Australian quarantine leaks underscore pandemic risks

Mike Head

Further COVID-19 infection escapes from Australian quarantine hotels, in recent days, have highlighted the continuing dangers of the global pandemic, particularly with the emergence of more transmissible variants. Nevertheless, major sporting events, such as the Australian Open tennis tournament, are being allowed to proceed.

Pedestrians walk away from the central business district in Melbourne, Australia, Wednesday, Aug. 5, 2020. (AP Photo/Asanka Brendon Ratnayake)

Yesterday, more than 100 people were placed in quarantine, as potential infection zones were identified across Melbourne, where the tennis “Grand Slam” event is being hosted. Within a few days, a second hotel quarantine worker tested positive for COVID-19. It was the third hotel quarantine-linked infection in the city in a week, with all three cases confirmed to be of the more contagious UK virus strain.

At the same time, health authorities issued a precautionary alert for sites in southeast Sydney and nearby Wollongong, after a returned overseas traveller tested positive to the coronavirus, two days after leaving their mandatory two-week quarantine at Sydney’s Sofitel Wentworth hotel.

In recent weeks, quarantine hotel leaks have occurred in all the mainland state capitals—Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Brisbane and Adelaide—indicating flaws in the facilities and safety procedures. Unlike the Western Australian government, which imposed a limited lockdown on Perth and surrounding areas for five days last week, including the closure of schools, the New South Wales and Victorian governments rejected such measures.

Each government claimed to be acting on the advice of health officials, but they made their contradictory decisions amid an escalating clamour from the corporate elite for a full and uninterrupted “reopening” of the economy.

Yesterday’s case in Melbourne involved a woman in her early 50s, who was part of the quarantine operation at the Holiday Inn at Melbourne Airport. She returned a negative test result after a nasal swab on February 4, and returned to work on Sunday February 7, where she developed symptoms and later tested positive. An alert was released just before midnight on Sunday.

The Victorian state Labor government’s Emergency Services Minister Lisa Neville, who oversees the quarantine program, said the woman had not appeared to breach any infection control protocols, and had worn a face shield as well as a mask.

The woman brought to about 80 the number of COVID-19 Quarantine Victoria and hotel staff who have been stood down, to be tested and placed in quarantine for 14 days. There were also nine police officers and 12 military personnel members in that position, Neville said.

Last Wednesday, a resident support officer was confirmed to be infected at Melbourne’s Grand Hyatt hotel, which housed some of the tennis competitors and support staff. As a result, about 600 players and staff were required to isolate for a day and be tested, interrupting warm-up events for the Open.

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews insisted that this “one case” would not stop the billion-dollar Open going ahead, with about 400,000 spectators permitted into the stadiums over the next ten days. “Decisions have been made, and we’ll proceed as we can,” Andrews said.

Last month, the lead-up to the tournament was thrown into disarray when numbers of positive coronavirus cases were detected from charter flights carrying tennis players, coaches and officials to Melbourne. Some players were forced to quarantine for two weeks.

In order to ensure that the Open is not disrupted, the Andrews government responded to last week’s Grand Hyatt infection by reverting to partial restrictions in place over New Year’s Eve. Masks were made mandatory indoors and the number of visitors allowed in homes was halved to 15. A plan to increase caps on staff in non-essential workplaces to 75 percent of capacity was paused.

Protocols at the state’s quarantine hotels were to be belatedly tightened, with workers wearing face shields, “buffers” introduced between large family groups in rooms and a review of ventilation.

In Sydney, the state health department issued a statement on Sunday evening saying the latest victim had not shown any symptoms, but had tested positive on day 16 as part of an enhanced follow-up strategy for people returning from overseas.

This development seems similar to that in New Zealand, where the government reported that a woman tested positive to the UK mutant strain after finishing her quarantine in Auckland in January, despite testing negative twice during her hotel stay.

These cases point to the heightened dangers posed by the new, more infectious variants, which have been able to evolve because of the refusal of governments internationally to impose shutdowns that would cut across returning to work in order to generate corporate profits.

Increasingly, epidemiologists are calling for a re-evaluation of the hotel quarantine system. Clinical epidemiologist Nancy Baxter, from the University of Melbourne, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation yesterday that any hotel suspected of airborne transmission should be immediately removed from the program.

“We need to get the airflow experts, the occupational health and safety experts, they need to go in, they need to assess these places and they need to say ‘this hotel has to close,’” she said.

Other health experts have pointed to inherent flaws, such as air conditioning and ventilation problems, in hotels that were not designed for quarantine purposes. Another factor is the hiring of poorly-paid contract security guards, who are not trained to manage coronavirus patients, nor provided with adequate personal protective equipment.

The federal Liberal-National Coalition government last week boosted its orders for vaccines to 150 million doses, even though the country’s population is less than 26 million. This typifies the breakout of vaccine nationalism, with Western powers buying up the majority of supplies.

Yesterday the government declared it was not concerned about the effectiveness of the AstraZeneca vaccine, despite the South African government suspending its rollout, after trial data showed the jab offered limited protection against B.1.351, the coronavirus variant first identified in that country.

Health Minister Greg Hunt told Sydney radio station 2GB on Monday: “I spoke with the UK health secretary in recent days—that’s their health minister equivalent—they’re having very strong results.”

Internationally, leading vaccine scientists are calling for a rethink of the goals of vaccination programs, saying that “herd immunity” through vaccination is unlikely to be possible because of the emergence of such variants.

Regardless of the dangers, the corporate media is ramping up its demands that governments rule out any further safety lockdowns. The February 5 editorial in the Australian Financial Review declared: “No more hair-trigger border and city closures by state premiers that constantly leave Australians stranded in their own country and disrupt a still fragile recovery in the domestic economy.”

On the same day, an Australian editorial praised Premier Andrews for his “sensible, refreshing response” to last week’s tennis-related Grand Hyatt case, contrasting it with the “hard lockdown” adopted by his Western Australian counterpart, Mark McGowan.

Last year, the Murdoch media publication denounced Andrews for weeks for partially shutting down Victoria in the face of about 800 deaths in that state. Now it is hailing him for trying to find a new “COVID normal” of “economic rebuilding and recovery” based on his bid to “manage contagion risks rather than eliminate them completely.”

Brazil: São Paulo teachers strike against deadly school reopening

Gabriel Lemos

Some 180,000 teachers in São Paulo, Brazil began an indefinite strike Monday against the resumption of partial in-person education in the state’s public high schools. Teachers voted for the strike action by an 80 percent majority in a virtual assembly held last Friday, February 5.

Teachers striking against pension cuts march in Sao Paulo last year.

Teachers went into the schools on the first day of scheduled classes to speak to students and parents about the strike, and are due to stay out beginning today. At the beginning of last week, private schools in the state had already reopened for in-person classes with up to 35 percent of their of students in classrooms. But on Monday, only 5 percent of students attended classes in the public schools.

The reopening of schools in São Paulo came after right-wing Governor João Doria (PSDB) decreed education an “essential service,” allowing schools to reopen in the so-called “red” and “orange” phases of the state’s supposed pandemic containment plan, dubbed “Plano São Paulo.” Before, schools could reopen only in the “yellow” phase, with the pandemic supposedly “under control.” Now infections are escalating.

The secretary of education of São Paulo, Rossieli Soares, is working closely with the most significant layers of Brazil’s ruling elite to reopen the state’s schools. This includes São Paulo’s corporate and commercial sectors, associations of private school owners, a section of the Brazilian medical sector, the corporate media, pro-business educational think tanks and the state’s courts.

On January 28, São Paulo Judge Simone Gomes ruled in favor of a suit brought by the teachers’ unions against the reopening of the schools. Basing her decision on the “protection of the right to life,” she barred the reopening of schools in the “orange” and “red” phases of the “Plano São Paulo.” One day later, the decision was reversed by the State Court of Justice.

Speaking for São Paulo’s governor, the state secretary of education threatened Monday that “appropriate judicial measures” will be taken against the strike, and that teachers who do not return to the classroom will not be paid.

The reopening of schools in São Paulo—Brazil’s richest and most industrial state, as well as the country’s financial center—will undoubtedly open the way for other states to do the same. Of Brazil’s 26 states, 20 have already planned to start in-person classes in the coming weeks.

The reopening of schools in Brazil, like all over the world, is being driven by the needs of the banks and corporations to reopen the economy. The dynamics of class struggle are increasingly pitting the profit interests of the capitalist class in reopening schools against the interests of the working class in saving lives and keeping schools closed.

The strike in São Paulo began after teachers in Rio de Janeiro decided to strike against the reopening of state and municipal public schools on January 30. Teachers in the southern state of Paraná are scheduled to strike on February 18, when in-person classes begin in the state. On Wednesday, February 10, teachers from the municipal public school system of São Paulo will hold an assembly to decide on strike action against the beginning of in-person classes, scheduled for February 15.

The strike in São Paulo was approved despite the efforts of the pseudo-left organizations working in the APEOESP teachers’ union to postpone its start. The Morenoite PSTU had proposed postponing the start of the strike until next Friday, February 12, while Resistência, one of the tendencies within PSOL (Party for Socialism and Liberty), had proposed holding another assembly, only on February 19, to consider action. Their main claim was that it was necessary to “build” support for the strike mobilization, even with the threat of more COVID-19 cases and deaths when schools reopened.

Expressing these tendencies’ middle-class pessimism and contempt for the lives of the Brazilian working class, Resistência’s union leader, João Zafalão, argued at Friday’s virtual assembly that: “The ideal policy, that of dreams, would be to decree a strike [now]. ... The problem is that our will is not capable, at this moment, of overcoming reality.” This means that, for him, the COVID-19 pandemic is not part of Brazil’s “reality.” Until Sunday, Resistência’s website, Esquerda Online, had not published a word about the teachers’ strike in São Paulo.

The teachers who attended the virtual assembly reacted with a revolt against the proposal of the Morenoite union officials. They wrote in the chat of the virtual assembly: “The difference in the calendar can mean more or less LIVES!!!”; “No more excuses. Build what? Graves?”; “The only need to strike immediately is a sense of reality! A year of Pandemic and you want to wait for more what??? STRIKE FOR LIFE, NOW!”

The reopening of schools is taking place with the pandemic still out of control in São Paulo. In addition to the enormous under-counting of COVID-19 cases and deaths, the Doria government has made constant changes to the criteria of the “Plano São Paulo” to force the reopening of businesses and schools in the state. Writing in the daily Folha de S. Paulo at the beginning of the second wave in Brazil in November, three professors at the University of São Paulo denounced the criteria of the “Plano São Paulo” by stating, “it was never a containment plan, but a plan for making economic activity more flexible despite the pandemic.”

In late January, Professor Alexandre Naime of the state university UNESP told the UOL website that, because of the worsening situation of the pandemic and the detection in São Paulo of the new highly contagious strain of coronavirus identified in Manaus, the state would need “something close to [a] lockdown.” However, according to him, “each time the problem worsens, they change the norm to make [the ‘Plano São Paulo’] classification more flexible.” In addition to the new Manaus strain, at the end of December the more contagious British strain of the coronavirus was detected in São Paulo.

In the last update of the “Plano São Paulo,” released last Friday, the pandemic situation in 10 of the 17 regions of the state supposedly “improved,” according to the state government. Even so, seven regions of São Paulo are in the “yellow” phase, seven in the “orange” phase and three in the “red” phase. In the “yellow” phase, in addition to non-essential services being allowed to work for more hours, the limit on the number of students attending in-person classes rises from 35 percent to 70 percent.

The main pretext given by the state government for relaxing the “Plano São Paulo” was a small decrease from 71.6 percent to 67.2 percent in the average rate of occupation of the state’s ICU beds. However, besides hiding the fact that the number of ICU beds in the state has increased in recent weeks with the worsening of the pandemic, this ignores the high number of cases and deaths still being registered in São Paulo during the second wave of the pandemic.

In the last month, the average number of COVID-19 deaths remained above 200 per day, reaching 365 on February 2, the highest number since September 9. In January, the number of deaths in the state of São Paulo was 37 percent higher than in December. The average number of cases in the state remained above 10,000 per day over the last month, with January the month with the highest number of cases since the beginning of the pandemic in São Paulo. The state has recorded a total of more than 1.8 million cases and 55,000 deaths. By comparison, California, the US state with the most coronavirus cases, has 3.4 million cases and almost 43,000 deaths.

The partial reopening of private schools for in-person classes and of state public schools for teachers’ meetings since February 1 has already led to dozens of new coronavirus cases and outbreaks in schools. APEOSP has registered 147 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in 79 state schools over the past week. In a private school in Campinas, in São Paulo’s countryside, 39 employees and eight students had tested positive by last Thursday, and one teacher had to be hospitalized.

APEOESP, whose president is the Workers Party (PT) state deputy Maria Izabel Noronha, known as Bebel, has insisted that the return to school should occur after teachers are vaccinated. This proposal, however, ignores the fact that the licensed vaccines in Brazil have not been certified for children and adolescents, who are a significant vector for coronavirus transmission and will continue to be infected and transmit the deadly virus to their families.

More importantly, this proposal blocks a unified fight with other sections of workers to implement measures that contain the spread of the virus in São Paulo and throughout Brazil. Faced with an out-of-control pandemic and the collapse of the vaccination campaigns, the only measure capable of curbing infections and saving lives is the closure of non-essential services and production, as well as schools, with financial compensation to all those affected, until the pandemic is eradicated.

This demand, however, has been ignored not only by Brazilian bourgeois parties, including the PT, but also the pseudo-left tendencies that orbit the PT and are today providing a left cover to a faction of the Brazilian ruling elite that has tactical differences with fascistic President Jair Bolsonaro.

São Paulo teachers are entering the same struggle as Chicago teachers in the US, who are now facing a bitter confrontation with the city’s Democratic mayor, the Biden administration and the Chicago Teachers Union.

Defying medical science and workers’ opposition, Dutch state reopens schools

Harm Zonderland

The Dutch government has mandated primary schools reopen their doors on February 8 and the easing of other lockdown restrictions. The curfew, which set off far-right protests, remains in force and may be extended. However, the Dutch Security Council, an assembly of mayors, stated through their chairman, Tilburg Mayor Hubert Bruls, that if the curfew is lifted, it should not be reimposed.

A family watches as the father get a nose an throat swab as residents of Bergschenhoek, Netherlands, take part in a mass test of all of the municipality's 62,000 inhabitants starting Wednesday, Jan. 13, 2021, following a cluster of COVID-19 cases at an elementary school, including about 30 cases of the British coronavirus variant. (AP Photo/Peter Dejong)

While mainstream media zealously pushes illusions that schools can be opened safely, governments across Europe and internationally are demanding schools be reopened even as evidence mounts that schools are key vectors in spreading COVID-19. Recent studies show that school closures reduced the spread of the virus in the United States. UK studies show that children are more susceptible to the so-called British variant and spread it more rapidly.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson had to admit that the “problem is schools may nonetheless act as vectors for transmission, causing the virus to spread between households.”

In the Netherlands, data from an outbreak of the British variant at a school in Lansingerland shows children spread the virus to their families in 17.9 percent of researched cases, against 5.6 percent for the “regular” virus. On February 3, Dutch communal health services (GGD) reported 4,060 confirmed cases and 205 hospitalizations.

While the government’s advisory board Outbreak Management Team (OMT) calls reopening schools a “real risk,” it advises not to keep schools closed, but to implement social distancing and supply “quick tests” to schools. Health Minister Hugo de Jonge also called school reopenings a risk, but he “think[s] the health care system can handle it.”

In fact, the Dutch health care system hangs by a thread. After decades of privatization and austerity, which led to the closure of five “bankrupt” hospitals in 2018, thousands of planned surgeries were canceled due to the pandemic. Public health examinations for cancer were cancelled in 2020 for the same reason, meaning that tens of thousands of people will likely develop cancer because of missing early treatment.

There is broad resistance among the international working class against the premature reopening of schools in the US, Brazil, UK, Germany, the Netherlands and beyond. US teachers in Chicago are striking against the school reopening. The United States has seen more than 26 million infections and suffered over 440,000 casualties. The Chicago Teachers Union negotiated with Democratic Mayor Lori Lightfoot for the reopenings as more than 10,000 teachers are breaking with the unions and organizing strikes themselves.

Everywhere, unions do everything they can to downplay and isolate strikes and force workers back to work. The Dutch Algemene Onderwijsbond (AOb), the largest teachers union, affiliated to the FNV (Federation of Dutch Trade Unions, the largest Dutch union federation), is at most sheepish as it follows the state’s dictates. An AOb spokesperson told RTL Nieuws, “Why can they not wait until the advice is completely pieced together, so that everybody can read which measures are necessary for children and teachers?”

Despite growing resistance among teachers, AOb claims that “most school workers would rather want the schools to be able to reopen.” In a recent article, the state-funded news outlet NOS Nieuws shows a twitter post from a concerned husband of a primary school teacher, saying: “She will strike. [...] Unions: idea perhaps? Strike for safety?” He also pointed to the government ignoring medical advice and said that education workers are “thrown into the fray unvaccinated.”

An online petition demanding schools open only after all school workers received vaccines has more than 31,000 signatures in four days. The petitioners point to the already severe personnel shortage and high workload in the schools. This makes replacing sick teachers nearly impossible.

The social crisis now unfolding in the Netherlands has been brewing for decades but erupted to the surface due to the government’s mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic. The government’s malign neglect of public health and treatment of the pandemic as a financial rather than health care crisis have intensified deep class tensions.

Unemployment has risen sharply, especially among flex workers and youth. The housing shortage, combined with student debt, makes it almost impossible for youth to find a place to live. More than 150,000 people rely on food banks for daily sustenance. One million people live in poverty, 250,000 of them are children, while the richest 10 percent saw their wealth increase by billions of euros.

The trade unions in the Netherlands are not working for the working class but against them. They give bogus reasons to justify rejecting members’ calls for strikes, arguing that the pandemic or lack of funds makes it impossible to strike.

This underscores the necessity, as the World Socialist Web Site has explained, for workers globally to build their own organizations, rank-and-file safety committees, for an internationally coordinated struggle against the pandemic and against school reopening policies. Independent organization and an international, socialist perspective are critical to mount a struggle. The trade unions, for their part, act like police enforcing state and corporate dictates on the working class.

The rank-and-file education safety committees in Germany and the UK have adopted a statement of solidarity with the protesting teachers in Chicago. Expressing their support and solidarity, the statement concisely explains the reasons behind the school reopening push: “The reason for this is clear to us: schools are being used as holding pens for children, and teachers are being employed as babysitters in unsafe conditions, so that parents can be forced to return to work and corporate profits can be maintained throughout the pandemic.”

Furthermore, the rank-and-file education safety committees point to the treacherous role of the trade unions in France and the UK. Only when teachers started taking matters into their own hands did the unions call for school closure, in order to prevent broader strikes they could not control.

The entire Dutch ruling class and political establishment—most prominently the far-right Forum for Democracy (FvD)—are pushing a policy of herd-immunity, allowing the virus to spread with as few containment measures as possible, in order to keep profits flowing to the banks. The way forward for workers in the Netherlands and internationally is in advancing a socialist program, placing human life above economics and the ruthless policies of the capitalist class.

Turkish government prepares to reopen schools as pandemic surges

Barış Demir

Amid a global homicidal back-to-school drive, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government is planning to begin in-person teaching starting February 15 in Turkey, where there are nearly 18 million students and 1 million teachers in K-12 schools.

Last week, after a cabinet meeting, Erdoğan said, “Considering limited internet access, we have decided to open village schools on February 15.” He added, “Preparations will begin for the 8th and 12th grades, primary and special education schools to start education from March 1.” The 8th through 12th grades already partially began in-person teaching on January 22.

Education Minister Ziya Selçuk’s announced Thursday that Monday through Friday, in-person education will begin at villages and similar schools on February 15.

Children wearing face masks for protection against the coronavirus, walk in Kugulu public garden, in Ankara, Turkey, Wednesday, May 13, 2020. (AP Photo/Burhan Ozbilici)

The ministry also declared: “As of March 1, face-to-face education will be held in all public and private primary schools, as well as nursery classes and special education classes within these primary schools as two days a week; face-to-face education will begin in the 8th grade of all public and private secondary schools and Islamic divinity secondary schools.”

Previously, Selçuk announced that the government had reached “a principled decision on the February 15 opening of schools,” emphasizing its determination against widespread concerns and opposition among teachers, parents and students.

With the lack of widespread vaccination, the spread of very transmissible COVID-19 variants and medical experts’ warnings of another surge, this decision continues the “herd immunity” policy at the expense of thousands of workers lives.

The purpose of the reopening drive is to get children out of their homes so their parents can be sent back to work to produce profits for the corporate and financial elites. The hundreds of billions of liras handed out to the corporations and banks since the beginning of the pandemic are to be recovered from the population, whatever the cost.

As of February 7, only 2,612,000 of Turkey’s population of over 83 million people had been vaccinated. Most have only received the first dose of a two-dose vaccine and so lack adequate protection.

Boston College Biology Professor Emrah Altındiş criticized the slow pace of vaccination. He wrote: “It is a dream to control the pandemic at this speed! If we think that an average of 100,000 people are vaccinated a day, 68 million people (2 doses per person), who constitute 80 percent of the population, will be vaccinated in nearly four years. Meanwhile, the protection of those who were vaccinated in the first year will probably be overdue! A vaccination mobilization is necessary!”

Moreover, Health Minister Fahrettin Koca recently announced that COVID-19 variants were found in 17 cities in the country. The campaign to reopen schools is all the more criminal as new strains of COVID-19, including potentially vaccine-resistant forms, are spreading.

Since the government gradually began face-to-face teaching in September, the number of daily cases rose rapidly up to 30,000 daily. With more than 30,000 daily cases in November and December, Turkey was in third place worldwide after the US and Brazil and became the first in Europe. Over the same period, the daily official death toll exceeded 250.

As the health care system neared collapse and public anger rose, the government had to suspend face-to-face education and take temporary lockdown measures in November. Due to these restrictions, however inadequate, the number of daily cases fell to around 5,000 in late January but only very briefly.

Even the Health Ministry’s discredited figures show that school closures and limited lockdown measures have slowed the spread of COVID-19, although the government has always called for keeping non-essential businesses open, making it impossible to contain the pandemic. The link between the return to face-to-face education and COVID-19 contagion is now a widely acknowledged scientific fact.

As the World Socialist Web Site reported, after UK children were noted to have higher infection rates than adults in December, Prime Minister Boris Johnson had to concede, “The problem is schools may nonetheless act as vectors for transmission, causing the virus to spread between households.”

With the reopening of US schools in the summer and fall as the pandemic raged, cases surged massively, driving the death toll to over 450,000.

Despite a considerable decrease in daily infections, the official number of daily cases in Turkey on February 3 increased again to above 8,000, with the trend rising particularly after the new strains were detected.

Moreover, medical experts and scientists continue to warn that it is too early to begin face-to-face teaching at schools and that a new surge might emerge as a result of the variant virus.

Professor Dr. Mustafa Necmi İlhan, a Health Ministry’s Social Sciences Board member, stated last Sunday, “We have 7,000 [daily] cases now [in an upward trend]. Because there is a mutated virus right now, I frankly think that it is too early to talk about lifting or loosening restrictions. … For now, I think it will be a bit early to consider decisions about opening schools or other restrictions.”

Prof. Dr. Elif Dağlı, a pediatric chest specialist, warned, “We have received information that health institutions treating the pandemic in Istanbul are being asked to prepare plans and programs for a new surge in March and April.”

Stressing that COVID-19 restrictions should continue, Infectious Diseases and Clinical Microbiology Specialist Professor Dr. Bülent Ertuğrul said, “We are now heading towards the third wave of the pandemic. The measures should be continued much more tightly. If we do not do this, we cannot overcome a third wave. If we do not be careful, we may also experience the troubles Europe is experiencing today.”

He added that there are two ways to prevent the disease. “We will either prevent it with a vaccine or by stopping the transmission of the virus in the society. This means restrictions, and we will prevent it this way.”

However, there are no widespread vaccination programs, full lockdown with contact tracing or other effective measures in Turkey. Bourgeois opposition parties and their allies in the pseudo-left groups and trade unions have tacitly backed the reopening drive. The pro-opposition Education and Science Workers’ Union (Eğitim-Sen) has not opposed the reopening drive since September and has worked to sow confusion among teachers, students and parents.

It demanded, “If you are going to open schools, education workers should be vaccinated right now.” Firstly, with current supplies, it is impossible to vaccinate all the hundreds of thousands of teachers and school staff before schools reopen.

Moreover, although the COVID-19 mortality rate in children is still low, they are not immune. It was also internationally confirmed that the virus, which children caught in schools, helped massively spread the disease when they carried it home to their parents. Limited vaccination of only a certain group without vaccination of the majority of the population will not control the pandemic.

An independent political intervention by the international working class is required to contain the global pandemic and save lives.

Calls for a general strike against military junta in Myanmar

Peter Symonds

Amid mounting protests in Myanmar against the February 1 military coup, calls have been issued for a general strike against the junta. Demonstrations throughout the country over the weekend, estimated in the tens of thousands, continued on Monday despite the use of physical force by the police and threats of violence by the military.

On Monday, the Myanmar Now newspaper quoted opposition activist Ei Thinzar Maung urging government employees to stop work in an effort to “tear down the military dictatorship.”

A crowd of protesters fill a street and a bridge as they demonstrate in Mandalay, Myanmar, on Monday, Feb. 8, 2021. (AP Photo)

Aye Misan, a nurse at a government hospital, told Reuters, “We health workers are leading this campaign to urge all government staff” to stop work. “Our message to the public is that we aim to completely abolish this military regime and we have to fight for our destiny.”

Those who stopped work yesterday appear to have done so on an individual basis and to have been mainly government employees and professionals. One doctor told the BBC: “Today, we, professionals—especially civil servant professionals such as doctors, engineers and teachers—came out to show that we are all together in this. Our objective is the same—to make the dictatorship fall.”

However, industrial workers joined the protest. “This is a work day, but we aren’t going to work even if our salary will be cut,” one protester, 28-year-old garment factory worker, Hnin Thazin, told the AFP.

Significantly a protest of about 1,000 people took place yesterday in the country’s capital of Naypyitaw, an artificial city created by the military as a bastion against social unrest and dominated by government offices. Police turned water cannon on demonstrators to try to disperse the gathering on a highway into the capital.

The Australian Associated Press reported: “Three lines of police in riot gear could be seen across a road as protesters chanted anti-coup slogans and told police they should serve the people not the military, according to media and a live feed of events. Police placed a sign in the road saying that live ammunition could be used if demonstrators breached the third line of officers.”

Naypyidaw is thought to be where top civilian leaders who were seized by the military during the coup, including Aung San Suu Kyi and President Win Myint, are being held.

In Myanmar’s largest city and former capital, Yangon, an internal note for UN staff estimated that some 60,000 people took to the streets to demand the release of political prisoners and an end to the military dictatorship. Nurses, teachers, civil servants and monks joined the rallies with placards such as “Say no to dictatorship” and “We want democracy.” Another sign read: “Release Our Leaders, Respect Our Votes, Reject Military Coup.”

The pretext for the military coup was allegations of electoral irregularities in national elections held last November. Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) won an overwhelming majority with 83 percent of the vote and took 396 out of 476 seats in the combined upper and lower houses of parliament. The military-backed Union Solidarity and Development party won just 33 seats.

In the week leading up to the coup, the military challenged the results in the country’s electoral commission, which dismissed the claims of election rigging. The parliament was due to convene for the first time on February 1 when the military seized power, installed commander-in-chief Senior General Min Aung Hlaing as the country’s leader, declared a state of emergency and detained top NLD figures.

According to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, 165 people, mostly politicians, had been detained since February 1, with just 13 released. An Australian economist, Sean Turnell, who was advising the NLD-led government, has been arrested.

Protests have taken place in the country’s second largest city of Mandalay and many towns and villages. Thousands reportedly marched in the southern city of Dawei and in Myitkyina, the state capital of Kachin in the north. In the town of Myawaddy, on Myanmar’s eastern border with Thailand, police shot into the air to try to disperse a protest.

In Yangon, Kyaw, 58, a small shop owner cited by the Guardian, called for an end to the coup. “There are so many young educated people here, this is a revolution of the new generation,” he said. He had participated in the 1988 uprising against the military dictatorship that involved not only mass protests but a huge strike movement of the working class.

The military is preparing for a new crackdown. A statement on state-run MRTV on Monday declared there had been violations of the law and threats of force by groups “using the excuse of democracy and human rights.” It warned of unspecified action “against offences which disturb, prevent and destroy the state’s stability, public safety and the rule of law.” In areas of Yangon and Mandalay, the junta has imposed a curfew and banned gatherings of more than five people.

Now, as in 1988, the intervention of the working class is essential to the fight for democratic rights in Myanmar. It is, however, critical that such a movement should draw the necessary political lessons from the events in 1988, which ended with a bloody crackdown by troops that killed thousands.

The 1988 strike movement had brought the military to its knees. It relied on the bourgeois opposition led by Suu Kyi, who were just as terrified of the working class as the military, to call off the protests on the phony promises of an election in 1990. Her intervention provided the army with the opening to turn its guns on workers. Having stabilised the situation, the junta simply ignored its promise to hold the election and put Suu Kyi under house arrest.

Two decades later, the military again turned to Suu Kyi as it sought to mend relations with the US and its allies. It released her from house arrest in 2010 and allowed restricted elections under a new constitution, paving the way for an easing of sanctions and for US President Barack Obama to visit Myanmar in 2016. Suu Kyi and the NLD were even allowed to form a government after winning the 2016 election.

However, the key levers of power have remained in the hands of the armed forces. Over the past five years, Suu Kyi has collaborated closely with the military, touring the world to encourage foreign investment, and acting as the chief apologist for its atrocities against the Muslim Rohingya minority. Like the military, her NLD is deeply imbued with anti-Rohingya chauvinism, branding them “illegal immigrants” to justify their complete lack of civil rights.

The NLD represents layers of the capitalist class who are hostile to the military’s political and economic domination, but who are equally fearful of social unrest, particularly of the working class. As she has before, Suu Kyi will seek to exploit the protest movement against the junta to strike a new deal with the military at the expense of working people.

Workers can defend their democratic and social rights only by politically breaking from Suu Kyi and the NLD, and fighting for their own independent class interests on the basis of an internationalist and socialist perspective.

Free Spanish rapper Pablo Hasél, jailed on terror charges!

Alejandro López

Spanish rapper Pablo Hasél is set to go to prison for allegedly “glorifying terrorism,” “inciting violence” and “insulting the Spanish crown and state institutions” in tweets and songs. He would become the first musician imprisoned since the end of the fascist dictatorship of Francisco Franco in 1978 and could face up to two decades in prison.

Hasél, 33, whose real name is Pablo Rivadulla, is a left-wing rapper popular for his political songs and poems against successive Popular Party (PP), Socialist Party (PSOE) and Podemos-backed governments. He criticizes anti-immigrant and pro-austerity policies, warning about the rise of fascism, authoritarianism and police state repression.

The unrelenting pursuit of Hasél and other artists and musicians is part of an escalating campaign by the European ruling class on free speech and democratic rights, intensified with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Terrified at growing social opposition to murderous “herd immunity” policies and bank and corporate bailouts, the ruling class aims to censor artists with draconian prison sentences.

Hasél has been persecuted over a number of years. In 2011, he was arrested for his song “Democracy F* You,” where he called for the liberation of the jailed leader of the Maoist armed group, First of October Anti-Fascist Resistance Groups (GRAPO). In 2014 he was sentenced to two years in prison for publicly insulting the King of Spain and glorifying terrorism. The sentence was not served, however, as Hasél did not have a criminal record.

In March 2017, the prosecutor’s office requested five years against him, to be added to the two he already has, for more songs and 64 Tweets. These tweets include:

• “The police kill 15 migrants and they are saints. The people defends itself from this brutality and we are ‘violent terrorists’, scum.” Hasél was referring to the infamous Tarajal Massacre, when police fired tear gas and rubber bullets on migrants attempting to swim across to the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, causing 15 men to drown.
  
  
• “The Bourbon mobster partying with the Saudi monarchy, among those who finance ISIS everything remains.” Hasél was referring to well-known relations between the Saudi and Spanish Bourbon monarchies, and between the House of Saud and Islamist terror group ISIS.

During the trial, Hasél did not condemn his songs and tweets, noting that “half the country thinks the same” about the monarchy. He said he sings about objective facts, widely reported in the media. He said that “in the end I will be the one made to pay” for the monarchy’s action—an observation that former King Juan Carlos seemed to confirm last year, when he fled Spain like a thief to avoid prosecution on corruption charges.

Hasél claimed he saw groups like GRAPO and the Basque separatist armed group ETA as “resistance” organizations. These groups are now defunct, in the case of GRAPO, since the 1980s. Hasél’s songs cannot be seriously presented as support for violent armed actions.

He concluded his defense, saying, “the limits of freedom of expression are always for us. It is the anti-fascists who are tried, persecuted and condemned. For those who want to sentence me to prison, the main problem is that I’m not a fascist, and I don’t want to throw bombs at Catalans, and seek the death of homosexuals and immigrants.”

In November 2020, the higher courts rejected his appeal and approved his conviction. On January 28, he received a judicial order to surrender within 10 days to face imprisonment. Hasél refused to surrender voluntarily, and his incarceration is imminent this week.

Currently he has been sentenced to a minimum of nine months in jail. But the courts are adding many new accusations that he could end up spending as much as 20 years behind bars.

The incarceration of Hasél is a blatant attack on basic democratic rights, including freedom of expression and artistic liberty. To state this does not imply any political sympathy for the petty-bourgeois Basque nationalists Hasél has defended or their terrorist activities, or his support for Stalinist regimes in the USSR, Eastern Europe and China. However, the Spanish state is clearly setting a precedent for a draconian crackdown on any oppositional political or artistic statement.

Indeed, Hasél himself noted, “you don’t have to agree with everything I say to see that this is a serious attack on freedom of expression.”

Last week hundreds and, in some cases, thousands have attended protests defending Hasél in Girona, Barcelona, Lleida, Manresa, Granada, Valencia, Zaragoza and Madrid. He also received solidarity messages from other singers or rappers, including Cesar Strawberry, ToteKing and Los Chikos del Maiz, and actors like Javier Bardem, Luis Tosar and Willy Toledo.

Spanish singer-songwriter Lluís Llach criticized the decision, comparing it to his songs against the Franco dictatorship in the 1970s. “ They are putting more musicians in prison now than during the Transition. Those of us that stood up against Franco’s regime were not imprisoned back then. Now things have changed.”

Hasél’s prosecution is part of a broad campaign of intimidation after the brutal police crackdown on the 2017 Catalan independence referendum. This was followed by relentless propaganda supporting fascist protests, the fascistic Vox party and show trials of Catalan nationalist politicians.

In November 2017, 12 rappers of the now-defunct band La Insurgencia were sentenced to six months in prison for glorifying terrorism. In 2018, rapper Josep Beltrán (Valtònyc) fled to Belgium in May to avoid a three-and-a-half-year prison sentence after being convicted of glorifying terrorism and insulting the monarchy. In recent years, more artists and citizens have been sentenced for blasphemy and glorifying terrorism.

Photo: Valtonyc/Twitter

A stench of fascism emerges from the state apparatus jailing Hasél. The same courts attacking artists for “glorifying terrorism” sentenced Catalan nationalists to a decade in prison for peaceful protests, claimed Francisco Franco’s 1936 fascist coup was legitimate and declared that his regime did not commit crimes against humanity. Over the past months, sections of the army working with Vox have repeatedly called for a coup. In private WhatsApp chats, former generals proclaim the need to “kill 26 million” left-wing voters.

Predictably, the PSOE-Podemos government, which is responsible for Hasél’s jailing, is downplaying the significance of this attack on fundamental liberties.

Pathetically Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias tweeted his concern for the state’s reputation. He said, “I think that in a democracy nobody should go to jail for crimes of opinion. There are other legal mechanisms to protect honour, integrity or prestige. I think Hasél’s incarceration will create the feeling that the law is not always the same for everyone.”

Similarly, Podemos spokesperson Isabel Serra stated in a press conference that Hasél’s conviction demonstrates “that freedom of expression in this country has been asphyxiated since the gag law was approved, a law that must be repealed urgently.”

In truth, Hasél has been prosecuted using the penal code, specifically by Articles 578 (exaltation of terrorism), 504 (insults to the security forces) and 491 (insults to the Crown), not under the reactionary Citizens Security Law (“gag law”) of the Popular Party (PP). Serra was attempting to deflect criticism of her party’s complicity in the repression of artists towards the right-wing PP.

Hasél has correctly accused Podemos “of being guilty, direct accomplices” in his persecution.

“In the eye of the hurricane”: The COVID-19 pandemic and the new variants

Benjamin Mateus

There have been 106.9 million cases of COVID-19 confirmed worldwide since the beginning of the pandemic. There have also been over 2.3 million deaths, a conservative estimate by all accounts. After the massive winter surge, cases have been steadily declining primarily due to containment measures put into effect by many countries after seeing their health systems approach near collapse or falter altogether.

Teachers including Amanda Thornton, left, conduct their classes online from laptops during freezing temperatures outside the Joseph Greenberg School in Philadelphia, Monday, Feb. 8, 2021. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

Still, the seven-day moving average of cases remains exceptionally high, with more than 457,000 cases each day. Although it is encouraging that the death toll is following the fall in cases, it still stands at an abominable 12,712 average deaths per day. The dominance of more infective and lethal variants of the coronavirus that are also immune-evading will assuredly, in the context of the global policy of “herd immunity,” lead to future waves of infections. There remains an abundance of energy in the virus to burn for some time.

So far, more than 130 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccines have been administered worldwide. The United States, according to Bloomberg’s vaccination tracker, has vaccinated over 40 million people who have received at least one dose, accounting for about 12 percent of the population. For the first time, the number of vaccinations has outpaced the number of infections. However, this should be taken as a cautionary statistical anomaly rather than a determined global response to the virus.

According to the director-general of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, more than 75 percent of all vaccinations administered thus far have occurred in just 10 countries, which account for 60 percent of global GDP. Many of those vaccinated in these countries are at lower risk of severe disease or death.

Meanwhile, almost 130 nations representing more than 30 percent of the world’s population have yet to receive a single injection, underscoring the deep inequity that characterizes global capitalist relations. Dr. Tedros noted during Friday’s press briefing, “All governments have an obligation to protect their own people, but once countries with vaccines have vaccinated their own health workers and older people, the best way to protect the rest of their own population is to share vaccines so other countries can do the same.”

Vaccine nationalism not only threatens to prolong the pandemic and global economic downward spiral. Without a coordinated international effort to suppress the virus, new and even more virulent lineages of the SARS-CoV-2 may evolve. The overwhelming surge of cases a little more than a month ago in Johannesburg, London and Manaus, Brazil, have confirmed the virus’s deadly nature and how political efforts to return to economic normalcy have contributed to this extremely disturbing development.

Speaking to CNN, Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, cautioned against self-congratulation over the dip in numbers. Given the rising cases of new variants, he compared the present situation in the United States to being in the “eye of the hurricane.”

“I’ve been on Zoom calls for the last two weeks about how we’re going to manage this. The big wall is about to hit us again, and these are the new variants. This could be really very dire for our country as we head into the spring. Now, we’re in a race. We’re in a race to see how quickly we can vaccinate the American people.”

A report from Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, California, published this week on a preprint server for health sciences, found that the B.1.1.7 variant first identified in the UK has a doubling time of a little over a week. It has an infectious rate 35 to 45 percent higher than the wild type of the virus.

The report found the variant was first detected in the US in early November and had spread to more than 30 US states by January. Scientists predict that UK variant will account for 50 percent of cases by March 23. Florida, with the most B.1.1.7 variant cases detected in any state, is expected to reach the 50 percent milestone by March 8. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has reported that six cases of the South African variant have been detected across three states, while three cases of the Brazilian variant, also known as P.1, have been found across two states.

Over the weekend, South Africa announced it was suspending plans to vaccinate frontline health care workers with the AstraZeneca vaccine. South Africa’s Minister of Health, Dr. Zweli Mkhize, explained that a small study conducted among 2,000 volunteers vaccinated with this vaccine found that it offered minimal protection against mild to moderate disease caused by the variant that accounts for 90 percent of COVID-19 infections in the country.

“The AstraZeneca vaccine appeared effective against the original strain, but not against the variant. We have decided to put a temporary hold on the rollout of the vaccine … more work needs to be done,” the minister said.

Evidence is also emerging that the South African variant is both more contagious and virulent. The hope is that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, still awaiting emergency authorization in the US and which has shown adequate results against this variant, will be rolled out soon.

Oxford University, an AstraZeneca partner, issued a statement to the effect that the “yet to be peer-reviewed study” was too small and involved a low-risk population with an average age of 31, making the preliminary conclusions of the study premature and inconclusive. “Protection against moderate-severe disease, hospitalizations or death could not be assessed in this study,” they added.

The race to vaccinate the population against SRAS-CoV-2, while variants of the virus are allowed to continue to spread, does not take into account the danger posed by these mutations and is a potential recipe for disaster. As these more contagious and virulent lineages of COVID-19 become more dominant, mitigation measures must be implemented immediately and an international strategy initiated to vaccinate the most vulnerable. Scientists’ predictions imply that the hurricane alluded to by Dr. Hotez will make landfall and more suffering and avoidable deaths will ensue.

French universities reopen despite spread of coronavirus, new variants

Samuel Tissot

Last week French universities began to partially reopen to students. Following a tweet from French President Emmanuel Macron on January 21 announcing the partial reopening, new rules this term will allow each student to attend classes one day per week. Macron’s tweet was made a day after a series of small student protests led by the New Anti-capitalist Party (NPA) and student unions called for the immediate reopening of universities on January 20.

Universite de Paris - Faculte de Droit, Place de Pantheon (Image Credit: Peter Haas/Wikipedia)

The measure will throw hundreds of thousands of students back into classroom settings every day. For example, at just the University of Orléans, 4,000 students will return for in-person education each day. The risk of infection is not limited to the classroom. Students, professors and staff will increase the number of people on public transport and lead to unmasked, crowded lunches in cafeterias.

Even if strict protocols are followed, the virus will inevitably spread in an educational setting. This has been shown by multiple scientific studies. However, in all likelihood there will be a repeat of the September reopening of universities and schools, where supposedly strict rules will not be followed by most universities. Lectures will again take place in poorly ventilated rooms and halls without enough space for social distancing.

In current conditions the policy means a further acceleration in the spread of the virus, leading to more infections and deaths both among students and the wider population. Since the September reopening, nearly 50,000 people have died from COVID-19 in the country.

The relaxation of these measures comes as dangerous variants of the virus become further entrenched in France. On Thursday, Prime Minister Jean Castex reported that 14 percent of COVID-19 cases in the country already involved the more infectious B.1.1.7 variant, first identified in the UK. In France, an average of 419 people have died every day over the past week.

On Sunday, preliminary results from a study were published showing that the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine was significantly less effective against the South African variant. In some cases, the British variant has also developed the E484K mutation that is believed to cause the reduction in vaccine efficacy. The rollout of the AstraZeneca vaccine in France began on Saturday and is a key part of the government’s vaccination campaign, which has still reached less than 3 percent of the population. The government is using the campaign for vaccines as a justification for its refusal to impose a lockdown until the population can be vaccinated and the virus stopped.

Contrary to the notion promoted by capitalist governments and the media, teenagers and young adults do get seriously ill from the disease. At the time of writing, 294 people aged under 30 are hospitalized with the virus, and 51 people in this age category have died from COVID-19 since the beginning of the pandemic. Health care workers treating patients with the British and South African variants have also emphasized that they are generally much younger than during the first wave.

Although undertaken in the name of defending students’ mental health, the partial reopening of universities is a tactical step in the government’s broader “herd immunity” policy. Macron has been pushing for a premature reopening of universities since the new year. On January 4, the Ministry of Higher Education decreed that certain groups of students could return in small groups and to sit for exams.

However, this met sharp resistance from students. For example, L2 students at Créteil University launched a petition against in-person exams. The petition stated: “The health crisis is far from over and is starting up again with the festive season and the arrival of a new strain of COVID is only making things worse. Doing exams in the classroom, given the current situation, is a dangerous action for everyone’s health.”

Although just over a month later, this remains true, with the exam season finished and a new semester beginning. The university administrations, government and student unions have redoubled their efforts to push for a reopening.

The unions and pseudo-left parties bear central responsibility for creating the conditions for Macron to push through the reopening. It was only following a series of small protests organized by the NPA and a coalition of student unions on January 20 that Macron announced the measure.

The protest encompassed the youth organizations of the Greens, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s Unsubmissive France and Macron’s own party, and was backed by the student unions. Only 1,500 protesters gathered in Paris and only a few hundred in other cities across France, yet these protests supposedly “pressured” Macron to implement his own right-wing policy. In contrast, when hundreds of thousands of “yellow vest” protesters demonstrated for months each week against social inequality and tax cuts for the rich, the president’s response was police repression.

In fact, the current reopening has already been criticized among these layers as being too limited. On January 25, Maryam Pougetoux, the head of the National Union of French Students, pushed for even more anti-lockdown measures, stating, “We must go further, with levels of 50 percent [in-person].”

The claim that accelerating mass death and illness in society will improve the mental health of students is absurd. In fact, according to a recent survey by Odoxa-Backbone Consulting, 46 percent of students fear for their own health, and 80 percent fear for the health of their families.

Nonetheless, Macron, in a February 2 interview, claimed his policies aim to “protect our youth as much as possible.”

A number of recent student suicides have underlined the mental health crisis engulfing youth both in France and internationally. While social isolation is a considerable huge strain on students, as well as the rest of society, it is not the underlying cause of the mental health crisis. The vast majority of youth face the specter of unemployment, and do not have access to adequate housing or food. A recent viral video of hundreds of students queuing for food parcels highlights the precarity facing French youth in the 21st century.

While the pandemic has compounded these issues, during the last 12 months the billionaire class’ wealth has rocketed. The youth face the brutal consequences of the European ruling class’ conscious decision to let hundreds of thousands die, including among their family members and friends. Those of student age have grown up only seeing only austerity at home and imperialist war abroad.

Despite the anti-lockdown campaign of Macron and the pseudo-left parties, there is not popular support for reopening universities among the population or the student body. The handful of students gathered by the student union-NPA protest stands in stark contrast to tens of thousands who have demonstrated against Macron’s recent police-state measures: the anti-Muslim Law Affirming Republican Principles and the Global Security Law. A recent poll showed that 70 percent of the French population stated they supported a new lockdown to stop the spread of the virus.

These protests were an effort to divert anger over the social crisis, poor housing, food insecurity and the mental health crisis behind a campaign for an end to lockdown measures. In doing so, they are functioning as the political cheerleaders for a policy aimed at sacrificing tens of thousands of lives for the profits of the corporate and financial elite. The campaign for a “reopening” is aimed at preventing any impact of a lockdown on corporate profits, and keeping schools open is necessary in order that children’s parents can continue to go to work.

The return to in-person instruction at the universities is a useful tool to increase pressure on schoolteachers to maintain in-person education. It also provides a precedent for the reopening of non-essential enterprise, including restaurants and hospitality venues.

Students and young people must not allow themselves to be used as pawns in the government’s efforts to pursue homicidal policy. Schools, universities and non-essential workplaces must be closed, and a comfortable living wage must be provided to the entire population, young and old. To fight for this program, students should turn to the working class, the only social force capable of imposing a scientific response to the pandemic. The fight against the policy of death is the fight against capitalism and for socialism.