JN.1 becomes dominant COVID-19 strain across the US, fueling winter wave of mass infection

Benjamin Mateus & Evan Blake

On Friday, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) updated its SARS-CoV-2 genomic surveillance variant proportions, with data obtained over the past two weeks, showing that the Omicron JN.1 subvariant accounted for 44.2 percent of all sequenced cases and is now dominant across the US.

Variant proportions across the US, December 23, 2023 [Photo: CDC]

Variant trackers and data scientists agree that the rise of JN.1 to dominance in the US will only fuel the country’s eighth wave of mass infection in the weeks ahead. This could soon cause the second-highest number of COVID-19 cases of any wave so far, excluding only the initial Omicron wave exactly two years ago. It is not yet clear how high JN.1 will push hospitalization and death rates, but data from the “bellweather state” of New York are very concerning, with hospitalizations rising 36 percent over the past week after JN.1 became dominant.

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JN.1 is now the dominant variant globally, causing spikes in infections, hospitalizations and now deaths in a growing number of countries. Some European countries, including Germany, the Netherlands and Denmark, have recorded all-time highs in COVID-19 wastewater levels, surpassing even the peaks reached during the first Omicron wave two years ago.

The case of Singapore is important to highlight as it provides a window into what the US and other regions can expect in the course of just a few weeks. The strain quickly rose in prominence and dominated other strains of SARS-CoV-2 by early December.

Singapore’s Ministry of Health has reported a steady rise in COVID-19 hospitalizations due to JN.1, despite having a population that has been highly vaccinated and boosted. The number of COVID-19 cases has more than quadrupled in the past month, while hospitalizations have jumped from 136 in late November to 560 in their latest update. Public health authorities have issued pleas for citizens to don masks again and are reviewing health system utilization to assure bed capacity remains available for the infected.

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In Malaysia, the government has reactivated the Heightened Alert System to better respond to developments. Cases have nearly doubled since early December. Thailand and Indonesia are also issuing similar advisories to their respective population.

On Tuesday, the World Health Organization (WHO) had to acknowledge the threat of JN.1 by designating it as its own “variant of interest” independent of its parent BA.2.86 (nicknamed “Pirola”). In its press release, the organization recommended that all people “Wear a mask when in crowded, enclosed, or poorly ventilated areas, and keep a safe distance from others, as feasible” and “improve ventilation.”

Significantly, for healthcare workers and facilities, the WHO advises “universal masking in health facilities, as well as appropriate masking, respirators and other PPE for health workers caring for suspected and confirmed COVID-19 patients.” They also suggest “improve ventilation in health facilities.”

Needless to say, these basic public health measures are not being implemented in the overwhelming majority of healthcare facilities. As with the United Nations’ toothless resolution calling for a ceasefire in Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people, the WHO’s advice falls on deaf ears, as the world’s ruling elites are inured to the mass death and suffering of their populations.

Nevertheless, in some health systems in Pennsylvania, Washington, Massachusetts, New Jersey and other states, administrators are doing the bare minimum of bringing back mask mandates in an attempt to slow the spread, especially among staff and patients.

Dr. David Christopher, an emergency room physician in Northeast Ohio, who has seen his ED being overrun with patients with respiratory illnesses, wrote on X/Twitter, “My hospital is finally reinstating COVID PCR testing on every patient being admitted which should give you a clue as to how bad things are getting again yet most people are totally oblivious while plague coughing is everywhere.”

Recent studies have shown that the particular mutation distinguishing JN.1 from its parent BA.2.86, L455S, has given it significant immune-evading capacity. A research group headed by Yunlong Richard Cao of Peking University is one of the few groups conducting real-time studies on the emergence of these new strains of Omicron. Summarizing its latest finding on JN.1 in a Lancet report, they noted:

JN.1, by inheriting BA.2.86’s antigenic diversity and acquisition of L455S, rapidly achieved extensive resistance across receptor binding domain class 1, 2, and 3 antibodies, and showed higher immune evasion compared with BA.2.86 and other resistant strains like HV.1 and JD.1·1, at the expense of reduced human ACE2 binding. This evolutionary pattern, similar to the previous transition from BA.2.75 to CH.1.1 and XBB, highlights the importance of closely monitoring strains with high human ACE2 binding affinity and distinct antigenicity, like BA.2.86 and BA.2.75, despite their unremarkable immune evasion capabilities. Such strains could survive and transmit at low levels since their antigenic difference would allow them to target distinct populations compared with dominant strains and have the potential to quickly accumulate highly immune-evasive mutations at the cost of human ACE2 binding capabilities.

In another report awaiting peer review by the same group, they underscored the dangers posed by SARS-CoV-2’s continuous evolution and the fatal flaws of a vaccine-only strategy. They found that a L455F+F456L mutation known as “Flip” on the receptor binding domain (RBD) of the virus inherently improves its receptor binding properties while maintaining its immune-evasive characteristics.

They wrote, “The enhancement of receptor binding increases the potential for the virus to further accumulate immune evasive mutations.” In their conclusion, they warned, “the evolutionary potential of SARS-CoV-2 RBD is still high and should not be underestimated.”

Ushering in the holiday seasons and entering the fifth year of the pandemic, such shifts in the genetic make-up of SARS-CoV-2 were not unexpected. They are part and parcel of the virus’s ability to consistently find new mechanisms to advance its own evolution using billions of human hosts, as detailed in a recent Substack piece by Drs. Arijit Chakravarty and T Ryan Gregory.

The corporate media continuously minimizes the risks of COVID-19 by noting that health system usage and deaths are no longer at levels seen in the first two years of the pandemic. However, this does not take into account the immense societal impacts of Long COVID, often termed “the pandemic within the pandemic.”

Not a single mainstream outlet has reported a highly significant interview with three of the world’s leading experts on Long COVID—Drs. Ziyad Al-Aly, Akiko Iwasaki and Michael Peluso—in which each stated that they continue to remain disciplined with masking in indoor public spaces in order to avoid Long COVID.

More so than any previously studied pathogen, SARS-CoV-2 has been shown to persist in myriad body tissues for unknown duration. Thus, in a recent discussion with the WSWS, Arijit Chakravarty conceptualized the ruling elites’ policy of “forever COVID” in a two-fold manner: through unending waves of mass infection, which will entail repeated annual reinfections for the great bulk of the population, untold masses are being seeded with SARS-CoV-2, potentially persisting in them forever. The implications of this policy are deeply disturbing, with ever-broader sections of society becoming debilitated and dying with each new wave of mass infection.

In an opinion piece published this week in the British Medical Journal, the scale of this “mass disabling event” was given further measure. According to the UK Office for National Statistics (ONS) Infection Survey, by the end of March 2023 (at which point the ONS discontinued this vital service), some 1.7 million people were experiencing Long COVID, 40 percent of whom had caught COVID-19 in the last two years (Omicron phase).

Extrapolated for the global population, this would mean that roughly 200 million people were then suffering from Long COVID. According to the ONS data, only 31 percent of those who still had symptoms after 12 weeks recovered within a year of their infection, the report noted. Tens of thousands of UK residents, and millions globally, have had persistent symptoms lasting for more than three years.

Despite the accumulated knowledge of post-viral syndromes and their impact, there is no impetus from within the capitalist political establishment to fund large, well-designed trials to evaluate potential treatments for Long COVID and related illnesses. As the authors noted:

Post-viral syndromes are nothing new. We already knew of the significant ongoing burden of disease in many infected with SARS-CoV-1 almost 20 years and MERS over 10 years ago. The chances that another new coronavirus like SARS-CoV-2 which causes significant long-term morbidity should have been a consideration from the very beginning of the pandemic. It should have been explicitly factored into the debates on policies.

Ukraine proposes mobilizing 500,000 more troops

Jason Melanovski

Honor guards carry the coffin of a Ukrainian serviceman during his funeral service in Independence Square in Kiev, Ukraine on Friday, December 15, 2023. [AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka]

The Ukrainian government is considering conscripting an additional 500,000 men in response to a request from the Ukrainian Armed Forces, President Volodymyr Zelensky announced on Tuesday at his end-of-year news conference.

The proposed mobilization plan would cost $13.3 billion, according to Zelensky. He admitted that it is unclear how exactly Ukraine, already Europe’s poorest country, would pay for the mobilization. During his trip to Washington last week, he failed to secure the immediate approval of $60 billion in US funding from Congress.

With a total pre-war population of approximately 36 million, of whom millions have left the country, the proposed numbers would represent a huge share of the working age population. They would be brought to slaughter bench in a NATO-provoked war that was described as a “stalemate” by Ukrainian General Valery Zaluzhnyi in November of this year in The Economist. 

The total number of Ukrainian soldiers already killed or injured in the war is a closely guarded secret by Kiev, but Zelensky’s former presidential advisor Alexey Arestovich confirmed Russian claims of 400,000 Ukrainian casualties during an interview earlier in December.

According to the UN, over 10,000 Ukrainian civilians have been killed, 560 of them children. Ukraine is now also the most heavily mined country in the world.

While Zaluzhnyi was strongly criticized by Zelensky and his advisers in November for describing the war as a “stalemate,” in reality, this appears to have been a charitable characterization, as Ukraine has lost 20 percent of its territory since the start of the war in February 2022, including its major shipping ports on the Black Sea. Many military analysts consider it highly unlikely that Kiev can retake Crimea or the Donbass region.

The much publicized spring “counteroffensive” was an abject failure, with no territorial gains and a reported loss of some 125,000 Ukrainian troops in just a few months time. A large portion of the expensive Western military equipment that NATO had delivered to Kiev was useless or went up in flames. Throughout the country, Ukrainian forces are now largely on the defensive and at risk of losing the strategically important city of Avdiivka northeast of Donetsk, which has turned into another “meat grinder” like Bakhmut in which both sides sacrifice untold numbers of troops in suicidal attacks for inches of land. 

As the war drags on, Russia’s numerical and material advantage is increasingly becoming clearer as Lieutenant General Ihor Romanenko, former deputy chief of the General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, recently told Al Jazeera.

“These days, we are focusing on switching to defense, and, to boost its effectiveness, to equipping and mining the most threatening [front-line] areas and use this time to amass resources,” Romanenko said.

In regards to military production, Russia’s rapid buildup of artillery and other armaments production over the past year is clearly having an effect on the battlefield. “This year, [Russians] managed to catch up with us and go ahead of us, and to produce large quantities of unmanned aerial vehicles,” Romanenko said.

Under these conditions, the call for the mobilization of 500,000 Ukrainian citizens is a tacit admission that the Zelensky government is prepared to sacrifice hundreds of thousands more in its bid to retake territory in Eastern and Southern Ukraine which in addition to its industrial and agricultural significance, is home to highly valued mineral deposits. 

The Zelensky government is rightfully worried about a backlash from working class Ukrainians who will be forced to give up life and limb in the war. It has called the mobilization push “a very sensitive issue” that has yet to be decided on before sending it to parliament for ratification.

Polls from the the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology show that some 65 percent of the Ukrainian population supports further mobilization. However, these figures should not be trusted as any opposition to the pro-war nationalist propaganda in Ukraine is highly censored, and participants would be unlikely to give honest answers for fear of a visit from the country’s Security Services (SBU). As Anton Hrushetskyi, the executive director of the Kyiv-based polling agency, himself told Reuters, Ukrainians often give “socially desirable” answers or give false names to protect their identity.

A rapid increase in conscripted soldiers also risks alienating the Ukrainian upper and middle classes who have largely been shielded from the war by either fleeing the country, exploiting student or medical deferments, or paying up to a reported $10,000 in bribes to avoid conscription, a huge sum that would be simply out of reach for working class Ukrainians.

In August, Zelensky fired the heads of Ukraine’s regional recruitment centers after a large-scale bribery operation was uncovered. By doing so, he inadvertently caused a rapid decrease in conscription numbers, angering the military and furthering a growing rift between the government and the military led by Zaluzhnyi.

On Monday, prior to Zelensky’s press conference, Zaluzhnyi openly criticized Zelensky’s firing of the recruitment leadership and blamed the conscription failures squarely on the Zelensky government. “These were professionals, they knew how to do this, and they are gone,” Interfax Ukraine quoted Zaluzhnyi as saying.

With a military crisis staring them squarely in the face, recruiters have increasingly resorted to dictatorial methods of grabbing young people from gyms, restaurants, malls and off the street and forcing them into the army as the WSWS reported last spring and the New York Times belatedly admitted last week.

As its domestic population of suitable recruits continues to dwindle, this week newly appointed Ukrainian Defense Minister Russian Umerov announced plans to force Ukrainian men living abroad back to Ukraine to serve in the armed forces. As BBC Ukraine reported in November, 650,000 Ukrainian men aged 18-60 have left Ukraine for Europe since the start of the war, while Zelensky’s former adviser Alexey Arestovich recently claimed that 4.5 million Ukrainian men, nearly half of the Ukrainian male population, had fled abroad to avoid military service, and that 30 to 70 percent of military units consist of “refuseniks,” who have gone absent without official leave (AWOL). 

To force unwilling soldiers back home, “invitations” will be sent out to the potential recruits who may then face “sanctions” should they not return. “We are still discussing what should happen if they do not come voluntarily...”, said Umerov.

As billionaire wealth surges, US faces record homelessness

Jacob Crosse

This holiday season, America’s financial oligarchy is celebrating as the Dow Jones Industrial average breaks record after record. But this winter, more homeless Americans than ever will spend the holidays on the streets, in homeless shelters, in parked cars and RVs, in abandoned buildings and under highway overpasses.

The number of homeless people in the United States has hit a record 653,000, a 12 percent increase over the prior year and an all-time record. This year, the number of homeless people in America was greater than the entire population of Vermont or Wyoming.

Tents line an overpass on North Hill Street above Cesar Chavez Avenue near U.S. 101 in Los Angeles, Wednesday, Nov. 15, 2023. [AP Photo/Christopher Weber]

These figures come from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) annual “point-in-time survey” released earlier this month.

But even this enormous figure is likely an underestimation. A 2017 report from the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty noted that a previous study using “administrative data collected from homeless services” estimated that the annual number of homeless people in the US is “2.5 to 10.2 times greater than can be obtained using a point in time count.”

Notable findings from the latest HUD survey include:

• Homelessness among families with children increased by 15.5 percent.
• California, home to the most billionaires in the US at 186, also has the highest homeless population at 181,399.
• Nearly one in six homeless people, or more than 98,000, were between 55 and 64, while another 39,700 were over the age of 64.
• Among homeless adults over 55, 46 percent were living in unsheltered areas “not meant for human habitation.”

Living on the streets is an increasingly deadly proposition for hundreds of thousands of people. A study released this year on housing status associated with rates and causes of sudden death in San Francisco found that homeless Americans were “16 times more likely to die suddenly than their peers,” outside of drug overdoses.

As more Americans than ever are living on the streets and millions more are one calamity away from joining them, the ultra-wealthy have never had it so good. As of November 2023, lobbying group Americans For Tax Fairness found that the collective wealth of 741 billionaires in the United States had grown to $5.2 trillion as of last month, “the highest amount every recorded” according to the group.

The simultaneous growth of extreme wealth and extreme poverty is the result of deliberate policies carried out by the ruling class for the benefit of the financial oligarchy—that is, for the benefit of Wall Street, major corporations, financial institutions, billionaires and the politicians who represent their interests.

Despite posturing as friends of the working class, President Joe Biden and the Democratic Party have continued many of the same billionaire-friendly social and tax policies promoted under the Trump administration. Biden has also overseen the elimination of virtually every pandemic era social program, including:

• The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) eviction moratorium, expanded and enhanced unemployment benefits, and the child tax credit. From December 2022 through November 2023, in just 34 cities, the Eviction Lab at Princeton University has tracked over 1 million evictions filed, including 75,704 in just the last month.
• The great “unwinding” of Medicaid enrollment has led to at least 13,379,000 enrollees losing coverage, according to KFF. Texas has seen the most people lose coverage with 1.7 million dis-enrolled, followed by Florida at 1.1 million and California with over 930,000.

• After a three and a half year pandemic pause, Biden has overseen the resumption of federal student loan payments for 43 million student loan borrowers with some $1.7 trillion in debt. Last week, the Department of Education confirmed that nearly 9 million borrowers, or nearly 40 percent who had bills due in October, missed their first payment, and did not pay by mid-November.

While the Biden administration declares that there is “no money” to pay for basic social programs, Congress has just passed an $890 billion military spending bill, while the White House is demanding the passage of another $105 billion for the war in Ukraine and to fund Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

In addition to these factors, in interviews with AP and the Wall Street Journal, Jeff Olivet, executive director of the US inter-agency Council on Homelessness, pointed to the “shortage of affordable homes and the high cost of housing that have left many Americans living paycheck to paycheck and one crisis away from homelessness.”

The price of a home in America has become unobtainable for vast swaths of the population. While housing prices have nearly doubled, wages have failed to keep pace. In November 2012, the St. Louis Fed recorded average earnings of all private employees at $24.16 an hour, or about $48,000 a year. A decade later, wages have not even increased an average of $1 a year, ending November 2023 at $34.10.

Declining real wages is the deliberate outcome of the class war policies carried out by the Federal Reserve, with the support of both big business parties, aimed at stifling workers’ demands for wage increases, while also tamping down resistance in the workplace to further exploitation. After years of ultra-low interest rates, over the last two years, the Federal Reserve under Chairman Jerome Powell has steadily raised interest rates and kept them high, inflicting higher costs on prospective homeowners in need of a loan.

In order to keep wages suppressed and workers on the job producing profits and sending war materiel to Israel, Ukraine and the South China Sea, the Biden administration has relied on the services of the trade union bureaucracies in every industry, from logistics, to healthcare, automotive, and the arts, to impose corporate-friendly contracts.

Workers in the United States and internationally have resisted the efforts of the government, corporate and trade union conspiracy to force through these rotten contracts, going on strike in record numbers. Between January 1 and December 20, there were 408 strikes in the US, according to Labor Action Tracker at Cornell University’s School of Industrial Labor.

Despite the increase in strikes, workers and their families have not been able to overcome inflation and cost-of-living increases, underscoring that the struggle to defend workers’ social rights cannot be waged within the confines of the trade union bureaucracies and the two-party system. Capitalism, the economic system that has produced such misery, is in irreconcilable conflict with the needs of the vast majority of the population.

Can We Stop Iran’s Executions?

Chloe Atkinson

Image by Steven Su.

Iran this week hanged a young woman convicted of murdering her husband, whom she married while still a child, defying international pressure for her to be pardoned. The Islamic regime in Iran is engaged in a war against its own people as it executes them for minor offenses or no offense at all. Since the beginning of the year, Iran executed at least 419 people – a major increase from the same period in 2022.

As Human Rights Watch points out, “The charges against the protesters have included vaguely defined national security charges such as enmity against God (Moharebeh), corruption on earth (Ifsad filarz), and armed rebellion (baghi). All of the vaguely worded crimes are capital offenses. The rushed trial proceedings, in which defendants are apparently prevented from having a lawyer of their choice, appear to fall grossly short of international standards.”

Amnesty International said it was “horrified” by the reports of the “chilling execution” of the young woman, saying the mother of two was “subjected to a forced and early marriage as a child.”

The office of the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights said it was “alarmed” by the execution.

After the death last year of 22-year-old Iranian Kurd Mahsa Amini after her arrest in Tehran for an alleged breach of the country’s strict dress code for women, Iranian citizens poured into the streets to defy the government. For months, they protested the cruelty of the regime, but government forces launched a massive crackdown and pushed back hard, arresting thousands of people throughout the country.

The alarming rate of executions has drawn severe criticism from several corners including the UN and the US. In November, the UN said it deplored the executions of a 17-year-old and a 22-year old and urged Tehran to immediately stop applying the death penalty.

The UN Human Rights Office said it was troubled by Friday’s executions. “The execution of Hamidreza Azari, who was accused of murder, is the first reported execution of an alleged child offender in Iran this year,” spokesperson Elizabeth Throssell said in a statement.

According to the Norway-based Iran Human Rights (IHR) group, Iran executed 582 people in 2022 but this year’s total is expected to be significantly higher.

As per IHR, the number of executions has surged to 707 individuals from the beginning of the current calendar year until the end of November, marking an unparalleled increase over the past eight years – and the year isn’t over yet.

Among those who were executed, 390 were sentenced to death on charges related to “drug offenses,” and 238 faced capital punishment on charges of “intentional murder,” as reported by IHR. Authorities executed at least one child offender and 17 women. The implementation of death sentences has intensified since October, with at least 200 individuals executed in Iran.

It is time for the UK, the EU, its member states and the US to take practical steps instead of simply verbally condemning Iran over its gross violations of human rights.

One of the ways the international community can pressure Iran is through diplomacy and dialogue, which it has already been doing to some extent.

A recent cyber attack in Iran which left gas stations across the country dysfunctional appears to have been the work of an unnamed foreign entity. Whether such cyber attacks can force the regime into complacency is not yet clear, but this method too has not proven itself yet.

The dire human rights situation in Iran calls for further measures against Iran but there are in fact few ways the international community can influence the regime beyond what it is already doing. While some Iranian human rights organizations have called for a regime replacement and some level of a coup detat, it is unclear who exactly would replace the regime and how. The powerful IRGC military maintains a powerful grip over the country and it is unlikely anyone will be able to carry out such an ambitious plan.

A glance at Iraq and Saddam Hussein’s rule there demonstrates that a dictator could have total power one day and be hiding in a hole in the ground the next day. At the moment, it seems unlikely that the Iranian regime including Ayatollah Ali Khamenei are going anywhere but in the Middle East region, anything can happen. Until something drastic occurs, the Iranian people will remain oppressed at the hands of their government as the regime wantonly executes civilians at will.

Climate scientists predict devastating weather conditions for the Southern Hemisphere summer

Frank Gaglioti

In the lead-up to the 2023/24 summer period in the Southern Hemisphere, climate scientists are issuing dire warnings of the consequences for the earth of the growing climate crisis.

This comes in the wake of the Northern Hemisphere summer that produced a searing heatwave across the Eurasian landmass and North America, accompanied by devastating wildfires.

Climate scientist at the University of Melbourne Andrew King told Nature there is “a high chance of seeing record-high temperatures, at least on a global average, and seeing some particularly extreme events in some parts of the world.”

One of the starkest indicators was the announcement on December 7 by Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) that 2023 was the hottest year in recorded history, including two days 2°C above the preindustrial period. Scientists predict that 2024 may be even hotter.

Graph shows anomalies in surface water temperatures globally [Photo by Copernicus Climate Change Service]

“As long as greenhouse gas concentrations keep rising, we can’t expect different outcomes from those seen this year. The temperature will keep rising and so will the impacts of heatwaves and droughts. Reaching net zero as soon as possible is an effective way to manage our climate risks,” C3S Director Carlo Buontempo commented.

The conditions of runaway global warming are being enhanced by the strong El Niño event in the Pacific Ocean, and a positive Indian Ocean Dipole. These are natural weather patterns that govern the earth’s weather systems but in combination with global warming are having potentially dire consequences.

The Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) announced the current El Niño event in September. This is usually associated with heatwaves. This followed a La Niña weather system for the past three years, that generally produces wet and cool conditions. This served to mask the effects of global warming to some extent.

The full effect of the changing climate is “emerging properly” King told Nature.

El Niño and La Niña are part of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) weather pattern that strongly influences the world’s climate. They are based on temperature differentials in the central and eastern Pacific Ocean.

In August, the BOM reported that a positive Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) had developed. This is associated with hot and dry weather for the Australian continent. The IOD is the difference in sea surface temperature between the western pole in the Arabian Sea and an eastern pole in the Indian Ocean south of Indonesia.

In 2019-20 the two climate systems in combination produced a very severe Australian bushfire season with a devastating impact on rural communities and the environment.

In east Africa the combination of the two weather systems is expected to cause extreme rainfall and flooding. Above average rainfall is predicted over southern Africa during spring followed by warm and dry conditions in the summer.

In South America El Niño is expected to produce excessive rain and flooding especially in Peru and Ecuador but also very dry conditions and drought for the Amazon and the northeast.

A feature of the Northern Hemisphere that accompanied the unprecedented summer heatwave were heat domes. These are due to the disproportionately large land mass where areas of circulating warm, dry air block the movement of low-pressure systems that would bring cooler conditions. This is not expected to appear in the Southern Hemisphere due to a much higher ocean-to-land ratio (80 percent of the Southern Hemisphere is water, compared to 60 percent of the Northern Hemisphere).

Nevertheless, numerous indicators around the world all point to conditions that are developing for a possibly unprecedented summer heatwave in the Southern Hemisphere.

One of the most important factors is the heating of the oceans that is leading to a very severe retreat of Antarctic ice. The world’s oceans cover over 70 percent of the globe and have acted as a heat sink for most of the world’s warming, because water has a very high heat capacity. According to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) 90 percent of the world’s warming has been absorbed by the top few meters of the ocean’s water. 

Antarctica, surrounded by the Southern Ocean

In April the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported that ocean temperatures were at an unprecedented high. The data gathered from satellites and ocean buoys showed that the average temperature at the ocean’s surface was 21.1° C since the start of April; the previous record was 21° C set in 2016. Even a small difference, spread over the vast expanse of all the oceans of the world, comes to a major increase in global warming.

“The current trajectory looks like it’s headed off the charts, smashing previous records,” climate scientist at the University of New South Wales Professor Matthew England told The Guardian.

The rising ocean temperatures are causing sea level rise due to thermal expansion, coral bleaching, accelerated melting of Earth’s major ice sheets, intensified hurricanes, and changes in ocean health and biochemistry.

A comment by Distinguished Scholar Kevin Trenberth at The National Center for Atmospheric Research in Auckland, published in January 2022 in The Conversation “Ocean heat is at record levels, with major consequences,” stated that “all oceans are warming, with the largest amounts of warming in the Atlantic Ocean and in the Southern Ocean surrounding Antarctica. That’s a concern for Antarctica’s ice—heat in the Southern Ocean can creep under Antarctica’s ice shelves, thinning them and resulting in calving off of huge icebergs. Warming oceans are also a concern for sea level rise.”

Scientists are particularly alarmed by the unprecedented warming at the poles. Sea ice was at a record low around Antarctica during the winter, leading scientists to predict feed-back loops.

“Large areas of the Southern Ocean that would usually still be covered by sea ice in October aren’t,” Ariaan Purich, a climate scientist at Monash University in Australia, told Nature. 

This leaves less sea-ice to reflect heat back into space, leaving dark ocean that absorbs the heat. “Then this makes the surface warmer and it’s going to melt back more sea ice so we can have this positive feedback,” Purich continued.

Global warming is more extreme at the poles than the rest of the planet, a process known as polar amplification. Antarctica is warming at triple the rate of the rest of the planet.

A study by physical geographer Kyle Clem at the School of Geography at Victoria University in Wellington and his team was published in June 2020 in Nature Climate Change “Record warming at the South Pole during the past three decades.” They found, “The most recent 30-yr period of 1989–2018 experienced the largest 30-yr annual-mean warming trend on record of 0.61 ± 0.34 °C decade−1 (95% confidence interval, CI), over three times the global average rate.”

The West Antarctic sea ice is of particular concern, because if this collapses, worldwide sea levels could rise by several meters. The ice sheet is vast and contains 2.2 million square kms of ice. It has warmed by more than 0.1 °C per decade over the last fifty years.

 Kaitlin Naughten [Photo: British Antarctic Survey]

Important research headed by ocean modeler Kaitlin Naughten and her group from the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, published in October 2023 in Nature Climate Change, and titled, “Unavoidable future increase in West Antarctic ice-shelf melting over the twenty-first century,” simulated a number of likely scenarios to predict the melting of the including that global warming is stabilized at  targets set out by the Paris Agreement, 1.5°C and 2°C.  

All these simulations show that the melting of the West Antarctic sea ice may have reached the point of no return. This is a very alarming result as the complete melting of the ice sheet would produce a 5m rise in sea levels. Internationally this would inundate low-lying islands and low-lying areas near the coast, devastating innumerable communities.

Naughten et al state, “Our simulations present a sobering outlook for the Amundsen Sea [a section of the West Antarctic Sea]. Substantial ocean warming and ice-shelf melting is projected in all future climate scenarios, including those considered to be unrealistically ambitious. A baseline of rapid twenty-first-century ocean warming and consequent sea-level rise appears to be committed. This warming is primarily driven by an acceleration of the Amundsen Undercurrent transporting warmer CDW (Circumpolar Deep Water) onto the continental shelf. Basal melting increases across all ice shelves in the Amundsen Sea, including in regions providing critical buttressing to the grounded ice sheet.”

The CDW is combination of ocean currents at a depth of about 500 m combining currents from the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans.

“It looks like we’ve lost control of melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. If we wanted to preserve it in its historical state, we would have needed action on climate change decades ago,” Naughten told Science.

Atmospheric scientist David Karoly at the University of Melbourne, who is a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, predicted worsening conditions for the next year.

“We know that the impact on temperatures associated with El Niño happens the year after the event,” Karoly told Nature.

The results of important research by climate scientists highlight that we are on the edge of a precipice and that the world’s climate is heading into unchartered territory with dire consequences for the future of humanity. Governments internationally, due to their total subordination to big business including the fossil fuel industry, have done nothing to curb the production of greenhouse gases. 

The president of the recent climate summit, COP 28, minister of industry and advanced technology of the United Arab Emirates and head of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company Sultan Al Jaber, spoke for all the gathered dignitaries when he claimed, “There is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says that the phase-out of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5C” (the proposed limitation for the rise in global warming).

G7 powers discussing plan to seize frozen Russian financial assets

Nick Beams

With the US and the European Union facing growing political difficulties in getting through increased military funding for the Ukraine war, a plan to seize frozen Russian financial assets of about $300 billion, which has been circulating for some time, is now coming under more active consideration.

Bank of Russia, Moscow [Photo by Ludvig14 via Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0]

The assets of the Russian central bank held in foreign banks and international financial institutions were frozen almost immediately after the war began in February last year, sending a shock wave through the international financial system. At that point, and in discussion since, the actual seizure was thought to be a step too far.

Earlier this year the European Central Bank (ECB) cautioned against an EU proposal to use the assets and divert them to Ukraine, and said it had to be part of a global plan involving the G7 powers.

“We have to be careful because this could lead to reputational damage,” the ECB said, “there could be implications for the euro as a safe currency.”

In an internal note at the time, the ECB warned of the risks of undermining the “legal and economic foundations” of the international role of the euro. “The implications could be substantial,” it stated.

The risk is that other countries, such as China and Saudi Arabia, which stow some of their currency reserves in euros, would consider it unsafe.

According to one EU diplomat, cited by the Financial Times (FT) when the asset seizure proposal was first under discussion earlier this year: “Every major euro-dominated economy is treading very carefully on this because of the potential effects for the euro and for foreign investment and clearing in euro.”

Opinions vary on the move, as exemplified in recent comments made to the FT.

Philip Zelikow, a former US diplomat, cited as a precedent the compensation of more than $52 billion, finally paid off at the end of last year, which was extracted from Iraq for the 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

“This represents an enormous opportunity,” he said. “We have spent nearly two years working through legal thickets and can now begin to contemplate the possibilities that may be available. If this works, the money at stake—$300 billion—would be a game-changer for Ukraine.”

An opposed view was advanced by Ingrid Brunk, a professor of international law at Vanderbilt Law School, who said the idea was “unwise.”

“Many countries have been damaged by many things that violated international law with no suggestion that we seize foreign currency assets. These are the most sacrosanct kinds of assets in the global financial system.”

Despite these reservations, there is now a concerted push from within the imperialist political establishment to go ahead.

Former British prime minister, now foreign secretary, Lord David Cameron, told a parliamentary committee earlier this month he was confident there was a “legal route” to confiscate the assets.

Cameron was basing himself on a long tradition. Back in the days when Britain ruled the colony of Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, it was said the colonial master practised “perjury by day and forgery by night.”

Cameron said he was pushing hard within the G7 for the proposal to seize the Russian assets, saying “extraordinary times require extraordinary measures.” He denied there would be a “chilling effect” of such action because investors that would likely be perturbed had already been “pretty chilled out by the fact that we have frozen.”

In the manner indicated by the Sri Lankan saying, the legal experts are getting to work.

The FT reported that while the US has not formally declared in favour of seizing the assets, it was working to have the plan go ahead. The newspaper pointed to a recent G7 discussion paper, written by US officials, which would present the seizure as a “countermeasure” permitted under international law to “induce Russia to end its aggression.”

The US paper said the asset seizure could be “pursued as a lawful countermeasure by those states that have been injured as specifically affected by Russia’s violation of the international law.”

This means the imperialist powers that have provided money for the war could get part of the Russian reserves as compensation. There is clearly a push for this to take place.

According to one Western official, cited in a recent report by the FT, there were “definitely live conversations” in the G7 and a “growing consensus” in favour of using Russian sovereign assets.

“It’s going back to the question of: Is it just up to Western citizens and treasuries to pay for the war, or should the Kremlin also be on the hook?”

Following the failure of the EU to agree on war funding, another EU diplomat said: “We need to find a way to get cash to Ukraine, in whatever form. And more countries are pointing at the assets and wondering why they are still sitting there.”

There are pressures developing on the other side of the Atlantic as well.

A report in the New York Times yesterday said the Biden administration was “quietly signaling new support for seizing more than $300 billion in Russian central bank assets stashed in Western nations” and was pressing other members of the G7 to come up with a plan, possibly by February 24, the second anniversary of the Russian invasion.

On Monday the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed piece by J. French Hill, a Republican Congress member from Arkansas, and Lulzim Basha, a member of the Albanian parliament, saying they had joined forces to make Russia pay for the reconstruction of Ukraine.

“Mr Putin must pay for his aggressions and war crimes. Strong legislation to seize all Russian sovereign assets is a start,” they wrote.

Another issue is the interest that is being paid on the frozen Russian money. This has turned out to be what in criminal circles is termed a “nice little earner.” Euroclear, the Belgian-based clearing house where most of the Russian money is held, made about €3 billion in the first nine months of the year. Discussions are being held on what to do with these windfall profits.

Earlier this month the EU Commission agreed on a proposal to devise a “legal” means to use the interest on these assets to supply Ukraine with as much as €15 billion over the next four years.

Details of the plan have not been made public, contrary to usual practice. It would have to be passed by the European parliament and all 27 member states to be implemented, which may prove to be unattainable. But it is an indication of the direction of events.

A significant move was made in Germany this week. Prosecutors stepped up proceedings, begun in July, to seize more than $720 million held in the Frankfurt account of a Russian financial institution. It was the first time a move has been undertaken to seize assets and not just freeze them.

German Justice Minister Marco Buschmann pointed to the wider agenda behind the move.

“What personally applies to unscrupulous leaders also applies to the assets of their power apparatus: we will not allow Russian money to finance the illegal war of aggression to lie untouched in German accounts,” he said.

Whether the move to seize Russian assets will be carried out remains to be seen, but there is clearly a push for it. The fear, notwithstanding the gung-ho pronouncements of Cameron and others, is that it would have a major impact on the operations of the international financial system.

Already, after the freezing of the Russian assets in the spring of 2022, there were moves by numbers of countries, including China, Saudi Arabia and Brazil, to lessen their dependence on the US dollar, recognising they too could have action taken against them should they cross the path of the US and the other imperialist powers.

The asset seizure proposal is also indicative of the wider aims of the US-NATO war. It is not about “defending democracy” and “little Ukraine” but carving up Russia and plundering its resources. Seizing its sovereign assets would be a significant step toward that goal.

Study finds that half of confirmed COVID patients in Africa now suffer from Long COVID

Bill Shaw

A recent study published in Nature Scientific Reports found that 48.6 percent—or nearly half—of individuals with documented SARS-CoV-2 infection in Africa subsequently developed Long COVID. This result is astonishing. Previous research has estimated that the rate of Long COVID in SARS-CoV-2 infection worldwide was roughly 10 percent, one-fifth the rate in Africa determined by this study.

People line up to be vaccinated against COVID-19 in Lawley, south of Johannesburg, South Africa, Wednesday, Dec. 1, 2021. (AP Photo/ Shiraaz Mohamed)

The study was a meta-analysis of 25 previous studies published in the English-language scientific literature. The researchers conducted a thorough literature search according to state-of-the-art methods, which include publishing the protocol for the review and meta-analysis prior to conducting it. This method avoids bias, because the researchers cannot go back and tweak the search criteria to manipulate which studies get included.

The most common category of symptoms of Long COVID in Africa cumulatively was psychiatric disorders, with 25.8 percent of all individuals with Long COVID experiencing symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. That was followed by anxiety at 24.4 percent, sleep disorders at 20.3 percent, and depression at 18.2 percent. These results, as the researchers note, are fully consistent with prior research into Long COVID and thus are confirmatory of prior research.

The most common individual symptom of Long COVID was fatigue, at 35.4 percent of all individuals with a confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection. There were also high percentages of patients with muscle aches (15.5 percent) and joint pain (17.3 percent). The study noted, “Overall, self-reported poor quality of life (25.4%) was extremely frequent.”

The results for organ-system-specific symptoms were also quite similar to past research. The most common neurological, respiratory, cardiac and gastrointestinal symptoms were, respectively, cognitive impairment (15.0 percent), shortness of breath (18.3 percent), palpitations (11.0 percent), and loss of appetite (12.7 percent).

The study found that age was a risk factor for subsequent development of symptoms of Long COVID. For every increase in age of one year, the risk of Long COVID increased by 10 percent.

Contrary to prior research, which has found that female gender was associated with a higher incidence of Long COVID, the investigators found that gender was not a significant risk factor for developing Long COVID among patients in Africa. The study found that the relative risk of Long COVID for females versus males was zero. This means that not only was the association with gender not statistically significant, it was not even different at all.

The lack of association with gender occurred despite the fact that females made up the majority of individuals studied at, 59.3 percent of the total overall population. Furthermore, female gender was not associated with the development of any particular symptom. The researchers did not offer any potential explanations for this finding or why it might contrast with prior studies.

The study also found that the severity of the initial SARS-CoV-2 infection was only a very minor risk factor for subsequent development of Long COVID. For every 1 percent increase in hospitalization, the incidence of Long COVID increased by just 0.003 percent. This result was statistically significant despite the small effect. The association with stay in an intensive care unit was not significant.

The researchers noted that given the differences in availability and character of hospital and ICU care in Africa compared to the developed world, and the differences in availability of particular data items (e.g., whether the patient required mechanical ventilation), that comparisons were extremely hard to make with any confidence.

Finally, the study looked at regional differences, dividing the continent into four regions: Eastern, Western, Northern, and Southern. They found that the incidence of Long COVID was highest in Southern (48.9 percent) and Northern (47.7 percent) Africa, and lowest in Western (17.0 percent) and Eastern Africa (5.1 percent).

The researchers do not explicitly state a possible explanation for these regional differences, but the fact that the 20 of the 25 studies they analyzed were in northern Africa strongly suggests that both SARS-CoV-2 infection and Long COVID are both under-determined in the rest of the continent, due to poverty and other severe resource constraints.

The researchers noted limitations to their study. First, they only reviewed English-language studies, and thus many studies published only in common languages in Africa, especially Arabic, were not included. The study was also unable to determine associations between pre-existing conditions and the subsequent risk of developing Long COVID, due to the poor and variable information on co-morbidities in the source studies. Similarly, the source studies did not provide sufficient information on vaccinations to enable study of whether vaccinations reduced risk of Long COVID.

The researchers noted the dramatic implications of their findings. The health care system in Africa generally, already under-resourced and over-burdened, is confronted with millions more individuals with chronic illnesses. Specifically, they note that in Africa there are only 1.4 mental health workers per 100,000 population, versus a global average of 9.0 mental health workers per 100,000. An already under-resourced and strained healthcare system in Africa is ill-equipped to handle millions of new patients with psychiatric disorders due to Long COVID.

Although not discussed in the study, one possible reason Africa has a much higher incidence rate of Long COVID is that vaccination rates are far lower than in developed nations. According to Our World In Data, only 32.5 percent of Africans have completed the initial vaccine series, with only 6.9 percent having received a booster shot.

Although the study could not measure the effect of vaccination on the risk of developing Long COVID, past studies have consistently shown such an effect. One study based on electronic health records in the United States found consistent reductions in Long COVID risk associated with SARS-CoV-2 vaccination.

The study reinforces the massive social crime committed by the ruling class in promoting the infection of billions of people worldwide by a novel coronavirus. SARS-CoV-2 infection has unprecedented impacts on human health, and one of the most significant is Long COVID, believed to now be impacting potentially hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

Another facet of this crime is the refusal of the pharmaceutical giants to waive their intellectual property rights on the vaccines. As a result, developing nations have struggled to afford sufficient quantities of vaccine to immunize their populations, leaving Africa much more vulnerable to the acute and long-term impacts of COVID-19.

The lesson for the working class is that to protect itself from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and from future pandemics, it must re-organize society around the principle of providing for human needs, not the private profit interests of a tiny layer of oligarchs.