Value of Award: MEXT scholarship is one of the few opportunities covering full expense hence very competitive in nature. Being eligible and having a high academic performance (GPA 2.3 or above out of 3.0) is vital.
Enrollment types, screening procedure and deadlines for submission differs by the country, check the application detail on at the website of the Japanese Embassy/consulate of your home country.
About the Award: The Teach for Nigeria Fellowship program is a 2 year full-time paid commitment in which we place the most outstanding graduates and professionals to teach in Nigeria’s underserved schools in low- income communities. The Teach For Nigeria fellowship is a transformational leadership program that equips Fellows with transferable leadership skills to effect change beyond the classrooms in the communities we serve.
Teach For Nigeria ensures that all Fellows have the knowledge and skills necessary to lead their students towards achievement. The Teach For Nigeria Fellowship begins with a six-week residential training program. Here, Fellows are exposed to curriculum, lesson planning, and classroom facilitation and student assessments among other modules, sessions, and keys to successful teaching.
After the Fellowship, alumni of Teach For Nigeria build on their classroom teaching experience to drive long-term systemic changes in the educational sector in Nigeria as they progress into leadership roles in their varied professions. The Teach For Nigeria model is based on the proven success of 40 country organizations including Teach For America, Teach First UK, Teach For Ghana, Teach For Bangladesh, Teach For Nepal and Teach For India, who are all part of the Teach For All network.
Type: Fellowship (Career)
Eligibility:
Teach for Nigeria is open to Nigerians who after the program can be a contributing change to education in Nigeria.
Candidate must be a Nigerian citizen, hold a minimum of a Bachelor’s degree and be younger than 35.
The Fellowship Selection Process: The Teach For Nigeria Fellowship is a highly selective program. We attract applications from leaders from different workplaces and graduates from the best universities across the world. Through the 3-staged process, we select the candidates with the highest potential to make a difference.
Number of Awardees: Not specified
Value of Fellowship: As a Teach For Nigeria Fellow, you are a part of movement of young leaders working to eliminate educational inequity. In addition, these are some of the benefits of being a Fellow:
Opportunity to be part of a movement that is changing lives and that will change society
Extensive leadership development training
Intensive teacher training leading to a Postgraduate Diploma in Education
Real responsibility from day one
Job and internship opportunities during and post Fellowship
Opportunity to be a part of a global network of change agents from across 42 countries
Access to a 9 month Mentoring Programme, offering a unique opportunity to achieve professional and personal development
Access to professional development and network of supporters
Ongoing leadership development, coaching, business training and skills workshops
Opportunity to design and implement a social change project
A stipend for two years including during the school holidays.
About 9-10 weeks of holiday
Duration of Fellowship: 2 years
How to Apply: The Application process is in three stages.
Stage 1: The Application form
Your application will help us understand your experiences, your motivation to join the Teach For Nigeria fellowship and why you would be a strong fit for the Fellowship.
Stage 2; Online Test
If we find you a good fit for the fellowship through your application, you will be invited to take an online test.
Stage 3;Assessment Center
If successful in your Online Test, we will invite you to the Assessment Centre, which is the final stage of our selection process. Here, you will teach a 5-minute lesson, take part in a group activity, and participate in a one-on-interview with our assessors.
Please note that applicants will be informed of the status of their application before the end of the recruitment cycle for the 2021 fellowship.
The hearts of political leaders in the United States and its imperialist allies are bleeding for imprisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. Jailed on February 2 this year, after returning from Germany where he received treatment for an alleged poisoning by the Russian state, Navalny has since gone on hunger strike.
The outrage over Navalny’s imprisonment and resulting health crisis is an object lesson in imperialist cynicism and intrigue. Those most passionately invoking his democratic rights are the architects of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s continuing and vastly more severe persecution.
There is nothing remotely comparable between the two men, and the differences are not in Navalny’s favour.
Assange is a heroic journalist who played a leading role in the exposure of some of the worst imperialist crimes of the 21st century, from covered-up details of the brutal occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan to US torture camps and extraordinary renditions.
Navalny is a right-wing, nationalist politician, who has referred to migrants from the Caucasus as “cockroaches” that should be killed. He represents a wing of the Russian oligarchy opposed to President Vladimir Putin and in favour of opening Russia up more widely to Western imperialism.
It is this difference which underpins their night and day treatment.
The WikiLeaks founder’s work was a spur to global antiwar sentiment and contributed to popular uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. He is being made an example of as retribution for the damage he inflicted to imperialist interests. The same interests mandate support for Navalny, who offers himself up as a tool for realising their designs on Russia.
The contrasting treatment tears apart claims by the likes of US President Joe Biden and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson to be supporting Navalny on human rights grounds while pursuing Assange on supposedly legal ones.
Assange’s persecution began more than a decade ago when Sweden launched a politically manufactured sexual assault investigation to secure his extradition. This would have been a staging post to the United States. Assange was forced, in 2012, to claim political asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he was kept arbitrarily detained by British police for the best part of seven years.
Following his illegal seizure and arrest in April 2019, he has spent the past two years in Belmarsh maximum security prison—on the charge of skipping bail for 25 weeks—on remand while the US pursued an extradition request for over a year, and since then for close to four months while the US appeals a ruling against extradition on health grounds.
His politically motivated case is a litany of abuses of legal and democratic rights, carried out alongside a slander campaign involving the world’s media and pseudo-left groups, designed to blacken his name and psychologically destroy the WikiLeaks founder.
Were Assange to be sent to the US, he faces a sentence of 175 years on charges under the Espionage Act.
Every government in the world lined up behind this imperialist conspiracy to have Assange, denounced as a “high-tech terrorist” by Biden, “face justice,” in the words of Johnson. German Chancellor Angela Merkel summed up the stance of the European powers with the comment in 2019 that Assange’s case “is a matter which doesn’t concern Germany and is in the hands of British justice.” Australia, Assange’s home country, washed their hands of him.
In contrast, when Navalny was arrested this year, also for violating parole, in connection with a 2014 embezzlement case, and sentenced to two years and eight months’ imprisonment, this gang of criminals miraculously discovered their democratic sensibilities.
Johnson praised the “brave” Navalny and said the Russian ruling “fails to meet the most basic standards of justice.” US national security adviser Jake Sullivan condemned the “violation of human rights.” Merkel declared the Navalny verdict “far from any rule of law standards.” French President Emmanuel Macron stated, “respect for human rights such as democratic freedom are not negotiable.”
Especially severe condemnations were made of the “outrageous attack on his [Navalny’s] life,” referring to his alleged poisoning by the Russian state. Yet nothing was said when an investigation into Spanish security firm UC Global, which provided surveillance for the Ecuadorian embassy, revealed a CIA plot to either kidnap or poison Assange.
As Navalny’s health has deteriorated due to his hunger strike, these officials have reiterated calls for his freedom, citing the danger to his life. Biden called Navalny’s treatment “totally unfair and totally inappropriate,” while his administration warned of “consequences” if he were to die. Josep Borrell, the European Union’s High Representative for foreign affairs demanded, “Russian authorities must grant him immediate access to medical professionals he trusts.” The UK’s Foreign Office said the same in its statement: “Mr Navalny must be given immediate access to independent medical care.”
This is precisely the demand made by campaign group Doctors for Assange and United Nations special rapporteur on torture Nils Melzer, but which was disparaged by the British government. Assange has been repeatedly denied bail despite the serious risk posed to his life by COVID-19 and by his own mental health.
UK Judge Vanessa Baraitser ruled against his extradition to the United States solely on the grounds that to do so would endanger his life and might lead to his suicide. The response of the Biden administration was to insist, as Trump had previously, “We continue to seek his extradition.”
The criminal agenda of the ruling class is echoed by their paid chorus in the media, who have been working overtime to fabricate progressive credentials for Navalny while leaving Assange to rot.
Since January this year, the Guardian, Britain’s leading nominally liberal paper, has published 78 articles and videos on Navalny. It published 16 on Assange, with just one since February. It only belatedly adopted a for-the-record opposition to Assange’s extradition in a November 2019 editorial, after waging a decade-long smear campaign against him. It wrote another in December 2020 and then again in January this year. It has written three on Navalny this year alone.
Amnesty International refused to acknowledge Assange as a prisoner of conscience for years but was so quick to apply the label to Navalny that they were forced into an embarrassing retreat in acknowledgment of his record of “hate speech” a few months later. US Democratic Party Senator Bernie Sanders has maintained near total silence on Assange, issuing a single tweet opposing his indictment in May 2019 that succeeded in not mentioning the WikiLeaks founder by name. He tweeted this Monday: “Make no mistake about what is happening here: activist Aleksei Navalny is being murdered in front of the world by Vladimir Putin for the crime of exposing Putin’s vast corruption. Navalny’s doctors must be allowed to see him immediately.”
Phrases like “human rights” and “democratic freedom” turn to ash in the mouths of Sanders, Biden, Johnson and their ilk. Their support for the politically filthy Navalny is a calculated provocation against the Russian state. They hope to use his fate as a pretext for a further escalation of military aggression against Moscow. Assange has had his democratic rights eviscerated with the consent of all the major powers to suppress opposition to this imperialist war drive.
The only real constituency for democratic rights in the world today is the international working class, which can only defend those rights through a combined struggle against the imperialist governments, their stooge Navalny and the Russian oligarchy represented by Putin. The demand for the immediate release and unconditional freedom of Julian Assange must be placed at the centre of that struggle.
Chadian President Marshal Idriss Déby Itno died yesterday from wounds sustained Monday while fighting the rebel Force for Change and Concord in Chad (FACT) militia in northern Chad. His son Mahamat Idriss Déby, aged 37, seized power at the head of a military commission staffed with 15 hand-picked generals.
Military spokesman General Azem Bermandoa Agouna issued a communiqué yesterday, declaring: “The president of the republic, the head of state and supreme commander of the armies, Idriss Déby Itno, just breathed his last breath while defending our territorial integrity on the battlefield. It is with deep sadness that we are announcing to the Chadian people the passing on this Tuesday, April 20, 2021 of the marshal of Chad.”
Chadian President Idriss Deby Itno, center, attends his final campaign rally for the recent elections in N'Djamena, Chad. Friday, April 9, 2021 (AP Photo)
It added that Déby, “like each time our republican institutions are gravely threatened, led operations in heroic struggles against the terrorist hordes come from Libya. Wounded in the struggle, he passed away once returned to N’Djamena,” the country’s capital.
Déby, who ruled Chad with an iron fist for 30 years after seizing power in a French-backed coup in 1990, was a longstanding tool of French imperialism. Hosting French and US troops at strategic bases at N’Djamena in the heart of the Sahel, Chad’s geopolitical importance surged after the bloody 2011 NATO war in Libya, which toppled Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, in alliance with Islamist militias. Chad’s army has provided troops for French military operations in Nigeria and across the Sahel, including in Niger and Burkina Faso, amid the French war in Mali.
Déby’s death comes amid a deepening crisis of French imperialist strategy in the Sahel, shortly after French President Emmanuel Macron rejected mounting calls in February for a withdrawal of French troops from Mali and the region.
The Elysée presidential palace in Paris issued a statement endorsing the illegal seizure of power by Déby’s son and praising Déby as a “courageous friend” of France, who “worked ceaselessly for the security of his country and the stability of the region for three decades.” It stressed “the importance that the transition take place in peaceful conditions, in a spirit of dialog with all political actors and civil society, allowing for a rapid return to inclusive governance based on civilian institutions.”
This effectively endorsed the moves of Mahamat Déby and the army chiefs, who extra-legally dissolved the National Assembly and announced an 18-month military dictatorship.
With the FACT militia reportedly still moving south from the Libyan border on N’Djamena, panic is mounting in the capital, and the new junta decreed a 6:00 p.m. to 5:00 a.m. curfew. There are some reports that civilians may have begun fleeing from N’Djamena across the border into neighbouring Cameroon.
There is mounting speculation that French forces, already stretched thin by operations in Mali and across the Sahel, may intervene against the FACT. France has 5,100 troops in Chad, including 1,000 troops, hunter-killer drones, and a squadron of Mirage jets at its main military base in N’Djamena, the headquarters for Operation Barkhane, France’s war in Mali and the Sahel. In 2008 and again in 2019, French warplanes bombed and repulsed rebel militias marching south on N’Djamena from the border region with Libya.
Citing French official sources, Reuters reported: “France and its allies will be looking to see how the political handover happens in the coming days. … If the [FACT] advance were to gather steam now, that could force Paris’ hands although it would seek to avoid intervening directly given the general uncertainty and impact it could have on wider Sahel operations.”
Washington and London have already ordered their non-essential diplomatic personnel to evacuate Chad, fearing violence if and when FACT troops reach the capital. “Due to their growing proximity to N’Djamena and the possibility of violence in the city, non-essential US government employees have been ordered to leave Chad by commercial airline,” the US State Department declared in a statement.
While it is strategically critical and has significant petroleum resources, Chad remains one of the world’s poorest countries. A former French colony that was granted formal independence in 1960, it ranks 187th out of 189 countries in the 2019 Human Development Index. Fully 66.2 percent of its population lived in severe poverty in 2019—before the economic and social dislocation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Though Chad only obtained 12.5 percent of the revenue from the Chad-Cameroon oil pipeline, revenues from the pipeline provided a basis for limited attempts by Déby to raise public sector workers’ salaries. However, this ended with the collapse of oil prices in 2017.
Since then, protests and social discontent have mounted against Déby, in line with growing strikes and anti-imperialist protests across the region. These include prominently the hirak against the Algerian military regime in 2019, as well as strikes by public sector workers and protests demanding the withdrawal of French troops in Mali.
Just before Déby died, Chad had held a presidential election on April 11 that ended officially in Déby’s re-election with 79.3 percent of the vote after security forces repeatedly attacked opposition candidates’ rallies. The FACT launched its operations against Déby in the context of these elections.
The FACT is itself a former tool of French imperialism, though one that has somewhat fallen out with its patron amid reports of rising tensions between Paris and Moscow.
It is a Chadian rebel militia based in southern Libya that until recently worked closely with General Khalifa Haftar, a French- and Russian-backed warlord and former CIA asset that has played a leading role in the civil war triggered in Libya by the 2011 NATO war. Until recently, Haftar and Déby were reported to have maintained cordial relations. Recruiting primarily among the Gorane (or Tubu) ethnicity, it was reportedly based at Sebha, in Libya’s Fezzan region, and tied to Russia’s Wagner private security firm.
In 2017, however, Paris turned on FACT leader Mahamat Mahdi Ali and froze his funds in French banks, on unspecified charges of “committing, or attempting to commit, acts of terrorism.”
In the run-up to the recent Chadian elections, the FACT moved south towards the Chadian border, however, attacking a border post while the elections were underway. Wolfram Lacher, from the German Institute for International Affairs and Security think tank, said: “By moving towards the border region with Chad, the FACT left the zone controlled by Haftar. It is not entirely certain whether it needed a green light from Haftar in order to attack Chad.”
The Macron government expressed its anger in the press, unabashedly expressing its neo-colonial view that Chad is a French military base. “The FACT potentially was able to avail itself of money and weapons because it had worked for Haftar together with Wagner,” an official French source told Le Monde, adding, “The fact that these people have now ended up in Chad in our zone of strategic influence is extremely problematic.”
The FACT clearly retains ties to the French political and media establishment, however, and yesterday Mahamat Mahdi Ali gave a brief interview to Radio France Internationale (RFI). He said that “Idriss Déby thought he was invincible” and appealed to “civil society” in N’Djamena to protest against the new regime.
Working hand in hand with the trade unions, transnational corporations operating in Spain are cutting tens of thousands of jobs. The list of companies involved covers almost all sectors of the economy.
Companies are using redundancy schemes, known by their acronym ERE in Spanish. This enables companies to carry out collective dismissals based on so-called “objective” reasons, such as economic downturns, technical innovations, organizational changes and productivity increases. The main advantage is that it allows companies to slash severance pay, which they must give to workers.
The trade unions play a despicable role in EREs. Many of the firms that obtained redundancy grants would not have gotten them without the intervention of the unions involved in negotiating the sackings. Part of the redundancy money goes straight into union coffers as commissions per worker made redundant, in most cases without the worker’s knowledge.
Rocio Sanchez works in the kitchen at La Francachela restaurant in Madrid, Spain, Friday, March 26, 2021. (AP Photo/Manu Fernandez)
Trade unions can gain up to 10 percent for each worker dismissed. In addition, workers under EREs pay a fixed amount for the trade union’s legal advisory services, ranging from €100 to €400. This helps to explain the popularity of EREs.
In the past six years, over 250,000 workers have lost their jobs under these schemes. Now, summing the ERE announcements in the past several weeks, over 21,000 workers are expected to be laid off in the coming months while all kinds of work centers will be closed, including factories, offices, shops and large shopping centers.
Banking is one of the main sectors. Since the 2008 global crisis, successive PSOE, Popular Party (PP) and PSOE-Podemos governments have promoted the concentration of this sector. In a little over a decade, five large banks increased their market share from 42.4 percent in 2008 to 67.4 percent last year. This was accompanied by a huge assault on workers: 100,000 jobs were destroyed, and 22,060 branches were closed. This assault continues.
With the green light from PSOE and Podemos, Bankia and CaixaBank are to merge, creating Spain’s largest bank. The new merger aims to make between 7,000 and 10,000 redundancies. Unicaja and Liberbank plan redundancies affecting 2,500 workers. BBVA has also leaked plans for 3,000 layoffs.
The banks can count on the inestimable support of the trade unions. Banco Santander recently laid off 3,572 workers and closed 1,033 offices. The redundancy agreement was described as a victory by the five signatory trade unions, while the compensation packages were described as “sufficient and worthy.” Sabadell bank also recently dismissed 1,800 workers, which the Stalinist Workers Commissions (CCOO) union called a “satisfactory agreement.”
In retail, job destruction is also accelerating. The trade unions agreed to the dismissal of 3,292 workers at El Corte Inglés, one of Europe’s largest retailers. FETICO union General Secretary Antonio Pérez argued that the redundancy scheme was valid because it was “supported by a technical report prepared by the consulting firm Deloitte” and “El Corte Inglés clearly has surplus staff.” FETICO is now calling on its members to sign up for the scheme voluntarily.
German perfume chain Douglas has agreed to 492 layoffs and the closure of 82 stores. A CCOO union bureaucrat described it as “bad news” but was quick to point out that the scheme “has managed to reduce the number of people affected and substantially improves the conditions of those who end up dissociating themselves from the company.” “Dissociating” means being sacked.
For its part, Swedish fashion multinational H&M plans to lay off 1,100 workers and close 30 stores, as part of a global restructuring plan. CCOO, the main union at the company, described the measure as “unjustified and disproportionate,” its usual comment before entering into negotiations and then claiming job losses as victories. The unions have made it clear that they have no intention of mobilising workers against the redundancy scheme.
In the food and beverage sector, Coca Cola aims to cut 360 jobs. Food products corporation Danone will soon negotiate the dismissal of 160 workers between Spain and Portugal, in a global layoff campaign targeting another 1,850 workers. Dairy company Leche Pascual agreed to 137 redundancies earlier this year. The company thanked the unions, welcoming “the rigor and responsibility that characterised the negotiating process from the beginning, always seeking the least possible social impact.”
In the manufacturing industry, which has already been ravaged since the 1980s due to the impact of globalization and requirements to enter the European Union, which included mass privatisations implemented by the PSOE, more jobs are expected to be lost.
In the Galicia region, on top of Alcoa’s aluminium plant closure, the Endesa-owned As Pontes thermal power plant and a Siemens-owned manufacturer of wind blades are to close. Multinational electrical equipment manufacturer Eaton has announced that it is closing its plant in the Basque country. Petronor will lay off 129 workers at its Muskiz refinery in another ERE, and Tubacex, a group specializing in the manufacture of steel tubes, is targeting another 129 workers.
In Valencia, automaker Ford is negotiating an ERE with the trade unions for 630 employees, within the 10,000 job cuts it plans across Europe, after having already laid off 350 workers in its Valencia plant less than a year ago. Electricity company Naturgy has just proposed another 1,000 layoffs to the trade unions, within an international restructuring plan that led it to lay off already 6,500 workers worldwide. The list of layoffs continues with automotive company U-Shin (76), Nissans ubcontractor ISS (110) and Italco textile (245).
These job cuts are not inevitable. They are the product of the capitalist crisis triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic and the reaction of big business to put the costs on the backs of the working class. In order to improve its competitive position in the world market, they seek to work with the unions to impose wage cuts, redundancies and worsen labour conditions.
In this process, the union bureaucracies rely on the pseudo-left, who like themselves articulate the interests of privileged layers of the upper middle class. An example is that of the Morenoite Workers’ Revolutionary Current (CRT) and its mouthpiece, La Izquierda Diario .
In one article on the mass attacks on jobs, they fraudulently call on workers to put their faith in the same unions that are profiting from the redundancies. They say: “The only way to avoid rising unemployment and increasing job insecurity is through a plan of struggle imposed on the unions by self-organized workers. It is necessary to demand that the unions break all their pacts with the government and the employers and that they call for unitary measures of struggle.”
Characteristically, they add: “We urgently need to organize and get the unions back from the hands of the union bureaucracies. An alternative fight plan must be promoted to defend all jobs.”
Such statements aim to conceal a fact experienced by millions of workers worldwide. Trade unions are no longer linked to the defence of the working class, as they were in the middle of the last century. Closely tied to the capitalist state and the corporations, they impose job cuts and social retrogression on the workers in the interests of privileged bureaucracies. They cannot be reformed nor pressured to benefit the interests of workers, any more than the capitalist class itself can be.
Nearly 900 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccines have been administered worldwide since vaccination campaigns began in earnest at the end of 2020. Despite a massive upsurge in production, a comparison of vaccination rates by continent starkly demonstrates that vaccines have not been distributed based upon need nor in the pursuit of equity, but rather according to economic hierarchy. North America has provided a vaccine to 39 percent of its population, Europe 23 percent, South America 14 percent, Asia 8.6 percent, Oceania 3.7 percent and Africa just over 1 percent.
World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus noted recently that one in four persons in high-income countries has received a vaccine. In low-income countries, only 1 in 500 has gotten the jab.
As the burden of the COVID-19 pandemic across the globe is shifting to more impoverished regions of the world, vaccine inequity raises significant concerns.
First CoronaVac vaccine doses arrive in Sao Paulo, November 2020 (Credit: GOVESP)
A surge in cases in mid-March in the Pacific island nation of Papua New Guinea, its first since the start of the pandemic, saw its inadequate health care system collapse in a matter of days, with hospital beds fully occupied and medicinal oxygen running out. India is facing a massive wave complicated by a variant with a double mutation that has driven daily case counts over a quarter million, and the death count has begun to soar.
The current pace of new infections had caught up with the previous highs during the winter months in the Northern Hemisphere, when Europe and the United States remained the epicenters of the pandemic. Though they still have the highest disease burden, Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands are seeing current infections surging fastest.
Additionally, the health care systems of countries like Poland, Ukraine and Turkey are facing a deluge of patients. While still suffering under a “maximum pressure” US sanctions regime, Iran is coping with a fourth and more extensive surge.
The world’s rich income countries have used their vaccination campaigns to ensure their populations are vaccinated first and foremost. The aim is to get the working class back into the factories to generate profits and to diffuse social tensions, a byproduct of utter neglect of the welfare of the population during the worst of the pandemic.
The paradox remains that the pandemic has been an enormous boon to financial capital, as evidenced by the rise in the indexes of stock exchanges, even as the death toll and mass misery have continued to grow.
Meanwhile, international tensions have only escalated as a result of the pandemic. Global relations increasingly resemble the pre-World War I years, with rival nation-states hell bent on securing control over world resources and markets. China’s more than 18 percent expansion in the first quarter of 2021 is seen as an existential threat by US and European imperialism.
Given these developments, the current and emerging COVID-19 vaccines are being promoted for prosecuting the ongoing geopolitical brinkmanship that is pitting the US and Europe against China and Russia in a struggle for the division of the globe’s resources. This struggle has the potential to rapidly escalate into open military conflict, posing an existential threat to life on this planet.
It is essential to take account of the state of the current global vaccine campaign.
Beijing has announced that it is committed to vaccinating 40 percent of China’s population by June. Last week, China had administered nearly 190 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines to its population, translating to approximately 13 doses for every 100 people. The seven-day average has remained steady between 3 to 5 million daily jabs but far short of the 11.5 million doses a day to meet the stated goal.
Though vaccine acceptance remains exceptionally high, the urgency to seek vaccination remains low. Since January 31, the country has reported less than 1,000 cases of COVID-19, of which the majority are imported. Since April 17, 2020, only six people have died from COVID-19. By all accounts, the coronavirus has been eradicated within the country. Still, national health officials and epidemiologists are concerned that they will not be able to maintain strict border controls forever. As a whole, the population remains biologically naïve to the coronavirus, and any outbreaks would create a severe public health crisis.
China exports vaccines to more than 30 countries
Thus far, China has exported close to 115 million doses of its COVID-19 vaccines (accounting for 42 percent of all the COVID-19 vaccines it has produced) to more than 30 countries. It has gone primarily to low- and middle-income nations, especially in Latin America, where China has increasingly supplanted the US as the region’s leading source of trade and investment.
Additionally, it is providing vaccine aid to dozens of countries. However, as Beijing is refocusing on its domestic vaccination campaign, it will need to produce 1.1 billion doses to meet current commitments to other nations.
The United States has administered 207 million doses of the 210 million COVID-19 vaccines it has manufactured to its own population. This accounts for 38 doses for every 100 people. India has produced 173 million doses and exported 37 percent, while the EU has made close to 157 million doses and exported 41 percent. The UK has provided over 22 million doses domestically.
Russia’s Sputnik V COVID vaccine has yet to be approved by the Emergency Medicines Agency. However, many European countries are turning to Moscow out of frustration over the EU’s slow rollout. As of March of 2021, the Russian Direct Investment Fund has licensed production in India, China, South Korea and Brazil. By the end of March, Russia had manufactured at least 30 million vaccine doses, and 5 percent were exported.
By comparison, the WHO-led COVAX facility, created to provide equitable vaccine access to low-income countries, has supplied only 40 million doses to the world’s poorest nations and is far from its goal of delivering two billion doses. According to the Wall Street Journal, “The COVAX division meant to help countries prepare for vaccine rollouts has received only around $600 million in contributions, leaving a gap of $7.3 billion for this year, and the World Bank has committed just $2 billion of a $12 billion financing package meant to help countries buy and distribute vaccines and strengthen health systems.”
Due to “incredibly tight” global supplies, Seth Berkley, CEO of the Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, told Reuters it would be unlikely if the COVAX dose-sharing facility would be able to procure more supplies this year. The ambitious goal of delivering 2 billion doses by the end of 2021 to participating countries, including 92 low-income countries, is severely hampered by lack of funding, vaccine nationalism and export restrictions on supplies.
These developments are most certainly the consequence of strategies to employ the COVID-19 vaccines as weapons in great power struggles.
The White House has predicted that the US will reach herd immunity sometime during the mid-summer. It intends to position itself to challenge China’s present lead in global vaccine distribution. Politico noted back in February that Chinese-made vaccines had “rolled out quicker than COVAX and even European vaccines earmarked for EU countries. China is providing vaccines for 19 African countries, for Serbia, Colombia, and many places in between.”
According to the purportedly independent multimedia organization, the China-Africa Project (CAP), “If the US really wants to make an impact and present a legitimate alternative to Chinese vaccines in places like Africa, it only has about six to nine months left. … China alone, not to mention India, may be able to satisfy much of the demand. Last week, Zheng Zhongwei of the National Health Commission said that Chinese vaccine output in 2021 would reach three billion doses. By the end of next year, that number will rise to five billion. Those are probably conservative estimates. And with local production deals already in place in Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas, Chinese vaccine output will increase even more.”
The high-income nations that are leaving poorer nations in the lurch have primarily taken up the supply of high-priced Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. According to Duke University, rich countries had collared 5.4 billion of the 7.8 billion doses purchased globally. China has positioned itself to fill this gaping void. Its vaccines have used traditional technologies making storage and shipping easy. If the World Health Organization (WHO), which is currently reviewing supporting documentation for COVID-19 vaccines from Sinopharm and Sinovac, provides these products emergency use listing, it will bolster China’s global role.
WHO-Europe vaccination expert, Siddhartha Datta, told journalists, “We are in touch with them to review the dossiers that both vaccine manufacturers have submitted. We will be hearing about a decision on the emergency use listing in April or early May, so please keep an eye on that.”
Currently, the WHO has issued emergency listings only for Pfizer, AstraZeneca, and Johnson & Johnson vaccines. The WHO’s emergency listing is a prerequisite for any vaccine manufacturer for purchase by the COVAX facility, which would extend their portfolio of vaccines to deliver shots to poorer countries.
As Washington has opted to hoard the COVID-19 vaccines for its own needs, the US corporate bourgeois media is working diligently to tarnish China’s vaccine initiatives. The language used in its reporting is characterized by unabashed nationalism and anti-Chinese provocations.
The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and New York Times have been direct conduits for Washington’s anti-Beijing rhetoric. Allies have utilized their press against China as well. Canada’s CTV News recently stated, “China and Russia have been using their locally produced COVID-19 vaccines to grow their international soft power by giving doses to desperate countries in order to have more political influence over them.” Benjamin Gedan, deputy director of the Latin American program at the Wilson Center in Washington, told CTV News, “It’s never encouraging to see the world’s largest dictatorships taking most advantage of this diplomatic opportunity.”
On April 5, Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced the appointment of former Obama administration official Gayle Smith as the coordinator of Washington’s global COVID-19 response and health security. Smith, who led the US response during the Ebola crisis, was asked to join the Biden administration to coordinate vaccine diplomacy efforts against those pursued by Chinese and Russian authorities.
In announcing Smith’s appointment, Blinken said, “We have a duty to other countries to get the virus under control here in the United States. But soon, the United States will need to step up our work and rise to the occasion worldwide because, again, only by stopping COVID globally will Americans be safe for the long term.”
Aside from its unvarnished appeal to nationalism, Blinken’s statement betrays concerns within the US ruling elite over both social tensions within its own borders created by the homicidal response to the pandemic, as well as Washington losing its grip over hearts and minds globally because of its failure to provide significant aid in the fight against the pandemic.
While vaccine diplomacy serves as an auxiliary of Chinese foreign policy in pursuit of bilateral agreements with poorer nations, China’s long-term efforts to produce and distribute its vaccines remain on unsteady footing. It faces similar issues with vaccine supplies as many other manufacturers. Constraints placed by the Biden administration through the Defense Production Act on the export of critical raw materials impede the world’s ability to produce COVID-19 vaccines.
Dave Lawler of Axios put it succinctly, “Few countries other than the US have the capacity to manufacture vaccines at scale, and most lack the resources to buy their way to the front of the line for imports. That’s led to a scramble for whatever supply is available.” Many Latin American nations rely on the limited supplies from China and Russia to begin their vaccination campaigns.
CoronaVac efficacy controversy
Numerous concerns have been raised regarding the performance of Sinovac’s COVID-19 vaccine, CoronaVac. Specifically, data from Brazil in January placed the vaccine’s efficacy barely above 50 percent, the threshold needed for regulatory approval. However, recent real world data from Chile, covering 10.5 million people, demonstrated that it was 67 percent effective at preventing symptomatic infections. The data also showed the vaccine to be 85 percent effective in preventing hospitalizations and 89 percent effective in preventing ICU admission. Prevention of death was at 80 percent.
The Western media, however, has cynically latched onto the low efficacy after a single jab of the two-dose vaccine regimen to besmirch its effectiveness. It should be noted that many in Chile had not heeded public health warnings or comprehended that the completion of the vaccine series was critical to providing maximal benefit and that continued public health measures needed to be implemented, leading many to become infected.
Still, the real world data is far more compelling as to the function of the vaccine, which has proved effective in protecting the elderly, making the surge less deadly for them. Dr.Rodrigo Cornejo, head of the ICU at the University of Chile’s hospital, told the Wall Street Journal that several of his close colleagues had died of COVID-19 infections early in the course of the pandemic. But since the medical staff has been completely vaccinated, he had not heard of any physicians dying from the contagion.
On April 9, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence published its annual threat assessment, stating: “In the coming year, the United States and its allies will face a diverse array of threats that are playing out amidst the global disruption resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic and against the backdrop of great power competition. … Beijing, Moscow, Tehran, and Pyongyang have demonstrated the capability and intent to advance their interests at the expense of the United States and its allies, despite the pandemic.”
It continued: “The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic will continue to strain governments and societies, fueling humanitarian and economic crises, political unrest, and geopolitical competition as countries, such as China and Russia, seek advantage through such avenues as ‘vaccine diplomacy.’”
The pandemic has already claimed the lives of more than 3 million people without any significant international measure to bring it to a stop. Without a doubt, millions more will perish. The economic fallout and instability portend long-term financial instability and humanitarian crises that will plague developing nations for decades. High food insecurity doubled from 135 million in 2019 to 270 million in 2020. By year’s end, the US threat assessment projects the figure will rise to 330 million.
For the working class, vaccines are necessary to save lives. For the ruling elites, they are seen as weapons as deadly as bullets in the drive toward global war.
On the night of April 13, the IG Metall union and Volkswagen group negotiators reached an accord on a new collective wage agreement for the 120,000 employees at VW plants in Wolfsburg, Braunschweig, Hannover, Salzgitter, Emden and Kassel, as well as for Financial Services AG, Volkswagen Immobilien GmbH (property services) and Volkswagen Vertriebsbetreuungsgesellschaft mbH (wholesale and distribution). Excluded from the agreement are thousands of workers in Saxony (Zwickau, Chemnitz und Dresden) who are still paid and treated as second-class employees.
VW chief negotiator Arne Meiswinkel stated that the result was achieved “with a sense of proportion and reason” and that it was “fair in the particularly challenging environment since the beginning of the pandemic.”
VW plant in Kassel (Image: BiCYCLE / CC-BY-SA 3.0)
IG Metall also praised the agreement. Their chief negotiator, Thorsten Gröger, who is also the district manager for IG Metall, magnanimously declared: “The colleagues deserve to be involved in the good result.” He described the deal as a “strong result in difficult times.” Bernd Osterloh, chairman of the VW works council, also praised the “strong result that our workforce, including during the coronavirus pandemic, has earned.”
The trade union has agreed to a cut in real wages barely any better than agreements in the steel and metal industry. There has been no monthly wage increase in the VW wage agreement since 2018. The union now praises the agreed wage increase of 2.3 percent all the more.
This increase will only take effect from January 1, 2022, and the collective agreement will run until November 30, 2022. With an inflation rate of 1.8 percent (2018), 1.4 percent (2019), 0.5 percent (2020) and an estimated 1.4 percent (2021) and 1.6 percent (2022), the 2.3 percent “increase” means a massive loss of real wages. These inflation figures come from a study carried out by leading economic institutes on behalf of the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology.
IG Metall also presented the following results as a “success”:
● A one-off payment of a “coronavirus premium” of €1,000 for 2020 (€600 for trainees).
● A previous performance-related remuneration will become a fixed component of the salary.
● A collectively agreed “additional remuneration” of 27.5 percent of a monthly wage will now be convertible into half the amount and three days off. So far, this solution only applies to those who care for relatives or have to look after their children more intensively. The latter can use the entire additional remuneration for this purpose—i.e., up to a maximum of six days.
● A training guarantee of 1,400 apprenticeships will be extended until 2025.
● Also, small amounts were negotiated as “pension components” for company pension schemes.
Regardless how the IG Metall officials want to present the result of the negotiations, in view of a profit of around €8.8 billion after tax in 2020, the collective bargaining agreement is an insult to the workers.
“We want to continue this in the coming years,” announced works council chairman Bernd Osterloh—a warning for all employees. This was not the reason 140,000 VW workers took strike action. IG Metall had originally demanded 4 percent, which itself was completely inadequate.
Sugarcoating the deal, IG Metall negotiator Gröger said: “The result that we negotiated last night means that the VW workforce will find a noticeable plus in their wallets”—a “plus” that inflation will have long since turned into a minus when it reaches the workers. In addition, all the signs are already pointing to job cuts, another reason why the VW Group is content to exchange wages for “time off.”
Despite lower net profits in 2020, shareholders can pocket a slight increase in dividends compared to the previous year. The share price rose in the period between March 2020 and the beginning of April 2021 from €87.50 to €246.15, almost reaching the record high of March 2015. According to the remuneration report, VW boss Herbert Diess earned around €6.1 million in 2020, plus bonuses of €1.8 million.
The remuneration for the group works council representatives is a measure of how much the “employee representatives” act as co-managers of the VW group and represent the interests of the owners and shareholders. Works council chairman Osterloh earned up to €750,000 a year including bonuses.
Last Friday, in a press conference with Health Minister Roberto Speranza, Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi announced a significant loosening of lockdown restrictions starting Monday, April 26. The announcement, which comes as hundreds of people continue to die every day of the virus, will ensure a further rise in coronavirus cases and deaths and has been widely denounced by medical professionals and scientists.
All schools are to resume in-person classes beginning next Monday. Restaurants and bars in so-called “yellow zones,” where there is a less rapid spread of the virus, will be permitted to reopen for outdoor dining. Swimming pools and outdoor sports can reopen.
Students outside the Ripetta art high school in Rome, Wednesday, March 24, 2021. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)
There are currently more than 14,000 daily cases in Italy. The B.1.1.7 strain, referred to as the UK variant, is the dominant variant in the country. An average of 381 people are dying every day. Just a week ago the daily death rate stood at 470. More than 3,000 people remain in intensive care.
Under these conditions, Draghi’s reopening announcement has a clearly homicidal character. In the course of the Friday press conference, he made no serious effort to justify the decision from a medical standpoint. Instead, he declared that it involved a “calculated risk” that there would be another resurgence of the virus.
This calculation has nothing to do with the protection of the population and everything to do with the interests of the Italian capitalist class. Schools are being opened so that parents can be freed to go to work and Italian capitalism can continue to make profits for its super-rich.
Medical professionals immediately denounced the announcement and warned that it will lead to unnecessary deaths.
“I would like to understand what has been calculated and considered, and how many deaths we are willing to accept,” said Sergio Abrignani, an immunologist in Milan on the “Che Giorno” program of Rai Radio1. Without sufficient vaccinations “and a high level of transmission, it is a biological threat,” he said.
Andrea Crisanti, the director of the Department of Molecular Medicine at the University of Padua, told Radio Capital that the reopening would be “irreversible, and there will clearly be a price to pay to be taken into account. … The figures do not justify the government’s decisions. How many deaths from COVID-19 are we willing to tolerate?”
He said, “For weeks we have been moving between 15,000 and 20,000 cases per day, a very high plateau, which does not permit us to plan reopening.”
Massimo Galli, the head of infectious diseases in Milan, told the Daily that “with Friday’s announcement, an all-clear message has been given that we cannot afford.”
Filippo Anelli, the president of the Federation of the Order of Doctors, said that “as doctors we cannot say that we are not worried that the situation will get out of hand.”
Even by the standards of other European countries, Italy’s current vaccination campaign has been a debacle. Only 17 percent of residents aged 70–79 have had at least one dose of the vaccine, the lowest level in the EU, apart from Bulgaria. With the health care system undermined by decades of funding cuts, the government had no coordinated national program for vaccine distribution, and left this to regional governments.
The widespread opposition among students and teachers to the reopening of in-person classrooms was expressed in a letter to Draghi written by a 16-year-old high school student, Flavia di Nocera, published in the Corrierino on Monday.
“The prospect of returning to school in the month of May is a measure in which I do not see any benefits, but only innumerable disadvantages,” she wrote. “My first reaction was anger: How is it possible to completely negate the sacrifices of the past year just to prove our efficiency, when the current conditions do not allow such a measure?”
Returning to classrooms “will not guarantee us immunity from the coronavirus, which can never be completely isolated from our classrooms, nor from public transport which many students use every day to get to school. This is not my hypothesis, but a fact attested to by the main newspapers that report many schools closed due to infections,” she wrote.
“Why reopen schools now? What drives us to throw away all our efforts, to make the infections spike again, to speculate on the lives of students, like guinea pigs in a monstrous experiment that pays for every mistake with human lives? … I have decided … that I, like many other children, will not take part in face-to-face lessons until my words and those of all the students of Italy will have been listened to and properly weighed. We do not want to be the puppets of macabre propaganda.”
The WSWS noted when Draghi became prime minister in February that he “personifies European finance capital like no other” individual in Italy. The former investment banker for Goldman Sachs and then head of the European Central Bank, Draghi’s name is identified with the policies of providing unlimited funds to the financial markets and imposing austerity on the working population.
“Will these openings be definitive?” Draghi asked on Friday. “When I said this was a calculated risk, that is exactly the answer. We have taken this risk; we are reopening … I have no doubt that the vaccination campaign will get better and better, if the correct social distancing measures are maintained, including masks, the chance that we must go into another lockdown is very low.”
Draghi is stating in a particularly open manner what is the policy of all the European governments. In France, Emmanuel Macron is moving to reopen primary schools the same day: April 26. His government has set a target date of mid-May for further relaxations of the limited lockdown measures in place. In a speech at the end of last month, Macron refused the closure of nonessential workplaces or an extended closure of schools, insisting that it was necessary to consider the broader impact of a lockdown, including on “the economy.”
Draghi’s announcement is in line with the campaign by the neo-fascist Fratelli d’Italia, which is continuing to campaign for an end to all lockdown restrictions, including the full reopening of all restaurants, and the pushing back of the curfew until 11 p.m.
The Fratelli d’Italia is attempting to capitalise on social immiseration of small businesspeople—including restaurant owners and other shopkeepers, who have been ruined by the pandemic and the lack of government support—to direct it behind the homicidal demands of big business for an end to all coronavirus restrictions. Many small businesspeople have reported not having received any government assistance at all.
