Lifting of restrictions by German authorities sabotages vaccine progress

Gregor Link

The COVID-19 pandemic has claimed an average of about 200 lives per day over the past two months in Germany. After the seven-day incidence rate of cases per 100,000 people was brought below 100 due to the rollout of the first vaccine dose and the population’s efforts, the federal and state governments are seeking to outdo each other with reopening proposals. The effect will be to drive up the death toll. The basis for this is the new Federal Infection Protection Act.

In Lower Saxony, hotels are being reopened for residents of the state, and in Schleswig-Holstein and Bavaria, tourists from across the country have been permitted to travel since last Saturday and today, respectively.

Pupils crowd at a school center in Dortmund-Hacheney

In North-Rhine Westphalia, the most populous state in the country and one that has played a pioneering role throughout the pandemic in abandoning COVID-19 restrictions, all schools will return to in-person learning on 31 May, as long as the incidence in the district is below 100 per 100,000 inhabitants. Minister President Armin Laschet (Christian Democrats) declared that this must happen “as soon as possible” and “prior to the summer holidays.”

The state government knows full well that this will endanger tens of thousands of students and their families. Bodo Löttgen, a CDU deputy in the state parliament, reported on Wednesday that 135,421 children under the age of 19 have already been infected in North-Rhine Westphalia. This equates to 17.2 percent of all infections. Ten percent of hospitalised patients still complain of symptoms six months after their infection. Twelve children in the state are currently in intensive care.

Although infection rates among students are catastrophically high, and generally neither teachers nor parents are fully vaccinated, the federal and state governments are demanding a swift resumption of full-time in-person classes. Franziska Giffey (Social Democrats, SPD), who resigned as Family Affairs Minister on Wednesday, told RBB Radio on Tuesday,“If we’re talking about outdoor restaurants, then we also need to talk about how we get back to business as usual.”

The unsafe reopening of schools is a recipe for incalculable misery. According to a survey conducted by 723 epidemiologists, which was published by the New York Times on Saturday, around half said that the comprehensive inoculation of the entire population, including children, was a prerequisite for the lifting of other restrictions, including a return to full in-person learning.

In April, the federal Education Ministers Conference (KMK) insisted that school exams go forward despite the pandemic, and that this required “as much in-person learning as possible.” The ministers’ agreement claimed that students have been able to “prepare well for their final exams despite the pandemic situation”—an assertion that, notwithstanding the best efforts of teachers, can only be described as a blatant lie.

On Monday, KMK president Britta Ernst (SPD) rejected calls for the purchase of air filtration devices for every school, commenting that this would “not produce the breakthrough” and it would “still be necessary to continue opening windows to ventilate classrooms.” Ernst described the regular testing of students as a “major contribution to making our schools safer,” even though the rapid tests have been proven not to detect every infection.

Driven by the desire to maximize profits, the ruling class is working to trigger another wave of infections and sacrifice countless people.

Already, daily outbreaks, ignored with a shrug of the shoulders by the political establishment, demonstrate the dangers. For example, in the working class district of Velbert-Birth in North-Rhine Westphalia on Tuesday, an entire housing estate had to be sealed off after a mass outbreak was triggered by the B.1.617 variant. Of the 200 residents, 26 caught the virus.

This variant, which was first discovered in India, has been categorised as a variant of concern by the WHO and is regarded as extremely difficult to combat. It is already responsible for almost 2 percent of all infections in Germany, and current data suggests it is more infectious than the British B.1.1.7. In Britain, the Indian variant already accounts for 5 percent of all infections.

These realities expose the class character of the pandemic, which is hitting working class families with full force. The German and European governments refuse to close down all nonessential production, scrap the patents for vaccines, and distribute vaccines already available in a socially just way.

In Germany, almost five months after the beginning of the vaccine campaign, only 38.2 percent of the population had received a first dose as of Wednesday. Only 11.9 percent are fully vaccinated. According to an estimate by the Robert Koch Institute, only 5 percent of those aged under 59 have received a second dose, and even among those aged 80 and over, almost one third have not been fully vaccinated.

But the government has declared its intention to allow the future administration of vaccines to be left up to the free market and the right of the strongest.

To this end, federal Health Minister Jens Spahn announced the complete abandonment of the existing vaccine prioritisation groups by 7 June. He justified this by saying that it is necessary to accelerate the vaccine campaign. Prior to this, the states of Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria, Berlin, and Saxony announced they would allow doctors’ surgeries to vaccinate without adhering to priority groups.

The measure, which was criticised both by the German Ethics Council and the Patient Advocacy Foundation, is aimed above all at giving more privileged sections of the population access to the vaccine and strengthening the tourism industry.

Left Party parliamentary group leader Dietmar Bartsch even called for the abandonment of the priority groups before the end of the month. On the Anne Will talk show, he justified this by claiming that unused vaccine doses are being destroyed. A fact check performed by Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland confirmed that this is untrue.

On the contrary, according to a report by Der Spiegel, millions of people will still have to wait months for their first dose. Ulrich Weigeldt, the federal chair of the German General Practitioners’ Association, told the news magazine, “There won’t be more vaccinations for first doses, but initially less.” A statement from the Insured Doctors Association noted that the quantities ordered of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for first doses would be restricted to two vials per doctor’s surgery this week, which equates to between 12 and 14 vaccines per surgery each week.

The supply of vaccines from the US producer Johnson & Johnson and the British-Swedish pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca is being limited by trade war conflicts between the European Union, Britain, and the United States. After the US government shut down a factory of a Johnson & Johnson supplier due to a glitch, the EU recently announced it would not conclude any further contracts with AstraZeneca.

Referring to the expected supply shortages and the currently existing prioritisation rules for second doses, Der Spiegel concluded, “until 4 July, i.e., during the first four weeks after the ending of priority groups, there will be just over 10 million doses of BioNTech and Moderna for people not yet vaccinated.”

The consequences of the shortages are already visible. In Bavaria, the vaccine centres will not administer first doses for several weeks, because the limited supplies are fully taken up with second doses. The reasons for this are the changed recommendation from the Permanent Vaccine Commission for the AstraZeneca vaccine and the lengthening of the interval between the first and second doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, which led to an above average number of first doses being administered in April.

Viola Priesemann, head of a research group on dynamics and self-organisation at the Max Planck Institute in Göttingen, warned in a comment to Der Spiegel against “reopening and throwing away” the declining case numbers brought about by increased immunity through vaccinations. The decisive factor in slowing the spread of the pandemic was “the behaviour of the people.” Under these conditions, Priesemann continued, it would be possible to bring the seven-day incidence down to 50 per 100,000 inhabitants within three weeks. “If we open more than is permissible due to the progress of vaccinations, the decline could take eight weeks, or even be thrown into reverse.”

Israel announces ceasefire as UN says 90,000 Palestinians displaced by bombardment

Kevin Reed

The Israeli security cabinet voted unanimously late Thursday to a “mutual and unconditional” cessation of hostilities, according to a statement from the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

News reports said a ceasefire brokered by Egypt had been agreed to between Israel and the Palestinian groups, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and was set to take effect at 2:00 a.m. on Friday (7:00 p.m. Eastern Time). A Hamas official also confirmed the agreement with the Reuters news agency, saying the ceasefire would be “mutual and simultaneous.”

Palestinian mourners shout slogans and wave Palestinian flags during the funeral of Mohammad Kiwan, 17, whose family says he was killed in clashes with Israeli police Thursday, May 20, 2021. (AP Photo/Mahmoud Illean)

It is unclear how long the ceasefire will last before Israel resumes its decadeslong violence against the Palestinians. However, as the smoke clears, the massive toll of the Israeli onslaught on Gaza has come into view.

The Gaza Health Ministry reported on Thursday afternoon that at least 232 people have been killed, including 65 children, and more than 1,900 have been wounded by the Zionist regime. As of Wednesday, the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said that the casualties in the West Bank stood at 25 deaths, including four children, and 6,309 wounded. Total casualties in Israel were reported at 12 dead and 796 injured on Wednesday.

Meanwhile, the UN OCHA said on Thursday that more than 90,000 Palestinians have been displaced from their homes over the past 11 days by Israel’s assault on the Gaza Strip.

The OCHA report stated that hostilities resulted in additional displacements, bringing the cumulative number of “internally displaced persons (IDPs) to about 91,000, including 66,000 seeking protection in 58 UNRWA schools across Gaza and over 25,000 staying with host families.”

OCHA spokesman Jens Laerke also told the Turkish Anadolu Agency, “Overall, the situation remains alarming. Hostilities between Israeli forces and armed groups in Gaza continued for the ninth day yesterday, but at a lesser intensity. On the other hand, clashes between Palestinians and Israeli forces across the West Bank, including in East Jerusalem, intensified.”

In remarks at the White House after the announcement of the ceasefire, US President Biden fully backed Israel’s violent assault, declaring, “The United States fully supports Israel’s right to defend itself against indiscriminate rocket attacks by Hamas and other Gaza-based terrorist groups that have taken the lives of innocent civilians.”

Biden also said he “commended” the Israelis for bringing the immediate conflict to an end after 11 days and, during a call earlier in the day, the President “assured” Prime Minister Netanyahu of continued US military support.

Just one day before the ceasefire announcement, Biden was praising Netanyahu for making progress in “degrading the capabilities of Hamas and other terrorist elements.”

As reviewed yesterday on the World Socialist Web Site, responsibility for the murderous campaign by the Israeli Defense Forces on Gaza lies squarely with US imperialism. The bombardment of defenseless Palestinians is being carried out with weapons and funding provided by the US government and with the endorsement of both the Democrats and Republicans in Washington D.C.

Al Jazeera reported that Palestinians in Ramallah celebrated as the ceasefire took hold early Friday, according to correspondent Safwat al-Kahlout, who said the sounds of fireworks and gunshots into the air could be heard. “Thousands of people went into the street to celebrate,” al-Kahlout said as Palestinians considered the ceasefire to be a victory.

An example of the violence directed against innocent civilians was an Israeli air raid on a Gaza family home, which killed a Palestinian man with disabilities, his pregnant wife and their three-year-old daughter, as reported by Al Jazeera on Thursday.

Relatives and authorities said that Eyad Salha and his wife, both age 33, were preparing to eat lunch on Wednesday, when “a missile tore through the seaside building’s facade and destroyed all three rooms in their Deir el-Balah flat, in the central Gaza Strip,” Al Jazeera reported.

Salha’s brother said the man had been unable to walk for 14 years and was not an armed fighter. “What did my brother do? He was just sitting in his wheelchair. What did his daughter ever do? What did his wife do?” he told the AFP news agency.

Microsoft vs Indian Farmers: Agri-Stacking the System

Colin Todhunter

In April, the Indian government signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Microsoft, allowing its local partner CropData to leverage a master database of farmers. The MoU seems to be part of the AgriStack policy initiative, which involves the roll out of ‘disruptive’ technologies and digital databases in the agricultural sector.

Based on press reports and government statements, Microsoft would help farmers with post- harvest management solutions by building a collaborative platform and capturing agriculture datasets such as crop yields, weather data, market demand and prices. In turn, this would create a farmer interface for ‘smart’ agriculture, including post-harvest management and distribution.

CropData will be granted access to a government database of 50 million farmers and their land records. As the database is developed, it will include farmers’ personal details, profile of land held (cadastral maps, farm size, land titles, local climatic and geographical conditions), production details (crops grown, production history, input history, quality of output, machinery in possession) and financial details (input costs, average return, credit history).

The stated aim is to use digital technology to improve financing, inputs, cultivation and supply and distribution.

It seems that the blueprint for AgriStack is in an advanced stage despite the lack of consultation with or involvement of farmers themselves. Technology could certainly improve the sector but handing control over to powerful private concerns will merely facilitate what they require in terms of market capture and farmer dependency.

Such ‘data-driven agriculture’ is integral to the recent farm legislation which includes a proposal to create a digital profile of cultivators, their farm holdings, climatic conditions in an area, what is grown and average output.

Of course, many concerns have been raised about this, ranging from farmer displacement, the further exploitation of farmers through microfinance and the misuse of farmer’s data and increased algorithmic decision-making without accountability.

The displacement of farmers is not lost on the Research Unit for Political Economy (RUPE) which, in a three-part series of articles, explains how neoliberal capitalism has removed peasant farmers from their land to facilitate an active land market for corporate interests. The Indian government is trying to establish a system of ‘conclusive titling’ of all land in the country, so that ownership can be identified and land can then be bought or taken away.

Taking Mexico as an example, RUPE says:

“Unlike Mexico, India never underwent significant land reform. Nevertheless, its current programme of ‘conclusive titling’ of land bears clear resemblances to Mexico’s post-1992 drive to hand over property rights… The Indian rulers are closely following the script followed by Mexico, written in Washington.”

The plan is that, as farmers lose access to land or can be identified as legal owners, predatory institutional investors and large agribusinesses will buy up and amalgamate holdings, facilitating the further roll out of high-input, corporate-dependent industrial agriculture – which has already helped fuel wide-scale financial distress among farmers and a deep-rooted agrarian and environmental crisis.

By harvesting (pirating) information – under the benign-sounding policy of data-driven agriculture – private corporations will be better placed to exploit farmers’ situations for their own ends: they will know more about their incomes and businesses than individual farmers themselves.

Open letter

Some 55 civil society groups and organisations have written to the government expressing these and various other concerns, not least the perceived policy vacuum with respect to the data privacy of farmers and the exclusion of farmers themselves in current policy initiatives.

In an open letter, they state:

“At a time when ‘data has become the new oil’ and the industry is looking at it as the next source of profits, there is a need to ensure the interest of farmers. It will not be surprising that corporations will approach this as one more profit-making possibility, as a market for so-called ‘solutions’ which lead to sale of unsustainable agri-inputs combined with greater loans and indebtedness of farmers for this through fintech, as well as the increased threat of dispossession by private corporations.”

They add that any proposal which seeks to tackle the issues that plague Indian agriculture must address the fundamental causes of these issues. The current model relies on ‘tech-solutionism’ which emphasises using technology to solve structural issues.

There is also the issue of reduced transparency on the part of the government through algorithm-based decision-making.

The 55 signatories request the government holds consultations with all stakeholders, especially farmers’ organisations, on the direction of its digital push as well as the basis of partnerships, and put out a policy document in this regard after giving due consideration to feedback from farmers and farmer organisations. As agriculture is a state subject, the central government should consult the state governments also.

They state that all initiatives that the government has begun with private entities to integrate and/or share multiple databases with private/personal information about individual farmers or their farms be put on hold till an inclusive policy framework is put in place and a data protection law is passed.

It is also advocated that the development of AgriStack, both as a policy framework and its execution, should take the concerns and experiences of farmers as the prime starting point.

The letter states that if the new farm laws are closely examined, it will be evident that unregulated digitalisation is an important aspect of them.

There is the strong possibility that monopolistic corporate owned e-commerce ‘platforms’ will eventually control much of India’s economy given the current policy trajectory. From retail and logistics to cultivation, data certainly will be the ‘new oil’, giving power to platforms to dictate what needs to be manufactured and in what quantities.

Those farmers who remain in the system will be tied to contracts and told how much production is expected, how much rain is anticipated, what type of soil quality there is, what type of inputs are required and when the produce needs to be ready – and how much money they will receive.

Handing over all information about the sector to Microsoft and others places power in their hands – the power to shape the sector in their own image.

The data giants and e-commerce companies will not only control data about consumption but also hold data on production, logistics, who needs what, when they need it, who should produce it, who should move it and when it should be moved.

Bayer, Corteva, Syngenta and traditional agribusiness will work with Microsoft, Google and the big-tech giants to facilitate AI-driven farmerless farms and e-commerce retail dominated by the likes of Amazon and Walmart. A cartel of data owners, proprietary input suppliers and retail concerns at the commanding heights of the economy, peddling toxic industrial food and the devastating health impacts associated with it.

And elected representatives? Their role will be highly limited to technocratic overseers of these platforms and the artificial intelligence tools that plan and determine all of the above.

As for farmers, many if not most will be forced to leave the sector. Tens of millions unemployed and underemployed ‘collateral damage’ stripped of their means of production.

Centuries’ old knowledge of cultivation and cultural practices passed on down the generations – gone. The links between humans and the land reduced to an AI-driven technocratic dystopia in compliance with the tenets of neoliberal capitalism.

As it currently stands, AgriStack will help facilitate this end game.

Anger mounts at UK government proposal to halve arts education subsidy

Paul Bond

More than 160,000 in Britain have signed a petition against proposed cuts to funding of arts subjects. There has been widespread anger at the Conservative government’s call to halve its subsidy support for “courses that are not among its strategic priorities—covering subjects in music, dance, drama and performing arts; art and design; media studies; and archaeology.”

This is deepening of the wholesale attack on arts education and cultural provision, that will deny larger sections of working class youth access to the field.

The government is proposing a cut to the student subsidy support available from the Office for Students (OfS). Part of the £1.47 billion teaching budget, this helps institutions to fund teaching in high-cost subjects on top of tuition fees. The proposal would cut the subsidy for an individual student in the affected courses from £243 to £121.50.

The government launched an OfS “consultation” on the proposal. The OfS made clear the nature of this consultation, stating that it was “not consulting on the total amount of funding available for distribution,” as this is predetermined by the government’s grant. The consultation only “seeks views” on “a statutory guidance letter… which sets out the funds available… and the related funding policies and priorities that [the government] wishes us to implement.”

The exercise was to channel anger at the cuts in order to then implement the government’s proposals. These were laid out clearly in the statutory guidance letter, which proposed an increase to high-cost subject funding “for subjects identified as supporting the NHS [National Health Service] and wider healthcare policy, high-cost science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects and/or specific labour market needs.”

This would be offset by “A reduction by half to high-cost subject funding for other price group C1 subjects—that is, for courses in performing and creative arts, media studies and archaeology.”

The OfS sought to downplay the impact of the cuts, telling the Guardian that they “relate to a small fraction of how these courses are funded, equating to a reduction of… 1 percent of overall funding.” The spokesperson insisted again that the OfS “has a fixed funding budget that is set by government,” while pointing to a government commitment to deepen these cuts. The “difficult decisions about how to prioritise our increasingly constrained budget” were based on the understanding that it “will have to stretch further in the coming years.”

This was laid out by Education Secretary Gavin Williamson in his statutory guidance letter, where he wrote, “The OfS should reprioritise funding towards the provision of high-cost, high-value subjects… We would then potentially seek further reductions in future years.

Education Secretary Gavin Williamson (credit: Wikimedia Commons-Kuhlmann/ MSC)

The proposal exemplifies the government’s attitude towards funding for wider education generally and about broader cultural questions specifically. For the ruling class, education is a functional tool of capitalist production and exploitation in what Williamson called “high-value subjects.” On this basis, access to culture, much less active involvement in its creation, should be of no concern to working class youth.

Williamson told the Conservative Home blog that the proposals would enable the OfS “to crack down on low quality courses” and allow students to “embrace the opportunities offered by degree apprenticeships, higher technical qualifications, modular learning and our flagship Institutes of Technology.”

Lest anyone miss his point, he added, “The record number of people taking up science and engineering demonstrates that many are already starting to pivot away from dead-end courses that leave young people with nothing but debt.”

What leaves students with “nothing but debt” is the punitive tuition fee and student loan system, introduced by Tony Blair’s 1997 Labour government and hiked up by successive governments.

The Treasury sees the current student loan scheme as unaffordable. Peers have warned that the scheme would cost around £1 trillion by 2040, with nearly 83 percent of loans never being repaid in full because graduates are not meeting the £27,295 a year salary threshold at which repayments begin.

A cut in tuition fees, from the present £9,250 to a maximum of £7,500 a year, is under discussion. To these ends Williamson is spearheading his attack on the arts and humanities, where the government calculates it stands to lose the most revenue.

The government is backing a cuts agenda already well underway. London South Bank intends to stop teaching history and human geography. Hull University is axing foreign language degrees. Aston University has plans to close its history and language department. Among the areas threatened by Leicester University’s savage redundancy programme is the teaching of Mediaeval and Modern Literature in the English department, a plan described by University of Bristol scholars as “cultural vandalism.”

The brunt of this savagery will fall on the arts and humanities in the newer universities, underscoring the class character of the attack. For the ruling class, culture is their preserve. The Department for Education assured the Independent, “High-quality provision in a range of subjects is critical,” so they had asked OfS to allocate “an additional £10 million to our world-leading specialist providers, including several top arts institutions.”

The OfS proposals would also see “The withdrawal of the allocation and weightings that support the additional costs of London compared to other regions.”

Beyond its impact on working class students in London, this will have an adverse effect on the arts. Six arts, design, fashion and performing arts colleges were federated into the University of the Arts London in 2003, which has a central focus for arts training and study.

The Contemporary Visual Arts Network organised an open letter of protest, focused on the place of the arts in the economy, noting, “The creative industries contributed £116bn in Gross Value Added in 2019 and support one in every 16 jobs.” All of this is based on arts education, with some two-thirds of employees in the sector having a degree, “evidencing the value of the universities and schools of art.”

The #ArtIsEssential campaign will be holding a digital protest on June 10. The letter, issued as part of the protest, was signed by more than 300 figures in the art world, including directors of the Tate galleries, the Whitechapel Gallery, the Serpentine Gallery, Manchester Art Gallery, and many university departments.

As well as the economic place of the arts, the letter spoke of “the essential role they play in the long-term cultural infrastructure, creative ambition and wellbeing of the nation.”

The Visual Arts Alliance emphasised the economic aspects of the cuts resulting from fewer arts courses being offered, as well as a decline in the number of skilled workers in the creative industries. Director Sharon Heal expressed the Museum Association’s concern at the proposed cuts. “The areas affected, including archaeology, art and music, are vital to a flourishing culture sector, and we urge the government to support entry to careers in these areas through a variety of routes including higher education and for people from all backgrounds.”

The Public Campaign for the Arts petition described the halving of subsidy funding to arts subjects as “an attack on the future of UK arts, the creative potential of the next generation, and the people who deliver our world-leading arts courses.”

The petition, which has received over 160,000 signatures, opposes “segregating and devaluing the arts in this way.” It calls for “important investment in creative skills, ensuring that arts courses are widely accessible and properly supported.”

It is not a question of deciding between alternatives for funding. The arts and cultural life must be accessible to all, and they require funding for training and education. Billions must be made available for arts and cultural studies and these subjects integrated into a comprehensive and universal education programme. This requires the establishment of workers’ ownership and democratic control of the banks and corporations and the wealth of the super-rich.

More than £100 billion in UK National Health Service contracts handed to private sector over last decade

Ben Trent

Nearly £100 billion in government health spending has gone to non-National Health Service (NHS) firms over the last decade.

In 2010, £8.4 billion was already annually flowing to private firms, but the last decade has seen this ratcheted up by 72 percent to £14.4 billion, according to data provided to the Guardian by the Labour Party. According to the research, £96.99 billion has been handed over in the last ten years, mainly to private sector conglomerates.

Even this is likely an underestimate. Gaps in the data for 2011-2013 mean the amount likely easily surpasses £100 billion.

The Conservative government has signaled its intent to further bankroll the private sector, proposing last year to spend £10 billion—across four years—on outsourcing knee and hip replacement surgeries. This is being justified on the pretext of reducing NHS waiting lists for treatment. The list currently stands at 4.7 million—a number that shot up over the last 12 months and is entirely down to the Tories’ criminal handling of the Covid pandemic.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock speaking at a government Covid-19 press conference inside No10 Downing Street (credit: picture by Andrew Parsons/No 10 Downing Street—Flickr)

This is still significantly less than the amount gifted to the private sector at the start of the pandemic to take on non-Covid patients. The mouthpiece for British capital, the Financial Times, admitted that the pay deal to the private sector at the start of the pandemic was to “[shore] up private health groups that would otherwise have struggled to survive.”

Handing over billions in public funds is central to the government’s NHS white paper released in February. It endorses a roll out of “Integrated Care Systems” (ICS), combining NHS trusts and GPs, with a single budgetary pot for the acquisition of external services. The ICSs no longer need to tender contracts but can award directly to anyone. Private companies are able to sit on ICS boards, as well as provision for them.

Commenting on the white paper, the WSWS explained that it would also formalise the “process of privatisation and outright cronyism” which has seen contracts for vast sums of money awarded to private sector friends and donors of the Johnson government. The paper gives the government more direct control of the NHS, with the health minister becoming the head of NHS England, clearing an even more direct path between the party in government, their donors and NHS services.

The government announced through the Queen’s Speech earlier this month that the white paper proposals will soon be made law.

In the last few weeks, various obscene examples of private sector involvement in the health service have been made public. Last month, the WSWS wrote on the significance of the 37 GP surgeries taken over by the US insurance company, Centene—a company facing fraud allegations in the state of Ohio—giving it responsibility for the primary health care of 530,000 patients.

The WSWS also reported on contracts awarded to pandemic profiteers, with one report noting that £3.7 billion worth of contracts awarded to track and trace, PPE and other pandemic-related health care systems and initiatives were “red flagged” for potential corruption as those receiving the contracts were politically connected. A staggering £1.6 billion worth of PPE contracts (comprising 14 tenders) were awarded to entities with known connections to the Conservative Party.

Through various means, the government is attempting to obfuscate its privatisation project. It has used the pandemic as a justification for making continued private incursions into the NHS, while starving it of much-needed funds.

According to a joint study by London School of Economics and the Lancet medical journal published this month, spending on the NHS, social care and public health needs to rise by £102 billion over the next decade, if it is to provide the health care required by the population in the wake of the pandemic. The LSE’s Dr Michael Anderson—the study’s joint research lead—commented, “Without concerted action and increased funding we risk the UK falling further behind other high-income countries in health outcomes and life expectancy, continued deterioration in service provision and worsening inequalities, increased reliance on private funding and an NHS that is poorly equipped to respond to future major threats to health.”

A mobile endoscopy suite run by the In-Health corporation at a National Health Service hospital (credit: WSWS media)

Allyson Pollock, the director of the Newcastle University Centre for Excellence in Regulatory Science and an expert in health service financing noted in the Guardian that years of gutting the health service left it crippled at the onset of the pandemic, and unable to provide an effective test-and-trace system. The government decided to spend an estimated £37 billion to “[construct] a parallel privatised test-and-trace system... outsourcing these crucial services to private Lighthouse laboratories and companies with little experience in public health.” Blatant profiteering allowed one firm involved, Serco, to pay dividends for the first time in seven years, worth around £17 million, as well as a profitable renumeration package for its CEO at just under £5 million.

While the recent data provided by Labour draws attention to the corrupt policies of the Tory government during the pandemic, this is aimed at political point scoring and not based on any principled opposition.

Labour’s track record on the NHS over the last decades is no better than the Tories’. Conservative prime ministers Margaret Thatcher and John Major set out the initial reforms to open up the NHS for privatisation with the introduction of Hospital Trusts and “internal markets”. After Tony Blair’s 1997 election victory for Labour, numerous hospitals were built under lucrative Private Finance Initiatives (PFI) at a vast cost to the taxpayer and various reforms implemented to develop the NHS internal market.

In 2012, David Cameron’s Conservative/Liberal Democrat government passed the Health and Social Care Act, opening up NHS trusts to massive levels of private sector involvement. The act introduced Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) and allowed foundation trusts to receive 49 percent of their income from outside the NHS, ie. from private sources.

In opposition, Labour under every leader from Ed Miliband to Jeremy Corbyn and current leader Sir Keir Starmer have offered up at best token opposition to the moves by the Tories to eviscerate the NHS and hive it off to their private sector mates.

Operating as the de facto coalition partner of the Tories, Labour voted in favour of the draconian Coronavirus Act 2020 and has consistently voted to renew this draconian legislation under which the Conservatives have been able to hasten their plans to break up the NHS, forcibly disbanding a protest of NHS workers and arresting the organiser this March. The protest was called over the government’s insulting offer of a 1 percent pay increase for NHS workers, which Labour “opposed” with a muted call for an equally insulting 2.1 percent.

The defence of the NHS will not come from the Labour Party or its adjuncts in the trade union bureaucracy. The trade unions have continually betrayed NHS workers’ struggles for even the most meagre of demands. Three years ago, the unions sold out struggles over pay by health care workers, with the so-called “best deal in eight years”. The stitch-up resulted in a vote of no confidence in the leadership of the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) being passed by the membership.

Health care workers on the move throughout the world in a fight for patient safety and a living wage

Alfred Kurosawa & Norisa Diaz

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to rage across the globe, governments everywhere are abandoning all mitigation efforts. A fierce opposition is brewing among workers all over the globe, particularly among health care workers who are standing up in defense of patients and society at large.

Healthcare workers demand better working conditions and more COVID-19 vaccines during a protest outside the Clinicas Hospital in San Lorenzo, Paraguay, Wednesday, May 19, 2021. (AP Photo/Jorge Saenz)

The Biden administration, along with its counterparts in Western Europe are continuing their campaign to reopen society, no matter the human cost. This campaign has been accompanied by media blackouts on daily cases, deaths and infections. In reality, 700,000 people around the world are testing positive for COVID-19, fueling mutations and undermining the very vaccines which are painted as a silver bullet. Vaccines, moreover, have only been accessible to less than five percent of the global population and are highly concentrated in the high-income countries.

Workers, including large numbers of health care workers are beginning to fight back across the globe. The outbreak of strikes and protests have erupted on every inhabited continent.

Workers in India are facing a nightmare of epic proportions. Over one million people have died and the country’s infections account for half of all global infections. At least 150 bodies have been dumped on the banks of the Ganges River as hospitals run out of oxygen and have negative capacity as patients line hallways and are packed in storage closets.

In the over 17 months since COVID-19 has emerged, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have done nothing to support the inadequate and poorly funded health care systems in the country, an international phenomenon that exposes the conscious disregard for human life by the global elite.

Junior doctors, who are still trainees, are striking against the inadequate resources and dangerous conditions at all hospitals in the country where at least a quarter have become infected and have no access to vaccines. Dr. Arvind Meena, president of the Junior Doctors association (JUDA), explained that “Twenty-five percent of junior doctors have been infected by coronavirus to date. We are demanding a guarantee of bed allotment for the junior doctors who get infected.”

Doctors are striking in Madhya Pradesh, a state located in the center of India, demanding better conditions as they too fall ill from this virus during a devastating surge of the pandemic. Doctors in Madhya Pradesh report being stretched thin, working up to 48 hours straight in hospitals that have unimaginable patient loads.

In Gujarat, to the west of Madhya Pradesh, and Punjab, a state in India’s northern region bordering Pakistan, many other health care workers are going on strike over working conditions. In Gujarat, teachers at medical colleges and Junior doctors are demanding higher non-practicing allowance in line with 7th pay commission recommendations and the abolition of control appointments. In Punjab, the government has responded to a week-long strike for the regularization of their services by terminating all those who sought to continue it. Of the approximate 3,000 participants, about 1,400 stayed striking and were terminated on the grounds that they were endangering people through COVID-19 with this mass gathering.

In Israel, hundreds of doctors went on strike last week in various regions demanding job protection as they face layoffs. This past Monday, 600 doctors went on a 24-hour strike in opposition to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision to cut funding to the health care system which will lead to layoffs. One doctor who supports the demands of the strike, Dr. Zeev Feldman, speaking to The Times of Israel explained: “...it’s clear without 600 doctors who are central to treating patients, the quality of care will suffer. We won’t allow this.”

Israel has had over 830,000 cases and at least 6,300 deaths. Health care workers have been pushed to the brink, with long hours, and grueling patient loads. “After the state cheered the physicians and gave them lots of praise during the crisis, it’s quite clear that things are returning to the old situation where health isn’t a priority and all emphasis in funding goes to security. This should not be allowed to happen,” said one supporter of the strike, Professor Nadav Davidovich.

The strike by doctors came during the escalation of attacks on Palestinians by heavily armed Israeli police and military forces that carried out a deadly airstrike on Gaza that very day. Already in a nightmare, doctors are caring for both COVID-19 patients and injured civilians in what has become an open warzone.

On May 5th in France, midwives went on a national one day strike against lack of PPE, vaccines and pay. Days later, on May 11th, French nurses from over 110 Intensive Care Units (ICU) protested, demanding more staff and better wages.

On May 7th, Bolivian health care workers held a 24-hour strike in opposition to the Emergency Sanitary Law, which bans protests and strikes. They also demanded that overdue salaries be paid, and a clear vaccine policy be presented, as they enter their third wave of the pandemic.

In Japan, health care workers have waged online protests which have resulted in hundreds of thousands of tweets opposing the government policy of sending workers to care for athletes and visitors in the Tokyo Summer Olympics. In response to the request for 500 Japanese nurses to work the event, one nurse from Nagoya, Japan, Mikito Ikeda is quoted saying: “Beyond feeling anger, I was stunned at the insensitivity. It shows how human life is being taken lightly...It’s hard for a hospital to go without one nurse and they want 500. Why do they even think this is possible?”

On Friday, 30,000 New Zealand public sector nurses and health care assistants voted to strike over “horrific and unsafe staffing conditions.” The announcement comes on the heels of a three-year freeze in wages announced by the Labour-Greens government for all public servants earning more than $NZ60,000.

NZ Nurses Organisation (NZNO) spokesperson said nurses were “absolutely furious” at the announcement as most have already progressed to the last step of their pay scale. NZNO members had already rejected a derisory annualised increase of 1.38 percent offer from the 20 District Health (DHBs).

In the New England region of the United States, health care workers in Massachusetts and Connecticut are also on the move. In Worcester, Massachusetts 700 nurses at St. Vincent hospital are entering into their 11th week of an open-ended strike demanding safe staff to patient ratios and PPE that determine life or death outcomes of patients. Tenet Healthcare, which owns the hospital, responded last week by threatening to terminate and permanently replace the nurses.

The threat of layoffs came just as Democrat Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont tapped the National Guard to intimidate over 5,000 nursing home workers fighting for a living wage and safe staffing.

Health care workers have been treated as expendable across the world, and their protests expose the opposition to the homicidal policy of “herd immunity” as well as the unsafe and exhausting conditions. Under these conditions, the trade unions, where they exist, have done everything possible to smother opposition.

As India’s daily COVID-19 deaths reach new high, Modi opposes free vaccinations

Wasantha Rupasinghe

Although India’s new daily COVID-19 infections dropped this week below 300,000 for the first time in almost a month, the official death toll reached record highs on successive days, with 4,329 fatalities registered on Tuesday and 4,529 on Wednesday.

Making the situation even worse, the pandemic has found new breeding grounds in India’s remote and rural areas, where more than 65 percent of the country’s population—over 800 million mostly oppressed and impoverished people—reside. Health care facilities are virtually nonexistent in rural areas.

People wait to receive COVID-19 vaccine in Mumbai, India, Thursday, April 29, 2021. (AP Photo/Rajanish Kakade)

As horrific as the official infections and death tallies are, they are widely seen by health experts as gross underestimates of the true extent of India’s COVID-19 catastrophe. Some scientists project that the real number of deaths in India’s “second wave” of the pandemic, which began in mid-February, is between five and 10 times higher than the official figure. This would mean that tens of thousands of people are currently dying from COVID-19 every single day.

Responsibility for this disastrous state of affairs lies squarely with Modi, his far-right Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government and India’s venal capitalist elite, which less than two months ago were still boasting about India’s purported exemplary management of the pandemic. Modi systematically ignored warnings from his scientific advisers about the developing second wave, which was driven by new and more infectious variants—including the B.1.617 strain, which was first identified in India and has now spread around the world. Instead, Modi continued to insist, as his government has done for over a year, that nothing can be allowed to get in the way of corporate profits. Even as the official daily death toll reached 3,000 in mid-April and India emerged as the epicentre of the global pandemic, Modi declared that it was necessary to “save India from lockdown,” not from the virus.

The government’s vaccine rollout, which is in complete disarray, is of a piece with Modi’s “profits before lives” strategy. His government is categorically refusing to provide free vaccines to the Indian population, which in practice means that hundreds of millions of impoverished people will go without. The BJP government has also left vaccine production and a significant portion of vaccine distribution to private companies, which are raking in huge profits thanks to the exorbitant costs the government has allowed them to charge. In addition to further enriching India’s fabulously wealthy elite, the Modi government took the decision to rely on private companies so as to showcase the prowess of Indian capitalist enterprise to the world.

The result of this policy is that India has one of the highest prices in the world for COVID-19 vaccines. Covishield, which is based on the vaccine developed by AstraZeneca and manufactured by the Serum Institute of India, costs $12 per dose, while Covaxin, produced by Bharat Biotech, is priced at $17 per dose. Both vaccines require two doses. To put this into perspective, a recent report noted that the pandemic has pushed a further 235 million Indians below the government “poverty line,” which is a set at an income of 375 rupees or about $5 per day. Thus, for a substantial section of the population, the vaccines are effectively out of reach.

In an interview with India Today TV on May 15, Dr. Devi Shetty, a member of the Supreme Court-appointed national task force for devising a scientific mechanism for distributing medical oxygen, remarked, “How many people in the country can afford this kind of money for vaccination? The last few months have been very difficult for the working class and the poor. There has been no source of income for many.”

Compared to the lavish sums of money spent on India’s military and the obscene levels of wealth piled up by the country’s billionaires—who, according to Forbes, saw their wealth nearly double over the past year to $596 billion—the cost of vaccinating everyone over the age of 18 is a pittance. The total cost has been calculated at $6.4 billion, or a mere 0.32 percent of India’s GDP, a small fraction of the 2020 defence budget of more than $71 billion.

The Indian ruling elite’s refusal to spend this minuscule amount to protect the population from the virus is in keeping with its chronic underfunding of health care more generally. For decades, the Indian state, that is all levels of government combined, have spent the equivalent of just 1.5 percent of GDP on health care.

This malign neglect has been compounded by the imperialist powers’ criminal response to the pandemic. Led by the US, they have refused to waive the pharmaceutical giants’ vaccine patents, and blocked the export of vaccines and the materials required to produce them. Hundreds of millions of doses have been stockpiled by the United States in a reactionary move to transform potentially life-saving vaccines into yet another weapon in American imperialism’s extensive military and diplomatic arsenal.

Last month WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus revealed that as of early April low-income countries had administered just 0.2 percent of the more than 700 million vaccine doses administered globally, while the wealthiest countries had received more than 87 percent. “There remains a shocking imbalance in the global distribution of vaccines,” he remarked. “On average in high-income countries, almost one in four people has received a vaccine. In low income countries, it is one in more than 500. Let me repeat that: one in four versus one in 500.”

When the Indian government launched its vaccine campaign in mid-January, Modi boasted that it would be the “world’s largest vaccination program.” Initially, the program was restricted to those aged over 60 and people aged 45 or over with comorbidities. People aged between 18 and 44, that is, nearly 600 million people, were included in the program as of May 1, even though the government well knew that it did not have the requisite vaccines, and that this would cause further chaos and hardship.

As of May 15, India, the world’s second-most populous country with 1.38 billion people, has administered just 182 million vaccine doses, according to Our World in Data. Merely 40.4 million people, or just 3 percent of the entire population, have been fully vaccinated.

The total population above 18 years old in India is about 966 million. This means approximately 1,93 billion doses of vaccines would be required to vaccinate everyone within 12 months, which translates into 5.4 million doses per day. The production capacity of the main two private vaccine manufacturers in India is limited to 3.8 million doses a day.

The miserable balance sheet of India’s vaccination campaign is the direct result of the Modi government’s focus on using it as a means to advance the economic and geopolitical interests of the ruling elite, not protecting the population from the deadly coronavirus. Its determination to rely solely on private enterprises, even though they lack the necessary production capacity to supply the Indian population, flows from the relentless pursuit of pro-investor policies by the entire political establishment for the past three decades. The BJP government also saw it as imperative to tout “made in India” vaccines under conditions where India is competing with China as a cheap labour platform for global investment, and lining up behind Washington in challenging Beijing militarily and diplomatically in the Indo-Pacific.

The reliance on the private sector for the distribution and administration of the vaccines is throwing up further barriers to substantial sections of the population getting inoculated. After the central government negotiated the purchase of 50 percent of total purchased vaccine doses, which have been designated for those aged 45 and over, it left the states and private hospitals to negotiate their own terms with the private manufacturers for 25 percent each. SII and Bharat Biotech were given a free hand to charge whatever prices they saw fit.

The result of this arrangement is that a disproportionate amount of India’s vaccine production is flowing to large private hospital groups, who are willing to outbid the states. A Times of India report noted that four major health care groups, Apollo, Max, Fortis and Manipal, are securing the lion’s share of vaccines. These vaccines are, in turn, overwhelmingly directed towards better-off layers of the population who can afford the extortionate price of between 1,000 and 1,200 rupees that private hospitals are charging patients on average per dose.

On the other hand, the rural population, which is facing a major surge in infections, is being sidelined, because the major private hospitals have virtually no presence in rural areas. While 30 percent of inhabitants of urban districts had received a first vaccine dose as of May 14, only between 12 and 15 percent of residents in rural and semi-rural districts had gotten a first shot.

Global excess deaths during the pandemic range from 7 to 13 million lives lost according to new estimate

Benjamin Mateus

Last week, the Economist published a special report, a modeling study looking at excess deaths attributable to the COVID-19 pandemic globally. As of May 2021, they concluded, there have been 7.1 to 12.7 million excess deaths worldwide. Their central estimate places the toll at 10.2 million people—three times the official figures—who would have otherwise been living today, had the world’s governments responded in earnest to the threat posed by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus.

As the Economist explained, the number of fatalities officially reported country by country grossly underestimates the actual figures. This is a result of the lack of testing to confirm the cause of death and a lag in registering deaths. Inundated health systems also mean people who died at home have never been counted. Using “excess deaths,” a process that counts the number of people who die in a region and compares it to historical baselines, statistical models can be developed to address the question of the actual death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic.

A worker in protective suits takes a break amid graves at a newly opened cemetery for the victims of COVID-19 in Medan, North Sumatra, Indonesia, Monday, Nov. 16, 2020. (AP Photo/Binsar Bakkara)

They write, “Using known data on 121 variables, from recorded deaths to demography, geography, and mobility, we have built a pattern of correlations that lets us fill in gaps where numbers are lacking.” However, for the same reasons mentioned, many countries cannot provide reliable figures for excess deaths. Much of the available data was extracted from the data set kept at the Kohelet Economic Forum, an Israeli think-tank, with the World Mortality Dataset project.

According to Sondre Ulvund Solstad, the Economist ’s senior data journalist, “The challenge becomes estimating excess deaths where they are unknown. You don’t just want to spit out a number and say, here is the truth, because the truth is you can’t know the exact number of excess deaths. The data doesn’t exist. So, what we have done and have invested tremendous effort in doing is to provide ranges that capture the variations that is possible…we tried to collect as much data as we could on all sorts of indicators so that if some data was missing at least, we would have some moderate data that could fill in.” He also explained that when data was missing, it was recorded as such, noting that “it says something in itself.”

He added that lack of data is most severe for low- and middle-income countries. “In these places, testing is less widespread mostly because it is expensive and not something elected officials there like to prioritize. We also suspect that in some countries governments would not want to prioritize testing because it would reveal how bad the pandemic really is.”

After the pandemic ravaged through Wuhan city and Hubei province in China, the coronavirus swept through the “rich world,” then moving into more isolated and internationally connected developing regions, causing mass amounts of fatalities. “Deaths have been rising for most of the past year [33 out of 52 weeks] and every month. That is not total deaths, but deaths per day. What we are seeing now is another spike by what’s happening in India.”

According to their modeling, India is experiencing 6,000 to 31,000 excess deaths per day, far above the 4,000 daily deaths reported. Their estimates are corroborated by other epidemiological models that place the numbers in the same range. If these are correct, then just in 2021 alone, more than one million have perished in India from COVID-19.

Solstad explained, “Unfortunately, India is not an outlier. Many country’s modeling suggests they have been hit much harder than India. For instance, Peru, which is one of the worst hit in the world, has seen deaths per person per million population about 2.5 times what we currently estimate as to the case in India.”

The Economist model estimates that as of May 10, 2021 deaths in Asia ranged from 2.4 to 7.1 million excess deaths while the official COVID-19 deaths are around 0.6 million. Russia, by example, has an excess COVID-19 death rate of more than five times the official report. While Latin America and the Caribbean have reported 0.6 million COVID-19 fatalities, the number of excess deaths is 1.5 to 1.8 million.

In Africa, the range peaks at 2.1 million deaths, though the official figure stands at close to 130,000, an estimated death rate 14 times the official numbers. With a reported 55,000 COVID-19 deaths, South Africa has recorded 158,499 excess deaths. Health officials believe 85 to 95 percent are directly attributable to SARS-CoV-2, highlighting the difficulty to access tests and health care. Those over 60 have seen an excess death of over 120,000.

Excess deaths in Europe stand at 50 to 60 percent higher, 1.5 to 1.6 million, than the official COVID-19 death figures. Estimates for the US and Canada combined are between 600,000 to 700,000. They calculated that excess deaths in the US are only seven percent higher than the official COVID-19 deaths implying that the actual COVID-19 mortality is just over 650,000.

By the numbers, the working class of rich countries has faced the brunt of the pandemic where “herd immunity” was the de facto policy. But the modeling also tells the story of a very fast-moving pathogen that infects quickly, even the youngest. In a report published in the Journal of Public Health on April 12, 2021, a seroprevalence anti-SARS-COV-2 antibodies study conducted on 1,675 blood samples collected from residents in Karachi, Pakistan, from May to July 2020 found that 34 percent of the community’s population had contracted the virus implying its high prevalence early in the course of the pandemic across many regions.

Solstad explained that age must be taken as a significant factor, meaning that older populations face a much higher consequence from the coronavirus. The estimate of the risk of dying from COVID-19 in Japan, for instance, where the median age is 48 versus in Uganda, where it is 17, is thirteen times higher. Yet, when age is accounted for, the younger population in developing countries faces a higher consequence from the coronavirus than their counterparts in more affluent regions simply because of the lack of health care resources.

The Economist notes the study published by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington on May 7, 2021 which estimates nearly 7 million excess deaths globally. They explained that the IHME applied fixed multipliers based on test-positivity rates to obtain estimates. Such a method can fail to match reported excess deaths as evidenced by their estimates for Japan and the US. But they applaud their effort highlighting the need for accurate data, which is woefully lacking. As they write, “Resources should be put into such measures not just to honor the dead and the truth, but also because, without such basic numbers, estimates of other impacts—economic, educational, cultural or in the health of survivors—are hard to understands, or to compare.”

One would think that such a devastating account of the actual toll of the COVID-19 pandemic’s human cost would make the front-page story of the leading press. The editorial boards would insist on opinion pieces that would explain to their readers the failures on the part of their respective governments to prepare for global threats. There may even be a statement by the paper calling for real-time data for every middle- and low-income country to address the grossly inadequate metrics to address medical and humanitarian needs in these regions. The British Journal of Medicine (BMJ) published a critical essay in February declaring the handling of the pandemic as tantamount to “social murder.”

Yet, there has not been any mention of this scathing report, which underscores the malign neglect pursued by the capitalist elite. The lives of these ten million are immaterial for them. The pandemic has shown that mass death is highly lucrative for the financial oligarchs. They increased their combined wealth by 60 percent, from $8 trillion to $13.1 trillion in 2020. The number of billionaires quadrupled to 2,775, the highest rate of increase in history. In short, the coronavirus has been a critical instrument for amassing ever greater piles of wealth.

As the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response (IPPPR) noted, almost every wealthy nation chose not to heed the World Health Organization (WHO) warnings at the end of January 2020, when the virus was declared a global threat. The wasted month in February 2020 helped seed the pathogen throughout every region of the world, leading Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreysus to declare the coronavirus epidemic a pandemic on March 11, 2020.

Over the intervening months, wave after wave of horrific COVID-19 surges compelled many countries to implement lockdowns to stem a complete collapse of their health care systems, bodies piling up in the corridors and backroom of hospitals and morgues. Health care workers without proper equipment, staffing, and emergency supplies were sent back into the deluge to shore up the crumbling edifice. Presently, Amnesty International has placed the figure of health care workers lost to COVID-19 at over 17,000.

While the wealth of the billionaires shot up, the pandemic led to the worst global economic crisis since the Great Depression. In April 2020 alone, 20.6 million jobs were wiped out in the United States. According to a collaborative study from the University of Chicago and Stanford, they estimate that 32 to 42 percent of the COVID-induced layoffs will be permanent. Despite the push to reopen the economy full throttle, the current trend indicates that, as even President Joe Biden acknowledged, that the US economy has a “long way to go” with growth reportedly constrained by the shortage of workers and raw materials.

According to a report published on January 25, 8.8 percent of global working hours were lost relative to the fourth quarter of 2019, which amounts to 255 million full-time jobs, impacting worst regions like Latin America, Southern Europe, and Southern Asia, amounting to $3.7 trillion in labor income lost. Estimates suggest that 2021 will continue to see losses in working hours equivalent to 90 to 130 million full-time equivalents. The IPPPR forecasted that the financial impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the world economy will amount to $22 trillion. The World Bank has estimated that an additional 150 million people may be pushed into extreme poverty this year.

After a year of death, human suffering continues to unfold on massive scale. Collapsing health systems are struggling to care for patients desperate for oxygen. Meanwhile, the COVID-19 vaccines trickle down all too slowly for the billions anxiously waiting for these lifesaving treatments. As the BMJ noted, the “vaccine gap between rich and poor countries is growing by the day.”