Appeals court ruling backs big publishers’ lawsuit against the Internet Archive

Kevin Reed

On Wednesday, a three-judge federal appeals court panel upheld an earlier ruling in favor of major book publishers and found that the Internet Archive was guilty of violating copyright law by scanning books and lending them to the public for free.

In its 64-page decision, the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in Manhattan ruled in favor of the lawsuit filed in 2020 by four of the 10 largest book publishers in the world against the San Francisco-based nonprofit Internet Archive and its Open Library project.

HarperCollins headquarters in New York [Photo: Jim.henderson]

The court rejected the Internet Archive’s appeal which was based on the argument that lending digital copies to the public at no charge should be considered “fair use” of copyrighted content. The court also rejected the Internet Archive’s novel policy of “controlled digital lending” in which electronic copies of books can be borrowed by readers one copy at a time in the same manner readers have been borrowing print books from public libraries for 235 years.

The appeals court ruling states:

This appeal presents the following question: Is it “fair use” for a nonprofit organization to scan copyright-protected print books in their entirety, and distribute those digital copies online, in full, for free, subject to a one-to-one owned-to-loaned ratio between its print copies and the digital copies it makes available at any given time, all without authorization from the copyright-holding publishers or authors? Applying the relevant provisions of the Copyright Act as well as binding Supreme Court and Second Circuit precedent, we conclude the answer is no.

The four publishers—Hachette Book Group, Inc., HarperCollins Publishers LLC, John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and Penguin Random House LLC—mounted their lawsuit in the first year of the pandemic after they learned that the Internet Archive had launched the National Emergency Library (NEL). The NEL was created in response to the closure of libraries during the public health emergency and the calls from readers and librarians to provide a means for people to obtain access to millions of books.

The NEL was an extension of the Internet Archive’s previously existing Open Library, minus the controlled digital lending, and permitted large numbers of people to borrow digital copies all at the same time. This response by the non-profit to an unprecedented crisis of access to books then became the subject of a ferocious campaign by the $25 billion book publishing industry which claimed, “willful mass copyright infringement” and demanded damages in its lawsuit.

After Judge John G. Koeltl of US District Court for the Southern District of New York forcefully ruled in favor of the publishers in March 2023, the Internet Archive removed 500,000 titles from its digital library and filed an appeal in September 2023.

One aspect of Koeltl’s ruling overturned by the appeals court was the contention that the Internet Archive was engaged in commercial activity. The judge ruled that the nonprofit was soliciting donations from readers and visitors to its Open Library website, gained non-monetary reputational benefit from its lending program and also received a small percentage of the sales of books from its Better World Books subsidiary.

The appeals court was not prepared to go as far as the lower court judge in stripping the Internet Archive of any financial resources whatsoever. However, the appeals court had no difficulty defending the market interests of the big book publishers who saw the limited initiative of the Internet Archive as a threat to its profits.

As the appeals court ruling states, “IA copies the Works in full and makes those copies available to the public in their entirety. It does not do this to achieve a transformative secondary purpose, but to supplant the originals.”

While the appeals court decision is directed at protecting the multibillion-dollar book publishing monopolies, it sought to hide this behind claims that it is defending the rights of authors. The ruling states:

With each digital book IA disseminates, it deprives Publishers and authors of the revenues due to them as compensation for their unique creations. Though IA and its amici [ supporters] may lament the consolidation of editorial power and criticize Publishers for being motivated by profits, behind Publishers stand authors who are entitled to compensation for the reproduction of their works and whose “private motivation” ultimately serve[s] the cause of promoting broad public availability of literature, music, and the other arts.

As pointed out by Dave Hansen, executive director of the Author’s Alliance, a nonprofit that advocates expanded access to digital books, the presentation of the relationships between authors and publishers by the court is a distortion. Hansen asserted:

Authors are researchers. Authors are readers. IA’s digital library helps those authors create new works and supports their interests in seeing their works be read. This ruling may benefit the bottom line of the largest publishers and most prominent authors, but for most it will end up harming more than it will help.

There is no doubt that the aggressive legal posture of the publishers toward the Internet Archive is aimed at bankrupting and shutting down the organization. Alongside the book publishers’ case, the Internet Archive also is facing a new lawsuit filed on August 11 by Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and other record labels for copyright infringement.

The labels’ lawsuit says that the Internet Archive’s “Great 78 Project” is an “illegal record store” for songs by musicians including Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Miles Davis and Billie Holiday. The recording industry has achieved considerable experience with digital rights management and has aggressively pursued actions against anyone and everyone it considers a threat to the commercial distribution of online music.

The global record industry labels, which had sales of $17.1 billion in 2023, have identified 2,749 recording copyrights that have been violated and they are claiming damages of $412 million. The annual budget of the Internet Archive, a US 501(c)(3) nonprofit, is $37 million derived from grants, donations and foundation funds.

Internet Archive logo

The Internet Archive was founded in 1996 to provide free access to collections of digitized media including websites, software applications, music, audiovisual and print materials. The organization is an advocate of an open and free internet. As of this writing, the archive has more than 42.1 million print materials, 13 million videos, 1.2 million software programs, 14 million audio files, 5 million images, 272,660 concerts and over 866 billion web pages in its Wayback Machine.

The Wayback Machine is an archive of the World Wide Web that allows readers to go “back in time” and see how websites looked in the past. It is a repository of the internet that is archiving and preserving online content from defunct websites.

Responding to Wednesday’s appellate court ruling, the Internet Archive issued a statement that said, “We are disappointed in today’s opinion about the Internet Archive’s digital lending of books that are available electronically elsewhere. We are reviewing the court’s opinion and will continue to defend the rights of libraries to own, lend, and preserve books.”

Speaking to the New York Times, Brewster Kahle, computer engineer and founder of the Internet Archive, said, “People are worried about book banning and the defunding of libraries, but I don’t know that there is really an awareness of what’s going on in the movement toward license-only access to electronic material.”

Kahle continued, insisting that libraries are “not just a Netflix reseller of books to their patrons. Libraries have always been more than that.”

One month of Ukraine’s invasion of Russia’s Kursk region

Andrea Peters

Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, Thursday, Aug. 29, 2024. [AP Photo/Alexander Kazakov]

One month into Ukraine’s invasion of Russia’s Kursk region, Moscow has yet to repel Kiev’s forces. President Vladimir Putin, whose government failed to prevent the first seizure of Russian territory by an army since World War II, is attempting to manage the debacle.

Speaking on Thursday, the Kremlin leader insisted that “the enemy has not succeeded” in its goal to compel the redeployment of soldiers away from the Donbass. The Russian military has now “stabilized the situation” and “begun to gradually squeeze the enemy out of the border territories,” Putin stated. Invoking Russian nationalism and attempting to manage deep popular anger over the government’s failure, he declared the liberation of Kursk to be the country’s “sacred duty.”

On the ground, Ukraine’s advance appears to have been halted and possibly even slightly rolled back. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who rules with ever-more authoritarian methods over a country whose working population is increasingly opposed to the war, claims his forces currently control 1000 square kilometers of Russian territory. If true, this would be a decrease of 200 square kilometers from what Kiev said it initially seized when its troops and tanks pushed past Russia’s poorly defended borders on August 6.

The Kremlin has been silent about the amount of territory it has lost. Speaking to school students in Tuva, Siberia, this week, President Putin described Ukraine’s military as “thugs who made it in to Russia,” as if the elite forces armed by the Western powers and trained by the British were akin to a bunch of roving bandits attacking a wagon train. His government has sought to emphasize the successes of its intensifying assault in the Donbass, where, even according to pro-Ukrainian Western media accounts, Kiev’s army is struggling.

In an article on Thursday, the New York Times described Ukraine’s military situation as “increasingly difficult.” Russian forces have managed to create a “a large bulge that extends about 20 miles deep through the center of Ukraine’s defenses,” it noted. The Washington press outlet The Hill warned the same day that Kiev’s “gamble against Russia risks becoming a blunder.”  A September 2 article in Foreign Affairs by Michael Kofman and Rob Lee likewise expressed concern over Zelensky’s “thinly-stretched lines” and ability to rotate troops out of the Donbass in order to hold onto Russian territory.

The Kremlin claims Ukraine has lost 10,000 troops in Kursk. If even 20 percent true, would be a large share of the 10,000 to 15,000 soldiers—largely drawn from elite forces—that Kofman and Lee estimate Kiev sent in.

President Zelensky is using its invasion of Kursk and the pressure building on its military—internally and at the front—to demand ever-more weapons from its Western backers and get authorization to launch attacks deeper into Russia. Ukraine’s seizure of Russian territory demonstrates, Zelensky stated in late August, that Putin’s “red lines” are an illusion not to be taken seriously.

The same point was made earlier this week by anti-Putin Russian oligarch, Mikhail Khodorkovsky—one of a number of contenders for power should the current occupant of the Kremlin be overthrown. Braying for war, he criticized the Western powers from the right, that is, for not acting rapidly enough on the fact that the Kursk invasion shows that “any red lines are not where [they] imagine them to be.”

The Zelensky government is now receiving the go-ahead from NATO to escalate. On Thursday, Jans Stoltenberg, head of the alliance, welcomed the lessening of Western restrictions on Ukraine hitting targets in Russia and endorsed the country’s use of long-range missiles. The following day, at a meeting of the imperialist powers and Zelensky at Germany’s Ramstein air base, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced another $250 million military aid package for Kiev.

Whatever the short-term outcome for Ukraine on the battlefield, the imperialist powers see in Russia’s debacle in Kursk an immense opportunity to advance their goals to carve up the entire country. This was spelled out in an article by political scientist Mark Katz, a fellow at both the Wilson Center and the Atlantic Council, in the National Interest this week.

“By itself,” he writes, “the Ukrainian occupation of Russian territory in Kursk may not discomfit Putin for long. But if it leads other actors to conclude that Ukraine’s Kursk offensive shows that Putin is unable to respond effectively to whatever they are contemplating, then Putin and his generals could find themselves overwhelmed with crises.” Katz went on to question the Kremlin’s ability to hold Chechnya, all the Muslim republics in Russia’s North Caucasus, Belarus, and Transnistria, the Moscow-allied breakaway region of Moldova.

Domestically, the Russian government is working to downplay the crisis in Kursk. News coverage of the region would give one the impression that life is, more or less, moving along swimmingly and the situation for civilians is under control. Recent press articles have highlighted orchestra concerts, computer classes for kids, the opening of a photo exhibit of great moments in the country’s military history, and the visit this week by a deputy minister to the region’s main agricultural university. Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin recently announced tax and insurance deferments for businesses in the area, Health Minister Mikhail Murashko just declared that the oblast is completely stocked with medicines, medical equipment, and blood supplies, and the government has reportedly already distributed 10,000-ruble payments ($110) to 120,000 evacuees. This is a paltry sum that only covers about two thirds of the over 180,000 people who had to flee the invasion.

Social media posts suggest that the reality, particularly for those caught behind the front lines, is appalling. A recent petition posted on the social media site Vkontakte appealed to the government to rescue people trapped in six villages who are, according to the appeal’s author, “without water, medicine, light and gas, and will soon be without food and the ability to heat their homes.” The petition, which was signed by 1,000 people within the first 24 hours that it was posted, reads, “This is a cry for help from your people to you! Do not abandon your people, who have made their choice in your favor! Please make your choice in favor of the people too!”

Hundreds, if not thousands, are missing. The search-and-rescue non-profit LizaAlert issued a statement this week indicating that of 918 reports it received of friends and relatives feared to be lost in Ukrainian-controlled territory, 698 were still unaccounted for and 5 were found dead. On Friday, RIA-Novosti carried a story of Kursk residents searching for their loved ones, with flyers of missing persons now being posted at bus stops. One man, who reported that his friend had not had contact with his parents since August 10, told the press outlet, “They said then that they were going to the farm to shelter from shelling, and that’s all.”

A video surfaced in mid-August documenting the abuse of a bewildered elderly man walking down the road in rags. He tells the Ukrainian soldiers, “I’m lost, I’ve been trying for five days now…” Wearing helmets of the Nazi SS, they taunt him and say, “Go drink vodka.” “Russian pig,” they declare in German. The family of the man, identified as 74-year-old Aleksandr Gusarov, saw the video, but reported that he was still missing at the time. The Ukrainian military is awash with far-right, pro-fascist, anti-Russian forces, who embrace the great crimes and collaborators of the Nazi war against the Soviet Union in which 27 million Soviet citizens were killed.

From a historical standpoint, the ruling class of Russia bears as much responsibility for what is happening in Kursk as the invading Ukrainian army and its NATO backers. In 1991, the ex-Soviet bureaucrats turned capitalists dissolved the Soviet Union and with it what remained of the conquests of the Russian revolution. This meant not just liquidating nationalized property and turning it into a huge well of profits for a new elite, but breaking apart the USSR, unleashing fratricidal nationalism, and transforming the entire region into an object of conquest for the imperialists.

Washington presses regional governments to secure Maduro’s ouster in Venezuela

Andrea Lobo

Five weeks after the July 28 presidential elections in Venezuela, the fascistic leader of the US-backed opposition, Maria Corina Machado, demanded on Thursday that the Biden administration “do more” to oust President Nicolas Maduro from power.

Edmundo González Urrutia speaks during a demonstration next to Maria Corina Machado (left), July 31, 2024 [Photo: Voice of America]

Speaking to reporters from an undisclosed location, Machado argued that this was a matter of strategic importance for US interests globally and concluded: “I am partial to maximum pressure.” She then repeated her appeals for the Venezuelan military to overthrow Maduro.

Following a Supreme Court ruling on August 22 declaring Maduro re-elected, Machado’s Unitary Platform coalition has continued to claim that its candidate, Edmundo González Urrutia, won the election. 

The entire election predictably served as a fraudulent “democratic” cover to create the conditions for a coup and possible foreign military interventions, and the Biden administration is already escalating pressures on all fronts.

At the same time, having already failed to oust Maduro by simply recognizing another self-anointed “president” like Juan Guaidó in 2019, Washington has continued to support talks with Caracas for a negotiated handover of power.

If possible, the Biden administration hopes for a regime change without a prolonged civil war or a more catastrophic economic disruption that could affect oil production or provoke a further exodus of migrants and the political intervention of key sectors of the working class. 

The Wall Street Journal reported this week that US-based oil giant Chevron pressured the White House to safeguard its continued production in the country, which has the largest known reserves in the world, even if that means keeping Maduro in power. 

Venezuelan oil exports, including to the US and Europe, reached a four-year high of 885,000 barrels per day last month and are seen as a potential alternative for Europe to Russia, whose exports are sanctioned, and the war-torn Middle East. 

Company executives argued, moreover, that Chevron serves as “a bulwark there against geopolitical adversaries gaining additional footholds in the country.” 

The Biden administration, however, has made clear that in the context of an emerging world war against Russia and China, nothing will suffice but total domination of Venezuelan oil and other key natural resources and cheap labor platforms in US imperialism’s “backyard.”

Pro-opposition demonstrations have remained subdued since July 30. While the corporate media claims this is primarily due to a wave of arrests and repression, such a swift suppression of the protests led by the far right can only be explained by a lack of active popular support, which entirely belies the claims of the Morenoite pseudo-left that these protests represented in any way the “popular will.” 

The far right has continued its attacks against public infrastructure, which only exacerbate mass suffering, including possibly recent fires that temporarily disrupted the electrical grid and the railroads.

While threatening to add sanctions against Venezuelan officials, Washington is now primarily acting through its regional allies, both the openly right-wing and nominally “left” governments alike, which have combined direct appeals for talks with Maduro with rabid provocations and backchannel overtures to the Venezuelan armed forces. 

US authorities stole Maduro’s presidential airplane last week in the Dominican Republic, whose multimillionaire President Luis Abinader met with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Friday to coordinate future actions regarding Venezuela. 

In a major intensification of these efforts, on Thursday, Ecuador’s president, the banana oligarch Daniel Noboa, requested that the UN Security Council declare the Venezuelan crisis a “direct threat to regional stability and international security,” clearly trying to set the stage for a foreign military intervention. The Chinese and Russian delegations blocked the discussion. 

That same night, Argentine President Javier Milei hosted a summit of the fascist Madrid Forum that Machado belongs to. There, this cheerleader for the Zionist genocide in Gaza lamented that “the free world is crossing its arms” while Maduro turns Venezuela into a “human cemetery.” 

As Milei was speaking, Argentine troops were finishing 10 days of military exercises with the Pentagon and the Chilean military, which were hosted by pseudo-left Chilean President Gabriel Boric. The exercises were launched after a “defense conference” in Santiago, where the US military’s top commander, Gen. Charles C. Brown, US Southern Command Chief Gen. Laura Richardson, and several Latin American and NATO military officials discussed “regional threats to democracy,” with a focus on Venezuela. 

Then there was the publication of a statement signed by 31 former Latin American and Spanish presidents, whose hands are covered with the blood of hundreds of thousands from imperialist wars and state violence, demanding that the International Criminal Court order the arrest of the entire Venezuelan leadership. 

In a manner entirely complicit with these fascist forces, the nominal allies of Maduro in the “pink tide” governments of Lula da Silva in Brazil, Gustavo Petro in Colombia and Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) in Mexico have sought to strong arm Maduro toward an off ramp, while backing the demands of the Venezuelan far right and Washington that Maduro present proof of his victory.

After Maduro and Machado both rejected their initial proposal for new elections, Lula and Petro are now pushing for an international “inquiry” into voting records and the setting up of a transitional government. 

These maneuvers make it clear that the elections were conceived of from the outset as a mechanism to press forward for regime change and secure US geopolitical interests in the context of brutal economic sanctions. All demands for an inquiry on election data from these governments are aimed at furthering the drive to bring to power the CIA “assets” who comprise the right-wing opposition. 

Currently, Colombian Foreign Minister Luis Gilberto Murillo, who is particularly close to the US political establishment, has sought to coordinate a meeting between Maduro, Lula, AMLO and Petro in efforts openly backed by Washington.

During this process, Lula has adopted an increasingly impatient and menacing tone, declaring last week that Maduro “must bear the consequences of his actions, and I will bear the consequences of my actions. Now I have the political awareness that I tried to help a lot, but a lot and a lot.” It is worth recalling that last December, Lula deployed troops to the Venezuelan border amid threats by Maduro to take control of territories disputed with neighboring Guyana. 

At the same time, Washington has sought to make an example of the government of Honduran President Xiomara Castro, one of the few that still backs Maduro. Last week, the US ambassador denounced a meeting between Honduran Defense officials with Venezuelan Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López. This was followed by the leaking of a video given by the head of a local drug cartel to US authorities that shows Castro’s brother-in-law accepting money from the cartel during her election campaign. 

This has led to a wave of resignations in Honduras and a media and political campaign calling for the overthrow of Castro herself similar to that preceding the US-backed military coup in 2009 that ousted Castro’s husband, Manuel Zelaya. 

Meanwhile, the Maduro administration has tried to use the elections and the aftermath to convince US imperialism that it can serve its interests better than the opposition by continuing to suppress the class struggle. It has combined threats against the far-right opposition with an olive branch to US imperialism. 

At the same time, a recent reshuffling of cabinet positions, including the naming of Diosdado Cabello—the second most powerful leader of the Chavistas—as Interior Minister points to insecurity over allegiances. The elections have also shown that the government has lost a significant base of support in the working class.

In recent days, arrests of suspected opposition supporters have stopped, and a bill to outlaw foreign NGOs and another to wipe out organizations accused of “fascism” have been temporarily shelved.  

Maduro has also extended the repression against organizations to the left of the government.

While an arrest warrant was issued against opposition candidate González Urrutia, efforts to detain him and Machado have been limited. On Wednesday, general prosecutor Tarek William Saab, a top Chavista leader, summoned González Urrutia’s lawyer, José Vicente Haro, for a private three-hour meeting. 

While Williams Saab reaffirmed the arrest warrant against González Urrutia and rebuffed requests for an inquiry into the elections, Haro himself represents a bridge between factions of the ruling class and US imperialism. He helped draft the 1999 Constitution approved under Hugo Chávez and several other laws, while advising top Chavista officials before becoming a Stanford fellow and deepening ties with US foreign policy circles. 

The dangers for the working class cannot be overstated. If Machado-Gonzalez have their way, they would install a fascistic, military dictatorship that would seek to privatize oil and other sectors and impose brutal social austerity at the behest of Wall Street, while aligning the country behind the US-NATO war against China and Russia. 

However, every established political organization in Venezuela has been implicated in backing Chavismo or the far right. The most important aspect of the Venezuelan crisis is that it has exposed all bourgeois nationalist governments of the Latin American pink tide and their pseudo-left apologists as instruments of US imperialism as it drags the region and the world toward world war, fascist reaction and barbarism.

Schlumberger Foundation Faculty for the Future Fellowship 2025/2026

Application Deadline: 10th November 2024

Offered annually? Yes

Eligible Countries: Developing Countries and Emerging Economies

To be taken at: Top universities abroad

Accepted Subject Areas: Physical sciences and related disciplines

About Schlumberger Foundation Faculty for the Future Fellowship: Each year, The Faculty for the Future fellowships, Launched by the Schlumberger Foundation, are awarded to women from developing and emerging economies who are preparing for PhD or post-doctoral study in the physical sciences and related disciplines at top universities for their disciplines abroad. Grant recipients are selected for their leadership capabilities as for their scientific talents, and are expected to return to their home countries to continue their academic careers and inspire other young women.

Offered Since: 2004

Type: PhD/PostDoctoral, Fellowship

Selection Criteria: A successful application will have gone through four selection rounds, with the reviewers paying particular attention to the following criteria:

• Academic performance;
• Quality of references;
• Quality of host country university;
• Level of commitment to return to home country;
• Commitment to teaching;
• Relevance of research to home country;
• Commitment to inspiring young women into the sciences.

Eligibility: Applicants must meet all the following criteria:

• Be a woman;
• Be a citizen of a developing country or emerging economy;
• Wish to pursue a PhD degree or Post-doctoral research in the physical sciences or related disciplines;
• Have applied to, have been admitted to, or are currently enrolled in a university/research institute abroad;
• Wish to return to their home country to continue their academic career upon completion of their studies;
• Be very committed to teaching and demonstrate active participation in faculty life and outreach work to encourage young women into the sciences;
• Hold an excellent academic record.

Number of fellowships: Several

Value of Schlumberger Foundation Faculty for the Future Fellowship: Faculty for the Future grants are awarded based on the actual costs of studying and living in the chosen location, and is worth USD 50,000 for PhDs and USD 40,000 for Post-doctoral study. Grants may be renewed through to completion of studies subject to performance, self-evaluation and recommendations from supervisors.

How to Apply: Interested candidates may Apply below

Visit Scholarship Webpage for Details

Metformin and COVID-19: An old drug with compelling anti-viral properties

Benjamin Mateus & Bill Shaw

With the COVID pandemic approaching the end of its fifth year, the ninth major wave of infections is washing across the global population infecting tens of millions of people each day. The return to school and the winter holidays in the Northern Hemisphere will only cause the number of infections to swell, raising both the number of deaths and the ranks of the invisible millions suffering from Long COVID.

Both in the United States and worldwide, capitalist political authorities have effectively ended any effort to protect the population from this deadly disease. The “forever COVID” policy, as the WSWS has termed it, or declaring COVID to be “endemic,” as Dr. Mandy Cohen, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, did last month, means more than just shutting down the collection of data on the number of infections, hospitalizations and deaths, or the number affected by Long COVID.

Willful blindness to the extent of the pandemic has been combined with near-abandonment of efforts to develop more powerful therapies against the disease, even as previously discovered therapies are of sharply declining effectiveness, because of the constant mutation of SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes COVID.

Dr. Mandy Cohen, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention since July 10, 2023 [AP Photo/Bryan Anderson]

Notably, the FDA pulled the emergency use authorization (EUA) of the monoclonal antibody Evusheld in January 2023. Only 14 months later, in March 2024, it supplanted this with pemivibart as COVID pre-exposure treatment for people with moderate to severe immune system dysfunction—solid organ transplant recipients, cancer patients receiving CAR T-cell therapy or stem cell transplants, or those with hematologic cancers that cannot mount a response to COVID vaccines, as well as others such as advanced HIV patients. 

This treatment is extremely costly, with a two-hour infusion administered in a medical setting every three months, coming with a price tag of more than $6,000 for one course, not including the additional medical fees for the facility, nursing and physician costs that go into administering the treatment. 

Additionally, for most of the world’s population, access to the anti-viral treatments by Pfizer (Paxlovid) and Moderna (Lagevrio) has been thwarted due to lack of availability or the horrendous cost for such treatments. Pfizer announced last year that a five-day course of Paxlovid would cost nearly $1,400. 

For patients with health conditions at risk for severe disease, Paxlovid can potentially reduce their risk of hospitalization by nearly half if taken early in the course of illness. But for the standard risk population, the treatment didn’t show such benefits. And complications with the treatment include multiple drug interactions and a virological “rebound” that can extend the duration of the period when the patient is infectious to others. 

Similarly, Remdesivir and Lagevrio have proven ineffective in patients with prior vaccine immunity or infections. The known safety concerns with these medications also mean potential complications for little benefit. 

This is the reality behind Dr. Cohen’s declaration that “we have the tools” to fight the virus that causes COVID, and her implicit blaming of patients who don’t take advantage of the tools, rather than the profit-based medical system supposedly supplying them.

The development of new therapies is held back by a health system rooted in capitalist profit interests. Specifically, issues around intellectual property rights, how they are reformulated, regulatory blocks and financialization of the drugs pose significant challenges. Additionally, there are problems in convincing the population to accept new therapies, given the anti-scientific reaction and quackery that was the hallmark of the early days of the pandemic, with fascistic figures like Donald Trump and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro promoting hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin. 

The promising results with metformin

Still, one recent medication that has appeared to overcome some of these hurdles is an old drug that has been used to treat diabetes, called metformin. Known to have anti-viral properties, its cheap price, favorable side-effect profile and widespread availability have aroused interest in its potential benefit to treat COVID. 

What follows is a summary of significant research on the anti-Covid properties of Metformin, and must not be read as a recommendation for its use without consultation with a well-informed physician familiar with a patient’s medical history and overall condition. Moreover, Metformin may produce side-effects and is not well-tolerated by all patients to whom it is prescribed.

Discovered in 1922, metformin didn’t become widely used until the mid-1990s when broad population-based studies proved its benefits. It is now the most widely used oral therapy for regulating blood sugar levels in diabetics. It has been proven to lower risks of age-related conditions like cardiovascular diseases and cancers as well as reduce all-cause mortality in diabetics. In 2022, it was the second most prescribed drug in the US. 

As authors of a 2023 review paper on metformin noted, “Interestingly, metformin was originally investigated as an anti-influenza drug in the early 1940s and showed some promise in improving flu symptoms coupled with reducing blood glucose levels. While it was not directly pursued as an anti-influenza drug, metformin showed promise in a variety of infections. Further retrospective studies suggest that metformin has protective benefits during flu infection as well. For example, obese patients with a history of metformin treatment have been shown to have a lower rate of influenza mortality. Another study demonstrated that in diabetics, metformin treatment reduced overall risk for hospitalization due to infections compared to other oral hypoglycemics such as sulfonylureas.”

Metformin was the second most prescribed US medicine in 2022.

Complications associated with COVID disproportionately affect the elderly, mainly due to their decline in immune function and ability to fend off infections. Also, those with comorbidities like diabetes and obesity can also develop severe reactions from a COVID infection. Preexisting diabetes has also been a risk factor after infection with SARS-CoV-1 and MERS-CoV coronaviruses. Moreover, patients treated in ICUs for severe complications with these viruses fared better when their blood glucose levels were kept in normal ranges.

The exact mechanisms for metformin’s health benefits have not been completely worked out. But some researchers have pointed to the possibility that metformin through its ability to cause changes to the ACE2 receptor—it adds a phosphate group to this receptor, causing conformational and functional changes—it could decrease the binding of the virus to respiratory cells. 

It has also been theorized that metformin’s anti-viral properties stem from its ability to block a crucial signaling pathway used by the coronavirus. A study published in January 2023 in the journal Virus Research found that in cell culture the administration of metformin to SARS-COV-2-infected cells led to a dramatic decline in viral proteins and viral life cycle, thus protecting these cells. A small group of patients treated with metformin in the study showed a drop in their viral titers, underscoring that their “results unambiguously demonstrated a potent anti-SARS-CoV-2 effect of metformin.”

Moreover, irrespective of one’s diabetic state, metformin has been shown to ameliorate the immune system’s response to inflammatory pathways, reducing cytokine levels, which have been implicated for development of severe COVID. As the authors of the above review underscored:

Metformin has the capability to impact immune responses through its modulation of inflammation, the microenvironment, and via metabolic and non-metabolic action on immune cells themselves. These findings highlight the ability of metformin to modulate immune cell function, specifically in T cells, macrophages, and B cells which are essential for controlling responses to infection and generating long-term immunological memory.

One of the first reports on the potential for metformin to mitigate the deadly consequences of SARS-CoV-2 infection was published online in May 2020 from researchers in Wuhan, China. In their retrospective analysis of diabetic patients hospitalized with confirmed COVID from January 27, 2020 to March 24, 2020, in-hospital mortality for the metformin group was 2.9 percent (3 of 104 patients), versus 12.3 percent (22 of 179 patients) for the group not taking metformin. 

Dr. Carolyn Bramante [Photo: University of Minnesota Medical School]

Another early observational report was published in preprint form in June 2020 by Dr. Carolyn Bramante from the University of Minnesota and colleagues. In that retrospective cohort analysis utilizing data extracted from the insurance company UnitedHealth Group’s Clinical Discovery Database, they analyzed the impact of COVID-19 on 6,256 patients admitted to US hospitals, of whom 2,333 were taking metformin in an outpatient setting. Interestingly, the study showed that there was a statistically significant reduction in mortality, but only for women. 

The COVID-OUT clinical trial

Nonetheless, with respect to gender, the above work prompted the Minnesota group to initiate the COVID-OUT clinical trial that enrolled participants, either overweight or clinically obese, from December 30, 2020 to January 28, 2022, to investigate three medications: immediate-release metformin, ivermectin (anti-parasite drug), and fluvoxamine (an anti-depression medication from the group known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors). The trial included 1,126 people who gave their consent to participate and completed at least one long-term follow-up survey 180 days after starting in the trial. There were six subgroups, one each for metformin plus ivermectin, placebo plus ivermectin, metformin plus fluvoxamine, placebo plus fluvoxamine, metformin plus placebo, and placebo plus placebo.

The study was “quadruple blinded,” which meant that neither the investigators, the individuals who assessed outcomes (i.e., Long COVID), the treating clinicians, nor the participants themselves knew which combination of drugs any participant was receiving. 

The analysis of the impact of metformin on Long COVID was published in Lancet Infectious Diseases, showing that the drug metformin lowered one’s risk of developing Long COVID by 41.3 percent, while no such reduction was seen with ivermectin or fluvoxamine.

The overall incidence of Long COVID in the metformin group nearly one year out from their initial infection was 6.3 percent compared to 10.6 percent in the placebo group. Earlier initiation of metformin during acute COVID-19 resulted in a greater reduction in risk. Initiating metformin within four days of symptom onset reduced risk by 63 percent versus 36 percent for initiation after. The strain of the virus did not affect the incidence of Long COVID. Vaccination status also did not impact the results; the reduction in risk was the same for both vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals.

Graph shows reduction in viral load for patients treated with metformin, vs. a placebo. [Photo: University of Minnesota Medical School]

Most recently, their latest publication in the journal of Clinical Infectious Diseases demonstrated a dramatic 3.6-fold reduction in SARS-CoV-2 viral load by day 10. Those receiving metformin were less likely to have detectable viral load than placebo by day five or day 10. The reviewers of the study commented that this

study makes a strong case for a potential effect of metformin on COVID-19 virologic decay and prompts reevaluation of existing data in support of its use. In vitro studies have identified both antiviral and anti-inflammatory activities of the drug, and the investigators initially identified metformin as a promising agent through use of sophisticated in silico modeling.

Furthermore, observational studies have suggested that individuals treated with metformin for diabetes have improved COVID-19 outcomes compared with those not on this drug. While cross-study comparisons have limitations, it is notable that the absolute risk reduction for hospitalization or death for metformin versus placebo in COVID-OUT was nearly identical to that from a recent study that compared nirmatrelvir-ritonavir (Paxlovid) to lack of treatment in a propensity-scored matched analysis in the vaccination era (i.e., 1 percent versus 3 percent). 

The fact that more than 50 percent of participants in COVID-OUT were vaccinated further amplifies the relevance of the study results to the current immunologic profile of today’s population, where nearly everyone has been vaccinated, or had COVID-19, or both.

The authors of the COVID-OUT studies should be commended for their initiative, which has provided compelling evidence for the benefits offered by Metformin. Further work to confirm these benefits should be expedited and consideration given to bringing other treatments forward to address the vacuum that exists in the treatment of COVID. 

Clearly, the paucity of effective treatments for COVID and mitigating Long COVID in a period where mass infection has been normalized is part and parcel of the logic of “forever COVID.” The need for treatments to address the harms caused by repeat infections with SARS-CoV-2 underscores the irrational and reactionary character of the policy of mass infection.

Unlike the flu, where adults may catch the influenza virus on average twice per decade, serial viral infection with COVID is commonplace. There have been more than 1.1 billion infections across the US during the COVID pandemic; on average, every person in the US and, by extension, the rest of the world, can expect to be infected annually. And given the long-term consequences of repeat COVID infections to respiratory, cardiovascular, neurological and metabolic systems, many have predicted that chronic health conditions will disable millions more and these illnesses will begin appearing at earlier ages than previously expected.

Macron names Barnier to lead right-wing French government backed by neo-fascists

Anthony Torres & Alex Lantier

Yesterday, after an unprecedented seven weeks of talks with members of the parliamentary parties since the July 7 elections, President Emmanuel Macron named Michel Barnier prime minister. Barnier will now try to select a ministerial cabinet that can win the support of the majority of the National Assembly.

New Prime Minister of France, Michel Barnier, right, and outgoing French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, left, arrive for the handover ceremony, Thursday, Sept. 5, 2024 in Paris [AP Photo/Michel Euler]

Macron’s selection of Barnier, a member of the discredited, right-wing The Republicans (LR) party, tramples upon the elections and installs the far right at the center of official politics. Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s New Popular Front (NFP) won a plurality in the July 7 elections, with 182 seats. Macron’s Ensemble coalition won 163 seats, and the far-right National Rally’s (RN) 143, only because the NFP endorsed Ensemble candidates, supposedly to stop a RN victory.

Having preserved his party from collapse with Mélenchon’s support, France’s widely-hated president has now named a right-wing prime minister who would rule with far-right support. LR and Ensemble together control only 233 seats in the Assembly, and Barnier is well short of a 289-seat majority in the 577-seat National Assembly. Yesterday, however, RN officials indicated that they played a central role in selecting Barnier and would, at least initially, support his government.

A Macron-Barnier government would impose violently right-wing policies and, sooner rather than later, provoke mass opposition in the working class. It is committed to policies that face opposition from an overwhelming majority of the French people, above all in the working class—notably escalating the NATO war in Ukraine by sending troops to fight Russia, and continuing attacks on pensions and social spending.

Barnier is a 73-year-old European Union (EU) bureaucrat known mainly as the EU’s representative in Brexit talks with Britain. He is a partisan of strict austerity and corporate tax cuts. He denounces social spending for creating “entitled people,” and opposes renewable energy. He has proposed a further one-year rise in the retirement age, beyond the two-year increase to 64 that Macron imposed in 2023, despite overwhelming popular opposition and mass strikes.

Barnier has adopted violently anti-immigrant, xenophobic positions, especially since the Brexit talks. In 2021, he called for a five-year ban on immigration into France, claiming that otherwise “there will be more Brexits.” He demanded “liberty of maneuver” for France to violate EU rules on immigration, and appealed to the police, demanding that immigration decisions be taken out of the hands of “people smugglers and judges.”

Having spent much of his career in the EU machine in Brussels, near NATO headquarters, Barnier also is a partisan of NATO. During the war in Ukraine, he has criticized policies of EU and French military autonomy advanced earlier by Macron, hailing NATO as a “pillar” of European defense.

The Elysée presidential palace announced Barnier’s nomination in a perfunctory communiqué, stating that Barnier would “build a government of unity serving the country and the French people,” aiming to “be as stable as possible and to have the best chances to create the broadest unity.”

Yesterday, RN officials made clear that they played a key role in the selection of Barnier, and that they would keep his government afloat, as long as it carries out policies acceptable to them.

RN leader Marine Le Pen told a press conference at the Assembly: “We demanded a certain number of conditions, namely that we have a prime minister that would respect RN voters. … I believe that Mr. Barnier fulfills that criterion. As for other things, on substantive issues, we will wait and see what the statement of general policy of Mr Barnier will bring, and the way in which he carries out the necessary compromises on the upcoming budget.”

The Belgian establishment daily Le Soir concluded that the RN “is the arbiter in the new legislature,” while the Courrier International wrote that “Barnier was the only name [Le Pen] did not immediately veto.”

The announcement of a Barnier government backed by the RN tramples the election results underfoot. Masses of workers and youth voted for NFP candidates, or for Ensemble candidates backed by the NFP, in order to block the coming to power of a far-right government. Under conditions where overwhelming majorities of the population oppose further pension cuts, the genocide in Gaza and military escalation against Russia, there were broad expectations that the vote would compel a shift in policy.

It is apparent that during the seven weeks of negotiations that followed the elections, Macron and the neo-fascists were engaged in constant plotting on how to continue the reactionary political agenda of the previous Macron government.

The NFP and allied trade and student unions have called nationwide protests tomorrow against Macron’s theft of the election. While a movement must be built among workers and youth against Macron, this poses profound questions of political perspective and orientation before the working class. Indeed, workers cannot fight war, genocide and social reaction on a national, purely “democratic” basis, by putting pressure on Macron to respect the election result and name a prime minister who would serve under him.

What faces workers in France, and in every country, is a deepening global war, attacks on social and living conditions, and police-state regimes rooted in an international crisis of capitalism. This cannot be resolved through appeals to national capitalist governments, who now brazenly display their fascistic sympathies at home and support for war and genocide abroad. There is nothing to be negotiated with them.

Indeed, the naming of the Barnier government amounts to an exposure of the bankruptcy of Mélenchon and his France Unbowed (LFI) party. He formed the NFP as an alliance with the big business Socialist Party (PS), the Greens and the Stalinist French Communist Party (PCF) that backed Macron in the elections. It refused to make any appeal to mobilize its voters, particularly in the urban working class, in mass strikes and protests against Macron’s far-right plotting. It thus played a central role in facilitating Macron’s installation of a far-right-backed government.

Now, NFP politicians are attacking Macron and, in the case of LFI, calling for participation in the September 7 protests. “The election was stolen from the French people. The message was ignored,” Mélenchon tweeted, calling for “the most powerful possible mobilization.”

Macron “is continuing to live as an autocrat. By naming Michel Barnier, the president is refusing to respect popular sovereignty and voters’ choices in the ballot box,” commented Mathilde Panot, the head of the parliamentary delegation for Mélenchon’s France Unbowed (LFI) party. She called on her supporters to fight “this coup that is unacceptable in a democracy” by participating in the September 7 protests.

While the PS called to censure Macron, the NFP collectively issued a statement denouncing Macron’s “total contempt for millions of French people” who voted in the elections, and the “arrival in power of the National Rally and its ideas.” It reiterated its “solemn pledge during the election campaign” to form a government that would “break with Macron’s policies.”