COVID-19 continues to run rampant in South Korea

Ben McGrath

It has been more than one year since South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol took office. In that time, his administration has torn up the country’s remaining COVID-19 mitigation measures, a process that began under the previous Democratic Party of Korea (DP) government. Thousands continue to be infected each day while Seoul promotes the lie that the pandemic is over.

People walk along the public area of the Cheonggye Stream in Seoul, South Korea, Thursday, May 11, 2023. [AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon]

The Yoon administration has seized on the World Health Organization’s May 5 announcement that COVID-19 was no longer a global health emergency in order to justify downgrading the crisis level for the deadly disease from “serious” to “alert.” COVID-19 case numbers point to a different reality.

In the past week, there have been on average 18,985 official new cases per day as of Monday while an average of 11 people have died each day. Put into perspective, 159 people died in last year’s Halloween crowd crush tragedy in Itaewon, meaning approximately double that number is dying from COVID-19 each month.

These facts did not stop Yoon from declaring on May 11 that the COVID-19 health emergency was over, and announcing that on June 1, nearly all remaining mitigation measures would be lifted. This includes eliminating the required seven-day isolation period for a person testing positive and replacing it with a “recommended” five-day isolation period.

Under conditions where governments around the world have similarly declared the pandemic over, even this recommended isolation period will not be encouraged. Ultimately workers will be forced back on the job while sick, inevitably leading to further infections. In addition, the few remaining indoor mask requirements at medical clinics and pharmacies will also be lifted, except for hospital wards serving vulnerable patients. It will also become harder for people to receive PCR tests, as more and more screening centers are being closed.

The government claims that COVID-19 has now become “endemic,” stating that the disease is now predictable and constant. Yoon declared on May 11, “I am pleased that the people are returning to their daily lives after three years and four months.” In other words, the South Korean ruling class is imposing a new normal in which the death toll mounts and thousands are infected each day putting them at risk of Long COVID and other long-term health consequences.

Seoul had already lifted its indoor mask mandate for most places at the end of January. The government then lifted mask requirements on public transportation on March 20. Tracking the spread of the disease is also being suppressed. Previously, the government had announced new case numbers in cities and regions with a daily text message to people’s phones, but that no longer occurs. Now, the government will make it even harder for people to receive updates on new cases, with figures released publicly on a weekly basis rather than each day.

However, many people continue to wear masks, reflecting the continued support for stopping the spread of COVID-19 among the population. If there are those that are increasingly removing their masks, it is a result of the constant barrage of disinformation from the government and media, spreading the lie that the pandemic has ended.

Yoon falsely declared, “The government has been doing its best to build an expert-centered, science-based response system, moving away from political disease control.” The exact opposite is true. The claim that requirements like mask-wearing, online learning for students, and social distancing requirements were nothing but politically motivated, denies that these science-backed measures helped halt the spread of COVID-19 early in the pandemic and are still required now. Conversely, the lifting of all mitigation measures is entirely political.

When the previous government of Democrat Moon Jae-in implemented mitigation measures at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, it was out of fear of opposition from the working class if it did not. These measures were widely popular and the vast majority adhered to them. However, the Moon government slowly began to chip away at these measures in the interest of big business, before announcing at the end of 2021 that South Korea would enter the “with COVID” era.

Between January 2 and October 29, 2022, according to Statistics Korea, 304,931 people died from all causes throughout the country. This was approximately 47,000 higher than the number of deaths during the same period in each of the preceding three years. The number of excess deaths in this 10-month period alone is significantly higher than the official death toll from COVID-19 since the beginning of the pandemic of 34,687.

Like the Yoon administration’s decision to downgrade COVID-19’s status and claim the pandemic is over, the announcement of the “with COVID” era was entirely political and in the interests of the ruling class.

It was aimed at winning support from big business for the DP’s presidential candidate, Lee Jae-myung, in the March 2022 election, which Yoon won. After taking office in May 2022, Yoon followed the path set by his predecessor and largely ignored the pandemic. Prior to the May 11 announcement, Yoon had not led a COVID-19 response meeting since July 29, 2022.

Yoon claimed the government’s decision on COVID had the support of medical professionals in South Korea. In announcing the supposed end of the pandemic, he appeared alongside 12 healthcare workers and thanked “doctors, nurses, and nursing assistants who committed themselves” to treating patients with COVID-19.

Throughout the pandemic, these workers, particularly nurses and support staff, waged struggles against the policies of both the Moon and Yoon administrations, demanding improved conditions. Healthcare workers struck or attempted to strike at various times, including in September 2021, then again the same month the following year, and in November 2022. While already difficult before the pandemic, their conditions had worsened as a result of government policies to keep them on the job and then to allow COVID-19 to spread.

In each case, unions belonging to the so-called “militant” Korean Confederation of Trade Unions suppressed and sold out the strikes, reaching sellout deals to block a genuine struggle against the COVID-19 policies and other attacks on workers.

Bangladesh releases a major strategic policy document

Wimal Perera

The Bangladesh Ministry of Foreign Affairs released a major foreign policy document on April 24, one day before Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina embarked on 15-day tour to Japan, the US and UK. Titled Indo-Pacific Outlook, the document inclines towards the US-led anti-China Indo-Pacific policy while attempting to maintain a delicate balance between the Washington and Beijing.

Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina with Japanese counterpart Fumio Kishida in Tokyo, Japan, April 26, 2023. [AP Photo/Kimimasa Mayama/Pool Photo]

Hasina discussed issues related to the Indo-Pacific as well as economic and security policies during her visits to Japan, where she spent four days, and the US, from April 29 to May 4. She spent the rest of her trip in the UK to attend the coronation of King Charles III.

The Indo-Pacific Outlook (IPO), which was drafted in February, formulates 15 key objectives without naming any specific country. It does not fully align itself with the US-initiated Indo-Pacific-Strategy (IPS) elaborated in December 2021 but repeats all the slogans used by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken—the need to defend “the rules-based order,” “international law,” “freedom of navigation,” and freedom of “overflight.”

Translated into plain language these propaganda phrases are part of Washington’s military-strategic offensive against its rivals—Russia and China—and to reassert US global hegemony.

This was exemplified in her inaugural address to the 60th convention of the Institution of Engineers in Bangladesh on May 13.

According to the Bangladesh Sangbad Sangstha, the country’s national news agency, Hasina denounced the imposition of US sanctions on Bangladesh, declaring: “There is now a tendency to impose sanctions, and sanctions on those by whom we contain terrorism. We have made a decision. I have said that I will not buy anything from those who will impose sanctions.”

Hasina’s speech was a reference to Washington’s imposition of sanctions in December 2021 on senior officials of Bangladesh’s Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) over human rights abuses. She previously denounced the sanctions, claiming that the notorious para-military RAB had played a major role in stopping terrorism.

Washington imposed these sanctions, not out of any concern for human rights but as a means to pressure the Hasina government to break its ties with China and to fully embrace the US-led war drive against Beijing.

Bangladesh is heavily dependent on revenues from apparel exports to the US. On February 10, the Business Standard reported that Bangladesh’s clothing exports to the US grew by 36.4 percent to $US9.75 billion year-on-year in 2022, and that the country’s current share of the US apparel market is almost 10 percent.

At the same time, the Hasina’s administration is attempting to placate China, an essential source of foreign direct investment (FDI) which topped $940 million in the 2022 fiscal year.

“China has been the largest trading partner” of Bangladesh for the past 12 consecutive years, a Chinese embassy official told the Financial Express last December. The big business newspaper reported that trade volume between the two countries increased by 58 percent in 2021.

China is the largest military hardware supplier to Bangladesh which is also an active partner in Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative. China is involved in several infrastructure projects, including the financing and construction of a Bangladeshi submarine base where two submarines purchased from Beijing are anchored.

Washington has welcomed the Hasina government’s Indo-Pacific Outlook document. In an exclusive interview with the Bangladesh Sangbad Sangstha last week, Afreen Akhter, the US deputy assistant secretary for South and Central Asia, said: “Broadly, we see lot of synergies between our two documents, our strategy, and your [Bangladesh’s] outlook. We both are focused on building economic prosperity in the region and through infrastructure, through our substantial development projects.”

On May 12, S. Jaishankar, external affairs minister for India, now a frontline state in the US-war drive against China, said: “I am truly glad that Bangladesh has joined the company of those [countries] who have done so by issuing its own Indo-Pacific strategic document.”

Other elements of Bangladesh’s document were reflected in the Japan-Bangladesh Joint Statement on Strategic Partnership announced on April 26 by Hasina and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida. The statement accepted “freedom of navigation overall and overflight of the high seas and civil aviation safety” and called for the maintenance of “regional and international peace, stability, and prosperity.”

Although the joint statement did not specifically mention Russia, it indirectly blamed it for the war in Ukraine, designating it as an “invasion,” and a “violation of international law, in particular of the UN charter.” It was a “serious threat to the international order based on the rule of law, with ramifications well beyond Europe, including in the Indo-Pacific,” the statement said.

Hasina also signed seven Memoranda of Understanding and one agreement, including on infrastructure and defense, with Japan during her visit. Japan has been one of the main foreign investors in Bangladesh. In fiscal year 2020–2021, it invested $2.63 billion, the highest aid donor for that fiscal year.

Hasina’s engagements in the US were limited to meetings with World Bank and the IMF officials. “No official meeting took place between her and the US government,” the Diplomat reported on May 9.

Bangladesh Foreign Secretary Masud Bin Momen, however, met with US Under Secretary for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland at the Ninth US-Bangladesh Partnership Dialogue. Momen reportedly stressed Bangladesh’s new strategic document in order to highlight how Dhaka has inclined towards the US strategic offensive against China.

On March 20 last year, Nuland visited Bangladesh to pressure the Hasina government to align itself with the US-led NATO war operations against Russia. Foreign Minister A.K. Abdul Momen indicated that Dhaka desired to maintain a balance between the US and Russia. After Nuland’s visit, however, Bangladesh, along with 139 other countries, voted for a March 24 UN General Assembly resolution accusing Russia of creating a “dire humanitarian situation” in Ukraine.

The Bangladeshi economy was devastated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the US-NATO war against Russia. The war led to a 25 percent depreciation of its currency, a 28 percent fall in foreign reserves, inflation rising to an average 8.14 percent—with price hikes in fuel, electricity and essentials—leading to a cost-of-living crisis and the eruption of nation-wide protests.

Beijing’s measured response to the Hasina government’s new Indo-Pacific Outlook document is reflected in an opinion piece by Dr. Liu Zongyi in the South China Morning Post.

Secretary general of the South Asia and China Center at the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies, Liu writes: “I view the release of this document not only as an initiative for the country to maintain its diplomatic independence and pursue its own national interests but also a move made under constant pressure to pick a side.”

While Bangladesh is still trying to maintain a balancing act between Washington and Beijing, its Indo-Pacific Outlook and subsequent statements point to a shift towards the US as it seeks investment from Japan and the US, and economic assistance from the IMF and World Bank.

Ukrainian-backed far-right saboteur units stage largest attack on Russian territory yet

Clara Weiss

On Monday, two Ukrainian-backed Russian insurgency units staged the largest attack on Russian territory in the war to date. The assault came just one day after Russia proclaimed the complete seizure of Bakhmut after 224 days of intense fighting, during which tens of thousands are believed to have died. It also comes just after the US declared it would train pilots for F-16 fighter jets, and Zelensky attended the G7 summit in Hiroshima, urging the imperialist powers to step up their involvement in the war even further.

Liberty of Russia Legion/Telegram [Photo: Liberty of Russia Legion/Telegram]

According to Russian press reports and officials, two saboteur units raided the Belgorodskaia oblast early Monday, combined with a series of drone attacks and cyber attacks on the regional telephone and internet networks. For at least the first half of the day, residents were reportedly bombarded with phone calls as well as text messages urging them to evacuate, falsely presented as alerts by Russian officials. A report in the Russian Nezavisimaya Gazeta on the events indicated that for much of the day during the attack, the population was left in the dark by officials about what was happening.

Drone strikes hit multiple targets in the region, including a grain depot in the village of Gora-Podol. In the same village, the Ukrainian-backed forces were also able to temporarily seize the “House of Culture” (Dom Kultury). One regional administrative building was shelled. Shells also hit private homes in at least several other towns and villages, causing fires and damage to buildings. As of this writing, regional officials have confirmed that eight people were wounded.

In the evening, the governor of the Belgorodskaia oblast, Viacheslav Gladkov, announced that a state of “counterterrorist operation” had been introduced in the region. The police and military forces deployed can now check identity documents, suspend activities of branches of industries and organizations that make use of explosive, radioactive, chemical or biological substances, evacuate citizens temporarily and intercept their telephone and other communications.

As of this writing, Russian reports indicated that fighting between the saboteur units and the Russian military and National Guard was still ongoing in at least two locations, in Kozinka and Glotovo.

The units were identified by both Russian and Ukrainian officials as the Russian Volunteer Corps (RVC), a neofascist organization, and the far-right nationalist Freedom of Russia Legion. It was the first time Ukrainian foreign intelligence acknowledged that these two organizations, both of which were formed in 2022 and are classified as “terrorist” in Russia, were operating under de facto control of Ukraine’s armed forces.

The attack marks the culmination to this point of a series of ever more aggressive military interventions by Ukraine-backed insurgency units and drone and terrorist attacks on Russian territory over the past 10 months. This included the assassination in August of Daria Dugina, a prominent far-right proponent of the Kremlin war, the assassination of the Russian military blogger Vladlen Tatarsky in April, and drone strikes on the Kremlin earlier this month.

The Belgorodskaia oblast, which directly borders the territories in East Ukraine now occupied and claimed by Russia, has been a central focus of drone strikes and shelling by the Ukrainian armed forces. The attacks, especially over recent weeks, are seen by military analysts as part of the preparations for Ukraine’s long anticipated “counteroffensive.”

Monday’s attack is part of a dangerous new phase, which is marked by an ever greater geographic expansion of the war and direct involvement of the imperialist powers. With Ukraine having suffered staggering losses, estimated in the hundreds of thousands—out of a resident population of under 30 million—the NATO imperialist powers are determined to offset the clear military setbacks by stepping up their direct involvement in the conflict and encouraging ever more reckless and dangerous attacks by Ukraine on Russian territory.

The character of the forces involved in the attack brings to the fore the true aims of the war being waged by the imperialist powers against Russia. Both the Russian Volunteer Corps and the Freedom of Russia Legion are ultranationalist and racist formations. They proclaim as their goal the violent overthrow of the government of Vladimir Putin and the institution of an ethnically “pure” Russian nation-state, along with separate, “independent” nation-states for other nationalities now living in Russia.

The Russian Volunteer Corps openly places itself in the tradition of the Vlasov Army, which collaborated with the Nazis in the war against the Soviet Union during World War II. In a manifesto from November, the RVC explicitly calls for the establishment of an ethnically pure Russian state, insisting that it represent “russkie”—a term for ethnic Russians—and not “rossiiane,” a term describing citizens of the Russian Federation regardless of their ethnicity or nationality. The Russian Federation’s 140 million residents include over 10 million Muslims and many other ethnic, national and religious minorities.

While the Freedom of Russia Legion has used less explicitly fascist language and symbols, it too has a clear far-right orientation. In a recent social media post, it declared that ethnic Russians are “the most oppressed” nationality in the Russian Federation today. One of its members is Igor Volobuyev, a native of Ukraine and the former vice-chairman of Gazprombank, one of Russia’s largest banks.

Just as with the central role of Ukrainian fascist and neofascist formations in the Ukrainian army, the involvement of these Russian far-right organizations in the NATO war exposes the true aim of the imperialist powers: the breakup of the Russian Federation through the fostering of ethnic and national conflicts. The aim of the promotion and arming of these forces is the establishment of far-right puppet regimes directly subservient to the imperialist powers.

The Putin regime has nothing to offer in response to this imperialist strategy except the promotion of a different form of Great Russian chauvinism and desperate efforts, through a combination of militarism and appeals for negotiations with the imperialist powers, to defend the interests of the oligarchy that arose out of the Stalinist dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Market Fundamentalism’ is an Obstacle to Social Progress

Richard Wolff

Photograph Source: Sam valadi – CC BY 2.0

A changing world order, a shrinking U.S. empire, migrations and related demographic shifts, and major economic crashes have all enhanced religious fundamentalisms around the world. Beyond religions, other ideological fundamentalisms likewise provide widely welcomed reassurances. One of the latter—market fundamentalism—invites and deserves criticism as a major obstacle to navigating this time of rapid social change. Market fundamentalism attributes to that particular social institution a level of perfection and “optimality” quite parallel to what fundamentalist religions attribute to prophets and divinities.

Yet markets are just one among many social means of rationing. Anything scarce relative to demand for it raises the same question: Who will get it and who must do without it? The market is one institutional way to ration the scarce item. In a market, those who want it bid up its price leading others to drop out because they cannot or will not pay the higher price. When higher prices have eliminated the excess of demand over supply, scarcity is gone, and no more bidding up is required. Those able and willing to pay the higher prices are satisfied by receiving distributions of the available supply.

The market has thus rationed out the scarce supply. It has determined who gets and who does not. Clearly, the richer a buyer is, the more likely that buyer will welcome, endorse, and celebrate “the market system.” Markets favor rich buyers. Such buyers in turn will more likely support teachers, clerics, politicians, and others who promote arguments that markets are “efficient,” “socially positive,” or “best for everyone.”

Yet even the economics profession—which routinely celebrates markets—includes a sizable—if underemphasized—literature about how, why, and when free (i.e., unregulated) markets do not work efficiently or in socially positive ways. That literature has developed concepts like “imperfect competition,” “market distortions,” and “externalities,” to pinpoint markets failing to be efficient or benefit social welfare. Social leaders who have had to deal with actual markets in society have likewise repeatedly intervened in them when and because markets worked in socially unacceptable ways. Thus, we have minimum wage laws, maximum interest-rate laws, price-gouging laws, and tariff and trade wars. Practical people know that “leaving matters to the market” has often yielded disasters (e.g., the crashes of 2000, 2008, and 2020) overcome by massive, sustained governmental regulation of and intervention in markets.

So then why do market fundamentalists celebrate a rationing system—the market—that in both theory and practice is more replete with holes than a block of Swiss cheese? Libertarians go so far as to promote a “pure” market economy as a realizable utopia. Such a pure market system is their policy to fix the massive problems they admit exist in contemporary (impure) capitalism. Libertarians are forever frustrated by their lack of success.

For many reasons, markets ought not claim anyone’s loyalty. Among alternative systems of rationing scarcity, markets are clearly inferior. For example, in many religious, ethical, and moral traditions, basic precepts urge or insist that scarcity be addressed by a rationing system based on their respective concepts of human need. Many other rationing systems—including the U.S. version used in World War II—dispensed with the market system and substituted a needs-based rationing system managed by the government.

Rationing systems could likewise be based on age, type of work performed, employment status, family situation, health conditions, distance between home and workplace, or other criteria. Their importance relative to one another and relative to some composite notion of “need,” could and should be determined democratically. Indeed, a genuinely democratic society would let the people decide which (if any) scarcities should be rationed by the market and which (if any) by alternative rationing systems.

Market fetishists will surely trot out their favorite rationalizations with which to regale students. For example, they argue that when buyers bid up prices for scarce items other entrepreneurs will rush in with more supply to capture those higher prices, thereby ending the scarcity. This simple-minded argument fails to grasp that the entrepreneurs cashing in on the higher prices for scarce items have every incentive and many of the means to prevent, delay, or block altogether the entry of new suppliers. Actual business history shows that they often do so successfully. In other words, glib assurances about reactions to market prices are ideological noise and little else.

We can also catch the market fetishizers in their own contradictions. When justifying the sky-high pay packages of mega-corporate CEOs, we are told their scarcity requires their high prices. The same folks explain to us that to overcome scarcity of wage labor, it was necessary to cut U.S. workers’ pandemic-era unemployment supplement, not to raise their wages. During times of scarcity, markets often reveal to capitalists the possibility of earning higher profits on lower volumes of product and sales. If they prioritize profits and when they can afford to bar others’ entry, they will produce and sell less at higher prices to a richer clientele. We are watching that process unfold in the United States now.

The neoliberal turn in U.S. capitalism since the 1970s yielded big profits from a globalized market system. However, outside the purview of neoliberal ideology, that global market catapulted the Chinese economy forward far faster than the United States and far faster than the United States found acceptable. Thus the United States junked its market celebrations (substituting intense “security” concerns) to justify massive governmental interventions in markets to thwart Chinese development: a trade war, tariff wars, chip subsidies, and sanctions. Awkwardly and unpersuasively, the economic profession keeps teaching about the efficiency of free or pure markets, while students learn from the news all about U.S. protectionism, market management, and the need to turn away from the free market gods previously venerated.

Then too the market-based health care system of the United States challenges market fundamentalism: the United States has 4.3 percent of the world population but accounted for 16.9 percent of the world’s COVID-19 deaths. Might the market system bear a significant share of the blame and fault here? So dangerous is the potential disruption of ideological consensus that it becomes vital to avoid asking the question, let alone pursuing a serious answer.

During the pandemic, millions of workers were told that they were “essential” and “front-line responders.” A grateful society appreciated them. As they often noted, the market had not rewarded them accordingly. They got very low wages. They must not have been scarce enough to command better. That’s how markets work. Markets do not reward what is most valuable and essential. They never did. They reward what is scarce relative to people’s ability to buy, no matter the social importance we give to the actual work and roles people play. Markets pander to where the money is. No wonder the rich subsidize market fundamentalism. The wonder is why the rest of society believes or tolerates it.

Scottish government scraps mask use in social care settings

Lucy Connell & John Vassilopoulos

The Scottish government has scrapped the use of masks in health and social care settings. The move took place as of May 16, following their earlier directive on May 9.

The directive came just four days after the World Health Organisation (WHO) falsely declared the pandemic emergency over, giving the green light to governments all over the world to abandon any remaining public health measures.

Letter from the Scottis government to all social care services declaring "the Cabinet Secretary for NHS Recovery, Health and Social Care and the Minister for Social Care, Mental Wellbeing and Sport have agreed to withdraw the ‘Coronavirus (COVID-19): use of face coverings in social care settings including adult care homes’ guidance and the ‘Coronavirus (COVID-19): extended use of face masks and face coverings in hospitals, primary care and community healthcare settings’ guidance. [Photo: screenshot: gov.scot]

In its directive, the Scottish National Party (SNP)-Green coalition government justified the abandonment of masks on the grounds that “Scotland continues to adapt to the COVID-19 pandemic and has entered a calmer phase of the pandemic.” What is meant by “a calmer phase” is revealed by government statistics. According to Public Heath Scotland, the last week of April saw an average of 725 patients with COVID in hospitals across Scotland and an average of 594 in the week preceding the directive.

COVID remains rampant in hospitals. In the 28 days leading up to May 11, 29.2 percent of infected patients in English hospitals acquired their COVID infection from their hospital stay. Around 8 percent of hospital-acquired COVID infections result in death. Social care settings are also dangerous: the majority of reported COVID outbreaks in Britain continue to take place within care homes. Even with reduced testing, the number of Scottish care homes with suspected COVID is currently more than double what it was two years ago when the vaccination rate for the elderly was far lower, but public health precautions were still in place.

Public health decisions and National Health Service (NHS) spending within Scotland are the responsibility of the devolved government. Throughout the pandemic, fanfare accompanied announcements that Scotland would extend public health precautions longer than those in England before those same precautions were quietly dropped weeks later as the government followed the same deadly “herd immunity” policy as Westminster. Scotland frequently climbed into the ranks of the worst per capita COVID death tolls in Europe.

The façade of benevolent stewardship has been useful in passing one of the most dictatorial measures in public healthcare: staff working in social care settings will not be permitted to protect themselves through masking unless they undertake and meet the criteria within a formal risk assessment. “In practice”—the letter reads, “for social care settings, this will mean that the element of choice to wear a mask outwith when it is recommended in the [Infection and Control Manuals] will no longer apply.”

The letter instructs all health and social care staff to disregard the COVID mitigations contained in the National Infection Prevention and Control Manual, and the Care Home National Infection Prevention and Control Manual. Instead workers must rely instead on their pre-COVID advice. Masks will be neither provided nor recommended to hospital staff as a COVID mitigation.

Preventing care workers from wearing masks is being justified on the grounds that it “can impact on the health and wellbeing of staff and users of social care, especially those with dementia or cognitive impairment… [creating] communication barriers and [impacting] negatively on relationships.”

This newspeak obscures four important facts:

* COVID negatively impacts the cognitive functioning of dementia patients, often permanently;

* People with dementia are over five times more likely to die of COVID than average;

* The implementation of indoor air safety measures and clear face masks would render any specious objections about “communication barriers” and negative relationship impacts void; and

* Out of all professions, social care workers face one of the greatest risks of Long COVID.

The government is ditching basic COVID safety advice, made just a few weeks ago. In April, the government’s COVID-19 Recovery Committee's said of Long COVID, “As a proportion of the UK population, the prevalence of self-reported Long COVID is greatest in people aged 35 to 69 years, females, people living in more deprived areas, those working in social care, those aged 16 years and over who were not working and not looking for work, and those with another activity-limiting health condition or disability [emphasis added].”

The government’s Social Care Support Fund, which guaranteed workers in private care homes £95.85 a week if sick or isolating with COVID, ended on March 31. This leaves staff with no choice but to either work when ill or use up their annual leave.

Scotland has the highest prevalence of Long COVID among the UK’s nations. Despite this, its Long COVID response is uncoordinated and grossly underfunded, even when compared to England and Wales. Long COVID clinics are generally unavailable and patients are left without the multi-disciplinary specialist support needed, relying on overextended and undertrained GPs. Even with appropriate referrals, the specialists required for treatment may not be available: waiting lists stretch to years, and one of Long COVID’s most common complications, dysautonomia in which the autonomic nervous system (ANS) does not work properly, has neither a clinical pathway nor a single Scottish specialist. Many Long COVID patients are simply directed to websites on how to “self-manage” their debilitating and systemic illness. Edward Duncan, a professor of applied research at the University of Stirling, has questioned “how appropriate self-management is as a sole means of therapeutic offer for people with quite complex needs.”

Government funding for Long COVID treatment has been tokenistic and late. Of the meagre £10 million pledged to its Long COVID Support Fund, the government has allocated only £3 million thus far, doled out in small amounts towards more “self-management” tools, and to charities willing to plug the gaps in Scotland’s failing social care system. Only £10,000 has been allocated towards the “delivery of long COVID advertising and signposting activity, aiming to increase awareness of long COVID amongst the general public in Scotland”.

The government does not want the public to be aware that COVID has detrimental and lasting health impacts. It is “a good thing” that Scotland is “[g]oing back to standard rules,' said Scotland’s national clinical director in a recent interview, adding, as apparent justification, “[e]veryone is fatigued with a global pandemic.”

Scottish Government COVID-19 press conference at St. Andrew's House, Edinburgh with the First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, August 24 2021. [Photo by Flickr / CC BY 2.0]

The government is trying to silence anyone who might expose its criminal COVID policies. Shortly after the new mask rules were announced, it emerged that former infection control nurse Lesley Roberts had been rejected as a core participant in the Scottish government’s official pandemic inquiry. Roberts had raised 22 official internal complaints over the handling of the pandemic. Core participants are permitted to make statements and to propose questions to witnesses. Roberts said, “If I do not meet the criteria for being a core participant, I do not think the inquiry is working fairly or impartially. As I am the only nurse who has reported the former Scottish First Minister [Nicola Sturgeon] to the police for corporate manslaughter, it must raise issue as to the level of evidence that I possess... and it must raise the question as to whether the government is being protected by the system.”

The ease with which the government has been able to implement this latest unscientific and undemocratic measure rests on its collusion with the trade union bureaucracy. Like its British and international counterparts, Scottish unions have worked alongside government to quash health-related industrial actions and pressure key workers into accepting unsafe working conditions and lower living standards. The union bureaucracy was instrumental in the Holyrood government being able to impose below-inflation deals on NHS workers who, in the latest pay settlement, received an average 6.5 percent pay rise—less than half the 13.5 percent rate of inflation as of March 2023.

The union bureaucracy has largely remained silent since the new measures were announced. The only public statement came from British Medical Association Scotland deputy chair Dr Lailah Peel, who stated that “COVID continues to exist and pose health risks” but made no call for public health measures to stop community transmission. He made a plea to “employers to respect an individual’s decision to continue wearing masks”.

Child mortality rises sharply in the United States

Emma Arceneaux

Little expresses more clearly the immense social crisis in the United States than the fact that child mortality is rising. 

Between 2019 and 2021, all-cause mortality rates among ages 1-19 rose by nearly 20 percent. These deaths are overwhelmingly driven by preventable injuries that have socially-conditioned causes, including homicides, overdoses and automobile accidents. COVID-19 also contributed. Only infants younger than one year did not experience increasing mortality rates during this time. 

Steven Woolf of the Virginia Commonwealth University, author of a recent opinion article in the Journal of the American Medical Association documenting this trend, observed to The Hill that “an increase of this magnitude has not occurred in half a century ... and perhaps has not occurred since the influenza pandemic [of 1919].” 

Woolf and his co-authors reviewed mortality data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention  (CDC) between 1999 and 2021 and found that pediatric injury deaths began rising over a decade ago. Suicides among ages 10-19 started to climb in 2007, increasing by 69.5 percent by 2019. Homicides in this group increased 32.7 percent between 2013 and 2019. 

Since then, over the first two years of the COVID pandemic, injury deaths continued to shoot up. Between 2019 and 2020, homicides in ages 10-19 increased by 39.1 percent, overdose deaths increased 113.5 percent, and transport-related deaths jumped 15.6 percent after having declined for decades. Even in children ages 1-9, injuries accounted for two-thirds of the increase in all-cause mortality.

The authors note that for decades, advances in public health and safety related both to injury prevention (e.g., seat belts and smoke detectors) and disease prevention in children and infants led to a decline in pediatric mortality, but this progress was now being “entirely offset by injuries, primarily those involving violence, self-harm, and drug misuse.” The greatest contributor to the increasing mortality rates was gun-related deaths, which accounted for 47.8 percent of the increase in 2020. 

For the first time in US history, firearm-related injuries became the leading cause of death among children in 2020, surpassing automobile accidents. Firearm-related deaths have been increasing in children since 2013 but rose markedly after 2019. The Pew Research Center reported a 50 percent increase in total firearm-related deaths in children under the age of 18 between 2019 and 2021. The majority of these (60 percent) were homicides, followed by suicides (32 percent) and accidents (5 percent). In contrast, among adult victims of firearm-related deaths in 2021, the majority (55 percent) were suicides. 

The United States stands alone among its peers in regard to firearm deaths in children. An analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation comparing firearm-involved death rates in children in the US to those in peer countries found that the US had 7 times the rate of Canada, the second-highest country. Moreover, the US is the only country among comparable nations where youth firearm deaths have increased since 2000. 

A memorial at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas Monday, May 30, 2022, to honor the victims of the school shooting. Photographs of the victims, from left, show Layla Salazar, McKenna Lee Elrod, Jayce Carmelo Luevanos and Nevaeh Alyssa Bravo. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

Already in 2023, there have been 227 mass shootings and 674 firearm deaths in children ages 0-17, according to the Gun Violence Archive. The K-12 Shooting Database has recorded 121 school shooting incidents this year, and 2023 is projected to have the highest number of school shootings on record.

It is no accident that rising mortality rates among children and youth are led by deaths of an antisocial and violent character and by deaths of despair. These deaths are a reflection of the rotten environment that exists in the center of world capitalism, which offers young people no future. 

For the last thirty years, the US has been waging unending wars abroad that have killed 4.5 million people just since 2001. Now the US is escalating the NATO war against Russia in Ukraine with open discussions among state and military officials of the possibility of a nuclear World War Three. 

War abroad has been accompanied by decades of social counter-revolution at home, during which inequality has soared, social assistance has been gutted, and the economic and democratic gains won by the working class over a century of struggle have been systematically rolled back. Among the latter is the recent push by lawmakers across the US to dismantle restrictions on child labor. 

Moreover, young people are aware that the entire world faces multiple existential threats in the forms of war, climate change, dictatorship and, not least of all, the ongoing COVID pandemic, which has  violently shaken their lives. 

While the bourgeois press has cynically sought to blame school closures, a vital public health measure against the pandemic, for the mental health and mortality crisis among the youth, they seek to minimize the traumatizing impact of mass death and disease on American children. 

According to the research by Woolf et al., COVID-19 accounted for a full 20 percent of the increase in child mortality rates in 2021. Other research found that it became the 8th-leading cause of death in US children following the Delta and Omicron waves. 

The direct effects of the pandemic on children have been staggering. CDC data shows that more than 2,200 children have died from COVID, more than 190,000 have been hospitalized, and virtually every child (96.3 percent as of last December) has been infected at least once. Millions of children are suffering from long COVID complications which can be both dangerous and severely debilitating. Add to this the devastating grief of more than 267,000 children who have lost one or both parents to COVID, and others who have lost grandparents and other non-parental caregivers.

It is no wonder that the youth mental health crisis, which has been documented for over a decade, would be exacerbated by these experiences. 

Just as the capitalist politicians of both parties deliberately chose to let the pandemic rip through the population, sacrificing the lives of thousands of children in the process, they will do nothing to provide the necessary resources to address the child mortality or child mental health crises.  

Health professionals have warned that in many cases there is no help available for young people. A 2019 study found that nearly half (49.4 percent) of children in need of mental health treatment did not receive it.  

Dr. Jennifer Downs of Connecticut's Children's Hospital told the New York Times that it took an average of one week, and sometimes as long as one month, for children who go to the emergency room for psychiatric care to secure an inpatient bed.  The vast majority of states are classified as having a “severe shortage” of child and adolescent psychiatrists, according according to the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychology. 

Despite this, the Biden administration pledged only a pittance ($300 million) to youth mental health programs in 2022, a fraction of the tens of billions given to Ukraine since the start of the NATO war against Russia last year.

In the face of immense challenges, students and young workers across the US are being radicalized by their experiences. During the Omicron wave of the pandemic, thousands of students in cities across the country walked out of school as part of a global struggle to temporarily close schools and stop the pandemic. Only a few months later, following the massacre in Uvalde, Texas, students again protested nationwide against the school shooting epidemic.

Biden proposes $1 trillion in social spending cuts after announcing $375 million more for war in Ukraine

Barry Grey

At a press conference Sunday following the G7 summit in Hiroshima, Japan, President Joe Biden called on Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to meet face to face to revive talks on a bipartisan plan to slash social spending in return for raising the nation’s debt ceiling and averting a default.

Biden spoke after talks between a team of White House advisers and negotiators named by McCarthy broke off on Saturday. The entire debt limit and budget negotiation process has from the start been heavily stage-managed in an attempt to stampede public opinion.

On Sunday, Biden repeatedly pointed to his proposal to cut more than $1 trillion in discretionary spending as part of a budget deal, making clear that his government is committed to imposing a new wave of austerity measures that will further undermine education, health care, housing, home heating assistance and other vital programs relied upon by millions of working class families.

Biden announced that he would be calling McCarthy from Air Force One while flying back to Washington. Later on Sunday, McCarthy dropped his accusatory tone toward Biden, called the telephone call “productive” and said the two would meet face to face at the White House on Monday. He also said the negotiating teams for each side would resume their talks later on Sunday.

Joe Biden and Volodymyr Zelensky. [Photo: @POTUS Twitter]

What neither he nor the Republicans nor the corporate media point out is the direct connection between the new austerity drive and the ever-expanding cost of the US-led war against Russia in Ukraine. While Biden was in Japan, the US government announced that it had allotted another $375 million to arm Ukraine, part of a feverish escalation that includes providing the right-wing nationalist government in Kiev with F-16 nuclear-capable jets.

In the barrage of propaganda over the supposed necessity to slash social programs to avert the nation’s first-ever default on its debt obligations—which, according to Treasury Secretary and former Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen, could come as early as June 1—nothing is said about the role of military spending in driving up the debt.

In fact, social spending as a percentage of GDP has declined sharply since 2011, when the last Democratic administration, headed by Barack Obama and Joe Biden, followed its multitrillion-dollar bailout of the banks after the financial crash of 2008 with the bipartisan Budget Control Act of 2011. That measure imposed a decade-long cap on discretionary spending, sharply reducing in real terms government outlays for education, health care and other vital social needs.

Military spending, however, has exploded. Last year, the Biden administration allocated $113 billion for the war in Ukraine and enacted a record $1 trillion defense budget.

The current debt ceiling/budget discussions between the Democrats and Republicans are part of a conspiracy by the American ruling class to make the working class pay for a war that has little popular support and threatens to trigger a nuclear holocaust.

At his post-G7 press conference, Biden chastised the Republicans for rejecting all proposals to help reduce the national debt by increasing taxes on the wealthy and enforcing tax laws on billionaires and corporations that routinely evade them. Among the provisions of a debt limit/budget bill passed last month by the Republican-controlled House is the cancellation of Biden’s plan to hire tens of thousands of additional Internal Revenue Service personnel to crack down on tax evaders.

In his remarks on Sunday, Biden provided a glimpse of the scale of parasitism and plunder of the economy by the financial aristocracy. He noted that 55 US corporations that made $400 billion last year paid zero in taxes. He added that billionaires in the US pay an average tax rate of 8 percent. He asserted that the hiring of IRS agents and enforcement of a 15 percent corporate minimum tax would generate $400 billion in additional federal revenue.

In fact, as Biden well knows, nothing will be done to rein in these swindlers. He raises the issue in an attempt to cover his attack on the working class with a fraudulent veneer of “equal sacrifice.”

At the press conference, Biden attacked the Republicans’ demands for loosening regulations on fossil fuel projects and imposing harsher work requirements on Medicaid and food stamp recipients. He was silent, however, on tougher work requirements for those receiving benefits under the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) welfare program. He was likewise silent on the House Republican bill’s provision to rescind unspent COVID-19 funds, much of which is for emergency social assistance.

He also criticized the Republican demand in the current negotiations that federal discretionary spending in 2024 revert back to the level for 2022, which would mean a double-digit cut in basic social programs, and that 2022 spending become the baseline for a 1 percent cap in increased spending over the next six years.

The New York Times reported Sunday that Biden had agreed to a cap on non-defense discretionary spending for the next two years, using 2023 as the baseline.

Interviewed Sunday on the “Meet the Press” program, Treasury Secretary Yellen, who last week said a default would trigger an “economic and financial catastrophe,” told moderator Chuck Todd that “the odds of reaching June 15th, while being able to pay all of our bills, is quite low.” She added, “There will be hard choices to make if the debt ceiling isn’t raised.”

While both sides say mandatory entitlement programs—Social Security and Medicare—are “off the table” in the current talks, the deliberately stoked crisis on the debt ceiling is the prelude to a ruling class offensive against these core programs.

On Sunday, CNN’s “State of the Union” program featured Louisiana Republican Senator Bill Cassidy, a so-called “moderate” who advocates tying Social Security to the stock market and essentially privatizing it.

“Face the Nation” host Margaret Brennan interviewed congressmen Brian Fitzpatrick, Republican of Pennsylvania, and Josh Gottheimer, Democrat of New Jersey, members of the “moderate” Problem Solvers Caucus in the House.

At one point, Gottheimer alluded to the “reform” of Social Security and Medicare, saying, “There are longer term fiscal issues we have to deal with. And I’d say we should be dealing with those as well, which is what Brian and I have proposed.”

Later in the interview, Fitzpatrick was more specific, dismissing the discussion between McCarthy and Biden on non-defense discretionary spending as essentially a sideshow. Referring to entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare, he said, “That’s 75 percent of our budget. And that’s where the financial solvency needs to be addressed by both revenue and expenses.

“Medicare will run out of money in 2028. Social Security will run out of money in 2034, he continued. “[U]ntil we tackle the mandatory spending and get a handle on our long-term sustainability of our debt and deficit, we’re just playing around the margins.”

International students in Australia confronting cost-of-living crisis and housing shortage

Aditya Syed

International students enrolled at Australian universities are among the many workers and young people hard hit by out-of-control living costs and insecure housing. Between the exorbitant cost of university education, inflation and their comparative lack of social connections and support, many international students are at acute risk of poverty, ill-health and homelessness.

Students at the University of Adelaide [Photo: University of Adelaide]

A spate of recent media reports have provided graphic illustrations of the social disaster that federal and state governments are doing nothing to address. Twenty-seven-year-old Zoe Jiang from China told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that she was paying $300 per week to sleep in a pitched tent within the living room of a student share-house.

In Perth, 27-year-old Sharlene from Zimbabwe told the radio station 6PR that she had been forced to sleep in a homeless shelter for two weeks, without her own bed, while sharing a shower with about 30 others. Sharlene reported being “a little traumatised” by the experience.

These stories are not unique—a large proportion of international students across Australia face insecure housing and rising costs of living. Students and young people of all nationalities and citizenship status are affected by this social and economic crisis. International students, however, have even greater difficulty navigating the rental market, since they are more likely to speak English as a second language, be unfamiliar with the local area, have no personal connections to help them and no renting history in Australia.

The housing and rental crisis impacting international students most sharply, is affecting students, youth and workers in Australia of all backgrounds. According to several studies, Australia’s shortfall in social housing is 524,000 and is set to reach 671,000 in the next decade.

The federal Labor government’s second budget, released on May 9, includes a cut of 31.8 percent in real terms from 2023–24 to 2026–27 in the housing and community amenities budget.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Treasurer Jim Chalmers claim that this will be offset by a $10 billion investment fund that might finance 30,000 new dwellings over five years. But even this is dependent on the mercies of the share-market where it would be invested. The investment fund is miniscule compared to the nearly $300 billion estimated to be required to resolve Australia’s social housing shortfall.

Meanwhile, the government has pledged hundreds of billions for the military and is providing stage three tax cuts of tens of thousands of dollars overwhelmingly to the richest sections of the population.

Research released last year indicated that the proportion of international students who were financially secure in Australia’s two largest cities plummeted from 44 percent in 2019 to just 30 percent in 2020.

The paper, “International students and the impacts of precarity: Highly and extremely precarious students in Sydney and Melbourne prior to and during the COVID-19 pandemic,” was based on survey interviews with more than 7,000 students, carried out by academics Alan Morris, Luke Ashton and Shaun Wilson.

The proportion of students in “extremely precarious” circumstances more than doubled between 2019 and 2020, from 5 to 11 percent. The study also found that a significant proportion of respondents (12 percent of financially secure students and up to 84 percent of financially insecure students) had skipped meals to pay rent in 2020. The study outlined many other disturbing problems facing international students, including overcrowding, very long commute times and issues with landlords.

In 2020, at the start of the pandemic, international students were left without even a semblance of support from the government and their educational institutions. Then Prime Minister Scott Morrison told them all to “go home.”

The number of international students in Australia subsequently dropped sharply but has since rebounded with the reactionary campaign, promoted by the entire political establishment, to “live with COVID” and junk all public health measures.

The return of international students has not been accompanied by any public investment in student accommodation, and rents have skyrocketed. In Sydney, average rental charges have gone up by 33 percent in the last 12 months, with many suburbs, especially in inner areas close to the largest universities, increasing by even more.

International students also frequently confront exploitative workplaces, often being paid less than the legal minimum wage. Since they are in more desperate circumstances, they are forced to accept poor working conditions and are often unwilling or afraid to raise complaints about their treatment, for fear that this will negatively affect their visa prospects and leave them with no livelihood.

A 2019 report by Professor Bassina Farbenblum of the University of New South Wales and Associate Professor Laurie Berg from the University of Technology Sydney, in conjunction with the Migrant Worker Justice Initiative, analysed data from a survey of 5,968 international students. They found that 38 percent of those surveyed did not seek information or help for fear of affecting their current or future visas, and 7 percent of all respondents reported that they had in fact lost their jobs as a result of a complaint.

One Chinese student living in Brisbane previously told the World Socialist Web Site: “I have rarely heard of Chinese students ever getting the legal minimum wage. The maximum wage I have ever received is $18 per hour and the lowest wage I’ve ever received is $12 per hour.”

A 20-year-old student from Vietnam told ABC News of the strain they faced by trying to work and study simultaneously, with no time for anything else: “It's a very tiring situation. You just study. If you are not studying, you are working… If you don’t work, you need to study. After you finish everything, you go back home tired, go to bed, sleep. The next day you are going to repeat again.”

Another 33-year-old student from Indonesia told the same outlet: “My rent is increasing every week or two. I am now doing two jobs. At the moment I am working around 40 hours per week, and that is barely enough to cover all my living expenses.”

The appalling conditions endured by many international students in Australia are not accidental, but rather are a result of deliberate government policy. International students have long been treated as “cash cows” by the Australian government—they pay multiple times the tuition fees paid by most local students and are excluded from almost all kinds of financial assistance from the government. Universities, rather than being institutions where students are welcome to gain knowledge and explore new ideas, are run as businesses, making vast profits by pumping out purportedly employable graduates for big business.