Sri Lankan government’s “let it rip” policy produces COVID-19 surge

Wasantha Rupasinghe

On May 20, Sri Lanka reported its highest daily tally of COVID-19 infections and fatalities this year, 15 and 3 respectively. Though these under-reported official figures appear to be smaller than previous spikes, they foreshadow a new wave of the deadly virus. The government long ago abandoned all basic coronavirus safety measures, including face masks mandates, falsely claiming that COVID-19 was just like a normal dose of the flu.

The latest figures bring the total number of COVID-related deaths in Sri Lanka to 16,864, and the total number of officially recognised infections to 627,357, since the deadly disease hit the island in 2020.

People queue up to give their swab samples to get tested for COVID-19 in a residential neighborhood in Colombo, Sri Lanka. (AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena)

According to Worldometer figures, Sri Lanka, from May 1 to 22, officially reported 23 COVID-related deaths, or an average of one person every day, with 195 cases or a daily average of nine cases. Given the fact that the country only carries out a very limited number of COVID-19 tests, the actual figures must be much higher.

Currently, there are no official daily COVID-19 updates in Sri Lanka. In fact, the “COVID-19 Situation Report” from the Health Ministry has not been updated since December 13, 2022.

The most recent Our World in Data figures on COVID testing in Sri Lanka was almost one year ago, on June 14, 2022. It shows a daily COVID testing rate of only 0.06—i.e., the number per thousand being tested per day. The country has never exceeded 1.18, on May 21, 2021, during the last peak of the pandemic.

Government health authorities are attempting to downplay the COVID situation on the island but the World Health Organization (WHO) places Sri Lanka at 80th, or in words, in the top third of reported cases in its list of 231 countries since the pandemic started.

The Daily Mirror recently quoted a senior health official who said authorities were “monitoring the situation, as there’s always possibilities of a spike in fresh cases.” Attempting to minimise the situation, the official claimed: “Nonetheless, there is little change because a massive wave of people is immunised against the coronavirus through a successful vaccination drive.”

The unnamed official, however, failed to mention that there is now clear evidence that the vaccines, including Moderna and Pfizer, offer immunity against COVID-19 for only six months. Mass vaccinations stopped last October, almost seven months ago. Although almost 15 million, or 67.6 percent of the population, were said to be fully vaccinated on October 23, 2022, the entire population is now susceptible to the highly immune-evasive and infectious Arcturus subvariant of Omicron XBB.1.16 now spreading across the globe.

Colombo continues to cover up the growing danger, while maintaining its criminal “let it rip” policies that place profits before human lives. Health authorities recently responded to a new surge in cases in northern Jaffna district by blocking the imposition of basic COVID-19 safety measures.

Patients lying in the passage of an overcrowded ward in a Jaffna hospital. [Photo: WSWS]

Apart from a short lockdown—from March–April 2020—when infections first hit the island, successive governments have abandoned all rudimentary COVID safety measures with most people, including doctors and nurses in hospitals and other health settings, no longer wearing masks.

The ending of the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC), first declared by the WHO in January 2020, has also opened the way for capitalist governments everywhere, including in Sri Lanka, to abandon all previously limited COVID preventive measures.

WHO’s announcement came despite 12,000 global excess deaths attributable to the pandemic per day, according to Our World in Data. This figure has spiked considerably since March with the Arcturus subvariant becoming dominant in India.

Hundreds, and in many instances, thousands of people in Sri Lanka, including school children, do not wear masks at religious gatherings, in hospitals and on crowded buses and trains, guaranteeing the rapid spread of the deadly disease.

Warnings by epidemiologists and serious medicals scientists about the danger of even more virulent new variants of COVID-19 are being ignored by the Wickremesinghe government.

At the same time, successive governments, in line with the demands of the International Monetary Fund and international finance capital, have unleashed a budget-cutting onslaught against the public health sector, pushing it to the brink of collapse. Desperate shortages of essential medical equipment and life-saving pharmaceuticals are being reported from all over the island.

Like all other capitalist governments, the Wickremesinghe government—a regime of austerity, violence and anti-democratic repression—and the trade unions, which block a unified independent struggle of workers to fight these social attacks, are utterly indifferent to the plight of millions of its citizens.

Unwilling to provide even the most rudimentary health measures, other diseases, previously held at bay, are reemerging. The latest of these include a dangerous outbreak of dengue fever which has infected over 33,000 people so far this year. Malaria has also returned with the first malaria death in 14 years reported last month.

The Great Panic: Trans-Sexuality and the Erosion of Patriarchy

David Rosen

Photo by Raphael Renter

The Trans Legislation Tracker reports that as of May 2023, 543 anti-trans bills have been proposed in 49 state and 71 have passed; of these, 59 have been signed into law while 12 others have passed but haven’t been enacted.  Last year, 26 bill were passed out of 174 proposed bills.

Oklahoma’s OK SB129 is representative of the tenor of the anti-trans campaign.  It reads, in part:

A physician or other health professional found to have knowingly referred for or provided gender transition procedures to any individual under twenty-six (26) years of age shall, upon conviction, be guilty of a felony.

If convicted, the health professional will lose his/her license.

Wyoming is promoting a similar bill (SF0111) that does the following:

A person guilty of child abuse, a felony punishable for imprisonment for not more than ten (10) years, if a personal intentionally inflicts upon a child under the age of eighteen (18) years any procedure, drug, or other agent or combination thereof that is administered to intentionally or knowingly change the sex of the child.

Still other actions are being promoted.  Arizona (SB1001) has moved to fire school employees who referred to student in any pronoun other than their biological sex; it has also moved (HB1700) to ban books in schools that validate concepts of gender or pronouns.

The Christian right and many Republicans are freaked-out by the increasing public presence of transgender or gender nonconforming people.  Why?

***

The historian Gerda Lerner, author of The Creation of Patriarchy, noted that patriarchy is ”an institutionalized pattern of male dominance in society.”  She points out, it “is a system created by men and women inadvertently, with unforeseen consequences.”  And she adds:

In a time when women’s average life span may have been less than 28 years, and when infant mortality was 70 to 75 percent, women were bearing and nursing babies all the time in order for the tribe to survive. So a sexual division of labor was created that was functional and approved of by both men and women.

She reminds us that ”[p]atriarchy has gone through many forms,” and “[a]s a system, patriarchy is as outdated as feudalism … But it is a 4,000-year-old system of ideas that won’t just go away overnight.”

Lerner also argues that the slavery of women and the exploitation of their sexual and reproductive capacity by conquering men marked the initial development of class distinction, and that ”slave women and children were the first property in these societies.”

For the first two centuries of American history, patriarchy was legal under a system known as “coverture” that held that no female person had a legal identity. “At birth, a female baby was covered by her father’s identity, and then, when she married, by her husband’s.”  More revealing, “[t]he husband and wife became one – and that one was the husband. As a symbol of this subsuming of identity, women took the last names of their husbands.”  Starting in 1839 and continuing over the next half-century, the legal status of married women – then single women – slowly changed, fueled by the suffrage movement.

Steven Ruggles’s study, “Patriarchy, Power, and Pay: The Transformation of American Families, 1800–2015,” further clarifies the evolution of patriarchy.  He notes that before the 19^th century, “most families were organized according to patriarchal tradition” He adds:

Household heads owned and controlled the means of production, and their wives and children were obliged to provide the unpaid labor needed to sustain family enterprises. Masters of the household had a legal right to command the obedience of their wives and children — as well as any servants or slaves — and to use corporal punishment to correct disobedience.

Those day are — in many but not all ways — over.  Over the last century, the marketplace has fundamentally changed and, with it, women’s place in the family and society.  While there still is a significant wage gap between man and women, many things have changed, including the increase presence of women in the labor force, decline in multigenerational households, increased non-marital cohabitation, increased divorce rate, increased women-centered family and increased never-married women.

***

Patriarchy shaped women’s lives over the last millennium as well as defining male “masculinity.”  But masculinity is not a singular category that defines all men; it is a complex category.  And, parallel to the major changes transforming women’s lives, men’s lives have also changed over the last century.

For millennia, masculinity was equated with being the family provider, the income earner.  And with that came a host of associated attributes, including the requirements of physical strength, emotional toughness and personal (and social) power.  However, as capitalism redefined economic life and the place of women in society, male hegemony was undercut.

Hanna Rosen points out, “The postindustrial economy is indifferent to men’s size and strength. The attributes that are most valuable today — social intelligence, open communication, the ability to sit still and focus — are, at a minimum, not predominantly male.”  She adds, “In fact, the opposite may be true.”

In a 2020 report in Psychology Today, the psychologist Noam Shpancer reports “psychologically, many men appear to feel that the defining traits of masculinity, including, ‘toughness, dominance, self-reliance, heterosexual behaviors, restriction of emotional expression and the avoidance of traditionally feminine attitudes and behaviors’ are ‘under attack.’”

So, what happens to the traditional male attributes, especially toughness and interpersonal dominance.  Stephanie Pappas, writing in the APA Monitor, argues that rage often turns into violence.  “Men commit 90 percent of homicides in the United States and represent 77 percent of homicide victims,” she argues.  “They’re the demographic group most at risk of being victimized by violent crime. They are 3.5 times more likely than women to die by suicide, and their life expectancy is 4.9 years shorter than women’s.”

In addition, there has been a significant increase in anti-LGBTQ+ violence and, as of 2020, around one out of every five hate crimes committed in the U.S. were motivated by anti-gay/trans bias. Yotam Ophir, of the University at Buffalo, points out that this violence is fueled by far-right rhetoric spread by white nationalist groups, extremist influencers and conservative politicians.

***

Traditional notions of gender identity, be it femininity or masculinity, are categorically different from gender nonconforming, nonbinary or transgender identity.  However, as the classical concepts of femininity or masculinity have been eroded under modern and postmodern social developments, the long-denied presence on gender nonconforming people has become more socially visible. This sets the stage for today’s great denial over the true complexity – and fluidity — of gender.

Genny Beemyn’s invaluable study, Transgender History in the United States, reminds us of the following:

One of the first recorded examples [of ‘transgender history”] involved a servant in the Virginia colony in the 1620s who claimed to be both a man and a woman and, at different times, adopted the traditional roles and clothing of men and women and variously went by the names of Thomas and Thomasine Hall. … Perhaps because it too was unable to make a conclusive determination, or perhaps because it took Hall at his/her word that Hall was bi-gendered or what would be known today as intersexed, the court ordered Hall in 1629 to wear both a man’s breeches and a woman’s apron and cap.

Four centuries later, in 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the first transgender- and gay-employment rights case.  The case involved Aimee Stephens, a trans-woman, and Don Zarda, a gay man.  The Court found that an employer who fires an individual merely for being gay or transgender violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits employers from discriminating based on sex. Aimee Stephens was fired after notifying her employer she would be transitioning, and the Court argued, she was fired because of her sex. In finding for Stephens, the Court reinforced the centrality of bodies to the word “sex,” while undermining the patriarchal belief that our bodies should determine our gender.

As Marx famously noted in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”

We’ve witnessed tragedy play out in the long, long battle to overcome patriarchy’s subordination of women.  We saw a less tragic version of it play out in the battle over gay rights.  We are now witnessing patriarchy play out as farse in today’s culture wars campaigns to repress transgender identity, suppress challenging reading materials and enforce electoral gerrymandering. Sadly, this farce has teeth, so the struggle continues.

Turkish elections: Erdoğan, Kılıçdaroğlu both call to deport refugees, for “law and order”

Ulaş Ateşçi

Days before the second round of the Turkish presidential elections on Sunday, People Alliance candidate Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Nation Alliance candidate Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu are both calling to deport millions of refugees and promoting “law and order” to “fight terrorism.”

AP Photo/Turkish Presidency via AP Photo Photo by Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi / CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 [AP Photo]

Sinan Oğan, the candidate of the far-right Ata Alliance, which came third in the first round with 5.2 percent (2.8 million votes), announced his support for Erdoğan in the second round. However, the alliance’s main force, the Victory Party, announced its support for Kılıçdaroğlu yesterday. The Victory Party received 2.2 percent of the vote (1.2 million) in the May 14 general election.

Kılıçdaroğlu’s reactionary anti-refugee propaganda, which he has been carrying out for years, has become the main campaign theme after the first round on May 14, accompanied by the “fight against terrorism” promises. This is a warning to all workers.

It exposes the political bankruptcy of the Kurdish nationalist People’s Democratic Party (HDP)-Green Left Party (YSP) and the pseudo-left parties that lined up behind Kılıçdaroğlu, presenting him as an “alternative” to Erdoğan. By channeling growing social opposition of the masses behind another pro-imperialist right-wing faction of the ruling class, they helped the ruling class block any genuinely left-wing challenge to Erdoğan from the working class.

Contrary to the lying claims of the political establishment, defenseless refugees fleeing imperialist wars from Afghanistan to Iraq and Syria pose no threat to the social and democratic rights of workers and youth in Turkey.

The Erdoğan government has however attacked democratic rights and built-up a police state in the name of the “fight against terrorism.” It used this as a pretext to justify the imprisonment of thousands of HDP members, including party leaders, the dismissal of elected mayors and acts of state repressions—and also Turkey’s continued illegal military presence in Syria and Iraq.

This agenda, on which both Erdoğan and Kılıçdaroğlu essentially agree, constitutes the framework for the bourgeoisie’s onslaught on the working class amid a deepening economic and social crisis in Turkey and internationally as NATO’s war against Russia escalates.

In a joint press conference with Kılıçdaroğlu yesterday, Victory Party leader Ümit Özdağ echoed the arguments of far-right and fascistic tendencies internationally. “If you don’t want Turkey to become an ‘immigrant land,’ if you don’t want to worry when your daughter goes out on the street ... then support the policy that will send 13 million refugees to their homeland and vote for Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu on May 28,” he declared.

Özdağ’s disgusting attack on refugees, who officially number around 4 million, as potential rapists is hardly unique. Kılıçdaroğlu, who has adopted the rhetoric of both Sinan Oğan and the Victory Party, recently said: “Those who love their homeland should come to the polls before the incoming fugitives completely darken the lives of our daughters.” Before the press conference, Özdağ thanked the CHP youth for writing “Syrians will go home” on the walls.

Özdağ is a virulent xenophobe who emerged from the fascist Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), now Erdoğan’s main ally in the People Alliance. His father, Staff Captain Muzaffer Özdağ, was a member of the junta that launched the 1960 military coup.

Özdağ became a leader of the Good Party, led by Meral Akşener, which broke away from the MHP after the NATO-backed coup attempt against Erdoğan in 2016. Together with Kılıçdaroğlu’s Republican People’s Party (CHP), the Good Party leads the Nation Alliance.

After Özdağ supported Kılıçdaroğlu, a seven-point protocol agreed upon by the Victory Party and the Nation Alliance was published. Its “purpose” section blames the social destruction caused by Erdoğan’s policies on refugees. It also made clear that basic social demands of the working class will be met with violent state repression.

The purpose of the protocol, it wrote, is “to determine details of joint work and cooperation to ensure national unity and solidarity, solve the problems of poverty, corruption, prohibitions and severe economic problems, and deport refugees and fugitives who pose a serious security and demographic problem for Turkey.”

“All refugees and fugitives, especially Syrians, will be deported within one year at the latest,” it declared. According to international conventions to which Turkey is a party and to domestic Turkish law, this deportation plan is illegal. However, the European Union’s “Fortress Europe” policy and Erdoğan’s collaboration with it have largely abolished in practice the basic democratic right to asylum.

The document pledges “an effective and decisive fight against all terrorist organizations,” stating that “appointing state officials instead of mayors whose links to terrorism are established by legal evidence will continue within the framework of judicial rulings …”

This means that Erdoğan’s policy of dismissing elected HDP mayors in Kurdish provinces without a judicial ruling and replacing them with state officials will continue.

The HDP-YSP has allied with Kılıçdaroğlu based on their joint orientation to US and NATO imperialism. Despite CHP support for state repression of the Kurdish people, it issued a hypocritical statement after a leadership meeting yesterday criticizing the compromise on the “appointment of trustees” targeting the HDP’s elected mayors. However, it raised no objections to plans to deport refugees within a year and other undemocratic provisions. The HDP has said that it would declare its final decisions on the election today.

The agreement between the Victory Party and the Nation Alliance came after Oğan announced his support for Erdoğan on Monday, despite Kılıçdaroğlu’s best efforts. Oğan said he and Erdoğan had agreed on almost identical terms. “An uninterrupted, consistent fight against all kinds of terrorist organizations will continue. There is now a timetable for the [deportation] of refugees and fugitives,” he declared.

“The CHP chairman ... supposedly started his political journey as ‘Gandhi Kemal’ and will end it as ‘Nazi Kemal,’” Erdoğan said at a rally on Tuesday. But his reactionary record and alliance with Oğan reveals that his criticism of Kılıçdaroğlu on refugees is hollow demagogy.

In an interview, Erdoğan said his government will continue its policy of “sending back refugees.” He said, “We have been supporting the safe and voluntary return of refugees from the beginning. So far, nearly 560,000 refugees have returned to areas cleared of terrorism [in Syria]. This number will increase as terrorist organizations are cleared from Syria.”

Since 2016, Ankara has launched several invasions into northern Syria attacking the US-backed Kurdish nationalist People’s Protection Units (YPG) to prevent an emergence of a Kurdish state next to Turkey in northern Syria. Today, the Turkish army, along with its Islamist proxies, occupies significant parts of the region.

Erdoğan’s government plans to completely eliminate the possibility of a Kurdish state by settling Syrian Arabs in illegally built housing in these areas. This dirty plan is accompanied by efforts to restore relations with Russian-backed Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

The pseudo-left parties that lined up behind Kılıçdaroğlu and remained silent on his anti-refugee campaign responded cynically to Oğan’s endorsement of Erdoğan, who they hoped would support Kılıçdaroğlu.

The major pseudo-left Workers’ Party of Turkey (TİP), which received nearly 1 million votes in the parliamentary elections, posted an edited picture of Erdoğan and Oğan’s faces together and declared, “You will lose Erdoğan!” But the TİP did not object to Kılıçdaroğlu’s alliance with the Victory Party, the main force behind Oğan in the first round. The TİP is now campaigning for Kılıçdaroğlu.

The Stalinist Communist Party of Turkey (TKP), from which the TİP emerged, also called for a vote for Kılıçdaroğlu in a statement on Tuesday, revealing its own political bankruptcy. It absurdly declared: “This vote does not mean a choice between two candidates who compete with each other on Americanism, bigotry and anti-immigrant sentiments, nor does it mean accepting either the People Alliance or the Nation Alliance, which have formed new alliances even before the election process is completed.”

Chinese health authorities warn of a new surge in COVID-19 infections with the XBB subvariant

Benjamin Mateus

On Monday, speaking in Guangzhou, capital of South China’s Guangdong Province, Dr. Zhong Nanshan, one of China’s foremost respiratory disease experts, announced that a wave of COVID-19 infections with the latest XBB subvariants of Omicron was building in his country. 

The surge is expected to peak at the end of June, with a projection of around 65 million infections per week, the country’s second largest wave during the pandemic. However, given the lack of testing, this must be considered a vast underestimate, as with any data regarding the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Notably, China has a considerable number of elderly and vulnerable people who remain largely unvaccinated.

As with China, other waves of infection are ripping through the populations of Southeast Asia, South Asia, East Asia and Brazil.  According to the World Health Organization’s (WHO) situation report, hot spots continue in Thailand, Indonesia and India, where deaths are also climbing. 

In Thailand, Dr. Tares Krassanairawiwong, director-general of the Disease Control Department, confirmed that between May 14 and May 20, 2,632 patients were admitted to hospital for COVID-19. Of these, 401 had lung infections, 226 required ventilators, and 64 deaths have been documented. He attributed the surge to the rainy season and beginning of in-class instruction for children. He called for taking general precautions, wearing masks and avoiding crowded indoor spaces.

Meanwhile, in Brazil, despite attempts to conceal the real state of the pandemic, recent reports on social media and on-line sources suggest that hospitals are once more overflowing with patients, and medicinal oxygen is in acutely short supply. These have been corroborated by various medical entities, local physicians and researchers in Brazil.

Additional countries affected include Vietnam, Philippines, Mongolia and to a less extent in Japan, South Korea and Australia. There are also spikes in cases occurring in the African countries of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Cabo Verde, Uganda and Mauritius.

These developments only confirm that the World Health Organization’s (WHO) declaration that it was time to end the Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) was premature. Rather than a serious assessment of the state of the pandemic, it more resembles the declaration of “mission accomplished” made by former President George Bush two decades ago, on June 5, 2003, in premature celebration of US imperialism’s conquest of Iraq.

While the wars of US imperialism over the last quarter century have killed over 4 million people, the deliberate decision by the ruling elites to give free rein to this deadly, contagious pathogen, which could have been eradicated in short order, is responsible for 20 million deaths and severe health consequences for tens of millions more.

According to Chinese health officials, by early May the new XBB subvariants, which were born out of the recombination of two previous Omicron strains, accounted for 84 percent of all sequenced SARS-CoV-2 viruses, up from a miniscule 0.2 percent in mid-February. It should be recalled that when the Chinese authorities lifted their Zero-COVID policy late last year, a tsunami of infections with the BA.5 Omicron subvariant hit the entire country, with estimates of over 1 million deaths. 

That a new wave of infections has appeared on the horizon three months later only demonstrates in stark terms the immune-evasive and contagious property of these continuously evolving strains and the criminal irresponsibility of the decision to end Zero-COVID. 

Line-up for mass COVID testing in Shanghai a year ago, before the abandonment of the Zero-COVID policy. [AP Photo/Chen Si, File]

Shanghai, that had beaten back the BA.1 subvariant just over a year ago, is now facing XBB.1.16, XBB.1.16.1.1 (Pangolin lineage FU.1), XBB.1.5, XBB.1.9.1 and multiple offshoots of the BA.5 subvariant.

The Chinese National Health Commission, like every other state health institution, continues to underplay the implication of the new surge with the oft-repeated claim that there is no significant change in the pathogenicity of newer variants. But by calling for “developing more effective vaccines,” Chinese officials are effectively conceding the mounting dangers to the population. A study from the Chinese Center for Disease Control (CDC) recently showed that in a sample of 368 COVID-19 infections, 104 were reinfections and a majority of those reinfected had previously received a booster.

Xie Xiaoliang, a biophysical chemist at Peking University, said at a recent academic conference, “Global data shows that mutations in the virus can intermittently trigger multiple rounds of peaks in infections, roughly once every five months, so researchers need to be prepared for a possible peak in outbreaks this winter.”

Xie Liangzhi, chairman of Beijing-based SinoCellTech, told the Global Times, “The vaccines based on original variants are not designed to prevent infection by new variants. The former cannot induce sufficiently effective neutralizing antibodies against the mutated strain, whereas the new generation of vaccines, which are more targeted, can induce sufficient and effective antibodies.” 

Even the WHO’s Technical Advisory Group on COVID-19 Vaccine Composition has acknowledged that the current vaccines’ efficacy against symptomatic disease is limited and declining with the XBB.1 lineages. They are recommending changing the formulation directed at these strains—such as XBB.1.5 or XBB.1.16—and shifting monovalent formulations, discarding the vaccine against the original strain as it no longer circulates.

Such admissions only underscore the continued failure of the vaccine-only strategy that the WHO itself had previously warned against. They had openly stated that vaccination without mitigation of the disease to the utmost possible extent was untenable as a pandemic control strategy. Its adoption now by the WHO is a scientific retrogression and a capitulation to the political pressures the agency has faced from the beginning of the pandemic. 

The only viable solution to the present pandemic calamity is the reimplementation of the core public health strategies that have been proven effective for centuries, such as quarantines, isolation and masking, while every effort is directed to the development of pan-coronavirus and mucosal vaccines, as well as including therapeutics and infrastructure planning to ensure indoor air quality is verified free of pathogens.

A study published last week in Nature by Sato Labs from the University of Tokyo offered a glimpse into the virological characteristics of the SARS-CoV-2 XBB variant. As previously noted, the XBB evolved out of the recombination of two previously co-circulating BA.2 lineages, BJ.1 and BM.1.1.1, last summer, a “landmark event in the pandemic,” according to Dr. Rajeev Jayadevan, co-chairman National IMA COVID Task Force & past president of the Indian Medical Association. Essentially, all previous variants involved individual mutations. XBB represents a qualitative change, as convergent evolutionary pathways enable the coronavirus to develop more complex adaptive capacities. 

As the authors of the report note, “To our knowledge, this is the first documented example of a SARS-CoV-2 variant increasing its fitness through recombination rather than substitutions.” They also found that XBB.1 had a “profound resistance to antiviral humoral immunity induced by vaccination or breakthrough infections of prior Omicron subvariants, consistent with reports from other groups.” 

It should be added that although XBB’s pathogenicity remains similar to its predecessors, it is no guarantee that future variants will not evolve more lethal versions. Recombinant events could very well link a highly transmissible variant like XBB with a variant that has similar tropism in deep lung tissue like Delta, leading to a variant with both characteristics: greater infectiousness and greater deadliness. That it has not happened yet is simply a case of blind luck.

As the WHO noted, the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic erased 337 million life years for the world’s human population. More worrisome, annual world statistics are also showing that there is a growing threat from non-communicable diseases such as heart disease, diabetes and cancer. That COVID-19 is contributing directly and indirectly in this sphere is no longer a matter of debate. 

All the public health gains in the first two decades of the 21st century are quickly being erased. Global life expectancy has plummeted. Diseases like HIV, cholera, tuberculosis and malaria are making gains again as access to necessary health care is being destroyed due to capitalism. Meanwhile, the threat posed by novel emerging pandemic pathogens has only grown in the face of inaction by governments all over the world and the demise of effective public health systems.

Workers Party imposes austerity in Brazil

Eduardo Parati

The government of Workers Party (PT) President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva mobilized all its efforts to get its new austerity policy approved this week.

Promoted by Lula’s Finance Minister Fernando Haddad in multiple interviews in major newspapers and on television channels, the PT’s fiscal package of social cuts has been hailed in financial circles and by the business elite.

Students demonstrating last month in Sao Paulo against attacks on education [Photo: Rovena Rosa/Agência Brasil ]

On Tuesday, the basic text of the proposal was approved by Congress, with dozens of amendments that will deepen its attacks on the working class. The initial proposal limits the increase in public spending to just 2.5 percent annually and caps it at 70 percent of the increase in tax revenue from the previous year, reducing this limit to 50 percent if the previous year’s fiscal target is not met.

The severe fiscal restrictions imposed by the new PT government do not apply, however, to foreign debt payments. In other words, its policy guarantees that the profits of domestic and foreign investors will be prioritized while cuts in social spending implemented by previous governments are maintained.

The “framework” proposed by Lula’s government is just a reconfiguration of the spending cap approved by the interim government of Michel Temer (MDB), aiming at better meeting the current needs of the ruling class. Temer’s fiscal package, which went into effect in 2017 and was suspended in the initial period of the COVID-19 pandemic, was a main component of an assault against the working class that the Brazilian bourgeoisie promoted in its political turn with the impeachment of PT president Dilma Rousseff.

As a result of this brutal austerity package, Treasury Secretariat data indicated that, by 2021, the rate of public investments relative to national GDP had fallen to 2004 levels. Describing the impact of these cuts on vital social sectors, Esther Dweck, an economist at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), stated: “In 2020, pre-pandemic, we have data showing that health care lost more than R$22 billion [US$6 billion] ... and education ... goes from a level of 26% of net tax revenues to ... 19%.” National Treasury Secretary Rogério Ceron said in January that meeting the cap required a 30 percent cut in total public investments last year.

Henrique Meirelles, the creator of the spending cap policy, was finance minister under Temer and was previously appointed by Lula to head the Central Bank during his first two administrations. Meirelles’ support and participation in Lula’s election campaign last year represented a decisive nod to the financial elite, indicating that the PT’s return to power would not divert the country from its trajectory of social cuts.

In addition to its fiscal policy, the new PT government is continuing the privatization program that was accelerated under the far-right administration of Jair Bolsonaro. A sanitation sector bill, announced just days before Haddad’s fiscal policy, was celebrated as a huge turning point in the privatization of the country’s water resources. One of the most notorious components of the measure is the complete freedom given to so-called “Public-Private Partnerships,” a privatization model that even under the right-wing Bolsonaro government remained restricted to a quarter of the sector’s public bids.

Although Lula’s election campaign was full of promises that he would rapidly increase social programs and investments, his real program of attacks on the working class was unveiled upon taking office. In his inaugural speech, Lula declared: “The model we propose, approved at the ballot box, demands a commitment to responsibility, credibility and predictability, and we will not give that up.”

The government’s announcement of its fiscal framework on March 30 was met with an immediate rise of the stock markets. The government also received praise from the president of the Central Bank, Roberto Campos Neto. Appointed to his position by Bolsonaro, Campos Neto has been the target of repeated criticism by Lula, who blames him for one of the highest interest rates among the world’s capitalist economies.

Demanding a significant decrease in interest rates, Lula seeks to mobilize industrial sectors dissatisfied with the Central Bank policy, which since 2021 has increased the rate from 2 percent to 13.75 percent today. In recent months, auto plants throughout the country have stopped production, a situation that was partially attributed to the Central Bank’s regime. On May 12, this precipitated a warning by National Association of Automotive Vehicle Manufacturers (Anfavea) president Márcio de Lima Leite that “we will continue to hear news of factory shutdowns or worse if interest rates remain high.”

The increase in interest rates in Brazil is in line with (and to a certain degree anticipated) the move of central banks in the main capitalist centers, sustaining a policy of rising interest rates under the guise of controlling a global inflationary wave. Behind the façade of fighting inflation, the real aim of the world financial elite is to suppress a growing wave of resistance from the international working class. Interest rate hikes are designed to force a decline in production and, if necessary, a global recession, which increases a competition for jobs and allows for a generalized lowering of wages.

In the official communiqué of the recent G7 meeting in Japan, the imperialist powers reaffirmed their demand that governments around the world maintain high interest rates combined with austerity policies, while attacking wages and social programs. Placing the full weight of the global crisis of capitalism on the working class, these cuts safeguard the profits of the parasitic financial elite and the ever-increasing funneling of resources to imperialist war.

In its report published in April, the International Monetary Fund acknowledged the exacerbated impact of the interest rate policy on the so-called “emerging economies.” However, directly referring to the case of Brazil, the IMF attributed the rise in the “real rate” of interest to “increased public consumption” (supposedly social spending during the COVID-19 pandemic) and pointed to austerity as the means to restore lower interest rates.

Last week, Brazil was visited by the second highest IMF official, Gita Gopinath, who held a meeting with Haddad and participated in an event with Central Bank officials in which she praised the maintenance of high interest rates. The main objective of the imperialist financial agency was to show its support for the PT’s austerity policies and to demand their further deepening. In an official statement, the IMF declared that “We strongly support the authorities’ commitment to improve the Brazilian fiscal position” and recommended “a more ambitious fiscal effort that continues beyond 2026.”

The PT government’s willingness to comply with the demands for “more ambitious” cuts was evidenced by Haddad’s participation in a session of the Congress’ Chamber of Deputies. Under the general theme of “depolarizing [politics],” the minister was warmly welcomed not only by PT congressmen, but also by key supporters of the Bolsonaro government. Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party (PL) deputy, Captain Alberto Neto, congratulated Haddad “for his ability, because I lived to see the PT be in favor of a spending cap, because this framework brings restraints on public spending.”

Lula’s and the PT’s declared aim of promoting the growth of Brazilian capitalism independently of a growing global economic crisis and trade and military conflicts between the imperialist powers are essentially infeasible.

In addition to submitting to the imperialist financial elite’s paralyzing demands on the Brazilian economy, the PT exposed the limitations of its national project during Lula’s participation in the latest G7 meeting.

Lula’s “peace” proposals to the imperialist powers had no influence on the meeting’s outcome in Hiroshima. The G7’s official statement announced the expansion of the war in Ukraine, including the promise of sending F-16 fighter jets to the Ukrainian forces and the extension of economic sanctions against Russia. It also reaffirmed China as the main target of US imperialism, accusing the country of “expansive maritime claims in the South China Sea.” Once more, the conception that the Latin American bourgeoisie will be able to balance between the imperialist powers and Russia and China was refuted.

The PT’s austerity policy amid layoffs of thousands of auto workers also exposes the significance of the nationalism of the unions and organizations of the pseudo-left. After promoting during the election the supposed ability of Brazil under the PT to reactivate the economy and bring jobs, these organizations are now acting to enforce the consolidation of cuts in working class living conditions.

In recent months, these unions have worked to suppress a national strike of nurses, the unification of a teachers strike wave in multiple states and a series of other actions in the oil, public transportation and other sectors.

Australian Labor’s budget cuts real spending on schools, maintains lucrative subsidies for private system

Patrick O’Connor

The Australian Labor government’s second budget, delivered on May 9, included significant cuts to real spending for public schools while maintaining the enormous flow of public funds into private schools, including the most exclusive institutions reserved for children of the affluent elite.

Australian Treasurer Jim Chalmers after presenting federal budget to parliament in Canberra on 9 May, 2023. [Photo: @JEChalmers]

Education barely featured in the government’s promotion of the budget. The word “schools” was not once mentioned in Treasurer Jim Chalmers’s budget speech.

Buried within the budget papers were real cuts to school spending. Funding for government schools will only rise by 5.7 percent from $10.2 billion to $10.8 billion in 2023–24, far below the 7 percent official inflation rate and what is required by the 2 percent population growth.

Federal funding is projected to increase even more slowly, by less than 4 percent a year, over the next four years, to $12.1 billion in 2026–27, amounting to a significant real cut.

This is part of a wider series of cuts to social spending, on top of record real wage cuts and declines in working-class living standards. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese sought to advertise tokenistic “cost of living relief” measures that in reality do nothing to address the crisis confronting working people and those relying on welfare payments.

At the same time, record anticipated military spending was kept off the books, including $368 billion on AUKUS nuclear-powered submarines that has been allocated as part of the US-led preparations for an aggressive war against China. A massive giveaway of $313 billion over a decade to the wealthy and upper-middle class via so-called Stage Three income tax cuts was likewise suppressed.

Teachers and school workers across the country are enduring real wage cuts, due to deals worked out between state governments and the Australian Education Union bureaucracy, along with the other teacher unions. Non-wage school expenses, however, are escalating rapidly, including for infrastructure and maintenance, school supplies and equipment, and information technology. Public schools will be asked to do more with less money.

This is amid conditions of an unprecedented crisis within public schools. Numerous schools, especially in working-class areas, are chronically short-staffed. Record numbers of teachers are quitting the system or reducing their hours, in response to excessive workloads, inadequate support for students with additional needs, and mandated regressive teaching requirements. An unknown number also have been affected by COVID and Long COVID, as the coronavirus continues to rip through schools, with some forced to temporarily return to remote learning as in New South Wales last week.

The Labor government is phasing out spending allocations connected to the pandemic. This year it has axed a $192 million “Student Wellbeing Boost” program that gave schools money “for the purposes of supporting students’ mental health and wellbeing through the impacts of COVID–19.”

Similarly, the government’s “Schools Upgrade Fund,” for “supporting capital projects to keep students and school staff safe after disruptions due to COVID–19”—involved just $50 million in spending last financial year and $215.8 million this year, before being axed entirely the year after.

This coincides with the Labor government’s ongoing efforts to convince the population that the pandemic is over. This false claim has been pushed by education department officials across Australia. As a consequence, principals in countless schools are failing to enforce even basic mitigation measures. Numerous HEPA air filtration systems that have been installed in school buildings are not being switched on each day, despite the scientific evidence of their utility in helping to reduce infection transmission.

The Albanese government has attempted to promote a number of new spending measures involving the most miserly of allocations.

For example, it will spend another $9.3 million, on top of the previously announced $328 million, for its so-called National Teacher Workforce Action Plan. This involves scholarships for professionals transitioning into teaching, additional university places, and an advertising campaign to supposedly help raise the status of the teaching profession.

None of these measures address the basic reason for the teacher workforce crisis—the intolerable working conditions that have been engineered within the schools. The government’s “Workload Reduction Fund,” involving annual spending of just $7 million in the next three years, amounts to a pathetic joke.

Labor is spending an extra $40 million for majority indigenous-student schools in central Australia. That equates to little more than 0.01 percent of the money the Labor government is planning to spend on the AUKUS attack submarines.

The Australian Education Union (AEU) nevertheless heralded the central Australia spending initiative. Federal union president Correna Haythorpe (whose annual salary and benefits stood at $298,000 when last reported in 2021) absurdly declared that it “potentially represents one of the most important steps forward for the future of Australian public schools.”

This statement underscored the AEU bureaucracy’s role as an active collaborator with the Labor Party’s assault on the public education system.

Haythorpe insisted that the central Australian spending represented “full funding” of public schools in that area, equivalent to 100 percent of the Schooling Resource Standard (SRS). Both the union and the Greens have suggested that the Labor government should move to fund public schools to 100 percent of the SRS more broadly.

What the AEU and the Greens never acknowledge is that the SRS funding formula is based on the pro-business, NAPLAN-tied (National Assessment Program—Literacy and Numeracy) school funding model first outlined by corporate leader David Gonski. On behalf of the previous Rudd-Gillard federal Labor government, Gonski developed a complex funding model, at the centre of which was a calculation as to how much money would be required to ensure that at least 80 percent of students are achieving above the national minimum standard in the regressive NAPLAN standardised tests.

In other words, delivering 100 percent of SRS funding would amount to ensuring that four out of five students in public schools have basic literacy and numeracy skills. This funding would not be anywhere near what would be required to ensure that every child, regardless of their families’ income level, has free access to the highest quality education as a social right that allows them to develop their full potential—intellectually, physically, culturally, and artistically.

While continuing to starve public schools of desperately needed funding, the Labor government is maintaining the lucrative flow of public monies into the private schools. Annual federal spending on non-government schools this year stands at $17.4 billion, rising by more than 10 percent to $19.26 billion by 2026–27.

The elite private schools, which receive millions of this public funding each year, while charging more than $40,000 in annual tuition fees, are awash with cash. They are spending a record amount on infrastructure investment, including Olympic-standard sporting facilities, world-class music studios, and, in one case, a library made to appear as a Scottish baronial castle complete with tower and turret.

Australia has one of the world’s most privatised school systems. Nearly 40 percent of students are enrolled in religious and so-called independent schools. The decline in public school enrolments is accelerating, because of the chronic under-funding and deteriorating conditions. Statistics released in February showed that enrolments in so-called independent schools increased by over 25 percent in the past decade, compared with an increase of less than half that in public schools at 11 percent.

Pacific leaders’ meeting ramps up US-led anti-China offensive

John Braddock

A meeting of Pacific Island leaders held in Papua New Guinea (PNG) on Monday saw the United States and its imperialist allies ramp up Washington’s confrontation with China in the Indo-Pacific.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, fourth left, front row, poses with leaders of the Forum for India-Pacific Islands Cooperation (FIPIC) in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, Monday, May 22, 2023. [AP Photo/Press Information Bureau via AP]

PNG is deeply impoverished but strategically important and resource rich. It was a key battleground during both world wars and is currently the site of commercial, diplomatic and geo-strategic tussles over Beijing’s influence. China is a major infrastructure investor in PNG.

US President Joe Biden was initially due to stop over in PNG en route to Australia for a meeting of the Quad, the de-facto military alliance involving Australia, India, Japan and the US, following the G7 in Japan. After Biden’s late withdrawal from both meetings last week, the US was represented in PNG by Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

All 18 Pacific Islands Forum leaders were summoned to Port Moresby, even though Biden’s stopover was scheduled for just three hours. The US-led summit was inserted into an India-Pacific forum previously organised by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has adopted a “look East” strategy to expand the country’s presence in the Pacific.

Modi’s forum, the third since 2014, and the US intervention were called amid their escalating confrontation with China. PNG Prime Minister James Marape effusively introduced Modi as the “leader of the Global South” and India the “third big voice” in global politics. He claimed the Pacific would “rally behind” India.

The major outcome of the meetings was the signing of a bilateral US-PNG Defense Cooperation Agreement giving Washington “uninhibited access” to strategic military and civilian locations, including ports and airports. While issuing assurances that the country’s “independence” will not be compromised, Marape declared: “[A]s we go forward over the next 15 years, we will see US soldiers in our country. We will see US contractors in our country.” US military presence is forecast to become the biggest since World War II.

The full text of the agreement is yet to be released, but the US is committing an extra $US45 million for various programs and $12.4 million to improve the “capacity” of the PNG Defence Force, including for domestic “security operations.” The US Coast Guard will be empowered to operate its “Shiprider” program alongside PNG’s maritime authorities in at-sea operations, ostensibly to control illegal fishing.

Marape said the agreement had a clause saying PNG will not be “used as a place for launching offensive military operations.” Nevertheless, the strategic naval base on Manus Island, which has had multi-million dollar upgrades by the US and Australia, will no doubt become a major military hub. In Port Moresby last August, Australia’s Defence Minister Richard Marles declared Canberra wanted a “greater role” for Manus which he described as a “strategic asset” for countering China.

After Biden’s cancellation, Australia’s Prime Minister Albanese absented himself, sending Minister for the Pacific Pat Conroy, but Canberra welcomed the US agreement. New Zealand’s Prime Minister Chris Hipkins attended and gave Wellington’s assent. In a statement reeking of hypocrisy, Hipkins told media: “New Zealand doesn’t support militarisation of the Pacific. Having said that a military presence doesn’t necessarily signify militarisation.”

Students from four PNG universities organised protests demanding the agreement not be signed. Former prime minister and opposition leader Peter O’Neill demagogically accused Marape of having, without consultation, “positioned our country at the epicentre of a military storm between China and the USA.” Marape declared Tuesday that the agreement was not a “treaty” and did not need to be ratified by parliament.

Beijing issued a scathing response, saying it was hypocritical of the West to criticise China when both the US and Australia were signing defence pacts with PNG.  China’s special envoy to the Pacific, Qian Bo criticised the US and its allies of deliberately undermining Beijing’s relations in the region. Qian accused the West of having a “Cold War mentality” and blinded by “ideological prejudice.”

No details of the broader discussions at either summit have been released, but an effort was made to smooth diplomatic relations with Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare who last year signed a security pact with Beijing producing hostile reactions from Washington and its local allies.

After a private meeting with Sogavare, Marape declared his support for strengthening “cooperation on mutual interests and priorities” particularly in “socio-economic development, maintaining law and order, peace and security” in the Solomons. The two leaders signed an agreement on PNG providing policing deployment in the country, which has previously used police trainers from China.

There is ongoing deep concern across the Pacific over the US-led anti-China offensive. Representing the region at the G7, Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown, the chair of the Pacific Islands Forum, called on the US and China to not bring “adversarial competition” to the Pacific. “For us, national security priorities are economic security, they are climate security,” Brown declared.

Pacific leaders have consistently held that global warming is a greater threat than China. According to the Sydney Morning Herald on May 18, the Albanese government has been warned it must raise its climate goals or risk Australia’s “security” ties to the region. It followed a forecast by the World Meteorological Organisation that global warming will almost certainly exceed a temperature increase of 1.5 degrees within the next five years, posing an existential threat to fragile Pacific islands experiencing relentless sea level rises.

Opposition has also erupted to Canberra’s AUKUS agreement with the US and UK, which provides for Australia’s establishment of a nuclear-propelled submarine fleet. A group of former leaders, the Pacific Elders’ Voice, has flatly condemned AUKUS as “triggering an arms race, by bringing war much closer to home.” The new submarines threaten to contravene the Treaty of Rarotonga, signed by Pacific nations including Australia and New Zealand, which in 1985 established a region-wide, nuclear-free zone.

Vanuatu is currently seeing domestic divisions over a security agreement with Australia signed last year. Amid claims Prime Minister Ishmael Kalsakau is moving “too close” to Canberra, some MPs, including within the government, have been pushing to delay, amend, or even scrap the deal. There appears to be little chance Vanuatu will ratify the pact in the near future.

Further resentment is building in the region over failed US promises to deliver funding to countries facing severe financial crises. Island Business this month listed a catalogue of commitments that have not eventuated, often stalled in Congress. They ranged from a proposed $1.7 billion US-led electrification project in PNG, intended to counter China’s Belt and Road initiative, to climate mitigation funding and support for the South Pacific Tuna Treaty.

Washington has, since the end of World War II, regarded the Pacific as an “American lake,” but largely outsourced oversight to Australia and New Zealand. That period has now come to an end as the Biden administration takes a much firmer, direct hold on the diplomatic, economic and military push against China.

The US has opened an embassy in Vanuatu after its Solomon Islands embassy was reopened following a 30-year absence. Embassies are currently being established in Kiribati and Tonga. Washington is meanwhile shoring up support with its northern Pacific neo-colonial possessions. Blinken has announced a $US7 billion boost to its so-called “Compact of Free Association” nations, deemed critical to US “national security goals,” while renewing strategic pacts with Micronesia, Marshall Islands and Palau.

In the wake of the PNG summit, Biden has formally invited Pacific leaders to Washington for face-to-face talks later this year, following an initial meeting there last September. The US president bluntly told that gathering: “The security of America, quite frankly, and the world depends on your security and the security of the Pacific islands.”