Menthol Marketing Exposes Institutional Racism

Michael Schwalbe

When it comes to destroying Black lives, no modern American institution can match the tobacco industry.

It isn’t just that 45,000 Black Americans die of tobacco-related diseases every year; it isn’t just that tobacco use is the main risk factor for the leading causes of death—heart disease, cancer, stroke—among Black Americans; it isn’t just that lung cancer, caused mainly by smoking, is the form of cancer that kills most Black Americans; it isn’t just that Black smokers suffer higher rates of death from causes related to smoking. It’s worse than that.

What’s worse is that much of this toll of death and disease is not an incidental result of the fact that about 15% of African Americans are smokers (most of whom want to quit). It’s a result of the tobacco industry’s sixty-year history of targeted marketing of menthol cigarettes to the Black community. This is institutional racism operating in the plain light of day.

Menthol is a problem because it’s a sales gimmick that actually works. In adspeak, it “cools and soothes” the throat. In fact, it numbs the throat and makes tobacco smoke less harsh. This makes it easier for kids to start smoking and harder for adults to quit.

In the 1950s, only around 5% of Black smokers smoked menthol cigarettes. But marketing researchers found that Black smokers had a slight preference for menthol cigarettes, a preference that tobacco companies sought to exploit. And so the industry began to heavily advertise menthol brands in Black communities and Black media. The industry also began sponsoring jazz festivals and other cultural events in Black communities, further linking menthol brands to Black identity.

It all paid off handsomely for the corporate pushers. By the mid-70s, 44% of Black smokers used menthol cigarettes. The figure today stands at 85%, tragically attesting to the power of the industry’s predatory marketing.

Although some advertising tactics (e.g., big billboards) were ended by the Master Settlement Agreement in the late 1990s, the industry continues to offer point-of-sale and discount promotions of mentholated tobacco products—small, cheap cigars are the latest example—in Black communities. In its promotions the industry also appropriates elements of Black culture, jazz musicians and rap DJs being some of its favorite images.

Public health groups have fought Big Tobacco’s use of menthol for years. The African American Tobacco Control Leadership Council has tried, with notable successes in California and Massachusetts, to get menthol banned in cities and states around the country. Here in North Carolina, the historic belly of the tobacco beast, the Center for Black Health and Equity has worked to raise awareness in the Black community about the tobacco industry’s manipulative advertising of menthol cigarettes and cigarillos.

Passage of the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act in 2009 gave the FDA an opening to ban menthol in tobacco products. The act banned fruit and candy flavors in cigarettes but, in deference to the tobacco industry’s political clout, exempted menthol. A ruling on menthol was supposed to hinge on the results of future research examining its health impacts.

In 2011, the FDA’s Tobacco Products Scientific Advisory Committee reviewed the evidence and concluded that “removal of menthol in cigarettes from the marketplace would benefit public health in the United States.” In 2013, the FDA conducted another review and again found that menthol cigarettes posed a greater health hazard than regular cigarettes. The initial determination, a decade ago, should have been the last nail in menthol’s coffin. Yet the FDA failed to act.

After the 2013 review, public health groups filed a citizen petition calling on the FDA to ban menthol as a tobacco flavoring. Although this led to no immediate action, years of pressure by public health groups spurred Scott Gottlieb, FDA director under Donald Trump, to propose enacting a menthol ban. But Republican Richard Burr, following in the footsteps of another North Carolina senator funded by the tobacco industry, Jesse Helms, fought the proposal. Burr convinced Trump to oppose FDA action on menthol, and the proposal died.

Last summer, in July 2020, the African American Tobacco Control Leadership Council and Action on Smoking and Health, in partnership with the American Medical Association and the National Medical Association, filed suit in U.S. District Court in northern California to compel the FDA to respond to the citizen petition submitted in 2013. With charitable understatement, the suit called the FDA’s non-action on menthol an “unreasonable delay.” The FDA filed a response to the suit, promising to respond by April 29, 2021.

Tobacco companies of course want to keep using menthol. The industry is now spending millions on a referendum campaign to overturn California’s ban. One breathtakingly disingenuous ploy is to claim that menthol bans will give police a reason to stop and search Black people. This is a lie, as Karen Bass, congressional representative from California and former chair of the Congressional Black Caucus has pointed out; a ban would prohibit selling mentholated tobacco products, not possessing them.

It’s not clear what happens next. The FDA could finally take action and ban menthol. If the Biden administration approves the ban, this would put the quickest end to the tobacco industry’s unconscionable history of institutional racism.

If the FDA, now headed by Biden appointee and acting commissioner Janet Woodcock, again fails to act, Congress could step up and pass legislation to take mentholated tobacco products off the market, as Canada and the European Union have already done. If it comes to this, public pressure will be needed to overcome the tobacco industry’s $50 million-per-year lobbying efforts and make this change happen.

Institutional racism can be hard to see because it’s often buried in organizational routines that are not consciously intended to be racist but which consistently produce racial inequalities. The targeted marketing of mentholated tobacco products to the Black community is an exception. In this case, the example is stark.

n the long run, the solution to the ongoing global pandemic of tobacco-related disease is to abolish tobacco companies. Short of that, we now have an opportunity to significantly curtail the industry’s ability to profit from the destruction of Black lives. If Black lives matter, we must not let the opportunity pass.

Honduras, Guatemala break up migrant caravan at behest of Biden administration

Andrea Lobo

Hours after beginning its journey to the United States on Tuesday, a new caravan of Honduran refugees was broken up by Honduran and Guatemalan state forces.

Caravan participants begin to gather at the San Pedro Sula bus terminal on Monday night (Twitter @PiaLaPeriodista)

About 300 Honduran asylum seekers had joined the caravan, organized spontaneously on social media and by word of mouth, when the Honduran police set up roadblocks demanding negative COVID-19 tests and identification papers before ultimately dispersing the caravan.

About 32 of the asylum seekers reached the Guatemalan border, where they were immediately turned back by the security forces.

This is the third migrant caravan formed in Honduras since two major hurricanes devastated much of the country last November. Honduran police dissolved the first one in December, while the second caravan in late January was brutally repressed by Guatemalan troops with beatings, tear gas canisters and the use of other antiriot gear.

The repression has not stopped smaller groups and families from reaching the US border, with the US Border Patrol apprehe­nding nearly 100,000 migrants in February alone. This is the biggest migrant surge in two decades, according to the US Department of Homeland Security.

The Democratic administration of President Joe Biden has detained more than 16,000 unaccompanied refugee children in crowded and inhuman conditions, while it has continued the Trump policy of summarily deporting the vast majority of asylum-seekers, using the pretext of the COVID-19 pandemic. This has only served to scapegoat those fleeing a humanitarian disaster for the health care and social crisis within the United States itself.

In the background of the assault on the latest caravan, US Vice President Kamala Harris, who was recently appointed by Biden to lead the response to the migration crisis, called Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei on Tuesday to effectively deliver marching orders for the crackdown on the refugees.

The White House readout of the conversation speaks of US “efforts to increase humanitarian assistance” and “explore innovative opportunities to create jobs and to improve the conditions” in the region. It concludes with the true purpose of the call: “The Vice President also thanked President Giammattei for his efforts to secure Guatemala’s southern border.”

Giammattei requested a Temporary Protective Status (TPS) for Guatemalan migrants and that the US send COVID-19 vaccines, hoping for a deal similar to that reached with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), in exchange for serving as an extension of the US Border Patrol.

Expecting the new caravan, the Giammattei government had declared states of emergency in the departments along the expected migrant route, suspending democratic protections and deploying hundreds of troops.

Last Saturday, Mexican troops carried out a show of force along the border with Guatemala. In recent weeks, the AMLO administration has deployed nearly 9,000 soldiers specifically to round up and detain Central American asylum-seekers. So far this year, 35,000 migrants have been detained in Mexico, most of whom have also been summarily deported.

The military and police in Mexico, which have been trained and used primarily for deadly combat over the last two decades, have killed two migrants in three days. A police official asphyxiated a Salvadoran woman in Quintana Roo on Sunday, and an Army soldier shot and killed a Guatemalan man in Chiapas on Tuesday.

After the second killing, according to the Guatemalan military, a group of about 300 enraged residents from the Guatemalan town of Tacaná drove into Mexico to protest. They managed to take six Mexican soldiers hostage and bring them back to Guatemala, where local police and soldiers negotiated their release shortly after.

What the Biden administration is demanding is that the semicolonial regimes in the region establish open-air prisons through police and military repression.

The latest caravan and surge demonstrate just how desperate the conditions are which the migrants are fleeing.

A refugee in the Honduran caravan, Sergio, explained to CNN, “We are conscious that [the border] is closed, but they can’t stop us. There can be 20 walls and 30 gates, but poverty is stronger than any border. They will not stop the caravans in Guatemala or Mexico. We are going because we need to.”

Another migrant, Francisco, added, “None of us want to leave. We are going by force, for our families.”

Amidst the devastating effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, Hurricanes Eta and Iota slammed the region in a span of just two weeks last November, causing more than $6 billion in damages. Entire towns need rebuilding and relocation, and vast expanses of crops were lost.

The UN estimates that, as of March 2021, there were 3.1 million people, or a third of the population of Honduras, suffering from severe food insecurity. This is expected to increase to 3.3 million by September.

Over 7,700 people remain in shelters, 53 percent of whom report posttraumatic stress. Hundreds of families remain at makeshift camps along the roads east of San Pedro Sula.

The Biden administration is shamelessly lying when it claims it wants to address the root causes of migration.

On one hand, it is hoarding COVID-19 vaccines, while Honduras has received only 48,000 doses. The country had to seek a $35 million international loan just to buy enough vaccine doses to cover 1.4 million people, less than 15 percent of the population, but there is no estimate for when those doses will arrive.

On the other hand, as of the end of February, the UN Flash Appeal for hurricane emergency aid in Honduras has received only $30.9 million out of the $90 million requested. The US Government gave only $15.2 million.

Meanwhile, America’s 657 billionaires, who could all fit in one large passenger aircraft, have seen their wealth increase by almost 45 percent, or $1.3 trillion, during the pandemic. This is 10 times the yearly GDP of the Northern Triangle, with its 33 million people, and 122 times public social spending (i.e., education, health care, housing, social assistance, environment and culture).

Honduras itself has a handful of billionaire oligarchic families and at least 185 individuals with more than $30 million in net worth.

Honduran Police set up a roadblock against the caravan, March 31, 2021 (credit CONADEH)

The desperate conditions in Central America are the result of over a century of imperialist oppression and plunder overseen by parasitic elites at the behest of the US banks and corporations.

At the same time, the lack of measures to halt the immense worsening of mass suffering in recent months is the result of the same policy being employed by US banks and corporations against American workers. The capitalist classes globally are threatening workers with hunger, homelessness and deprivation to compel them to return to work under unsafe conditions and continue generating profits as the pandemic worsens.

The brutal repression against the refugees prepares and heralds a savage response against the resistance of workers within the United States, Mexico, Guatemala and throughout the Americas.

Workers in every country can advance their common interests only by mobilizing politically and internationally to abolish all capitalist exploitation and the obsolete nation-state system, while reallocating the wealth of the financial elite and the resources of society to solve all social needs.

New studies show COVID-19 leads to significant organ damage and the death of many survivors

Robert Stevens

A landmark study in the UK by teams at University College London, the University of Leicester and the Office for National Statistics confirms how deadly COVID-19 is. It backs up the growing mountain of evidence that the disease results in major organ damage in the human body.

The report, “Post-covid syndrome in individuals admitted to hospital with covid-19” was published Wednesday in the BMJ (formerly, British Medical Journal). It found, “Over a mean follow-up of 140 days, nearly a third of individuals who were discharged from hospital after acute covid-19 were readmitted (14,060 of 47,780) and more than 1 in 10 (5,875) died after discharge…”

A nurse holds a phone while a COVID-19 patient speaks with his family from an intensive care unit. (AP Photo/Daniel Cole)

Those readmitted needed to be taken back into hospital within four months of being sent home.

The remit of the cohort study was to “quantify rates of organ specific dysfunction in individuals with covid-19 after discharge from hospital compared with a matched control group from the general population.” These number of readmittances and deaths, it adds, occurred “at rates four and eight times greater, respectively” than in the control group.

The study compared medical records of nearly 48,000 people who had received treatment in a National Health Service (NHS) hospital for COVID-19 and been discharged by August 31, 2020. It concluded, “Individuals discharged from hospital after covid-19 had increased rates of multiorgan dysfunction compared with the expected risk in the general population.”

It has long been known that COVID-19 causes damage to the bodies’ major organs, including heart damage, kidney damage, lung damage, liver damage, hearing loss and contributing to bringing on Type 1 diabetes. In January, a study found that while no trace of COVID-19 had appeared in the brains of people with the infection, there was evidence of blood vessel damage caused by the body’s inflammatory response in the post-mortem brains of patients who tested positive for coronavirus. This suggests the virus may indirectly attack the organ.

The UK study builds on previous research on outcomes for patients taken into hospital with COVID-19 but based on tens of thousands of cases is able to draw conclusions about the extent of dysfunction in organs of those affected.

The report notes, “Most studies so far have focused on symptoms associated with post-covid syndrome rather than organ dysfunction, and few have made use of a control group, allowing the inference of counterfactual outcomes.”

It states, “Since SARS-CoV-2 infection was recognised in late 2019, the academic and clinical emphasis has been on respiratory manifestations. Increasing evidence exists for direct multiorgan effects, however, and indirect effects on other organ systems and disease processes, such as cardiovascular diseases and cancers, through changes in healthcare delivery and patient behaviours.”

The BMJ states “In a recent study of 1,775 veterans in the United States admitted to hospital with covid-19, 20% were readmitted and 9% died within 60 days of discharge. After restricting follow-up in our study to the same length of time, we found similar prevalence rates of 23% and 9%, respectively. The US study did not analyse organ specific endpoints and was conducted in a specific population. Our study extends these findings as we found that covid-19 was associated with dysfunction in a range of organs after discharge in a broader population of patients admitted to hospital.”

The results in the UK survey demonstrate how deadly COVID-19 is. It is already known that approximately one-third will develop symptoms that typify what has been come to be known as Long COVID or “long-haulers”. It is common—after their COVID-19 infection has cleared up—even among those who have not required hospitalisation, to suffer from a number of symptoms like chronic fatigue or “brain fog.”

The phenomenon of Long Covid is still being analysed by scientists, with the BMJ study noting that “Long covid, or post-covid syndrome, is not one condition, and is defined by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) as ‘signs and symptoms that develop during or after an infection consistent with covid-19 which continue for more than 12 weeks and are not explained by an alternative diagnosis.’”

While Long Covid is still being investigated, it was known almost from the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, as thousands died, that this was a disease that once present in lungs and blood could spread to other organs, often resulting in fatalities.

Last month, the WSWS noted research published on Medrxiv in October 2020 carried out by a UK team of physicians, scientists and academics, based on a study of 201 patients. The study into “Multi-organ impairment in low-risk individuals with long COVID” found mild impairment in heart (32 percent), lungs (33 percent), kidneys (12 percent), and liver (10 percent), including pancreas and spleen. Multiorgan impairment was observed in 25 percent, while 66 percent had some form of derangement of a single organ. Among those involved in the study was Dr Amitava Banerjee of the Institute of Health Informatics at University College London.

Banerjee also contributed to the new study published in the BMJ. He told the Guardian, “This is a concern and we need to take it seriously… We show conclusively here that this is very far from a benign illness. We need to monitor post-Covid patients so we can pick up organ impairment early on.”

The findings are proof of the criminal response of the ruling elite internationally, who despite being aware as soon as autopsies showed the deadly impact of highly contagious COVID-19—including its significant impact on human organs—did nothing to stop its spread. Instead, in the words of UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s former adviser Dominic Cummings, to “protect the economy” a policy of “herd immunity” should be adopted.

The implications for society globally of this homicidal policy are staggering. The study notes, “With over three million people in the UK having tested positive for covid-19 at the time of writing, and many more who have had the disease but have never received a test, our findings suggest that the long term burden of covid-19 related morbidity on hospitals and broader healthcare systems might be substantial. Also, organ dysfunction in hospital patients represents only part of the problem; other symptomatic manifestations of post-covid syndrome in individuals not requiring admission to hospital have the potential to be debilitating for patients, placing a considerable burden on healthcare resources, particularly in primary care.”

The number of people infected with COVID-19 globally has risen significantly since the study was completed, with over 4.3 million people having contracted the disease in Britain alone resulting in over 150,000 deaths. Internationally nearly 130 million people have been infected with over 2.8 million people dead.

According to an Office of National Statistics survey published Thursday, an estimated 1.1 million people in Britain (from a population of around 66 million) were suffering with Long Covid symptoms in the four weeks from February 6. The ONS found that one in five people had Long Covid symptoms five weeks after an initial infection and one in seven after 12 weeks.

The survey was based on a large sample of 20,000 participants who tested positive for Covid-19 between April 26 last year and March 6 this year. The sample led to an estimation that of those with Long Covid symptoms, 674,000 reported infection in the previous three months. A staggering 70,000 people said they still had Long Covid symptoms over a year since infection. The ONS said, “(61.6%) experienced at least some limitation to their day-to-day activities as a result, and 196,000 (17.9%) reported that their day-to-day activities had been limited a lot.”

A wide age range among the population were suffering with Long Covid. Living in deprivation was an important factor, found the ONS. “Prevalence rates of self-reported long COVID were greatest in people aged 35 to 69 years, females, those living in the most deprived areas, those working in health or social care, and those with a pre-existing, activity-limiting health condition.”

Moreover, the disease has mutated numerous times into more contagious strains. The Kent, UK variant B.1.1.7 was first detected last September and by February 9, the variant had spread to 59 countries and has now been traced in over 100 countries. First detected in the United States at the end of December, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention predicts that it could soon be the dominant variant in that country.

UK variant discovered at University of Pittsburgh and Penn State campuses

Alex Findijs

The University of Pittsburgh ordered students to shelter in place after a large outbreak of COVID-19 cases last week. The number of active infections rose to 76 among staff and students, with 72 infections recorded in the last week alone. The total number of infections at the university now stands at over 1,060 for students and 207 for faculty and staff.

In a statement last week by the COVID-19 Medical Response Office (CMRO), the university noted that the rise in cases is likely tied to the rise in the surrounding community. The five-day moving average rose to 8.6 per day last week, mirroring the broader community trends in Allegheny County. Both the county and the university are reporting an average of 30 cases per 100,000 each day, one of the highest rates of infection in Pennsylvania.

William Pitt Union at the University of Pittsburgh. (Photo: pitt.edu)

Concern over the sudden rise in cases was heightened over the detection of the B.1.1.7 variant of the virus, more commonly referred to as the UK variant.

“With the U.K. variant, B.1.1.7, present on the Pittsburgh campus, we are highly concerned about increased transmission rates and a surge in cases. Forty-two new students testing positive for COVID-19 in three days is worrisome,” said the statement.

The UK variant is up to 50 percent more transmissible and has been linked to higher death rates in the United Kingdom.

In response, the university issued a shelter-in-place order and moved into “Elevated Risk Posture,” which will enforce additional restrictions on campus activities in an attempt to slow the spread of the virus. The shelter in place had originally been planned for April 16 as a precaution ahead of graduation and will remain in effect until further notice. A tweet by the university informed students that they should “only go out for classes, work if needed, safe exercise, takeout food and essentials.”

In a statement on Wednesday, the CMRO said: “This action is being taken to respond to a consistent increase in positive cases among students. With the presence of the U.K. variant, B 1.1.7., on campus and in Allegheny County, the COVID-19 Medical Response Office (CMRO) is concerned that this trend will continue.”

Additionally, the statement noted: “Of significant concern is that the increase in positive cases since the end of last week is now among our resident hall students.”

The spread of COVID-19 through residence halls is particularly disturbing considering the presence of the UK variant on campus. Given the higher transmissibility of this variant, it is possible that large numbers of students have already been infected and may test positive in the coming days.

The university’s reckless insistence on retaining in-person instruction will no doubt continue to exacerbate the problem. With students still moving and gathering around campus under the new guidelines, the virus will still be able to spread between students and staff, and it has the potential to spread to new residence halls.

The experience of nearby Binghamton University offers a sharp warning. After a spike in cases, the university committed to only partial restrictions and insisted on keeping in-person classes in session. The result has been nearly 1,000 cases this semester. Binghamton University has also reported that they ran out of isolation housing for infected students. In the end, students were told to return to their dorm rooms to wait for an isolation room to be prepared, creating conditions for further spread in the dorms.

Another warning of what Pittsburgh may experience in the coming weeks is Pennsylvania State University. Penn State has also detected the UK variant among students and recorded 264 cases last week with a positivity rate of four percent. Cases have been steadily climbing for the past two weeks, and 223 students are currently in quarantine and isolation.

Centre County, Pennsylvania, where Penn State is located, has also seen a considerable rise in case numbers. The daily infections per 100,000 people more than doubled from 18 in the second week of March to over 44 today. Hospitalizations have also doubled from 11 on March 10 to 22 on March 26, highlighting that the rise in cases is not just affecting students.

The variant was detected through testing of wastewater samples, a common practice at universities used to test large groups of students using fewer resources. The sample in which the variant was detected was collected on March 7, a week before student cases doubled. Under these conditions it is likely that the virus may spread to a significant portion of the campus population if left unchecked.

Remarkably, unlike the University of Pittsbugh, Penn State has not responded with any additional restrictions. Instead, university administrators and health officials called on students to continue to social distance and wear masks. Despite issuing 381 sanctions on students for not wearing masks in public or violating restrictions on gatherings, there are no reported enforcement mechanisms for students to get tested.

Penn State’s surveillance testing systems is also notably weak. Only one to two percent of the campus population is selected for surveillance testing each day, in contrast to other schools of similar size and stature, like the University of Illinois or Syracuse University, which have weekly testing regimes for each student.

Matt DiSanto, editor of Onward State, an unofficial student newspaper and blog, wrote: “As Penn State introduces more and more in-person events and experiences, the harder it’ll get to use an ‘off-ramp’ to deescalate student life. … We’ve survived nearly eight months without the college experience of years past already, and I’d happily continue if it meant fewer students unnecessarily contract COVID-19.”

He continued: “If Penn State can’t handle its COVID-19 outbreak, surrounding communities will hurt, too.”

These outbreaks at two of Pennsylvania’s largest universities with the presence of a more contagious variant is an alarming development in the fight against the pandemic. Even with the rate of vaccinations rising each day, it is quite possible that the new variants will cause a fourth spike in cases and deaths before the population can be fully vaccinated. If nothing is done to stop the spread of the virus, universities will once again act as vectors for their transmission to the wider community and accelerate the spread of the variant.

Republican voter suppression bills advance as Democrats promote illusions in Congress

Alex Findijs

The signing of Georgia’s voter suppression law has sparked controversy and outrage across the United States. However, despite facing one of the greatest assaults on voting rights since the dismantling of Jim Crow in the 1960s, the Democratic Party has made little effort to mobilize popular opposition to the law.

A protest by state representative Park Cannon, who was arrested last Thursday by state troopers for knocking on the governor’s door as he was announcing that he had signed the bill, drew a few dozen attendees. A protest in front of Atlanta City Hall on Saturday, organized by The People’s Uprising, drew a crowd of a little over 100 people.

In this Nov. 3, 2020, file photo, a poll worker talks to a voter before they vote on a paper ballot on Election Day in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson, File)

Instead of mobilizing the working class to oppose this law and similar legislation in dozens of states, the Democratic Party is focusing its efforts on court suits and the passage of H.R.1, federal legislation that would override some of the state bills. A few days after the Georgia bill was signed into law, three voter advocacy organizations filed a lawsuit challenging it.

New Georgia Project, founded by Democratic politician Stacy Abrams, Black Voters Matter Fund, and Rise, a student voting group, have filed a joint lawsuit against the law. The lawsuit argues that the bill violates Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits the restriction of voting rights based on race, as well as the First and 14th Amendments, by creating an undue burden on the right to vote.

A second lawsuit was filed on Sunday by the Georgia chapter of the NAACP, the Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda, The League of Women Voters Georgia, GALEO Latino Community Development Fund, Common Cause and the Lower Muskogee Creek Tribe.

While these suits wait to be heard, additional voter suppression bills are progressing through state governments throughout the United States.

Last Tuesday, Iowa enacted a law that imposes a host of restrictions on voting. It reduces the time that polls are open until from 9 p.m. to 8 p.m.—a small but potentially significant change—and also cuts the number of early voting days from 29 to 20. Additionally, the law restricts local election officials from establishing additional early voting sites unless petitioned to do so.

Like many similar laws, Iowa’s bill also targets mail-in voting. Prior to the new law, mail-in ballots needed only to be postmarked by the day before the election. The new regulations require that mail-in ballots arrive before polls close on election day. It makes it a misdemeanor for any person, other than an immediate family member, to handle an absentee ballot, whereas any person designated by the voter could do so under prior legislation. Local election officials may also not mail absentee ballots to voters unless they specifically request it.

An even more restrictive bill was advanced out of committee in the Texas Senate on Friday. If made law, this bill would prohibit drive-thru voting, further restrict early voting days, allow partisan poll watchers to record voters who receive assistance with casting their ballot, and forbid local election officials from encouraging votes to request an absentee ballot, even if they are eligible.

A particularly restrictive part of the bill would require disabled voters who request an absentee ballot to provide proof of their disability from a doctor, in what is essentially a poll tax.

The Florida Senate is also currently reviewing a bill that would include attacks on mail-in voting and voter registration. The bill would reduce the validity of an absentee ballot request from two election cycles to one, requiring voters to reapply every two years. In Miami-Dade County alone this change would affect 400,000 out of the county’s 1.5 million voters. The bill would also ban any person other than an immediate family member from handling an absentee ballot, on the threat of a misdemeanor charge, and would require that all mail-in ballots arrive by 7 p.m. on election day.

All three of these states have full Republican control over the legislative process, but in Michigan the Republican legislature is attempting to circumvent Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer to impose voter restrictions. The Republican plan is to blend the House and Senate versions of a voter suppression bill and launch a petition drive. If the Republican Party gathers 340,000 signatures, Michigan law would allow the Republican legislature to pass the bill into law without the signature of the governor.

Ron Weiser, chair of the Michigan Republican Party—who has been quoted calling the top three Democrats in the state “witches” who need to get ready “for the burning at the stake”—said that if the bill was not passed into law that Republicans “have other plans to make sure that it becomes law before 2022.”

The response of the Democratic Party to these assaults on democratic rights has been to promote their extensive election bill, H.R.1, also known as the For the People Act. Now under review by the Senate, if passed the bill would enact several major changes to US election law.

The 600-page bill would establish automatic voter registration, restore the right to vote for those with past criminal convictions, require states to provide two weeks of early voting and drop boxes for absentee ballots, and introduce reforms to campaign finance law and gerrymandering.

Many of these provisions have been, in general, popular reforms for years, especially changes to campaign finance laws. However, deeper examination shows that the law is designed to appease popular demands without actually meeting many of them.

For campaign finance, the law would enact some changes as to how campaign financing is reported to the public, targeting the “dark money” in American politics flowing through political action committees (PACs).

However, it would not actually impose any substantial restrictions on wealthy donors, whose largest inconvenience from this bill would be having to report, under certain conditions, what political organizations they donate to.

The provisions for gerrymandering, the process of drawing congressional districts with a partisan bias, are also questionable. The bill includes provisions to keep communities together (gerrymandered districts often split cities into multiple districts to separate voters), but the bill only provides that states must “minimize” the division of communities.

The bill would also ostensibly prevent politically motivated redistricting by requiring states to establish independent commissions to oversee the redistricting process for congressional districts (the gerrymandering of state legislative districts, which is even more widespread, is not subject to federal legislation).

Both parties have engaged in gerrymandering for decades, but the Republican Party has been more effective in the recent period, because it has controlled more state legislatures. A major purpose of the Democratic bill is to eke out a few more seats in the House of Representatives in Republican-controlled states like North Carolina, Ohio and Texas.

The wider concerns of the Democrats are best exemplified through the bill’s section on countering foreign interference. Doubling down on the Democratic Party’s anti-Russia campaign, the bill uses the claim of Russian interference in the 2016 election to justify clamping down on free speech online.

H.R.1 would require online platforms with at least 50 million users to create a database of all requests for political advertisements, including a copy of the ad, the ad’s targeted audience and number of views, the rate charged for the ad, and the purchaser of the ad. Such a provision could be used to keep files on third-party, independent and socialist political candidates and organizations, potentially being used to censor such groups from purchasing political advertisements on social media.

The bill would also require political committees to notify the FBI of any connections with foreign political parties. The FBI would have to submit an annual report to Congress on the connections between political committees and foreign contacts. This section could be used to justify federal surveillance of any political organization with foreign contacts, including socialist and antiwar groups.

Regardless of the contents of the bill, it is not currently expected to pass the Senate. Without ending the filibuster the Democratic Party will need 60 votes to pass the bill. West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, a conservative Democrat now regarded as the “swing vote” on such legislation, has publicly expressed preference for bipartisan negotiation.

Last week, Manchin claimed that passing H.R.1 without Republican support would spark further events like the coup on January 6. According to Manchin, existing distrust in the voting process, cultivated by the Republican Party’s lie that the election was stolen from Donald Trump, would only be exacerbated by expanding voting rights.

“We had an insurrection, Jan. 6, because of voting, right?” said Manchin, warning that Congress “should not at all attempt to do anything that will create more distrust [in elections].”

This is a cowardly and false perspective. The January 6 coup was not some misguided protest spontaneously organized over mistrust in mail-in voting. It was actively organized by fascist militias and elements within the Republican Party, fueled by the former President’s fascistic and false rantings about a rigged election. Manchin is attempting to downplay the significance of the fascist insurrection and cover for his Republican colleagues, whose approval he values more than the crumbling democratic institutions of the United States.

Georgia Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock offered more support to passing the bill during his rounds on Sunday morning talk shows, but he too refused to commit to ending the filibuster. Speaking on CNN, he said of Republicans that “the ball is in their court. They could vote the bill up. But if they don’t, we have to pass voting rights no matter what.”

This language is purposely ambiguous. “No matter what” could mean anything from abolishing the filibuster to gutting the bill of major provisions in order to win a handful of Republican votes.

The Democratic Party cannot be entrusted with the defense of democratic rights. Even under threat by Republican bills targeting Democratic voters, the party has no solution to offer other than legal challenges and the promise of a voting rights bill destined to die in the Senate.

Instead of calling out mass protests to oppose the Georgia voter suppression law, the Democrats are channeling social opposition behind their own electoral ambitions.

Democratic Party aligned voting rights organizations are also playing their role in this cynical diffusion of mass anger. Voter advocacy groups have rallied around calls for a boycott of Coca-Cola, in the futile hope that they can pressure the international conglomerate to influence the Georgia government after the bill has already passed. The Democratic Party is only concerned with protecting its electoral competitiveness and ensuring that popular opposition to voter suppression does not emerge outside its political control.

During the civil rights movement it was only the mass upsurge of working class opposition to segregation and racism that forced parts of the Democratic and Republican establishment to concede the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. This period of reform is long past. There has been a sharp turn to the right in the political establishment as the capitalist system moved to retract the concessions granted in the previous years of bitter class struggle.

Automakers halt production at 18 plants in Brazil

Brunna Machado

This week, 10 automakers in Brazil—Volkswagen, Volkswagen Trucks and Buses, Mercedes-Benz, General Motors, Nissan, Toyota, Renault, Volvo, Scania and Honda—suspended totally or partially their production, sending more than 50,000 workers home for periods ranging between five and 15 days, depending on the plant.

The shutdown was an initiative of the companies themselves and, in the midst of the uncontrolled pandemic in the country, was presented as an effort to fight COVID-19. Brazil has so far registered more than 320,000 COVID-19 deaths, with a record of 3,869 deaths on Wednesday. March ended as the deadliest month of the entire pandemic.

Brazilian Ford workers outside the plant in Taubate, Brazil, Tuesday, Jan. 12, 2021, the day after Ford Motor Co. announced it will close three plants in Brazil and stop producing automobiles in the South American country where it has been operating since 1919. (AP Photo/Andre Penner)

The first to announce its closure, Volkswagen, which employs about 15,000 workers in the country, said it would suspend production at its four plants for 12 days “in order to preserve the health of its employees and their families.” The management of Mercedes-Benz, Scania, Nissan, Renault and Honda have made similar announcements.

But there are other reasons pushing billion-dollar companies like these to halt their production, and the first one on their list is certainly not the “health of their employees.”

First of all, it is important to underscore that such measures have been taken exclusively in the auto industry, which is undergoing a deep restructuring of production, with substantial workforce reductions in every country, and which is currently facing parts shortages in different parts of the globe.

A March 18 article in Folha de São Paulo reported that Honda’s plant in Sumaré, in the state of São Paulo, which employs around a thousand workers, was the first automaker to stop its production for lack of electronic circuits. Production had already been halted for a week in February and for another 10 days in March, and this week it has stopped again.

Other companies, such as Toyota, Volkswagen, Renault, Volvo and Mercedes-Benz, had already halted or reduced production. According to the same report, Volkswagen Trucks and Buses (VWCO) had been keeping unfinished vehicles in the lot waiting for parts, and when the parts arrived, the employees had to work overtime to finish the job. Now, VWCO is shutting down the plant completely from March 29 to April 4, keeping its 3,500 workers at home.

Volvo, which followed its competitors in adopting the pretense of fighting the pandemic, was one of the only ones to admit that the measure was also due to the instability in the parts supply chain. Its plant in Curitiba, in the state of Paraná, was not totally paralyzed, but production was reduced during the last eight days, with about 2,000 fewer workers.

It is clear that the companies have made a calculation. Foreseeing the need for new stoppages due to the instability in the production chain as well as cuts imposed by their own restructuring plans, many, if not all of them, took advantage of the pandemic conditions to justify their shutdowns as a benevolent act in the interests of their workers. It was, at the same time, a way to prevent an action by the working class in response to the increasing infections in the factories.

In the industrial complex of ABC, in São Paulo, which currently has five plants shut down (Mercedes, Volks, Scania, Toyota and GM—with a total of about 30,000 workers at home), the Metalworkers Union (SMABC) presented the production halt as an achievement of their negotiations with the companies.

A few weeks ago, as the pandemic worsened in the country and especially in São Paulo, the union was criticized by workers witnessing an increase in deaths among their colleagues.

On the Facebook page of the Mercedes CSE (Company’s Union Committee), which is an arm of the SMABC, a worker commented on the news of a colleague’s death:

“That’s very sad. … It is also sad that many people are being infected inside the company and they still claim that it all comes from the outside. Is it a coincidence that the same department [of the plant] has more than 6 people infected, all coming from the outside? How many more will have to die for someone to take an attitude? Many people go to work afraid of being infected and infecting someone back at home who may be in higher risk. But the company just wants to know about production, because inside there we are just another number that died and they will put a new one in our place. But you can’t replace a family member.”

Other workers warned about the lack of basic preventive measures. “Hand sanitizer is missing in many dispensers; the one in my leisure area, for example, only saw alcohol at the moment it was installed,” commented one of them. “Go at 11 o’clock in the cafeteria and you’ll see the crowding. An invitation for contagion,” said another.

“It’s past time for the union to organize a plant shutdown. Last year when the situation was not at this level, there were collective [vacations] and bimonthly employee alternation. … Now that we are in a much worse scenario, we are all working normally!” said another worker.

These comments come from workers at the Mercedes plant in São Bernardo do Campo, which has already recorded six deaths of employees, four of them in March alone. The plant has the second highest number of infections in the region, according to Diário do Grande ABC. With a total workforce of 8,500, Mercedes-Benz had 1,447 (17 percent) infected workers.

First on the list is Volkswagen, with 1,560 infections, or 18.3 percent of the approximately 8,500 employees. It had registered five deaths up to March 21. At Scania, 761, or 19 percent of the approximately 4,000 employees were infected, and one died. At Toyota, 137 were infected, or 9.1 percent of the 1,500 employees.

Trying to minimize the unsafe conditions at the assembly plants, which have an infection rate three times higher than the national average, SMABC president Wagner Santana told Diário do Grande ABC that this difference is due to the fact that the auto companies have tested 100 percent of their workers, and that if there was mass testing in the country, the national average would be equal or higher than that of the plants. This argument was angrily refuted by a GM worker on the comments section: “A hundred percent were tested? I work at an assembly plant and that didn’t occur.”

The union official’s effort to protect the company went even further. Echoing the claims of capitalist managers, he implied that workers get infected at home or in the streets, not in their workplaces.

“No matter how much [the auto plants] present the feeling of being very safe, since they really do everything possible to make the work environment safer, even more so if we compare it to someone who works in a store ... and has to take a crowded bus to get there, the worker is not safe. Moreover because he doesn’t live in the assembly plant. He circulates. He goes home to his family, to the supermarket,” Santana argued.

The loyalty of the unions to the automakers, explicitly expressed by Santana, is fundamental to guaranteeing that the response to the pandemic remains subordinated to the interests of the transnational capitalist groups controlling these companies. The terms of the shutdown of the production underscores this: the companies are considering the days off as “time off,” to be compensated later by the workers.

Some of these companies are also counting on the calendar of municipal holidays. In an attempt to counter the catastrophic spread of the pandemic, several cities have rescheduled holidays in order to create a period of 10 consecutive days off, starting this week. Others companies have opted to give collective vacations to their employees and, in these cases, the workers will not have to make up work days, but they have lost their right to choose their vacation period.

Moreover, the established period for these shutdowns is totally insufficient to really contribute to the fight against the pandemic. In most of the factories, work will resume on April 6. With the current pace of the pandemic in Brazil, with daily averages of over 75,000 new infections and more than 3,000 deaths, there is no possibility that the situation will be under control in less than a week; in fact the expectations are that it will be worse. In other words, workers will return to be infected in the unsafe environments of the factories, and deaths will increase again.

This path of death must be rejected by autoworkers throughout the industry with a strike that prevents their return to work, demanding full payment of their salaries while isolation is necessary. All the costs must be paid out of the profits accumulated by the automakers, and not with layoffs or overtime work.

The antiscientific campaign to promote “living with the virus”

Angelo Perera, Norisa Diaz & Benjamin Mateus

The ancient Greek physician Hippocrates used the terms “endemic” and “epidemic” to distinguish between diseases that were always present in a population and diseases that only occurred during certain parts of a year or at yearly or even greater intervals.

In epidemiological terms, endemic means the constant presence and prevalence of a disease within a population in a certain geographic area. It refers to a state when a disease reaches a level that most of the population has developed immunity. They can develop secondary infections though these are often mild. Children usually become the primary cases because they are naïve (not previously exposed) to the virus.

A Tropical Medicine University virology lab researcher works to develop a test that will detect the P.1 variant of the new coronavirus, in Sao Paulo, Brazil, Thursday, March 4, 2021. (AP Photo/Andre Penner)

Certain influenzas and viruses that cause the common cold are thought to be endemic. Some endemic viruses have been eradicated by vaccines and public health measures. Two historical examples are smallpox and rinderpest.

However, the recent use of the term endemicity by the ruling class and bourgeois scientists has little to do with its epidemiological understanding and everything to do with a fatalistic response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In much the same way that repeated lockdowns and reopenings have inured some people to accept the permanence of the virus, the talk of the virus becoming endemic is employed against any further mitigation efforts which impinge on profit accumulation.

Regardless of such defeatist conceptions, the pandemic remains in its early and acute phase, with significant potential to infect a vast portion of the globe’s population that has not yet been exposed to the coronavirus. A cohesive international strategy employing the public health tools that are within our grasp could bring the contagion under control before it becomes endemic, at the cost of millions of lives.

These nihilistic conceptions being promoted by the bourgeois press and some scientists to justify dispensing with all mitigation efforts and allowing the pandemic free rein are dangerous to the working class. They would use the deployment of COVID-19 vaccines to anaesthetize the public against the impending catastrophe, although this is only possible in a handful of wealthy countries where vaccine supplies are ample.

At the World Health Organization’s March 22 COVID-19 press briefing, Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned, “The inequitable distribution of vaccines is not just a moral outrage, it’s also economically and epidemiologically self-defeating. Some countries are racing to vaccinate their entire populations while other countries have nothing. This may buy short-term security, but it is a false sense of security.”

Executive Director of WHO’s Health Emergencies Programme Dr. Mike Ryan reaffirmed the director-general’s warnings, stating, “The formula for this may be boring, it may not be attractive; there are no silver bullets, but we have got to get back to strong, comprehensive, strategic approaches to the control of COVID that include vaccination as one of those strategies. I’m afraid we’re all trying to grasp at straws. We’re trying to find the golden solutions and we just get enough vaccine, and we push enough vaccine into people and that’s going to take care of it. I’m sorry: it’s not! There aren’t enough vaccines in the world, and they’re distributed terribly iniquitously. In fact, we have missed a huge opportunity to bring vaccines on board as a comprehensive measure. It’s not being implemented in a systematic way. It’s a failed opportunity and, as the D-G says, is not only a catastrophic moral failure, but it’s an epidemiologic failure and it’s a failure in public health practice.”

It is possible to eradicate the virus

The lack of any significant measures to eradicate the virus, combined with the economic devastation for much of the working class, encourages a pessimistic outlook to which even principled scientists are not immune. As the virus ravages the world population, with its seven-day infection rates increasing by 400 percent from February 28 through March 5, the ruling class utilizes the fatigue felt by the population through repeated shutdowns and reopenings to establish a rationale for living with the virus. This has been willful.

Still, the response of some cities and nations in the course of the pandemic has proven that the SARS-CoV-2 can be eradicated. When the contagion first struck Italy in February of 2020, causing a massive health care crisis and inundating their health systems, the town of Vo, a commune in the Province of Padua in the Italian Veneto region, an hour west of Venice, was placed in a strict 14-day lockdown, with all 3,270 people being tested for the virus multiple times. Positive cases were quarantined and treated. In a matter of a few weeks the virus was eradicated from the town.

Testing, contact tracing and quarantining—precisely the methods used in Vo—were employed in all nations that have managed to rein in the virus. As of March 22, 2021, Taiwan, a country of 24 million people, has had 1,006 reported infections and 10 deaths. In Singapore, home to five million people, new cases have remained in the single or low double digits since October 2020.

The science of public health and the tools for eradicating the virus have always been available, but the decision to allow the virus to spread unchecked with nothing more than vaccines made available to a tiny percentage of the developed world is part of a conscious decision which, without the revolutionary intervention by the international working class, can lead to the virus becoming endemic.

However, this is not merely rhetorical. There is a sea of death between the two terms, eradication and endemicity. Reaching endemicity means that the majority of the world’s population will contract the virus, which at its present lethality means tens of millions more lives lost. The arithmetic is inexorable: If billions contract COVID-19, with a death rate approximating two percent, then 20 million people will die for every billion people infected.

This does not even begin to take into consideration the numerous and more deadly variants. The present horrors in Brazil are demonstrating that prior infections with previous strains of SARS-COV-2 do not necessarily protect the population from the new and more virulent variants.

“Inevitable” and “endemic”

The drive to label the pandemic as inevitable has been a bipartisan effort. The media is flooded with articles to misguide readers that public health and science itself are helpless to prevent the disease. A few examples include a February 17 piece in USA Today, which utilized model data from Emory University and Penn State University scientists to suggest that “if the novel coronavirus continues to circulate in the general population and most people are exposed to it from childhood, it could be added to the list of common colds.”

The researchers who completed the Emory/Penn State study lament: “One year after its emergence, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has become so widespread that there is little hope of elimination.”

On February 16, Nature printed a survey it conducted, where 89 percent of scientists polled expressed their concerns that COVID-19 is likely to be endemic in pockets of the global population. Disregarding the persistent efforts of Dr. Michael Osterholm to inform the Biden administration on a correct policy to eradicate COVID-19, the magazine highlighted one of Osterholm’s quotes: “Eradicating this virus right now from the world is a lot like trying to plan the construction of a stepping-stone pathway to the Moon. It’s unrealistic.”

It should be of no surprise to anyone that a significant section of scientists has become resigned to accepting COVID-19 as an ineradicable disease. It points to nothing more than their disillusion with the inaction of world governments, as schools and businesses throughout the world have essentially opened their doors.

Fundamentally, it expresses the inevitability of the virus reaching a state of endemicity under capitalism and rules out the possibility of a working class movement and socialist revolution that could halt the virus in a matter of weeks with coordinated global action, as part of a larger struggle in the fight for socialism, where the lives and interests of the working masses around the globe are prioritized.

What is invariably left out of these press releases is the criminal policy of the ruling class across the globe, that has ignored the warnings of epidemiologists and scientists as it interfered with their priority for profit accumulation.

With remarkable foresight, in late spring of last year, as countries were prematurely reopening commerce, Dr. Mike Ryan lambasted the world governments for lifting restrictions under conditions of persistent and rampant transmission of the virus, without systems in place to even detect it, let alone trace and quarantine the infected, warning this would produce “a vicious cycle of public health disaster followed by economic disaster followed by public health disaster.”

The alternative of Zero COVID

There is, however, a growing chorus of scientists who are putting forward a call to eradicate the coronavirus. The Zero COVID policy, first articulated by Independent SAGE, a group that rivals the British government’s official Scientific Advisory Group on Emergencies (SAGE), argues for the proven public health measures that can halt the spread of COVID-19. They call for lockdowns, with compensation for those economically affected, improved testing and contact tracing, and argue that the pandemic can be suppressed with public health measures.

A leading advocate is Dr. Deepti Gurdasani, an epidemiologist who is a senior lecturer at Queen Mary University of London. She has spoken out scathingly on the UK plans to come out of lockdown so quickly. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, after implementing the strictest lockdown measures on January 4 to stem the disastrous tide of infections and deaths during the winter surge, was in no time demanding again for school reopenings by early March. Dr. Gurdasani called it a “shockingly negligent strategy” and “very clearly a policy of tolerable deaths,” while speaking to Channel 5 News on February 22.

Gurdasani cited predictions forecasted by the Imperial College that even under the best conditions of three to four million doses of the vaccine rolled out a week, opening schools on March 4 would increase the Effective Reproduction Rate (Rt) to above 1, resulting in 30,000 to 60,000 more deaths. She warned of the dangers of the virus mutating to threaten vaccine effectiveness, under a high rate of transmission, as has already happened with the South African variant.

Aoife McLysaght, of the Molecular Evolution Lab in Dublin, Ireland, spoke on a pinned Tweet, of the need to fight for Zero COVID, which would “allow us to go about our lives in a normal way.” Commenting on the danger of relying solely on vaccines as new variants emerge, McLysaght warned of “a whole new pandemic arriving at our shores.”

The science put forward is an indictment of world governments’ inaction, including the Johnson administration in Britain, which allowed the unchecked spread of the emergence in southeast England of a more virulent form of the virus, lineage B.1.1.7 which spreads 30-80 percent faster than the wild strain. In Brazil, the policies of the fascistic President Jair Bolsonaro have allowed the dominance of the P.1 strain of the coronavirus, which is up to 2.5 times more transmissible and has a potential to reinfect up to 63 percent. The health care systems in Brazil are buckling under the gravity of so much severe disease and death. Already, spillovers into neighboring countries like Peru, Chile and Uruguay are causing new surges in these regions.

While the growing group of principled scientists who call for the Zero COVID strategy have laid out the salient policies and make a case for mitigation efforts, what is lacking entirely is a socialist perspective. Fundamentally, Zero COVID accepts the current mode of production. It argues for a more humane capitalism, for improved public health measures under the current framework of a system which itself has produced the pandemic. The profit motive has reigned supreme and the indifference to human lives is the logical outcome of a class policy in the interests of the world’s elite. The Zero COVID policy is correct on a scientific basis but lacks a political strategy to achieve these necessary aims. Inevitably, these scientists have become auxiliary consultants to capitalist agencies.

The only social force that is capable of preventing SARS-CoV-2 from becoming endemic is the international working class, which must organize itself and build its leadership in order to carry out a fight for socialism and against the homicidal policies carried out by the ruling elites around the globe. Armed with a socialist perspective and program, the global working class can not only eradicate SARS-CoV-2 but many more viruses and horrors which have been allowed by the ruling class to persist—from measles to hepatitis, to hunger and homelessness.