deadly forms.

The Delta variant developed in India in 2021 at the very point where the Modi government was proclaiming victory over the virus. A similar danger now exists with XBB.1.16. The large number of subvariants of the coronavirus shows that it retains its ability to mutate rapidly, with natural evolutionary pressures giving the advantage to mutations that are more vaccine-evading.

As in other countries, the Indian corporate media have latched on to comments from official government sources downplaying the significance of the XBB.1.16 upsurge to inure the population to accept as benign continued infection with a deadly and harmful virus.

For instance, India Today reports health ministry sources as telling it that XBB is not a “dangerous variant.” Other media outlets are repeating this claim, advising people not to “panic.”  

The Indian ruling elites have a notorious history of ignoring prior warnings of onrushing disasters, as seen in the pandemic’s devastating second wave in spring 2021, which was driven by the highly pathogenic Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2. 

Starting from early April 2021, to the peak of the second wave about April 30, India reported over 400,000 new daily cases and over 4,000 daily deaths. Scenes of masses of bodies piled onto funeral pyres shocked the world and demonstrated that the death toll was far higher than officially acknowledged.

Figures on excess deaths, subsequently, showed that the 2021 COVID wave was one of the deadliest public health disasters in the country’s history. At the time, Reuters reported that warnings had been made by a forum of scientific advisers to Indian officials in early March of a new and more contagious variant of the coronavirus taking hold in the country. But these warnings were totally ignored by the Modi government. Indeed, as the Delta variant surged across the country in mid-April, and at a time when shortages of ICU beds, critical drugs, oxygen, and medical personnel were already being widely reported, Modi took to the airwaves to vow that he would “save” the country from lockdown—not the deadly virus.

A similar refusal to admit plain facts, in order to avoid spreading “alarm,” characterizes the government’s response to the current COVID crisis. Currently, India’s daily positivity rate stands at 5.46 percent while the weekly positivity rate is 5.32 percent. Both numbers indicate the infection is spreading once again, but greatly underestimate its impact.

The rates in India’s national capital Delhi and Maharashtra, where Mumbai, the financial capital, is located, are far higher. Both areas were centers of the 2021 Delta outbreak as well.

Last Tuesday, Delhi reported 1,537 fresh infections, up a staggering 430 percent in only three weeks. The positivity rate of 26.54 percent implies that there is a high number of undetected transmissions taking place, which means that without rapidly re-initiating mitigation measures, a significant proportion of the population stands to become infected again. Maharashtra recorded 1,100 new coronavirus infections last Wednesday and 1,113 on Thursday.

The number of new COVID-19 deaths last Thursday was said to be 29, which is understood to be a mere fraction of the actual figures. Without proper testing and the confirming of previous COVID infections that will have left patients’ health compromised, deaths from respiratory and cardiovascular collapse will be palmed off as solely due to the prior medical conditions of those who perished. The contribution to those deaths from the government’s grossly negligent response to the pandemic will be erased. 

Overall, the official COVID-19 death toll in India since 2020 stands at an astronomical figure of over half a million preventable deaths. Yet, according to a July 2021 report by the US-based Center for Global Development, the real death toll of COVID-19 pandemic in India was already between three and five million, or ten times the official figure. 

Neither Prime Minister Modi nor any other Indian political leader has ever expressed an iota of concern over the massive death toll, revealing their indifference to the fate of millions of Indian toilers. They only display publicly the real attitude of capitalist governments all over the world, which have declared the pandemic officially over to ensure the working class is producing profits at full capacity regardless of the real conditions on the ground.

India long ago abandoned even limited measures to curb the virus spreading, while rhetorically attempting to keep face with the concerns of the population. 

On March 22, chairing a “high-level review meeting,” Modi remarked that the COVID-19 pandemic “is far from over”, and directed officials to increase whole genome sequencing of COVID positive samples. He also stressed the need to “ensure the availability of the required drugs and logistics for influenza and COVID-19 cases across health facilities.” For this he asked authorities to carry out “mock drills” in hospitals to “ensure that our hospitals are ready.”  

However, he failed to announce any enhanced funding for these healthcare facilities. In reality, the Modi government has taken pains to reduce the national healthcare budget, which is among lowest across the world, while continuing to rapidly expand India’s military spending. In 2022, India’s military spending was the world’s third largest  

According to the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER), India’s oldest and largest, non-profit, economic policy research think tank, the share of health in the aggregate federal and state budgets in 2022-23 stood at 2.4 percent of the GDP. This is a sharp reduction from 3.6 percent in 2021-22. India’s healthcare spending as a percentage of GDP is well below the average for the world, and for other developing countries. 

And despite the recent rise in COVID infections and concerns raised by the WHO on the nature of XBB.1.16, the government is not implementing universal mask mandates, school closures, or providing free mass testing to track and trace these new infections. Health Minister Mansukh Mandaviya adopted the usual delaying tactics by asking states to identify hotspots and ramp up testing in those places, allowing the wave to get ahead of public health efforts. With a fast-moving virus, immediate and broad-based response is essential.

In defiance of the government’s “don’t panic” injunctions, Dr. Randeep Guleria, the former director of Delhi’s All India Institute of Medical Science (AIIMS), speaking to India Today TV on April 17, advised people to mask up in indoor spaces with poor ventilation and indoor crowded public areas. 

Endorsing remarks made by the TV presenter, Sneha Mordani, who suggested that the current daily cases around 10,000 is a “gross underestimation,” Dr. Guleria said: “We are really underestimating [the] number of cases… It could be many times more [than] what we are currently testing because many people are not getting tested. We really don’t know how many people [are] actually positive.” He proposed to increase testing to know the “actual situation.” As media reports show, India, a country with 1.4 billion people, tests only a minute fraction of its population, with around 200,000 COVID tests administered every day. 

Dr. Guleria also countered the claims made by some people that “if there are mild cases, we need not to bother too much.” He said, “As the cases are increasing, the chances for the virus to mutate are higher [which could lead] to a new variant.” 

He added that the virus’ rapid mutations mean that the potential for a new mutation to emerge with increased lethality is possible and even probable. “I don’t think we can really predict how this virus will behave in the future.”

The Modi government’s indifference to the impact of COVID-19 on India’s population over the last three years should come as a stark warning to the working class that they cannot rely on the ruling elites to protect them and their families from any future threat posed by COVID or other public health catastrophes.

The UK’s plummeting wages and the trade unions

Thomas Scripps

Despite the growing militancy in the working class, wages are falling drastically behind inflation.

Office for National Statistics (ONS) figures show average weekly earnings in February 2023 of £596, for pay excluding bonusses. This is a 7 percent increase on the year. In the same period, prices have risen twice as quickly, 14 percent according to the Retail Price Index (RPI).

The average worker in the UK was as a result over 6 percent poorer this February than they were just one year earlier. The effect is the same as if someone had taken more than £1,900 out of the average worker’s annual pay.

The extra money workers are forced to spend in supermarkets, on bills, at the petrol station, in rent and so on goes to the major corporations and the banks either to protect their profits against their own rising costs—essentially passing these on to the working class—and/or, more frequently, to boost their profits yet higher.

Over the last two years, the scale of the looting operation has been staggering. Since February 2021, average wages have increased by 11.4 percent. Prices have increased 23.3 percent, leaving workers’ pay packets nearly 10 percent lighter in real terms—nearly £3,000.

A section of the 2022 national Trades Union Congress rally in Parliament Square [Photo: WSWS]

As always, the average figures disguise a far worse situation for the poorest half of earners. These households spend a larger proportion of their budget on essential items like energy bills and food, whose price has risen faster than the average rate.

In the year to February 2023, gas prices rose by 129.4 percent, electricity by 66.7 percent, and food prices by 18.2 percent. Food is still getting more expensive more quickly, with figures for March showing a 19.2 percent rise—the highest since August 1977.

The human cost of these cold figures is enormous material hardship and mental distress, social exclusion, relationships strained, families broken apart, and potential wasted.

According to ONS surveys, 26 percent of adults experienced shortages of essential food items in the last two weeks—up more than a third on a year before. Over half reported buying less food.

A fifth of adults are occasionally, hardly ever, or never able to keep comfortably warm in their home, with half reducing their energy use. More than a third are struggling to pay their rent or mortgage.

This is the result of the capitalist organisation of society which sacrifices human life to protect and expand profits.

Workers have mobilised on mass in the last year to challenge this devastating situation, insisting that they will not be bled white to the benefit of a super-rich few. Strike action has been mounted by numbers and across a range of sectors of the economy not seen for decades. Yet wages are still falling sharply.

This is the result of the trade union leadership’s suppression and betrayal of the strike movement that began last Summer. Compared to the 1970s—the last time comparable price hikes were seen—industrial action has been kept low. In that decade, an average of over 1 million working days were lost each month to strike action, with some months seeing more than 5 million. Between June 2022 and February 2023, approximately 340,000 days were lost each month.

Workers have voted or indicated their willingness to vote for action in far larger numbers but have been held back by their unions. Where strike action has gone ahead, the union leaderships have pushed acceptance of pay deals lifting workers’ wages by less than the increase in prices, leaving them poorer in real terms.

In the NHS, health unions Unison and the Royal College of Nursing recommended (and Unison has forced through) a deal giving workers an average 4.75 percent pay rise for April 2022-23 and 5 percent for April 2023-24—plus a one-off lump sum worth roughly 6 percent. The unions allowed a 3 percent deal to be imposed by the government in 2021-22, giving a consolidated pay rise between April 2021-24 of roughly 13.3 percent.

But already between April 2021 and March this year, prices have risen by 22 percent, meaning health workers’ pay is already behind inflation and will fall further and further behind over the next year as prices continue to rise.

At Royal Mail, the Communication Workers Union is preparing a pay deal of 10 percent over the three years from April 2022 to April 2025. It previously agreed a 3.7 percent rise for the two years April 2020-2022, giving a just over 14 percent rise between April 2020-2025.

Prices have already climbed by over 25 percent, with more than two years of inflation to go.

It is the same story on the railways, with the Rail, Maritime and Transport union securing agreement on a pay deal of between 9.2 and 14.4 percent (depending on salary) for 2022-24 for its Network Rail members. These workers received a 2.1 percent rise in 2020 and zero in 2021, giving a total rise over the four years of between 11.5 and 16.8 percent—versus 25 percent inflation already.

The union bureaucracy defends itself by pointing to the “union premium”—the difference in average wages between unionised and non-unionised workers. But this figure has been falling at least since the turn of the millennium in virtually every sector. In 2021 (the latest available figures), it was less than 5 percent across the whole economy and negative in manufacturing, construction and wholesale and retail trade.

It stretches the word “premium” to breaking point when union members are getting poorer in real terms. The bureaucracy is essentially setting the ceiling for wage rises at below inflation, leaving the roughly three quarters of workers not covered by a collective bargaining agreement, who the unions have no perspective for organising, in even worse straits.

Trade union struggles were always historically limited to what could be “afforded” by capitalism, seeking only to secure as favourable a balance as possible between wages and profits whether this was enough to actually meet workers’ needs and demands or not.

But the limitations imposed on the class struggle by accepting the authority of the trade union leaderships are now so severe that the result is the impoverishment of the working class. According to the government’s own Office for Budget Responsibility, real household disposable income will suffer the largest fall in 2022-24 since records began in the 1950s.

The effects are felt far more broadly than in wages. Lack of protections for workers meaning more stressful and strenuous working conditions, plus the pressures of low pay and poverty, have contributed to the largest number of people out of work due to long-term ill-health on record—over 2.5 million people. This is an increase of more than 400,000 since early 2020; 150,000 of that in the last year and 89,000 in the three months to this February alone.

The COVID-19 pandemic, both the direct impact of the virus and the shattering blow its uncontrolled spread dealt to the health service, is doubtless the most significant single factor. The unions did not protect workers from the disease and are winding down strike action in an NHS in desperate need of funds and decent salaries to attract and retain staff and prevent collapse.

The lesson driven home by the strike wave is that the unions will not wage a fight to defend workers’ living standards. There is no incentive for general secretaries paid more than £100,000 a year and receiving pension payments worth almost as much as their members’ yearly salaries to stick their neck out. They and their leaderships have become totally accustomed to negotiations purely on the companies’ terms.

Biden administration declares Argentine union bureaucracy a “model” as it enforces historic cuts in living standards

Andrea Lobo

Amid a historic attack on workers’ living standards in Argentina, US Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, Biden’s second-highest-ranking diplomat, met with leaders of the General Confederation of Workers (CGT) in Buenos Aires and praised “the transformative power of Argentine syndicalism.” As the largest trade union body in the country, the CGT is a “model” for the entire region, she stressed.

Wendy Sherman (center) meets with leaders of the CGT at the US embassy in Buenos Aires, April 14, 2023 [Photo: @USAmbassadorARG]

Conditions are worsening exponentially for workers in Argentina, who often describe the decades-long fall in living standards by pointing out that they haven’t had an asado (barbecue) in years, or half-jokingly saying that they have “had to become vegetarian.”

In 2021, meat consumption reached the lowest point since the 1920s, when Argentina was one of the wealthiest countries in the world. In late 2022, UNICEF found that more than 1 million children and 3 million adults were skipping a daily meal because they couldn’t afford it. Meat consumption had fallen 67 percent, and the intake of fruits, vegetables and dairy had dropped 40 percent, according to the UN agency.

At the behest of global finance capital and in close coordination with the IMF, the “left” nationalist government of Peronist President Alberto Fernandez and the union bureaucracy are enforcing  economic shock therapy to impose mass poverty and hunger against workers.

With the third highest inflation rate in the world after Venezuela and Zimbabwe, prices in Argentina have increased 105 percent in one year—that is, they have more than doubled. And inflation is expected to continue accelerating, as the ruling elite employs the devaluation of the Argentine peso as a battering ram against workers.

By the end of 2022, the official poverty rate had risen to 40 percent, but it is likely much higher now. In February 2023, UNICEF warned that two out of three children were poor or are deprived of basic rights, and that nearly 100 percent of these children live in households with an active worker. In the first trimester of 2023, the government found that the median per capita income in the cities—where 93 percent of the population lives—had fallen to 44,000 monthly pesos. This means that half of the population is living on $107 monthly, or about $3.60 daily according to the black-market but more precise “blue dollar.”

In an industrialized country and leading food producer, children are undernourished and incomes have fallen below Haiti’s per capita GDP.

And just as US imperialism “draws lessons” from its war against Russia in Ukraine by staging war games in Europe and the Asia-Pacific, it is sending top officials to draw lessons from the escalating class struggle in Argentina.

Gerardo Martínez, foreign relations secretary of the CGT and leader of the construction workers union UOCRA, led the delegation to the US Embassy and said in a news briefing that they “analyzed the socio-economic situation in Argentina, the trade-unionist vision of social dialogue and the efforts to find guided compromises.”

Barely 20 miles away from the embassy, in the suburb of General Pacheco, workers at a snack food plant of the US multinational Mondelez (formerly Kraft Foods) were blocking the Pan-American highway, exposing the character of Sherman’s meeting with the CGT bureaucrats.

A worker who belongs to a rank-and-file committee organizing the protest explained to C5N:

[The] union and its internal commission ignored us and signed an agreement at our expense. We are suffering speed-ups, and fellow workers who are pregnant are being forced to work on packaging, where they hit their bellies against boxes given the fast rate of production. We can’t stand this any longer. The situation started during the pandemic. The company hires and fires personnel as it pleases. Now, 1,800 have been left jobless, including pregnant workers. This company does whatever it wants … and the Ministry did not answer our appeals.

Beyond exchanging compliments, Sherman, who was joined by US Ambassador Marc Stanley and other US diplomats, asked the CGT to “institutionalize” an Argentine chapter of “M-Power”—a Biden administration initiative launched with the support of the AFL-CIO that seeks to “elevate the role of trade unions” internationally.

This request takes place as the White House exerts pressure and leverages IMF funds to align Buenos Aires behind its military and economic war drive against Russia and China. The Biden administration’s M-Power is one of its tools to advance this geopolitical agenda.

The meeting with the CGT follows a recent trip by President Fernández to the White House. Sergio Massa, the minister of economy, who is leading the ongoing austerity drive, has met several times with IMF and US officials in Washington this year. Moreover, on Monday, the chief of the US Southern Command, Gen. Laura Richardson, met with Argentine Defense Minister Jorge Taiana to discuss the country’s ties to China.

The praise for the CGT as a “model” confirms the warnings of the World Socialist Web Site that Biden’s claims to be “the most pro-union president” mean that he is relying on the union bureaucracy to impose austerity and war.

In Argentina, with a Central Bank interest rate of 78 percent, local and foreign investors are seeing windfalls, and vultures led by the IMF are ransacking the public treasury by charging interest on $400 billion in public debt. Monthly interest payments to “Leliq” bondholders have increased seven-fold over the last year, surpassing pension payments and becoming the largest expenditure for the government.

Meanwhile, export corporations, including in gas and mining, can sell their products in dollars and euros and maintain low operational costs in pesos.

This outright plundering of Argentina, with the support of the handful of corrupt billionaire oligarchs in the country, has been possible only thanks to the union bureaucracy, which is allied with the Fernandez administration. The CGT and CTA confederations agreed to a 60 percent ceiling on wage negotiations with the government, which is resulting in a huge drop in the purchasing power of workers.

At the same time, in “revision talks,” or paritarias, every six months or even more frequently, union officials meet with employers in ostensible “negotiations” mediated by the government, where they feign outrage and sometimes are compelled to call for “Hollywood” strikes for 24, 48 or 72 hours until they finally “compromise” and agree to wage increases far below the inflation rate. This process has become institutionalized, and its results are enforced by union delegates and the “internal commissions” at workplaces.

As a fundamental element in the Argentine syndicalist “model,” wherever rank-and-file opposition seems to overflow, as in Mondelez, careerists among the plethora of pseudo-left organizations swarm in like firefighters with their fists raised and and spouting radical rhetoric, calling for workers to “recover” the unions from the bureaucracy. But whatever new leadership or faction they build gets channeled back and integrated into the same bureaucracy in the name of “unity.”

As workers face global corporations and offensives directed from Wall Street and London, the most crucial service provided by the Argentine union federations is that they keep workers isolated from their class brothers and sisters internationally as they, too, enter into struggle against similar attacks.

After decades of militant struggles, beginning with waves of strikes in 1918 and 1919, inspired by the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, Argentina’s trade union apparatus took shape in the 1940s, amid a boom of trade and industrialization that began during World War Two. A cabal of military officials eventually led by Juan Domingo Perón implemented major concessions to workers, including wage increases, new benefits and labor protections. However, these measures were used to subordinate union activity to the diktats of management and the capitalist state.

Perón had been influenced by what he saw for almost two years, as a military envoy during the war in Mussolini’s Italy, particularly the fascist corporatist alliance between the state, employers and trade unions. This is the historic basis of the “model” now promoted by Biden.

Union membership, encouraged by Perón, shot upwards, and the union bureaucracy became entrenched around the Peronist CGT, which grew into a conservative appendage of the capitalist state.

The US designation of the CGT as a “model” form of trade unionism has particularly sinister implications, given the history of this right-wing apparatus during the run-up to the 1976 military coup. It played the leading role in organizing the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance, or Triple A, a network of death squads that killed and disappeared hundreds of militant and left-wing workers and even union delegates in an attempt to quell the mounting uprising by workers and youth.

Today, both the US and the Argentine ruling classes are banking on this union bureaucracy suppressing working class opposition as the next administration tries to eliminate welfare, energy subsidies and other social protections, while siphoning the profits from the world’s largest lithium deposits and the major Vaca Muerta gas field at the behest of the financial vultures and US and European imperialism.

Major class battles are on the horizon and, while the Peronist bureaucracy maintains significant influence that Biden wants to emulate, its enforcement of decades of unending attacks on living standards has significantly eroded its control over the working class. Union membership among formal workers has been cut almost in half since 1990, to 27 percent.

Stoltenberg calls for Ukraine to join NATO amid escalation of conflict with Russia

Alex Lantier

US and NATO officials met at Ramstein Air Base in Germany yesterday to coordinate new arms deliveries to Ukraine ahead of a planned Ukrainian spring offensive, a day after NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg went to Kiev and said Ukraine should join NATO.

These provocative actions all point to the growing risk of an escalation in which the leading NATO imperialist powers would intervene in the war to directly attack Russia. Indeed, were Ukraine admitted into the NATO alliance today, it could invoke Article 5 of the alliance treaty to demand that all NATO member states declare war on Russia. The immediate actions decided by NATO, to set up supply lines to deliver battle tanks and other heavy arms to Ukraine, also raise the risk of a clash between Russian and NATO forces.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg answers reporter's questions during a press statement prior to the meeting of the 'Ukraine Defense Contact Group' at Ramstein Air Base in Ramstein, Germany, Friday, April 21, 2023. (AP Photo/Matthias Schrader)

“Ukraine’s future is in NATO. All allies agree on that,” Stoltenberg said on Thursday in Kiev. He added that Ukraine’s NATO membership would be “high on the agenda” of NATO’s July summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, and that NATO has already spent €150 billion on arming Ukraine. “Allies are now delivering more jets, tanks and armored vehicles,” he said. “NATO stands with you today, tomorrow and for as long as it takes.”

Russian government spokesman Dmitri Peskov replied that Ukraine’s joining NATO would “pose a serious and significant danger to our country, to the security of our country.”

Arriving in Ramstein for the Ukraine Defense Contact Group meeting yesterday, Stoltenberg pledged to “ensure that Ukraine prevails” in the war. He confirmed that Ukraine functions militarily as part of NATO in all but name, saying: “I also expect NATO allies to agree a multi-year program to help Ukraine transition from Soviet-era equipment, standards, doctrines to NATO standards and doctrines, and to ensure full interoperability between Ukrainian forces and NATO forces.”

Significantly, Stoltenberg suggested NATO is not confident that Ukraine’s spring offensive will end the war, and is planning a broader conflict. He said, “Hopefully, the Ukrainians are able to make a lot of progress and you can have a just and an enduring peace soon. But no one can say that with certainty. So we need to be prepared for the long haul.”

He made clear that already massive arms deliveries will be escalated: “Maybe it sounds a bit more boring, but … this is now a battle of attrition, and a battle of attrition becomes a war of logistics.”

Stoltenberg said NATO must “ensure that Ukraine has the military strength, the capabilities, the deterrence to prevent new attacks, because you have to remember that the war didn't start in February last year. The war started in 2014, when Russia illegally annexed Crimea, and when Russia for the first time moved into eastern Donbas. And then we had the full-scale invasion in February [2022].”

After the meeting, US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley gave a press conference. Austin denounced “Russia’s reckless and lawless invasion” of Ukraine in February 2022 and said: “In just a few short months, the Contact Group has delivered more than 230 tanks, more than 1,550 armored vehicles and other equipment and munitions to support more than nine new armored brigades.”

Austin and Milley were repeatedly questioned by NATO reporters on the state of the Ukrainian armed forces and whether the planned spring offensive could start. Milley said that, beyond tanks and artillery ammunition, for Ukraine “the most critical thing right now, is that air defense system, to make sure that it is robust, it's rigorous, it's deep … That's the most important, critical military task right now. That was the theme of this entire day, was air defense, air defense, air defense, to make sure that Ukraine can defend its airspace.”

He also said that US Abrams tanks, on which Ukrainian troops will begin training in two weeks, “they’ll be very effective. But I would also caution, there’s no silver bullet in war.”

One of the principal technical difficulties facing NATO tank deliveries to Ukraine is the massive logistics chain of parts and supplies necessary to keep Abrams or Leopard tanks in combat. Yesterday, German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius announced that Germany, Poland and Ukraine have signed an agreement to build a hub in Poland to repair Leopard tanks sent to the war in Ukraine. The cost of building the hub is estimated at around €200 million.

NATO officials and media are presenting their utterly reckless policy of NATO military escalation against Russia based on relentless propaganda lies. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine last year is based on a reactionary Russian-nationalist strategy that enormously escalated the fighting in the region. But this invasion was not a sudden, unprovoked act of aggression; nor was the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014.

The war in Ukraine is the product of decades of imperialist war and intrigues made possible by the Stalinist bureaucracy’s dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. This not only paved the way for decades of NATO wars near the former USSR’s southern and western borders, in Yugoslavia, the Middle East and Central Asia. It also let US and NATO officials spend billions of euros on building up far-right, anti-Russian Ukrainian-nationalist groups who ultimately carried out a NATO-backed putsch in Kiev in 2014.

The vote to rejoin Russia in Crimea, which is overwhelmingly Russian-speaking, came after the newly-installed NATO-backed regime in Kiev sent far-right militias to attack Russian-speaking areas in southern and eastern Ukraine. The areas of Donetsk and Luhansk in the largely Russian-speaking Donbas seceded amid fighting between local militias and far-right Ukrainian militias like the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion. Fighting continued in the region until the Russian invasion last year.

Now, NATO officials are investing enormous resources in the planned spring offensive to retake parts of southern and eastern Ukraine held by Russian troops. This aims above all to fill the gaps in Ukrainian forces left by catastrophic losses they suffered fighting Russian troops around Bakhmut, after which Ukrainian losses are estimated to run into the hundreds of thousands.

While the spring offensive itself poses an enormous risk of escalation into direct Russia-NATO clash if it is successful, many indications suggest that it could lead to a debacle for Ukraine. The only way to avoid a complete Ukrainian collapse would then be for NATO powers to directly intervene in the conflict against Russia.

After the publication two weeks ago of leaked US military documents suggesting that Ukraine is in a far weaker position than the US press has admitted, many reports indicate that the Ukrainian forces may be heading for a bloody defeat.

El Pais—a daily close to Spain’s ruling social-democrats, who have aggressively participated in the NATO war, arming the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion—admitted that Russian forces outgun Ukrainian forces 10 to 1 in heavy artillery. While Ukraine is straining to receive hundreds of NATO tanks, Russia is thought to still have several thousand operational tanks and nearly 10,000 tanks in reserve despite losses suffered in the war.

Moreover, it added that Ukrainian forces, many newly-recruited and given brief training on complex weapon systems, are walking into the largest defensive works built in Europe since World War II.

It wrote, “Nothing like it has been seen in Europe since 1945: … 800 kilometers of trenches, anti-tank ditches, dragon’s teeth (reinforced concrete obstacles to hinder armored vehicles), concrete machine-gun nests and bunkers today form a defensive line protecting the territory occupied by Russia in Ukraine. Since last summer, the invading forces have been constructing a massive defensive barrier to hold off the expected Ukrainian counteroffensive.”

The response of the NATO powers to fears of a looming Ukrainian debacle is to threaten escalation. Polish officials have repeatedly stated that they would be prepared to enter the conflict, with Polish Ambassador to France Jan Emeryk Rościszewski telling the French LCI station: “If Ukraine does not defend its independence, we will have no other choice, we will be forced to enter the conflict.”