The West is Practicing Vaccine Apartheid at a Global Level

Prabir Purkayastha

More than an eighth of the world’s population living in rich countries—the United States, Canada, the UK, and the EU—have access to more than 50 percent of the world’s vaccine doses. According to Our World in Data, about 112 million people in the United States alone received at least a single vaccine jab by April 8. This is more than 12 times higher than the total number of people vaccinated in the entire continent of Africa—which has four times the population of the United States. On April 8, the World Health Organization said that “nearly 13 million of the 31.6 million doses delivered so far [to 45 African countries] have been administered.”

And if we do not count the vaccine doses that have been administered in Morocco—truly an outlier in Africa—as of April 8, the United States has received almost 35 times the vaccine doses that Africa has. No wonder Dr. Tedros Ghebreyesus, the WHO’s director-general, called the distribution of vaccines “grotesque” and “a catastrophic moral failure.” Let us not call reserving the bulk of vaccines for a handful of rich ex-colonial or settler-colonial states “vaccine nationalism.” Let us call it what it is: vaccine apartheid at a global level.

How much of the vaccines manufactured in the rich countries have gone to the rest of the world? The brutal answer is that the rich countries have kept their supplies almost entirely to themselves. Moderna’s vaccine production has mostly been used to inoculate the population in the United States besides supplying it to some countries in Europe and to Canada. Pfizer has supplied its vaccines to the United States from its U.S. facilities, and to Europe and the UK from its European plants. It has also supplied vaccines to Israel and the Gulf monarchies and (begrudgingly) parts of Latin America, but that makes up a small fraction of its total production.

The rich countries have had some squabbles with each other over vaccine supplies—an example of this is the clash between the EU and the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca and the UK. Perhaps this is why they have had no time to think about the rest of the world.

A comparison of the number of doses manufactured by the rich countries with the number of doses used by them in their own countries provides a clear picture of the extent of vaccine apartheid practiced by these countries. An article in the New York Times in late March reveals how “Residents of wealthy and middle-income countries have received about 90 percent of the nearly 400 million vaccines delivered so far.”

Where has the rest of the world gotten its vaccines from? It appears that the only other sources of vaccines for low- and middle-income countries are the ones being produced by China and India, with Russia providing smaller amounts of vaccines. This is substantiated by various press sources that recount how countries in Latin America, Eastern Europe, Africa, and Southeast Asia are receiving supplies from China, India, or Russia.

How much of the vaccine supplies from Sinovac, a Beijing-based biopharmaceutical company, and Sinopharm, a Chinese state-owned company, was administered locally in China, and how much has been provided to the rest of the world? About 115 million doses have been used in China, and the same amount has gone to the rest of the world, according to an April 5 article in Nikkei Asia, which relied on data provided by Airfinity, an analytics company. Similarly, based on the figures released by India’s Ministry of External Affairs website on April 15, 2021, more than 65 million doses of the Serum Institute’s Covishield vaccine—licensed from AstraZeneca—have been exported to other countries. With the surge in the rate of infection in India recently, the doses exported from India have fallen in comparison to the number of doses it has administered to its own population. According to an April 13 article in Deutsche Welle, “more than 104.5 million people in the country have received at least one dose of the inoculation,” while “India has shipped more than 60 million doses to 76 nations.” China and India are the only two major countries that have been willing to export vaccines while also vaccinating their own people.

To curtail the sharp rise of COVID-19 cases in India, the country is currently prioritizing its supplies and has temporarily halted exports of vaccines from India. This has slowed down vaccine supplies to other countries significantly in March and April and will impact the COVAX program, particularly in Africa, which is heavily dependent on the WHO’s Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT)-Accelerator program and its vaccines pillar of COVAX.

Sputnik V, developed by the highly respected Gamaleya National Center of Epidemiology, has shown its efficacy in clinical trials. Ramping up its production, however, has been slow. Russia’s production capacity of vaccines is not on the scale of Indian and Chinese manufacturers. While many Indian and South Korean companies have expressed interest in manufacturing Sputnik V, they have yet to start doing so. Only one South Korean company—Hankook Korus Pharm—has started production of Sputnik V, and a large consortium of South Korean companies have signed up to manufacture 500 million doses. Five Indian companies—Hetero Biopharma, Gland Pharma, Stelis Biopharma, Virchow Biotech, and Panacea Biotec—have inked deals with the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) for setting up a combined production capacity of 850 million doses.

Meanwhile, even as India looks to ramp up its current vaccine production to meet the worldwide demand for vaccines, it has not been able to do so. The Serum Institute of India, the largest vaccine manufacturer in the world, can produce up to 100 million Covishield doses per month and can add to that capacity with additional investments. Similarly, Biological E—which is expected to produce 600 million doses of Johnson & Johnson’s single jab vaccine after recent approvals by the United States Food and Drug Administration—has not been able to begin production. This raises questions about what is preventing these companies from expanding and producing vaccines.

This is where the global media—read: the dominant Western media—fails to inform the people about the bottlenecks in ramping up production around the world. Apart from the intellectual property rights issue, the major roadblock to quickly ramping up global vaccine production is that the rich countries—the United States, the EU, and the UK—have been refusing to export not only vaccines but also the supplies of intermediate products and raw materials required for vaccine production in other countries.

The United States is using a 1950 Korean War-vintage Defense Production Act to curb exports of vaccines as well as raw materials and other inputs vital for vaccine production elsewhere. In a letter to India’s commerce secretary Anup Wadhawan and foreign secretary Harsh Vardhan Shringla, Prakash Kumar Singh of the Serum Institute wrote that by invoking the Defense Production Act, the United States is making it difficult to “[import] necessary products like cell culture medias, raw material, single-use tubing assemblies and some specialty chemicals” to India, according to an article in Mint. The U.S. restrictions, which prioritize Moderna and Pfizer’s vaccine production, harm not only the Serum Institute’s Covishield production but also its efforts to produce another 1 billion doses of Novavax vaccine. Adar Poonawalla, the chief executive of the Serum Institute of India, told a World Bank panel recently, “The Novavax vaccine, which we’re a major manufacturer for, needs these items from the U.S. We are talking about having free global access to vaccines but if we can’t get the raw materials out of the U.S.—that’s going to be a serious limiting factor,” according to an article in the Financial Times.

Similarly, Mahima Datla, managing director of Biological E, which is committed to making Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose vaccine in India, voiced her concern about the U.S. embargo on vital intermediate products and supplies. In an interview with the Financial Times, she said that materials that are a vital part of vaccine production are made only by a limited number of companies that are under the U.S. embargo. Unless the global supply chain is viewed in its entirety, and not with the me-first approach of the United States and the rich countries, we will not be able to control the pandemic.

The Indian government, which looked quite willing to be the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue’s COVID-19 vaccine supplier—as also seen from the joint statement by Quad leaders, “The Spirit of the Quad”—seems to have backed off from any public engagement with the U.S. government on this count. There has been no public response by the government of India relating to the plea of the Indian big generic manufacturers on how to facilitate both capital and the much-needed supplies for rapidly increasing production. Instead, the Indian government has slowed down its export of vaccines to other countries, worsening the global crisis.

The other part of the ugly picture of vaccine apartheid is the vicious campaign mounted against the Chinese and Russian vaccines. It is bad enough that the United States and its allies are not willing to share the vaccine they produce with the rest of the world. Moderna and Pfizer vaccines are not available to most low- and middle-income countries, and even if they were available there, these countries would not be able to provide the ultra-cold chain infrastructure required by these mRNA vaccines. An anti-China and anti-Russia campaign by Western media means that they are willing to deny the global population of any vaccine—even if this means taking on the risk of new variants emerging and the permanent threat of COVID-19 looming large across the world.

The latest in this anti-China campaign is twisting the statement of Gao Fu, the head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, who suggested improving the efficacy of the vaccines being produced by China by mixing them. This is being touted as a “rare admission of weakness” and proof of the poor quality of Chinese vaccines. How are similar statements by AstraZeneca of using Sputnik V as the second dose along with a first dose of AstraZeneca not viewed in the same light?

The figures to show more than 90 percent efficacy for Moderna and Pfizer, and above 62 percent for Oxford-AstraZeneca, compared to supposedly only about 50 percent efficacy for the Sinovac vaccine do not reflect a true comparison. In clinical trials in Turkey and Indonesia, the figures for Sinovac’s vaccine were 83.5 percent and 65.3 percent, respectively. The low figure of 50.4 percent in the Brazilian trial was the result of counting very mild symptoms as positive cases, which other vaccine trials did not count. Data of Brazil’s Sinovac’s CoronaVac trials showed that it provided 78 percent protection in mild cases and 100 percent protection in moderate and severe cases, according to an article in Bloomberg. Esper Kallas from the School of Medicine, University of São Paulo, Brazil, pointed out in an article in Science Magazine, “If you can prevent someone being seen by a doctor by 78 percent and prevent hospital admissions by 100 percent, let’s give a toast and celebrate.”

The good news is that Sinovac’s vaccine is maintaining its efficacy against the more transmissible and dangerous Brazilian P1 variant at more than 50 percent. AstraZeneca’s vaccine has low efficacy (10.4 percent) against the B.1.351 prevalent currently in South Africa, although it was more effective against the B.1.1.7 variant, otherwise known as the UK variant.

I have earlier reported about the World Trade Organization rules and the rich countries’ unwillingness to temporarily suspend intellectual property rights rules so that all the vaccine producers can re-engineer their facilities very quickly to produce COVID-19 vaccines. In the books of the rich countries, the tens of billions of dollars to be earned as profits in the vaccine market by Big Pharma far outweigh the benefits of saving millions of lives. This also explains the vicious campaign against Chinese and Russian vaccines. For Big Pharma and the rich countries, it is profit over lives every time, whether it was during the AIDS epidemic earlier or with the COVID-19 pandemic now.

Vaccine apartheid and support for Big Pharma are driving the policies of the rich countries. It does not matter that these policies will perpetuate the continuation of the global pandemic and the emergence of new variants along with the economic crisis being faced by most nations. Only a powerful movement for people’s health and universal vaccines can beat back the offensive by Big Pharma coupled with the ongoing vaccine apartheid by the rich countries.

Chauvin’s Conviction is Far From Justice

Bette Lee

In a rare moment in US history, a racist white cop, Derek Chauvin, has been convicted on April 20^th of murdering an unarmed Black man, George Floyd. If this is a “turning point” for America, it was a long time coming. It took hundreds of years of resistance and resilience to get here.

It took 250 years of unrelenting systemic racism and white supremacy that enslaved and terrorized Black people, through the era of Jim Crow, and the rise of the KKK, who attacked Black people with impunity. The “freedom” they had been granted turned out to be a hollow promise and a cruel betrayal. Black people were forced to work as sharecroppers for their former slave owners, their cities were burned, and hundreds of them were lynched at “picnics” where white folks took photos, laughing in front of the “strange fruit” hanging from trees, as described by Billie Holliday in her haunting song.

It took the crushed lives of millions of Black, brown and people of color forced to live in chronic poverty and social despair, while they were “racially profiled,” arrested, brutalized, jailed and killed by racist cops with impunity for hundreds of years. When Black people organized and fought back, their leaders and organizers were spied on, infiltrated and hounded by the FBI. Law enforcement set out to destroy the Black Panthers; many were jailed, others like Fred Hampton were murdered.

It took the life of George Floyd, who was killed while he was in handcuffs, face down on a concrete street, by a racist cop, Chauvin, who had no regard for his humanity or his life.

It took millions of viewers who watched in horror the video of Floyd’s murder on social networks and the media. It was clear to millions of viewers that Floyd had been unjustly murdered and that Chauvin was guilty of this egregious crime.

It took the profound grief, outrage and determination of Floyd’s family, friends and community, and activists to speak out, protest and demand justice for almost a year after his death.

It took 26 million Americans who took to the streets in over 2000 cities to support Black Lives Matter in the largest social justice movement in the US.

It took countless acts of civil disobedience and activism in cities like Minneapolis where Floyd was murdered, where police precincts and stores were set on fire, windows were smashed, banks and govt. buildings were vandalized and covered with graffiti, bridges and roads were blocked, parks and civic spaces were occupied, statues of the founding fathers Washington and Jefferson, and Confederate generals like Robert E. Lee were toppled unceremoniously and spray painted with “Slave owners” and “Racists.”

It took over 100 consecutive nights of resistance and intense confrontations with the police, where thousands of protestors in cities like Portland were pounded by police and the federal troops sent by Trump, night after night with massive amounts of tear gas, pepper spray, flash grenades, rubber bullets and projectiles.

It took the courage of thousands of people, willing to risk injury and arrest to resist police violence, racism and inequality. Almost 1,000 protestors were arrested in Portland during the BLM protests last year. 6,000 acts of police violence were documented during the BLM protests in Portland last year. But in the face of brutal police repression, many protestors did not back down.

Chauvin’s conviction meant that a racist cop was finally held accountable for killing a Black man, but accountability is not the same as justice. Systemic racism and white supremacy are entrenched in law enforcement and policing because America is still a deeply racist country which refuses to acknowledge its history and perpetration of white supremacy. Instead, liberals and politicians like Biden will celebrate Chauvin’s conviction as a “step towards justice,” as evidence that America is still the shining beacon of democracy and justice. They will use Chauvin’s conviction as justification that incremental reforms, not systemic change, will end racism in America. But Chauvin’s conviction will not stop police from killing more Black and people of color. No African American believes that.

Police reforms, including defunding or the banning of qualified immunity are significant steps to ameliorate police abuse, but they will not end police killings. The reforms are aimed at dealing with the symptoms of a sick country, but they will not exorcize the root causes of systemic racism and corruption.

There is no justice as long as Black, brown and people of color are deprived of their humanity and access to decent jobs, housing, education and health care. There is no justice as long as the primary role of the police is to control and terrorize the poor, workers and people of color, while serving and protecting the rich and powerful. There can be no justice without social equality, where the rich get richer, while millions of people are forced to live in abject poverty and despair. There can be no justice when police continue to target and traumatize people of color who have to live with the daily threats of police and state violence, incarceration, and murder. The recent killings of Daunte Wright, 20 years old, and Adam Toledo, 13 years old, by the police during the trial of Derek Chauvin clearly demonstrates that police reform is not enough. Only an honest reckoning with its history of settler colonialism and its toxic legacy of systemic racism, white supremacy and grinding poverty will lead to real social change and the transformation of America to where justice can prevail.

Slaves to the Constitution

Paul Street

Slavery lives on in U.S.-American life, crippling “our” supposed grand “democracy” in numerous ways. The massive wealth, income, and health gaps between Black and white Americans and the related persistent segregation and mass arrest and incarceration of Black Americans cannot be properly understood without reference to the two and a half centuries in which Black Americans were enslaved.

The racist police state that has produced the cop murders of Milton Hall, Mike Brown, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Rekia Boyd, Laquan McDonald, Sandra Bland, Brionna Taylor, Tamir Rice, George Floyd, Daunte Wright (killed not far from the site of Floyd’s murder during the trial of Floyd’s murderer Derek Chauvin) and so many more Black victims has a dark historical connection back to the Slave Patrols of British colonial North America and the pre-Civil War US republic.

People who fly the Confederate Flag (as did many of the fascist January 6 Capital Rioters) are waving the banner of slavery. The Confederacy was formed southern slaveholders who calculated that the newly elected U.S. president Abraham Lincoln’s opposition to slavery in the nation’s western territories spelled doom for their racist forced labor and torture system. Anyone who says that the Confederate symbol is about “states’ rights” and not slavery is either a liar or a fool.

Slavery also distorts American political life and policy in ways that are rarely noted. The American political system violates the elementary democratic principle of one person, one votes in numerous interrelated ways, including widespread and absurd gerrymandering of US House and state legislative districts and campaign finance rulings that grant concentrated wealth massive power over U.S. elections. Two constitutionally encoded and openly anti-democratic barriers to popular self-rule – the Electoral College and the granting of two US Senators to each of the nation’s 50 states regardless of their wildly divergent populations – trace back to slavery.

Why can a right-wing U.S. president be elected over a centrist opponent who receives more votes than him, as in 2000 and 2016? Why do US presidential elections focus almost completely on a small number of battleground states, largely ignoring most of the rest of the nation? And why does white, rural, and reactionary Wyoming, home to less than 600,000 people, get to have as many representatives in the powerful upper body of Congress as liberal, multicultural California, home to nearly 40 million? If Chicago or the New York City borough of Brooklyn were states and had the same ratio of U.S. Senators to population enjoyed by Wyoming, they’d have roughly 10 Senators each. It’s absurd. The Senate is so lopsided right now that 26 states containing just 17 percent of the U.S. population elect a majority of senators before the 2020 election. The people in the smallest 26 states elected more than half of the US Senators. The Republican Party’s Senate majority and near majority in recent years has been based on its strength in these disproportionately rural, white, and reactionary states.

And that absurdly apportioned Senate is a great barrier to progressive legislation backed by most Americans. Some of that legislation has already been passed by the more genuinely representative if still badly gerrymandered House. The stymied measures include a major labor law reform that would re-legalize and empower union organizing and collective bargaining and a voting rights bill that would roll back racist voter suppression and gerrymandering.

That absurdly right-wing Senate is why we are absurdly saddled with a 6-3 supermajority right-wing Supreme Court far to the right of majority public opinion.

What’s it got to do with slavery? Quite a bit. During the nation’s Constitutional Convention, the representatives of the slave-owning southern colonies-turned-states required the now utterly preposterous presidential Electoral College (which badly over-represents small states by including the Senatorial over-weighting in the assignment of Electors per state and by granting victory on the basis of 270 votes from winner-take-all state-based Elector slates instead of a national popular vote) and the two senator-per-state rule as prices for agreeing to join the Union from which they would later secede. The South relied on the (viciously exploited) labor of Black non-citizens, something that caused the slaveholders’ delegates to fear under-representation in a federal government that might (they worried) abolish their morally abhorrent chattel regime. They found part of the solution in a presidential election system that combined the indirect election of the American chief executive – the openly democracy-flunking Electoral College – with the revolting “Three Fifths Compromise,” which let southern states count their slaves, albeit with a two-fifths discount, as part of its total number of Electors (and House Representatives). Another part of the solution was the granting of just two Senators per state, regardless of population size, which meant that the reduced number of voting citizens imposed by slavery would not crush strong southern representation in the powerful upper Congressional chamber.

Here we are now more than 23 decades after this horse-and-buggy-era Constitution was drafted and passed by and for merchant capitalists, publicists, and slaveowners for whom democracy was the ultimate nightmare. We play a ridiculous game of Simon Says with the absurdly venerated, aristo-republican Founders. We nod along like hopeless idiots at the authoritarian insult of a government that grants Wyoming one US Senator per 284,506 people and California one US Senator per 19,992,131 people.

We are slaves to this ridiculous charter. It’s pathetic.

Turkish government rejects lockdown as pandemic spins out of control

Ulaş Ateşçi

As a result of the “herd immunity” policies implemented by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government in the interests of the ruling class, the COVID-19 pandemic in Turkey is out of control. Turkey has become an epicenter of the pandemic, like India and Brazil. According to Health Minister Fahrettin Koca, at least 85 percent of new cases in the country are due to the more contagious UK or B.1.1.7 variant.

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan sits with his wife Emine at a rally of his ruling party’s congress in Ankara, Turkey, Wednesday, March 24, 2021 (AP Pool).

Despite limited measures announced on April 13, the number of daily cases remains over 60,000, sometimes more than in the United States. Proportionally to its population, Turkey (85 million) has more than tripled the rate of reported cases compared to India (1.4 billion people and nearly 300,000 daily cases). The test positivity rate is nearly 20 percent. According to Ministry of Health data, 362 people died on Wednesday.

These figures vastly underestimate true losses. While Turkey has surpassed the United Kingdom in terms of total number of cases with nearly 4.4 million, at 37,000 deaths it seems far behind countries like the UK (127,000), France (102,000) and Italy (118,000) in total mortality. According to investigative filmmaker Güçlü Yaman’s calculations, however, there had been 98,000 excess deaths in Turkey by early March 2021.

Last week, an anonymous physician caring for coronavirus patients in Istanbul told the daily Cumhuriyet: “Even if a PCR test is positive, COVID-19 is not written on the death certificate if the intensive care patient dies after an average of 15-20 days after he/she tested positive.”

This ongoing slaughter is the direct result of the Turkish ruling class seeing mass deaths and the sickness of millions as “acceptable.”

As the pandemic erupted out of control as the predictable consequence of the “opening up” policy in early March, the Erdoğan government announced last week limited measures to calm growing social anger and prevent a collapse of the health care system. However, it kept nonessential production and some grades in schools open.

“In the economy, things are going very well on the production side,” Erdoğan blithely declared, claiming that his government has been very successful against the pandemic.

He made clear that businesses’ profits and competitiveness in global markets guided his government’s response to the pandemic, not saving lives. “We need to reduce the numbers of infections below the general average in the world, especially in countries with which we have close relations. Otherwise, we may run the risk of not being able to take advantage of economic opportunities brought before us by the pandemic.”

The impact of the “gradual normalization” policy in early March is quite clear. The number of COVID-19 deaths in Turkey was 66 on February 28, when the number of seriously ill patients fell to 1,191. However, the official daily death toll has risen six-fold to nearly 400, while the number of seriously ill patients surged to 3,400.

The government rejected calls from health experts and scientists to close down nonessential production for 28 days, strengthen social distancing measures and accelerate vaccination. It adopted limited measures, like starting curfews at 7:00 p.m. rather than 9:00 p.m. on weekdays. However, almost all workers are exempted from curfews so nonessential production can continue. Restaurants and cafés cannot accept customers inside until May 16.

The irrationality of state policy is manifested in the implementation of strict curfews, but only for those over 65, many of whom have been vaccinated, or the prohibition of intercity travel by private car, while there are no restrictions on crowded public transport by plane or buses.

After the government announced these limited measures, Dr. Cavit Işık Yavuz of Hacettepe University in Ankara emphasized yet again that containing the pandemic requires large-scale lockdown measures. “At this stage of the pandemic, you need to take the highest and broadest restrictions you can get by supporting society in social and economic terms. Otherwise, you have no chance of containing this pandemic.”

Since reopening schools to in-person education in March, at least 31 teachers have died of COVID-19. Children have not only spread the disease but begun to be more severely affected. However, the government kept kindergartens open in order to ensure that parents can go to work and generate profits for their employers.

Professor Dr. Sinan Çavun from Bursa’s Uludağ University tweeted on Wednesday: “The reasons why the third wave [of the pandemic] is so bad are as follows: 1) Our vaccination rate is low, 2) Schools are re-opened, 3) Uncontrolled congresses [of Erdoğan’s ruling Justice and Development Party, AKP in March], 4) Thousands of workers continue to work in factories, 5) The risk of contamination is very high in public service and transportation, 6) Continuation of home meetings.”

Turkish Intensive Care Society chair Professor İsmail Cinel warned, “The last wave is like no other. Younger patients come with more tissue destruction. Our pediatric patients are also on the rise.”

The Turkish Medical Association (TTB) called nationwide protests on April 15 under the slogan, “We do not give up our right to life. Stop deaths!” On April 12, TTB Chairwoman Prof. Dr. Şebnem Korur Fincancı said, “Our hospitals are filled with COVID-19 patients, even newly opened services are not enough to meet the needs, and there is no place in intensive care units.”

She emphasized that patients with serious diseases other than COVID-19 are also at risk. “Not only COVID-19 patients but also non-COVID-19 patients are aggrieved because of this picture; they cannot access the required care for problems that cannot be delayed.”

Health Minister Koca recently announced that intensive care occupancy rate in Istanbul, the epicenter of the pandemic in Turkey, was 71.4 percent. Health care workers told the daily Evrensel that many Istanbul hospitals have stopped elective surgeries.

Istanbul Medical Chamber officials announced that there is almost no room in intensive care units in Istanbul state hospitals, a situation private hospital bosses turned into an opportunity. Some private hospitals demand up to 15,000 Turkish liras (nearly US$1,850) for a day from COVID-19 patients. Turkey’s monthly minimum wage is only 2,800 Turkish liras.

Ankara Medical Chamber Chair Ali Karakoç explained the dire situation in the capital, where COVID-19 patients needing hospitalization “are unfortunately kept on stretchers or in their homes. Either a patient needs to be discharged or die; new places are opened only this way. … Every place is full in Ankara, including the intensive care units of private hospitals.”

According to official data on weekly caseloads in cities, the number of cases per 100,000 in Istanbul between April 10-16 increased to 920. In Istanbul, with a population of about 16 million, this means nearly 145,000 cases per week and 20,000 cases per day. This means that the city of Istanbul alone has more daily cases than any European country except France.

Only 7.9 million people, less than 10 percent of Turkey’s population, are fully vaccinated; the more than 5 million refugees in Turkey from war-torn countries of Africa and the Middle East are not included in this statistic.

The devastating consequences of this “social murder” policy are also reflected in rising deaths among health care workers, despite their having received the Sinovac vaccine. TTB Family Medicine Branch Chair Emrah Kırımlı told bianet: “We did not get any news of COVID-19 deaths among health workers for some time. But we have started to get death news from them again.” According to TTB data, 12 health care workers have lost their lives so far in April. Overall, 410 have died in Turkey since the beginning of the pandemic.

Kırımlı added, “More importantly, mutations have been on the increase. We know Sinovac’s COVID-19 vaccine is less effective in the face of coronavirus variants. While mutations are so widespread, one must consider vaccinating health care workers again.”

This tragic report does not lessen the need to vaccinate the population, as all the vaccines have demonstrated their effectiveness at limiting the contagion. However, it indicates the urgency of mobilizing workers in Turkey and internationally to fight for a halt to nonessential production and schools until the pandemic is contained. This is essential, together with full compensation to all affected workers and small businesses, together with other social distancing measures and a rapid, global vaccination campaign free of charge.

Johnson halts travel to India as “there will be another wave” as UK sports venues and nightclubs reopen

Paul Bond

Prime Minister Boris Johnson this week reiterated his government’s commitment to its murderous “herd immunity” policy, saying again that everyone had to “learn to live with this virus.”

In his Tuesday press conference, Johnson announced that easing lockdown restrictions will continue. The coming fortnight will see large attendances at events as part of the government’s Events Research Programme (ERP)—aimed at the full reopening of the economy by June 21—that will inevitably lead to more infections and deaths.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson holds a COVID-19 press conference in the Briefing Room in 9 Downing Street. 20/04/2021. (Picture by Simon Dawson / No 10 Downing Street-flickr)

Johnson said, “We cannot delude ourselves that COVID has gone away,” adding, “I see nothing in the data now that makes me think we are going to have to deviate in any way from the roadmap cautious but irreversible that we have set out. But the majority of scientific opinion in this country is still firmly of the view that there will be another wave of covid at some stage this year.”

The callous response of the ruling elite was clear, with Johnson insisting, “We must—as far as possible—learn to live with this disease, as we live with other diseases.”

“Learning to live with” COVID means learning to die from it. The government’s official death toll is 127,327, but this is a sizable underestimate, as it records only deaths within 28 days of a positive test. At least 150,841 have died with COVID-19 cited on their death certificate. This equates to around 221 deaths recorded per 100,000 people—the highest death rate among all countries with a population of more than 20 million.

Lockdown is ending despite the spread to Britain of a host of mutations of the virus, including the Indian double-mutant B.1.617 variant. By Monday this week, 103 cases of B.1.617 had been officially identified in Britain, but other analysis of publicly available information suggested around 160 cases by last Saturday.

Johnson announced he had “very sadly” cancelled an already postponed trip to New Delhi. He had reluctantly decided to ban travel to and from India putting the country on a red list as a “precautionary” measure, but the ban only resumes Friday.

This allowed nearly a week of continued travel between the two countries before the ban came into place. There were still 16 direct flights scheduled from India between the announcement Monday and the deadline, and many more indirect flights. India’s own travel restrictions, imposed over concerns over the UK variant B.1.1.7, only reduced the number of direct flights from 70 to 30 a week. This in the same week in which India recorded highest number of COVID-19 daily cases (315,728) ever seen during the pandemic.

Narendra Modi’s far right Bharatiya Janata Party government, like Johnson’s, bears responsibility for allowing the virus free rein. The B.1.617 variant poses exposure to a more contagious form of the disease that could impede existing vaccination programmes. Professor Danny Altmann, an Imperial College London immunologist, told Good Morning Britain that vulnerable people who have been vaccinated could “still be caught out by variants like this.”

University College London epidemiologist Professor Andrew Hayward, of the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), called for a suspension of travel while the “unknown level of risk” of B.1.617 was properly assessed.

B.1.617 is currently listed by Public Health England as a “variant under investigation,” less serious than B.1.1.7—the mutation that emerged in Kent, England last September and is now the dominant strain across much of the planet—and other strains. Altmann warned, “My assumption from everything I’ve seen is that it will become a variant of concern”—the next level up.

B.1.617’s response to existing vaccines is not yet clear, and might undermine Johnson’s boast that 33 million people in Britain have received their first dose of the vaccine. Only 10.7 million have so far received the second dose. Rollout has in any case slowed appreciably, with supply bottlenecks and concerns about availability.

The spread of variants has exposed the Conservative government’s shambolic testing programme. University College London virologist and member of Independent SAGE, Professor Deenan Pillay, told MPs the spread of B.1.617 could be 10-20 times greater than documented, because only around 10-15 percent of positive swabs are handled at laboratories scanning for variants.

Johnson announced that an “Antivirals Taskforce” would be a vital part of “living with this virus.” The Taskforce is part of a strategy to ensure no further impediment to the activities of business. Johnson said it intended to make available by the end of the year at least two effective antiviral treatments that can be taken at home, both by those testing positive and those living with them, to accelerate recovery and reduce transmission.

Government Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Patrick Vallance—an early advocate of achieving herd immunity through mass infection and without vaccines—called them “another key tool” in the pandemic response that “could help protect those not protected by or ineligible for vaccines.”

Johnson and Health Secretary Matt Hancock proclaim tablet antivirals, but these do not yet exist. Johnson said the Taskforce would “search for the most promising new medicines and support their development through clinical trials.” Hancock spoke of the need to “supercharge the search for antiviral treatments and roll them out as soon as the autumn.”

Vallance said such antiviral tablets “could also be another layer of defence in the face of new variants of concern.” This is a tacit admission of the government’s disregard for public safety that has allowed the spread and mutation of the virus.

Variants are created when mutations cluster together and create new proteins. This allows further access to host cells, jeopardising existing vaccination programmes. In Israel, the rapid spread of the British coronavirus variant B.1.1.7 in December delayed the unfolding national vaccination programme’s expected improvement in morbidity rates. Researchers at Tel Aviv university this week reported that B.1.1.7 is around 45 percent more contagious than the original strain.

Last week saw the largest surge testing operation in Britain to date, after a “significant” cluster of South African variant cases was identified in south London. Variants are not identified by the test itself but require genetic sequencing. Because of the delays, Independent SAGE’s Dr Gabriel Scally said the UK is “continually trying to play catch-up.”

Professor Pillay questioned the effectiveness of surge testing when people are still moving around freely. Four weeks after a variant has been identified, he said, there is “a naïve assumption that testing should happen in the postcodes in London around where it was first identified,” but “in a place like London you don’t limit yourself to moving within one postcode.”

The government sets great store by repeated lateral flow tests. Significantly less accurate than the National Health Service’s PCR test on the original strain, they may also not pick up new variants.

The government last week had to deny that it planned to halt rapid testing over concerns about false positives. Leaked emails showed senior officials calling for “fairly urgent decisions” on the “point at which we stop offering asymptomatic testing.”

This weekend 8,000 football fans will attend London’s Wembley stadium for the League Cup final between Manchester City and Tottenham Hotspur. Chartered trains will bring 750 fans from Manchester in northwest England to London—where they will then have to travel to the stadium and back on London’s busy Underground!

The fans will be used as guinea pigs. They must sign an ERP consent form, take a lateral flow test at a designated site in the 24 hours before the game and agree to take two PCR tests. The second test will be five days after the game, allowing plenty of time to spread any infection they may have.

Pointing to the possibilities for cross-infection, Professor John Ashton, former director of public health for northwest England, said, “If we’re not careful, we’ll finish up in a situation in October where we’re back at square one.”

The Wembley attendance is the largest crowd for a sporting event since the first lockdown last March, when such events played a key role in COVID’s mass spread. The following weekend will see Liverpool nightclub Circus host a two-night event to be attended by 6,000 people. There will be no masks or social distancing, as this will also be an ERP event. The homicidal policy is back in full force.

Pandemic produced a “catastrophic year” for Middle East and North Africa

Jean Shaoul

Recent reports testify to the catastrophic impact of the pandemic in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region and the implications for social and political unrest.

Launching Amnesty International’s annual report, Heba Morayef said that the pandemic had exposed the terrible legacy of divisive and destructive policies that had perpetuated inequality, discrimination and oppression and paved the way for the devastation wrought by COVID-19.

A cemetery worker moves the body of a person who died from COVID-19 for a funeral, at the Behesht-e-Zahra cemetery just outside Tehran, Iran, Wednesday, April 21, 2021. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)

The year 2020 “was a catastrophic year for prisoners, refugees, migrants and minorities who are already marginalized and due to COVID-19 have found their situation more precarious than ever. The pandemic has amplified divisions, discrimination and inequalities that already exist in the region.”

The region, home to enormous energy resources that have enriched a tiny, ultra-reactionary layer, has been devastated by decades of wars, conflicts, imperialist interventions, and sanctions, orchestrated by the US and its European and regional allies. Millions of people have been made homeless, forced to live in refugee camps or internally displaced people’s (IDP) camps where even the most basic facilities are lacking. Some 5.8 million refugees and 6.8 million IDPs are children, many going without schooling.

The pandemic has inflicted a horrendous toll, with more than 7.3 million recorded cases and 150,000 fatalities, a pale reflection of the real losses and suffering given the lack of testing and recording systems. Iran has been by far the worst affected, recording around 65,000 deaths, while Iraq and Egypt have recorded about 15,000 and 12,500.

Across the region, the authorities have used the pandemic as a pretext to increase the exploitation of the working class, silence criticism and suppress dissent.

Employers have laid off hundreds of thousands of workers. In Egypt, tens of thousands of private sector workers were dismissed, forced to accept reduced wages, work without protective equipment, or take unpaid leave. Workers and trade unionists have faced arrest for going on strike. In Jordan, renewed protests by teachers broke out last August over the government’s decision to freeze public sector pay due to the pandemic. The government dispatched the police to raid 13 union branches and arrest dozens, while a court ordered the dissolution of the teachers’ union.

Morayef said that health workers had suffered as a result of deliberately neglected health systems and pitiful social protection measures, with authorities in Egypt and Iran threatening or arresting health workers who spoke out against their government’s negligent response to the pandemic. At least nine health workers were detained in Egypt under anti-terrorism laws for criticizing the government. In Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco and Syria, workers were not provided adequate personal protective equipment (PPE).

As protest movements reemerged in Algeria, Iraq and Lebanon, after subsiding in the first few months of the pandemic, protesters faced arrest, beatings and prosecution for participating in demonstrations. In Iraq, federal authorities arrested thousands of protesters in the first few months of the year, while Kurdistan Regional Government officials used deadly force against workers protesting unpaid wages and charged others with “misusing electronic devices” in organising a protest last December.

In Lebanon, security forces used rubber pellets in a shoot-to-harm manner in January and February, injuring hundreds of protesters, while in Tunisia, police fired tear gas in densely populated residential areas with canisters landing inside homes and near a hospital. In Iran, security forces used pointed pellets, rubber bullets and tear gas against protesters. In Egypt, small protests last September led to the arrests of hundreds under "terrorism" and protest-related charges.

The security forces’ use of excessive force was carried out with impunity. According to the UN’s World Food Programme, some 64 million across 12 Arab states, or one in six Arabs, do not have enough food to be healthy. War, conflicts, and sanctions-induced economic crises have made hunger a fact of life, with even stable governments concerned over the rise in global food prices, particularly wheat, under conditions where bread is heavily subsidised.

The situation is most acute in war-torn Syria and Yemen, where around half the population go hungry. In Syria, a basket of basic foodstuffs was more than 200 percent more expensive in February than in the previous year and costs twice as much as the average monthly salary of a public sector worker. Bread, which means queuing for hours at government-subsidised bakeries, constitutes a meal for hundreds of thousands of people. The UN has warned of looming famine in Yemen as aid agencies have been forced to slash their programmes due to shortfalls in funding.

Food prices have risen 400 percent in Lebanon in the last year following the collapse of its currency—collateral damage in the US-led campaign against Hezbollah to undermine Iran and Syria. Fights have broken out over subsidized cooking oil in supermarkets in which one man was killed, forcing some to employ armed guards to distribute subsidised basics.

The World Bank’s latest regional economic report points to the political impact of the pandemic and lockdowns. It warned that the rise in poverty, government debt and general indebtedness had further eroded the public’s trust in government throughout the MENA region. Its economies had contracted by 3.8 percent in 2020, with the sharpest declines in government revenues in 2020 among the Gulf oil producers and developing oil exporters due to the collapse in oil prices. Oil importing countries expect to see their GDP shrink by 9.3 percent in 2021 compared to pre-pandemic levels, with the oil producers in the Gulf seeing a contraction of 7.7 percent. As a result, the Bank expects the total accumulated COVID-related losses will reach $227 billion by the end of 2021.

While the Bank sought to explain the measures taken by governments throughout the region as expenses incurred to finance health and social protection for their citizens, the exact opposite was the case: they acted—like their counterparts throughout the world—to shore up the profits of corporations and banks.

The average public debt in MENA countries is forecast to rise from about 46 percent of GDP in 2019 to 54 percent in 2021, with debt among the non-oil producers reaching about 93 percent of GDP in 2021. This is expected to rise further, meaning that that much government spending will go on debt servicing, reducing the amount available for the social safety net, healthcare and essential public services.

While the Bank expects a partial economic recovery later this year, it says this is “dependent on an equitable rollout of vaccines”—which is a pipe dream.

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), only 14 of 21 countries in the region that extends from Morocco to Afghanistan (excluding Algeria and Israel) have received vaccines—meaning 20 percent at best will be vaccinated by the end of 2021.

Within the Middle East, Israel has vaccinated around 60 percent of the population, and despite having bought more than it needs is denying jabs to the Palestinians who live under its occupation. The smaller Gulf States—Qatar, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates—have been inoculating citizens and foreign workers. While the public debate has focused on access to vaccines, distribution to places where there is a lack of food, barely operational health systems or functioning public institutions as in Syria, Yemen, Lebanon, and Libya is even more problematic.

The COVID-19 pandemic is a global problem, which requires a global solution. This must include a coordinated vaccination programme, the shutdown of all nonessential production until the pandemic is contained, and the seizure of the wealth of the super-rich in the Middle East and North Africa and the major imperialist powers to provide wages for all workers forced to shelter at home and funding for quality health care. It will only be implemented through the mass mobilisation of the working class based on a socialist programme to end social inequality and war, whose source lies in the capitalist profit system.

New German Christian Democratic candidate for chancellor promotes policies of herd immunity, austerity and war

Johannes Stern

The Christian Democratic candidate for Chancellor in September’s general election is incumbent North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) state premier Armin Laschet. He succeeds Angela Merkel (Christian Democratic Union, CDU), who has been the lead candidate for the CDU and its Bavarian sister party the Christian Social Union (CSU) in the last four federal elections and has governed the country as chancellor since 2005.

The decision was preceded by a power struggle lasting several days between Laschet and Markus Söder, the right-wing conservative Bavarian state premier and CSU leader. Söder, who justified his claim to the candidacy by pointing to higher popularity ratings among voters and within the Union (CDU/CSU), ultimately bowed to the decision of the CDU executive.

CDU candidate for chancellor Armin Laschet at a press conference on April 20, 2021 (Tobias Schwarz/Pool via AP)

Before the decisive vote on Monday evening, a whole series of notoriously right-wing party figures, including Bundestag (federal parliament) President Wolfgang Schäuble and former parliamentary group leader Friedrich Merz, had campaigned for Laschet.

In his first statements and interviews after the candidate selection, Laschet left no doubt that as chancellor he would continue and intensify the anti-working-class and militarist course of the grand coalition of the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats (SPD). This applies above all to the murderous “profits before lives” policy in the pandemic, which has already cost the lives of more than 80,000 people in Germany alone.

Speaking to the ARD programme “Farbe bekennen” (Show your colours) on Tuesday evening, Laschet defended the ruthless policy of opening up the economy in the interests of the corporations, which has once again led to a massive increase in the number of infections and deaths in recent weeks. “My line was very straightforward, and it still applies today. When incidence figures go down, you must roll back encroachments on fundamental rights,” he said. That had also been his “position last spring.”

Even then, the state government in NRW led by Laschet, in coalition with the Free Democratic Party (FDP), had ensured the unsafe return to businesses and schools, consciously calculating on the loss of human life. There will be “school communities that will have to mourn the death of teachers, school administrators or family members, which can sometimes have a sustained impact on school life and everyday school life,” declared NRW state Education Minister Yvonne Gebauer (FDP) in April 2020.

Laschet himself stands for the murderous herd immunity policy more than any other German state premier. He has repeatedly called for a quick end to all coronavirus measures. Most recently, he praised the decision to overturn the so-called “Easter truce” originally announced by the federal and state governments. It was necessary to get out of the “permanent cycle of lockdown” and “now open a new chapter,” he explained. “Pure closure” had “come to its end” and his state government would launch temporary projects “possibly quickly after Easter.”

At his first press conference as a candidate for chancellor on Tuesday, Laschet spoke openly about the interests behind the aggressive reopening policy: “We have big budgetary challenges after the pandemic.” He said that one was “currently alleviating many challenges by taking on debt. But sustainability means paying it back after the crisis, also in the interest of future generations.” There must be “no more of the same.”

That is unequivocal. The gigantic sums that have flowed into the accounts of large corporations and the super-rich as part of the coronavirus emergency aid packages are to be recovered from the working class through harsh social cuts and attacks on jobs and wages. And not only in Germany, but, as happened after the economic and financial crisis of 2008-2009, all over Europe. “We know we will not be strong in Germany if Europe is not strong,” said Laschet. “And therefore, our neighbours will also face great challenges after the pandemic, and we will also only be able to answer them together as Europeans.”

The herd immunity policy and social attacks at home go hand in hand with Laschet’s call for a more aggressive German-European foreign policy. “Our contribution as Europe must become more offensive in a world of authoritarian social models. We must fight for our values of freedom and solidarity and justice, of human dignity in this world,” he declared at the press conference.

Earlier, he had already positioned himself as a hardliner in a comprehensive foreign policy interview. Speaking with the chief correspondent of the Reuters news agency in Berlin, Andreas Rinke, in an interview which appeared under the headline, “I am a realpolitik politician” in the current issue of Internationale Politik magazine, he refused to be cast as a “Russia-appeaser” and called China “a geostrategic challenge.” At the centre stands the demand for a massive arms offensive to assert the interests of German and European imperialism worldwide—even independently of the USA.

“If you want a common European security policy, you also have to produce the means of defence together,” Laschet said. “If you want to speak the language of power, you also need the instruments of power.” Therefore, he said, “achieving NATO’s 2 percent target is not an American imposition but in our interest. We have to improve our own capabilities.”

By this, Laschet means the procurement of the most lethal weapons systems, with the declared aim of waging war. For example, the “European drone project,” which he “advocated in the coalition committee,” was a “European lighthouse project that stands for European capacity to act.”

To the question of whether Germany should “become more involved in foreign missions,” Laschet responded with an explicit defence of Germany’s war policy. The “mission with the French” in Mali, for example, was in the “German and European interest.” And if “the continued presence is necessary” in Afghanistan, where German troops have been stationed for two decades now, “the Bundeswehr will still remain.”

When Laschet criticises imperialist war policy, he does so from the right. In Libya, he was “in favour of intervention at the time for humanitarian reasons,” but “admits that the situation has not improved significantly since then.”

Laschet’s conclusion is not to end the murderous wars that have claimed millions of lives and reduced entire countries to rubble in recent years, but to make them more effective: “Interventions from outside do not only need a mandate under international law, they also need to be strategically thought through. Too many interventions aimed at ‘regime change’ have failed in the last 20 years, partly because too little thought has been given to the challenge of the period afterwards.”

To develop a German-European war capability, Laschet advocates close cooperation with France. With the Aachen Treaty, “numerous suggestions” of French President Emmanuel Macron “would already be taken up and supplemented by German proposals, such as cooperation in arms procurement, artificial intelligence, foreign policy or battery production.”

The question of a “common army” could also “certainly be a long-term perspective.” However, “first of all, we have to ensure that Europe acts together on security. We must strengthen PESCO [Permanent Structured Cooperation, part of the EU security and defence policy] and push ahead with joint projects.”

Significantly, in the Internationale Politik interview, Laschet advocated a possible “consensus” with the Greens precisely on foreign and defence policy. In the CDU-FDP-Green exploratory talks in 2017, they had “come very far” in foreign policy fields. He reminded those who were sceptical about cooperation with the Greens “of the Bundestag elections in 1998: at that time, it was also said that foreign policy, in particular, would make an alliance with the Greens difficult. And then the public experienced that the first German war mission since 1945, with the bombing of Belgrade, happened under an SPD-Green government of all things.”

The policies of militarism, social attacks and herd immunity are supported by the nominally left-wing parties in the Bundestag. The SPD’s candidate for chancellor and current finance minister, Olaf Scholz, increased the military budget only a few weeks ago by another five percent, to almost 50 billion euros. And with Annelena Baerbock, the Greens have also chosen an outspoken militarist as their candidate for chancellor on Monday.

The Left Party has also made it clear that it would fully support this reactionary course as part of a possible SPD-Left Party-Green government coalition at federal level. In interviews, the new party leaders Susanne Hennig-Wellsow and Janine Wissler have signaled their support for foreign deployments of the Bundeswehr. At the state level, the Left Party is already putting the “profits before lives” policy into practice with the parties of social cuts and war, the SPD and Greens.

In the “Farbe bekennen” programme, Laschet declared that the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) should not have any “influence on the shaping of German politics.” However, after the 2017 federal elections, all the establishment parties increasingly adopted the programme of the extreme right and integrated the AfD into the political system. Laschet himself has engaged in xenophobic agitation during the pandemic. When mass infections occurred in the slaughterhouses of meat billionaire Clemens Tönnies last year, he did not criticise the slave-like working conditions, but rather claimed that “Romanians and Bulgarians” had brought the virus in from their homeland.

With 30,000 daily COVID-19 cases, Macron reopens French schools

Will Morrow & Jacques Valentin

In a press conference last night, French Prime Minister Jean Castex confirmed that despite the more than 30,000 daily coronavirus cases in the country, the Macron government is proceeding with its plans to end the limited lockdown measures and reopen schools beginning this Monday.

All primary schools will reopen on Monday, as was originally announced by Macron at the end of March. They were closed for a single week before the two-week school holiday break. Middle schools and high schools are to return to school the following week, on May 3, with high school classes being organized on alternating schedules, with classrooms reduced to half the size.

French President Emmanuel Macron (Image Credit: AP Photo/Francois Mori)

In addition, the 10-kilometer restriction on travel away from home is being removed. Castex stated that the government is maintaining its projected timeline to reopen outdoor dining and cafes, cultural and sporting venues and certain stores in the “middle of May,” though this would be confirmed and subject to development of “the health situation.” He added that this may be implemented on a nationwide or region-by-region basis.

Castex announced this reopening policy even while admitting that the “number of daily cases remains slightly more than 30,000.” In comparison, when the Macron government ended the stricter lockdown in May 2020, which had involved the closure of schools and many non-essential workplaces over eight weeks, there were between less than a hundred and several hundred cases per day—or roughly 0.5 percent of the current levels. The government had claimed that its threshold for re-imposing a lockdown was then 5,000 cases per day.

In the period since, the health situation has become more dangerous, with the dominance of a more contagious variant, B.1.1.7, which now makes up almost all cases in France. Both Tuesday and Wednesday, there were more than 34,000 cases in France. On April 20, there were over 44,000 cases. The seven-day average of daily deaths remains at 300. Macron’s pursuit of a reopening of schools guarantees that the number of cases will continue to grow and that large numbers of people will die unnecessarily.

Three and a half weeks since the announcement by Macron of limited lockdown measures, the outcome has been a disaster. The seven-day average of new cases is 32,274, a decrease of only two percent from the week before. Approximately 31,000 people remain hospitalized. The number of people in intensive care units is close to 6,000.

The milestone of 100,000 deaths of coronavirus was passed on April 15. The number of daily deaths has never dropped below 250 since October 20. Mass death is the official policy of the Macron government in the face of the pandemic.

The rate of reproduction of the virus, or the r-rate, had fallen below 0.7 even during the limited lockdown of November 2020. Only in recent days has it fallen below 1 nationally. Even in the regional departments which are officially considered to be less at-risk, the r-rate is in some cases above 1, meaning that the virus is spreading exponentially.

Castex’s speech followed by just a day the Italian government’s formal approved of a decree codifying last Friday’s announcement by Prime Minister Draghi for a partial end to lockdown measures. Italian schools are to completely reopen beginning Monday, along with outdoor dining and cafes, museums and swimming pools. The current daily death rate in Italy is more than 300.

On a global scale, the coronavirus is developing into a new and more dangerous phase. The seven-day average of daily cases is at its highest level on record. In many countries in eastern Europe, Brazil, India, Brazil and elsewhere, the number of cases and deaths has reached new levels. Under these conditions, governments across Europe are abandoning the pretense of maintaining lockdown measures to fight against the spread of the virus and declaring that the reopening must continue regardless.

The motivation for this policy lies in the interests of the European capitalist class and its demand that non-essential industry must continue so that corporate profits can continue to grow. Schools are being kept open so that parents can be kept at work. This was the meaning of Macron’s statement at the end of March that it was necessary to consider the impact of further lockdowns on “the economy.”

Thus, on April 6, Macron reaffirmed his perspective for the reopening of schools as scheduled, regardless of the development of the health situation. “It is essential that we resume in-person classes for the kindergarten and primary schools on April 26, and for middle and high schools the following week. I have not conditioned the reopening of the kindergartens, primary, middle or high schools on any health indicators.”

Yet to the extent that cases were reduced over the last two-and-a-half weeks, the major contributing factor was the closure of schools for three weeks, due to the two-week holiday period. Now even this is being ended. The reopening of schools is being carried out with the active support of the trade unions, which support the policy of ensuring parents can remain at work.

The actual number of daily cases is likely significantly higher than the official total. According to the John Hopkins Institute, the number of daily tests in France dropped significantly, from 7.92 per thousand people on April 3 to 5.09 on April 16, likely due to a fall-off in testing during the holiday period.

Turkey summons Greek, French ambassadors over Mediterranean incident

Alex Lantier

Tensions continued to mount in the eastern Mediterranean this week, after the Turkish Foreign Ministry formally called in the Greek and French ambassadors for talks on Monday over a Franco-Greek naval excursion into waters claimed by Turkey. The incident points to mounting tensions among NATO member states in the eastern Mediterranean and across the Middle East and Africa, as French imperialism backs Greece against Turkey.

On April 15, Greece had provocatively posted a three-day NAVTEX announcement that the French oil exploration vessel L’Atalante would conduct research south of Crete and Rhodes. These waters in the eastern Mediterranean are claimed by both Turkey and Greece, whose claims have French backing. Athens provocatively timed the announcement to fall as Greek Foreign Minister Nikos Dendias met his Turkish counterpart Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu for what were billed as “confidence-building” talks in Athens.

A Greek Navy Ship at Malonas Bay, Rhodes. (Credit: Flickr.com/seligmanwaite)

Ankara replied with its own NAVTEX declaring that the area in question is in Turkey’s continental shelf, and that it did not recognize Greece’s authority to issue such an announcement. Ultimately, L’Atalante and the Greek frigate Elli entered the region despite the Turkish warning, on April 17, though they left the area after being intercepted by two Turkish frigates.

On Monday, the Turkish Foreign Ministry summoned Greek Ambassador to Turkey Michael-Christos Diamessis and French Ambassador Hervé Magro in protest. Remarkably, this summoning of ambassadors—a step reserved for serious diplomatic incidents—did not receive significant coverage or comment in French and international media, though it was widely reported in Turkish and Greek media.

Nonetheless, the Turkish Defense Ministry extended an offer on the same day to Athens to resume talks with Greek military officials on new “confidence-building measures.”

Athens rejected the olive branch offered by Ankara, however. On Tuesday, a Greek Foreign Ministry spokesman confirmed that the L’Atalante had been operating in a zone that Athens claims as its territorial waters under the terms of a Greek agreement with Egypt. The spokesman reported that the NAVTEX station at Iraklio, on Crete, had issued an announcement formally reiterating this position. The Greek embassy in Ankara also issued a formal protest to the Turkish authorities.

The Dendias-Çavuşoğlu talks during which Athens launched the naval provocation themselves blew up, after reportedly cordial discussions, when Dendias surprised Çavuşoğlu by publicly denouncing Turkey in the concluding press conference.

In fascistic language, Dendias denounced Turkey, alleging that it had failed to respect its reactionary deal with the European Union (EU) to prevent Middle Eastern refugees from fleeing via Turkey to Europe, by instead encouraging refugees to “storm” the Greek border. He said, “Concerning migration, I honestly believe that after last year’s incidents, Turkey should not try to teach Greece on anything about migration. … I believe the storming of our border was not the right thing to do.”

Dendias continued by rejecting Turkish proposals for demilitarization of the Greek islands off the Turkish Mediterranean and Aegean coasts, through which refugees have arrived via Turkey to Greece. “We have the army stationed on our islands because there is a threat,” Dendias declared, continuing: “Can anybody say there is no threat of landing units near our islands? If there is no such thing, please notify us.”

Dendias also reiterated that Athens rejects the agreement on territorial jurisdiction in the Mediterranean signed between Turkey and NATO’s Libyan puppet regime in Tripoli. Athens advances instead an alternative agreement on Mediterranean waters that it signed with the Egyptian military dictatorship of General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.

Çavuşoğlu replied that Ankara wants to “continue this dialogue without preconditions and we want to develop our relations with Greece in every field, as two neighbors and allies,” adding: “We wanted this first meeting to continue in a more positive atmosphere, but in his remarks, Nikos Dendias, unfortunately, made extremely unacceptable accusations against my country. … Turkey is capable of protecting its rights, especially in the eastern Mediterranean, and the rights of Turkish Cypriots.”

Greek media hailed Dendias’ provocative statements for having surprised and humiliated the Turkish government. The Greek City Times gloated that “Çavuşoğlu was so taken aback by Dendias’ response that he could only mutter out that the Greek foreign minister withdrew from a ‘positive’ dialogue.”

The provocative role played by Athens, supported by Paris, reflects mounting divisions inside NATO inflamed by three decades of imperialist war in the Balkans and the Middle East since the Stalinist dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. The region has been set aflame by NATO wars launched in Libya and Syria in 2011, after the revolutionary workers uprising in Egypt, and the 2014 NATO-backed putsch in Ukraine. Disputed eastern Mediterranean waters are not only coveted for their oil, but their strategic value for conflicts in Ukraine, Syria, Libya and Africa’s Sahel region.

France and Turkey have backed rival militias in the Libyan civil war between rival Islamist militias NATO had used to topple Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s regime in 2011. This embroiled the eastern Mediterranean in far-flung conflicts between shifting rival alliances of imperialist and regional Middle Eastern powers. As these conflicts mounted, French and Greek warships nearly clashed with Turkish warships last summer in the eastern Mediterranean.

Paris has stoked these conflicts as it faced the debacles of the NATO war for regime change in Syria and its wars in Libya and Mali. Its support is critical in encouraging far smaller Greece, (population 10.72 million, gross domestic product $194 billion), to provoke Turkey (population 82 million, GDP $649 billion).

This policy exposes the reactionary and politically criminal role of European imperialism. Billions of euros are being spent on conflicts and border provocations that threaten to unleash a bloody military escalation—even as France, Greece and Turkey see a new wave of COVID-19 infections and insist on “herd immunity” policies, claiming there is no money for lockdowns.

This week, reports broke that Greece plans to purchase six more French-made Rafale fighter jets, after negotiating a multi-billion-euro deal to purchase 18 Rafale jets last year. Greece also signed a record $1.65 billion contract with Israel for training Greek pilots last week, as well as an agreement on Patriot missiles and unspecified “regional issues” with the Saudi monarchy when Dendias visited Riyadh on Wednesday.

Last week, Ankara announced it would hold talks with the Sisi junta in Cairo, which has close ties with Paris and has defended Khalifa Haftar’s militia in Libya against the Tripoli regime. This was reportedly prepared by talks between Turkish and Egyptian intelligence. Çavuşoğlu said, “A Turkish delegation led by the deputy foreign minister will visit Cairo at the beginning of May, and after this visit, I will meet Egyptian foreign minister Sameh Shoukry. Egypt is an important country for the region, and we hope to take our relations to another level.”

This doubtless intensified anger against Turkey in ruling circles in Paris, which is reeling after one of its key allies in its war in Mali and the Sahel, Chadian President Idriss Déby, was killed in fighting with a Chadian “rebel” militia based in Libya.