Vaccine Nationalism

Rajan Menon

Fifteen months ago, the SARS-CoV-2 virus unleashed Covid-19. Since then, it’s killed more than 3.8 million people worldwide (and possibly many more). Finally, a return to normalcy seems likely for a distinct minority of the world’s people, those living mainly in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, the European Union, and China. That’s not surprising.  The concentration of wealth and power globally has enabled rich countries to all but monopolize available vaccine doses. For the citizens of low-income and poor countries to have long-term pandemic security, especially the 46% of the world’s population who survive on less than $5.50 a day, this inequity must end, rapidly — but don’t hold your breath.

The Global North: Normalcy Returns

In the United States new daily infections, which peaked in early January, had plummeted 96% by June 16th. The daily death toll also dropped — by 92% — and the consequences were apparent. Big-city streets were bustling again, as shops and restaurants became ever busier. Americans were shedding their reluctance to travel by plane or train, as schools and universities prepared to resume “live instruction” in the fall. Zoom catch-ups were yielding to socializing the old-fashioned way.

By that June day, new infections and deaths had fallen substantially below their peaks in other wealthy parts of the world as well. In Canada, cases had dropped by 89% and deaths by 94%; in Europe by 87% and 87%; and in the United Kingdom by 84% and 99%.

Yes, European governments were warier than the U.S. about giving people the green light to resume their pre-pandemic lifestyles and have yet to fully abolish curbs on congregating and traveling. Perhaps recalling Britain’s previous winter surge, thanks to the B.1.1.7 mutation (initially discovered there) and the recent appearance of two other virulent strains of Covid-19, B.1.167 and B.1.617.2 (both first detected in India), Downing Street has retained restrictions on social gatherings. It’s even put off a full reopening on June 21st, as previously planned. And that couldn’t have been more understandable. After all, on June 17th, the new case count had reached 10,809, the highest since late March. Still, new daily infections there are less than a tenth what they were in early January. So, like the U.S., Britain and the rest of Europe are returning to some semblance of normalcy.

The Global South: A Long Road Ahead

Lately, the place that’s been hit the hardest by Covid-19 is the global south where countries are particularly ill-prepared.

Consider social distancing. People with jobs that can be done by “working from home” constitute a far smaller proportion of the labor force than in wealthy nations with far higher levels of education, mechanization, and automation, along with far greater access to computers and the Internet. An estimated 40% of workers in rich countries can work remotely. In lower- and middle-income lands perhaps 10% can do so and the numbers are even worse in the poorest of them.

During the pandemic, millions of Canadians, Europeans, and Americans lost their jobs and struggled to pay food and housing bills. Still, the economic impact has been far worse in other parts of the world, particularly the poorest African and Asian nations. There, some 100 million people have fallen back into extreme poverty.

Such places lack the basics to prevent infections and care for Covid-19 patients. Running water, soap, and hand sanitizer are often not readily available. In the developing world, 785 million or more people lack “basic water services,” as do a quarter of health clinics and hospitals there, which have also faced crippling shortages of standard protective gear, never mind oxygen and ventilators.

Last year, for instance, South Sudan, with 12 million people, had only four ventilators and 24 ICU beds. Burkina Faso had 11 ventilators for its 20 million people; Sierra Leone 13 for its eight million; and the Central African Republic, a mere three for eight million. The problem wasn’t confined to Africa either. Virtually all of Venezuela’s hospitals have run low on critical supplies and the country had 84 ICU beds for nearly 30 million people.

Yes, wealthy countries like the U.S. faced significant shortages, but they had the cash to buy what they needed (or could ramp up production at home). The global south’s poorest countries were and remain at the back of the queue.

India’s Disaster

India has provided the most chilling illustration of how spiraling infections can overwhelm healthcare systems in the global south. Things looked surprisingly good there until recently. Infection and death rates were far below what experts had anticipated based on the economy, population density, and the highly uneven quality of its healthcare system. The government’s decision to order a phased lifting of a national lockdown seemed vindication indeed. As late as April, India reported fewer new cases per million than Britain, France, Germany, the U.K., or the U.S.

Never one for modesty, its Hindu nationalist prime minister, Narendra Modi, boasted that India had “saved humanity from a great disaster by containing Corona effectively.” He touted its progress in vaccination; bragged that it was now exporting masks, test kits, and safety equipment; and mocked forecasts that Covid-19 would infect 800 million Indians and kill a million of them. Confident that his country had turned the corner, he and his Bharatiya Janata Party held huge, unmasked political rallies, while millions of Indians gathered in vast crowds for the annual Kumbh Mela religious festival.

Then, in early April, the second wave struck with horrific consequences. By May 6th, the daily case count had reached 414,188. On May 19th, it would break the world record for daily Covid-19 deaths, previously a dubious American honor, recording almost 4,500 of them.

Hospitals quickly ran out of beds. The sick were turned away in droves and left to die at home or even in the streets, gasping for breath. Supplies of medical oxygen and ventilators ran out, as did personal protective equipment. Soon, Modi had to appeal for help, which many countries provided.

Indian press reports estimate that fully half of India’s 300,000-plus Covid-19 deaths have occurred in this second wave, the vast majority after March. During the worst of it, the air in India’s big cities was thick with smoke from crematoria, while, because of the shortage of designated cremation and burial sites, corpses regularly washed up on riverbanks.

We may never know how many Indians have actually died since April. Hospital records, even assuming they were kept fastidiously amid the pandemonium, won’t provide the full picture because an unknown number of people died elsewhere.

The Vaccination Divide

Other parts of the global south have also been hit by surging infections, including countries in Asia which had previously contained Covid-19’s spread, among them Malaysia, Nepal, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Vietnam. Latin America has seen devastating surges of the pandemic, above all in Brazil because of President Jair Bolsonaro’s stunning combination of fecklessness and callousness, but also in Bolivia, Columbia, Chile, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay. In Africa, Angola, Namibia, South Africa, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo are among 14 countries in which infections have spiked.

Meanwhile, the data reveal a gargantuan north-south vaccination gap. By early June, the U.S. had administered doses to nearly half the country’s population, in Britain slightly more than half, in Canada just over a third, and in the European Union approximately a third. (Bear in mind that the proportions would be far higher were only adults counted and that vaccination rates are still increasing far faster in these places than in the global south.)

Now consider examples of vaccination coverage in low-income countries.

• In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Nigeria, South Sudan, Sudan, Vietnam, and Zambia it ranged from 0.1% to 0.9% of the population.

• In Angola, Ghana, Kenya, Pakistan, Senegal, and South Africa, between 1% and 2.4%.

• In Botswana and Zimbabwe, which have the highest coverage in sub-Saharan Africa, 3% and 3.6% respectively.

• In Asia (China and Singapore aside), Cambodia at 9.6% was the leader, followed by India at 8.5%.  Coverage in all other Asian countries was below 5.4.%.

This north-south contrast matters because mutations first detected in the U.K., Brazil, India, and South Africa, which may prove up to 50% more transmissible, are already circulating worldwide. Meanwhile, new ones, perhaps even more virulent, are likely to emerge in largely unvaccinated nations. This, in turn, will endanger anyone who’s unvaccinated and so could prove particularly calamitous for the global south.

Why the vaccination gap? Wealthy countries, none more than the United States, could afford to spend billions of dollars to buy vaccines. They’re home as well to cutting-edge biotechnology companies like AstraZeneca, BioNTech, Johnson and Johnson, Moderna, and Pfizer. Those two advantages enabled them to preorder enormous quantities of vaccine, indeed almost all of what BioNTech and Moderna anticipated making in 2021, and even before their vaccines had completed clinical trials. As a result, by late March, 86% of all vaccinations had been administered in that part of the world, a mere 0.1% in poor regions.

This wasn’t the result of some evil conspiracy. Governments in rich countries weren’t sure which vaccine-makers would succeed, so they spread their bets. Nevertheless, their stockpiling gambit locked up most of the global supply.

Equity vs. Power

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who leads the World Health Organization (WHO), was among those decrying the inequity of “vaccine nationalism.” To counter it, he and others proposed that the deep-pocketed countries that had vacuumed up the supplies, vaccinate only their elderly, individuals with pre-existing medical conditions, and healthcare workers, and then donate their remaining doses so that other countries could do the same. As supplies increased, the rest of the world’s population could be vaccinated based on an assessment of the degree to which different categories of people were at risk.

COVAX, the U.N. program involving 190 countries led by the WHO and funded by governments and private philanthropies, would then ensure that getting vaccinated didn’t depend on whether or not a person lived in a wealthy country. It would also leverage its large membership to secure low prices from vaccine manufacturers.

That was the idea anyway. The reality, of course, has been altogether different. Though most wealthy countries, including the U.S. following Biden’s election, did join COVAX, they also decided to use their own massive buying power to cut deals directly with the pharmaceutical giants and vaccinate as many of their own as they could. And in February, the U.S. government took the additional step of invoking the Defense Production Act to restrict exports of 37 raw materials critical for making vaccines.

COVAX has received support, including $4 billion pledged by President Joe Biden for 2021 and 2022, but nowhere near what’s needed to reach its goal of distributing two billion doses by the end of this year. By May, in fact, it had distributed just 3.4% of that amount.

Biden recently announced that the U.S. would donate 500 million doses of vaccines this year and next, chiefly to COVAX; and at their summit this month, the G-7 governments announced plans to provide one billion altogether. That’s a large number and a welcome move, but still modest considering that 11 billion doses are needed to vaccinate 70% of the world.

COVAX’s problems have been aggravated by the decision of India, counted on to provide half of the two billion doses it had ordered for this year, to ban vaccine exports. Aside from vaccine, COVAX’s program is focused on helping low-income countries train vaccinators, create distribution networks, and launch public awareness campaigns, all of which will be many times more expensive for them than vaccine purchases and no less critical.

Another proposal, initiated in late 2020 by India and South Africa and backed by 100 countries, mostly from the global south, calls for the World Trade Organization (WTO) to suspend patents on vaccines so that pharmaceutical companies in the global south can manufacture them without violating intellectual property laws and so launch production near the places that need them the most.

That idea hasn’t taken wing either.

The pharmaceutical companies, always zealous about the sanctity of patents, have trotted out familiar arguments (recall the HIV-AIDS crisis): their counterparts in the global south lack the expertise and technology to make complex vaccines quickly enough; efficacy and safety could prove substandard; lifting patent restrictions on this occasion could set a precedent and stifle innovation; and they had made huge investments with no guarantees of success.

Critics challenged these claims, but the bio-tech and pharmaceutical giants have more clout, and they simply don’t want to share their knowledge. None of them, for instance, has participated in the WHO’s Covid-19 Technology Access Pool (C-TAP), created expressly to promote the voluntary international sharing of intellectual property, technology, and knowhow, through non-restricted licensing.

On the (only faintly) brighter side, Moderna announced last October that it wouldn’t enforce its Covid-19 vaccine patents during the pandemic — but didn’t offer any technical assistance to pharmaceutical firms in the global south. AstraZeneca gave the Serum Institute of India a license to make its vaccine and also declared that it would forgo profits from vaccine sales until the pandemic ends. The catch: it reserved the right to determine that end date, which it may declare as early as this July.

In May, President Biden surprised many people by supporting the waiving of patents on Covid-19 vaccines. That was a big change given the degree to which the U.S. government has been a dogged defender of intellectual property rights. But his gesture, however commendable, may remain just that. Germany dissented immediately. Others in the European Union seem open to discussion, but that, at best, means protracted WTO negotiations about a welter of legal and technical details in the midst of a global emergency.

And the pharmaceutical companies will hang tough. Never mind that many received billions of dollars from governments in various forms, including equity purchases, subsidies, large preordered vaccine contracts ($18 billion from the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed program alone), and research-and-development partnerships with government agencies. Contrary to its narrative, Big Pharma never placed huge, risky bets to create Covid-19 vaccines.

How Does This End?

Various mutations of the virus, several highly infectious, are now traveling the world and new ones are expected to arise. This poses an obvious threat to the inhabitants of low-income countries where vaccination rates are already abysmally poor. Given the skewed distribution of vaccines, people there may not be vaccinated, even partially, until 2022, or later. Covid-19 could therefore claim more millions of lives.

But the suffering won’t be confined to the global south. The more the virus replicates itself, the greater the probability of new, even more dangerous, mutations — ones that could attack the tens of millions of unvaccinated in the wealthy parts of the world, too. Between a fifth and a quarter of adults in the U.S. and the European Union say that they’re unlikely to, or simply won’t, get vaccinated. For various reasons, including worry about the safety of vaccines, anti-vax sentiments rooted in religious and political beliefs, and the growing influence of ever wilder conspiracy theories, U.S. vaccination rates slowed starting in mid-April.

As a result, President Biden’s goal of having 70% of adults receive at least one shot by July 4th won’t be realized. With less than two weeks to go, at least half of the adults in 25 states still remain completely unvaccinated. And what if existing vaccines don’t ensure protection against new mutations, something virologists consider a possibility? Booster shots may provide a fix, but not an easy one given this country’s size, the logistical complexities of mounting another vaccination campaign, and the inevitable political squabbling it will produce.

Amid the unknowns, this much is clear: for all the talk about global governance and collective action against threats that don’t respect borders, the response to this pandemic has been driven by vaccine nationalism. That’s indefensible, both ethically and on the grounds of self-interest.

As COVID-19 variant continues to spread, World Health Organization warns “we expect things to only get worse”

Bryan Dyne

The more infectious and deadly Delta variant of the coronavirus, first detected in India last October, is now present in at least 80 countries, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). It is expected to overtake the Alpha variant, first detected in the UK, in the coming months as the dominant variant of the coronavirus worldwide.

In countries such as India and the United Kingdom, it has already become the dominant variant of the coronavirus, with at least 90 percent of all new cases caused by the Delta variant. In countries such as the United States, it accounts for at least 10 percent of all new cases and will “probably” become the dominant variant in the country, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky warned Friday on Good Morning America.

A driver in protective suit in a school bus assigned to take people who tested positive for coronavirus to a referral hospital in Jakarta, Indonesia, June 18, 2021 [Credit: AP Photo/Dita Alangkara]

In Lisbon, Portugal, authorities ordered a weekend lockdown of the entire region after more than 1,300 new cases were recorded in the past 24 hours, of which roughly half were of the Delta variant. In Moscow, local health authorities have determined that the Delta variant is now the most prevalent COVID-19 variant in the city, making up 89.3 percent of all new cases.

And in India, while cases and deaths have continued to decline, with confirmed counts currently standing at two-month lows of 69,000 and 1,600 respectively, experts are concerned that such figures greatly undercount the true toll the Delta variant took on India when it began to spread like wildfire in late February and early March.

There are also surges of the Delta variant across Africa and South Asia, including countries such as Namibia, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Rwanda, Myanmar, Zambia, South Africa, Bangladesh, and Indonesia. As a result of the spread of the disease, the global decline in new cases since the beginning of May, largely a result of mass vaccination campaigns in the world’s wealthier countries, has slowed.

Worldwide, the number of new cases on Thursday totaled just over 367,000, just 20,000 less than new cases reported seven days previously. In contrast, the decrease in daily new cases from two weeks ago to one week ago was more than 71,000. Similar changes were detected in the trajectory of the world’s daily new coronavirus cases in the weeks leading up to the emergence of the Alpha variant as the dominant form of the coronavirus, which helped to fuel the skyrocketing cases this past December and January. Daily deaths remain above 9,000 internationally.

World Health Organization Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus further warned on Friday, “Every region has countries that are now facing a steep increase in cases and deaths. Many countries in Latin America have rapidly increasing epidemics, and others have plateaued at a high level. In Africa, cases have increased by 52% just in the past week, and deaths have increased by 32%. And we expect things to only get worse.”

Spikes in the Delta variant are particularly happening in the countries and regions that have the lowest vaccination rates. “It's a trajectory that is very, very concerning,' said Dr. Mike Ryan, the World Health Organization’s executive director. “The brutal reality is that in an era of multiple variants, with increased transmissibility, we have left vast swathes of the population, the vulnerable population of Africa, unprotected by vaccines.”

The emergence of the Delta variant as dominant is even more concerning given how dangerous it has shown itself to be. It is up to 60 percent more infectious than the Alpha variant, and thus up to 2.5 times more infectious than the original wild variant. It also causes more than 4 times as many hospitalizations as the wild variant. And while those fully vaccinated are largely protected from the Delta variant, most of the world remains extremely vulnerable.

As Dr. Tedros noted, “More than half of all high- and upper-middle income countries and economies have now administered enough doses to fully vaccinate at least 20% of their populations. Just 3 out of 79 low- and lower-middle income countries have reached the same level.” He also made explicit that, “Vaccines donated next year will be far too late for those who are dying today, or being infected today, or at risk today,” before calling for further increases in vaccine production and for their more equal distribution around the world.

Moreover, data from Public Health England tracking the Delta variant has revealed that this particular mutation of the coronavirus can “escape” immunity granted by those that have only received their first dose of the two-dose mRNA vaccine regimen developed by Moderna, Pfizer and others. Thousands have gotten sick as a result.

These dangers are compounded by the fact that as the virus is allowed to spread among those partially vaccinated, there is every possibility that, under the selective pressure of partial immunity, it will evolve to evade the immunity of those fully vaccinated.

In a world where public health measures such as masking, testing and contact tracing are largely being abandoned, such a development would reignite the pandemic in an even more explosive form. Vaccination is in many areas the only form of protection against the coronavirus, and if it fails, cities could once again resemble the horrors of Wuhan, Italy and New York City in the early days of the pandemic.

And in many ways, this evolution of the pandemic would be even worse. Records from the UK indicate that children are more susceptible to the Delta variant, meaning that reopened schools are not just vectors of transmission but also have the potential to become charnel houses for the youth that attend them. More broadly, the increased infectiousness of the Delta variant indicates that, if it was not stopped by vaccines, a dozen people infected could become millions inside a month.

There is no shortage of warnings about just how bad the pandemic could become, even in countries with high vaccination rates like the United States. To date, nearly 4 million lives have been lost. On the other hand, there are still 7.8 billion lives which can be saved from premature death caused by the coronavirus.

The capitalist class which controls society’s resources, however, is more concerned with making profits than human lives. Only token amounts of funds are directed towards vaccines and next to nothing for other life-saving public health measures. The real solution to the pandemic is not medical or scientific, but social and political, the international working class taking the immense wealth hoarded by the bourgeoisie and using it to end the mass death inflicted on the world over the past 18 months.

Despite threat of Delta variant, German government continues reopening policy

Marianne Arens

Although the new Delta variant of the coronavirus is spreading rapidly in Europe, the German government is downplaying and covering up the danger in order to continue its back-to-work policy.

The Delta variant (B.1.617.2) first emerged in India, where it caused a near-vertical rise in coronavirus numbers and a death toll of nearly 400,000. It has since spread to the UK, where the highly contagious variant has caused a new surge in infection numbers and forced the Johnson government to delay the announced end of coronavirus measures by four weeks.

On Friday, the Portuguese authorities sealed off the capital, Lisbon, for the weekend. “The numbers are increasing very rapidly,” Vitor Almeida, from the crisis unit of the Portuguese Medical Association, told news programme Tagesschau. “The reason is unmistakably also the Delta variant, which is dominant in Lisbon. Hence the government’s decision to set up a security cordon around Lisbon over the weekend.” Almeida regarded the main problem to be in the city’s working class suburbs, where people lived very close together and cannot maintain social distancing.

But what are the German authorities doing to warn the population and take precautions? The answer is nothing. The issue is being systematically pushed into the background and played down. Even in the news about Portugal, Tagesschau was quick to reassure “vacationers from Germany” that the situation in Lisbon meant they would only be affected in “exceptional cases.”

Currently, the European soccer championship is dominating all TV channels and news broadcasts, and the stadiums are being increasingly filled. Together with the constant reports about vacations, tourism and summer events, this conveys a mood that the pandemic is over. In Berlin, the ban on dancing is just being lifted, and up to 250 guests are now allowed at open-air events without masks and social distancing.

Yet the news is anything but reassuring. More and more evidence suggests that the Delta variant is also spreading in Germany.

In Munich, 45 cases of the variant have been officially detected. The Robert Koch Institute (RKI) reports a doubling of the share of the Delta variant from 3 percent to more than 6 percent of all coronavirus infections, but these figures are already a few days old. In contrast, a southern German laboratory group that has sequenced coronavirus swabs at several sites reports that the highly contagious variant is already responsible for 11 percent of all new SARS-CoV-2 infections in the Munich area.

In Baden-Württemberg, the state health office in Stuttgart warned on Friday that a significant increase had been observed for two weeks. In the Heidenheim district, two school classes and a day care group had to be sent into quarantine after a major outbreak was detected. Evidence of the Delta variant was found in no fewer than 89 infected individuals.

In North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany’s most populous state, about 150 students in the neighbouring towns of Soest and Werl were sent into quarantine on Wednesday and Thursday after the Delta variant was detected in four outbreaks. This affected the graduating classes of the secondary school in Soest and an entire elementary school in Werl.

Following a graduation ceremony, “clear contact tracing was no longer possible,” the Soest health department explained. Since May 12, there have been repeated cases of coronavirus in this district, in which the Delta virus was detected. This variant was also detected at an elementary school in Hamburg.

For a long time, doctors and virologists have been urging that the new variant be taken seriously, including Carsten Watzl, secretary-general of the German Society for Immunology (DGfI).

“It is safe to assume that by autumn at the latest, the Delta variant will be the dominant variant in Germany,” Watzl told the Augsburger Allgemeine newspaper on June 17. He urged the acceleration of the pace of vaccination. What was urgent was the installation of air filters and other structural responses at schools, the immunologist warned. Especially “if a great many children are not vaccinated and the Delta variant comes in the autumn, there is a threat of more outbreaks in schools again.”

What is particularly troubling about the Delta variant is that it also threatens people who have only received one vaccine dose. Only full vaccination with two doses provides some immunity in the case of this variant.

Against the background of this danger, it is particularly alarming that only a small proportion of the population in Germany have had two shots. Just 50 percent have received the first dose, and only 25 percent the second. Thus, many millions of 20- to 50-year-olds, who are particularly active in professional and social life, are still unvaccinated and without any immune protection.

Yet people are being encouraged to act as if the pandemic is over, being sent back to work. Schools and nurseries will reopen without restrictions and the mandatory wearing of masks before the summer vacations.

“When I heard that I was shocked,” said virologist Melanie Brinkmann in an interview with Der Spiegel. “Masks are the least of the evils, after all. We’re in a good starting position: it’s summer, you can open windows in classrooms, incidence rates are low, we have vaccinations, we’re testing.” But instead of proceeding with care, politicians were “again acting impatiently and without a plan.”

The same Spiegel article quotes Dirk Brockmann, from Humboldt University Biology Institute, saying, “We are making the same mistakes again, while we now have the chance to apply intelligent reopening strategies ... Instead, we are now again wildly relaxing everything at once.”

The government is fully aware of the dangers of its unscrupulous actions. Health Minister Jens Spahn (Christian Democratic Union, CDU) said on Friday at a press conference with RKI chief Lothar Wieler that it was “not a question of if, but when the Delta variant will prevail in Germany and throughout continental Europe.” Nevertheless, all politicians in the federal and state governments are continuing their dangerous reopening policy without restriction.

Although daily incidence numbers are just declining, reaching 10.3 per 100,000 on Friday, death rates remain very high; they have been in the range of about a hundred coronavirus deaths per day for days. More than 90,000 people have died from coronavirus in Germany so far, and hundreds of thousands will suffer from its effects for the rest of their lives. At least one in ten infected people struggle with Long Covid.

None of this has any impact on policymakers. The new variant is not taken as an occasion to publicize the enormous danger of the pandemic, to do everything possible to keep it in check and prevent the spread of new variants. The interests of big business, the banking world and the super-rich take precedence. For them, 2020 was a very good year. According to the latest Global Wealth Report, the number of the world’s super-rich increased by about ten percent to 60,000, and they now own a combined 15 percent of the world’s wealth.

Just how mercilessly the banks and corporations are demanding back-to-work policies from governments is evident from a new proposal by the head of the Institute of the German Economy (IW), Prof. Michael Hüther. His institute has compared hours worked in Germany with those in Switzerland and Sweden. To leverage “dormant growth potential in the German labour market,” Hübner now proposes that blue- and white-collar workers work an average of two hours more per week and take 1.5 weeks less vacation. “There is unused potential in the German labour market,” reads an IW press release dated June 14, 2021.

It is clear that this is also the reason why nurseries and elementary schools must be fully reopened again at all costs. IW head Hüther made this clear in an interview with Bild. “Many women, for example, work part-time involuntarily because there is a lack of nursery places.” He said it was time to remedy the failures of the past and ensure that hundreds of thousands of women could work full-time.

It is also no coincidence that this economic institute compares German working hours with those in Switzerland and Sweden. These are the countries that have been among the most ruthless in enforcing back-to-work policies during the pandemic, causing a higher-than-average number of coronavirus deaths.

The political handling of coronavirus over the past 16 months has made clear that in Germany, as in every capitalist country, a ruthless profits-before-lives policy is being pursued, characterized by a high degree of criminal negligence and systematic cover-ups. This will only change when the working class itself intervenes and takes up the struggle for a workers’ government.

UK inquiry into murder of Daniel Morgan sheds light on police criminality

Julie Hyland

The Independent Panel Investigation into the murder of private investigator Daniel Morgan finally reported last week. It has taken almost 35 years, an inquest, a failed trial and four previous investigations/inquiries to get anywhere near the truth of his killing.

The panel was tasked with investigating explosive questions: if police were involved in Morgan’s killing and how; whether police corruption protected those responsible; and if there were corrupt relations between private investigators, police and journalists.

The sign outside the current New Scotland Yard building, located in Victoria, London (Man vyi/Wikipedia)

The report answered “yes” to all of these questions, making its finding of “institutional corruption” an understatement. The report points to systemic criminality—from murder, drug dealing, fencing stolen property and concealing evidence, to stealing and selling information on individuals to the media. It shows that, far from the Metropolitan Police simply being “not honest in their dealings with [Morgan’s family] and the public,” it has been the single greatest obstacle to truth and justice.

The Met’s criminality involves not only Morgan’s murder and a series of botched investigations into it but extends to other high-profile cases, including the racist killing of black teenager Stephen Lawrence, and corrupt relations between police and journalists, particularly at Rupert Murdoch’s now defunct News of the World.

Morgan was found dead, with an axe embedded in his head, on March 10, 1987, in a pub car park in Sydenham, London. He had founded Southern Investigations with Jonathan Rees. Detective Sergeant Sid Fillery, based at the local Catford, southeast London police station was assigned to the murder case. But Fillery concealed that he had been working unofficially for Southern Investigations.

In April, Rees and brothers Glenn and Garry Vian were arrested on suspicion of murder, and Fillery and two other Catford officers on suspicion of perverting the course of justice. All six were released without charge. That summer, detective constable Alan “Taffy” Holmes, who was said to be working with Morgan to uncover police corruption, was deemed to have committed suicide, in mysterious circumstances.

An inquest into Morgan's death in April 1988 heard allegations that Rees and Morgan had argued, and Rees had told others that friends of his at Catford police station were going to murder Morgan, or help arrange his killing, with Fillery replacing him as partner. Rees denied the allegation, but Fillery later retired from the Met on medical grounds and joined Southern Investigations as business partner.

A covert police inquiry in 1998 uncovered Rees conspiring to plant Class A drugs on a mother in a child custody case and liaising with a Sunday Mirror journalist to access the bank accounts of several members of the Royal family. Rees was jailed for seven years for perverting the course of justice. In 2003, Fillery, who was running the firm during his business partner’s incarceration, was arrested for possession of child pornography, and jailed.

Only due to the persistent efforts of Morgan’s family did Rees, the Vians and Fillery stand trial in 2009. But after almost two years of pre-trial arguments the case collapsed in 2011 when “supergrass” evidence was ruled inadmissible and police claimed to be unable to find relevant files.

In 2011, the Met admitted police corruption was a “factor” in the failed first investigation but nothing more was forthcoming. Public campaigning saw then Home Secretary Theresa May agree to an Independent Panel Investigation into the Morgan case in 2013 but without any statutory powers, including the power to compel witnesses to testify.

What was originally intended to complete in 12 months has taken seven years due to police obstruction. The final documents were only released to the panel in March.

The panel’s investigations also shed further light on the racist murder by up to six white youths of 18-year-old Stephen Lawrence in Plumstead, southeast London on April 22, 1993. Yet again, the police investigation in this instance amounted to deliberate sabotage. Two of his killers remained at large until 2012, while four others remain free.

The Lawrence killing and police “failures” were the subject of a public inquiry in 1998, headed by Sir William Macpherson, which found that these were the result of “institutional racism”. Recommendations on “diversity” training and increasing the recruitment of black and Asian officers concealed police criminality—specifically, allegations that several officers were involved with notorious south London gangster and drug runner, Clifford Norris, father of one of the accused.

A review of “Possible corruption and the role of undercover policing in the Stephen Lawrence case” in 2014 found that intelligence relating to police corruption in the original investigation was not disclosed to the Macpherson inquiry. That report raised potential links between police corruption on the Lawrence and Morgan investigations.

The Lawrence review determined that, from the “limited sources available”, there was “a strong inference that Clifford Norris was a corruptor of police officers and an intimidator of witnesses”. Detective Sergeant John Davidson, who worked on the Lawrence investigation, had a “possible link” with Norris, it suggested, and there was “an enhanced level of suspicion that DS Davidson was corrupt both before and after” his involvement in the case. The corruption included recycling drugs and stolen property.

It concluded that, had this corruption been known, the Macpherson inquiry “might have been driven to the conclusion” that there was more to police failings in the Lawrence investigation “than simply an inappropriate manner and unfortunate unconscious racism.”

The Morgan panel cited Southern Investigations as “a hub of corruption” between serving and retired police officers and the media. Police officers were paid up to £2,000 a time for “sensitive intelligence” regarding celebrities, politicians and royals.

Murdoch’s News of the World was among the most invoiced, reportedly up to “500 times [a] month” between April 1987 and 1989. Rees was prominent in supplying this illegally obtained information to the newspaper, using his police connections.

The rot goes to the top of the Met. The panel criticised former Met commissioner Lord Stevens for taking up employment with Murdoch’s tabloid following his departure from the police. It stated that “the demonstrated links between personnel at the highest levels of the Metropolitan Police and people working for a news organisation linked to criminality associated with the murder of Daniel Morgan, are of serious and legitimate public concern. For senior police officers to take up employment with media outlets or other organisations, whose record involves criminal activity, is profoundly damaging for the reputation of the police service.”

The News of the World, part of Murdoch’s News International group, was closed in 2011 following an outcry over its involvement in phone hacking.

Most damning, panel member Professor Rodney Morgan said the finding of institutional corruption was not used in a historic sense but “in the present tense”.

Met Commissioner Cressida Dick was personally censured by the panel for the years of delays in its receiving requested information, including gaining access to the police national database, Holmes. The panel states that they have “never received any reasonable explanation … by [then] assistant commissioner Dick and her successors” for this obstruction.

It was Dick who, as Gold Commander, oversaw the operation that led to the brutal police killing of innocent Brazilian worker, Jean Charles de Menezes on July 22, 2005. Menezes was shot 11 times by plain clothes police using hollow-point bullets on a London underground train. No police officers were ever charged for his murder, and Dick was promoted to Deputy Assistant Commissioner for Security and Protection shortly after before becoming Commissioner.

Daniel Morgan’s brother, Alastair, who has led the fight for justice, denounced “police and successive governments” for their failure “to deal effectively with serious police criminality”, and called for Dick's immediate resignation.

Instead, the government and media have closed ranks around the Met. Home Secretary Priti Patel sought to delay publication of the report, demanding it be reviewed by her office prior to release on national security grounds. The Met rejected the panel’s key findings and dismissed calls for Dick’s resignation, while Patel and London's Labour Mayor Sadiq Khan signaled their “full confidence” in the Commissioner.

Italian artist auctions off invisible sculpture

Erik Schreiber & David Walsh

In May, Italian artist Salvatore Garau sold his “immaterial sculpture” I Am at an auction. The invisible piece of art consists literally of nothing. Even though the work has no material existence, the Art-Rite auction house estimated its value at between €6,000 and €9,000 (that is, between approximately $7,000 and $11,000). During the auction, bidders pushed the price up, and Garau walked away with €15,000 ($18,300).

In exchange for this sum, the buyer—a private Milanese collector—of the putative work, the latest version of the Emperor’s New Clothes, received a certificate of authenticity and the artist’s instructions for displaying the sculpture. Garau stipulated that the work must be exhibited in a private home in an area of approximately five square feet that is free of obstruction. Special lighting and climate control are optional.

How is one to conceive of an invisible sculpture? Garau had a ready pseudo-scientific explanation for Spanish tabloid Diario AS. “The vacuum is nothing more than a space full of energy, and even if we empty it and there is nothing left, according to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, that nothing has a weight,” he said. “Therefore, it has energy that is condensed and transformed into particles, that is, into us.”

Salvatore Garau

For those confused by this double-talk, Garau appealed to mysticism. “When I decide to ‘exhibit’ an immaterial sculpture in a given space, that space will concentrate a certain amount and density of thoughts at a precise point, creating a sculpture that, from my title, will only take the most varied forms. After all, don’t we shape a God we’ve never seen?”

I Am is not Garau’s first invisible “sculpture.” In February, Garau exhibited Buddha in Contemplation in Milan’s Piazza della Scala. It was allegedly displayed inside a taped square on the cobblestone. “It is a work that asks you to activate the power of the imagination,” said Garau.

Laughable as it is, this is the artist’s most pertinent remark about his “work.” Taking this nonsense at face value, Garau has entirely abdicated the artist’s responsibility to communicate something important about the world through his or her art. With I Am, Garau has provided nothing of value, taken the money and forced others to create the ostensible work themselves.

This aesthetic charlatanry belongs on the same historical plane as the rise of financial parasitism generally and most recently, since the onset of the pandemic, the “vast escalation of speculation promoted by the Fed and other central banks,” in the words of a recent WSWS article. “Debt, corporate bonds and other financial assets are what Marx characterised as fictitious capital.” Reflecting these economic and social processes, we now have arrived at highly speculated upon, fully “fictitious art.” As this may suggest, an enormous, unstable asset bubble in art and collectibles presently exists.

Garau is prospering while artists in the United States alone have lost an estimated average of $34,000 each, and hundreds of millions collectively, in creativity-based income since the beginning of the pandemic.

The Italian artist (born in 1953) did not emerge out of thin air (although “thin air” seems to be very much his stock-in-trade). His “work” has some connection to the tradition of Conceptual Art, a trend that emerged in the mid-1960s. Conceptual Art rejected the traditional art object, in the words of critic Roberta Smith, in favor of “a vast and unruly range of information, subjects and concerns not easily contained within a single object, but more appropriately conveyed by written proposals, photographs, documents, charts, maps, film and video, by the artists’ use of their own bodies, and, above all, by language itself.”

The claim was made that in Conceptual Art the idea behind a work now took precedence over questions of material, technical skill and aesthetics. The idea is everything, and “the execution is a perfunctory affair,” in the words of Sol LeWitt, one of conceptual art’s earliest theorists and practitioners.

But art had always been based on ideas. What seemed to be new, or more pronounced here, following on the empty efforts of Andy Warhol and the Pop Artists, was a thoroughgoing “relinquishing [of] the expressive potentialities of painting and sculpture,” in the words of British critic Peter Fuller. Conceptual Art codified and legitimized the artists’ worshiping of the accomplished social and aesthetic fact. Despite their radical pretensions, the Conceptual Artists displayed tremendous passivity in the face of existing realities, including advertising, the media and official information distribution.

Roberta Smith cites the remarks of Conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner made toward the end of the 1960s. “Art that imposes conditions—human or otherwise—on the receiver for its appreciation in my eyes constitutes aesthetic fascism.” She continued, “Weiner did not care if his ‘Statements,’ succinctly phrased Process-type proposals, … were executed by himself, by someone else or not at all; that was the decision of the ‘receiver’ of the work. … And Douglas Huebler, who was one of the first artists specifically called Conceptual, along with Weiner, Joseph Kosuth and Robert Barry, wrote in 1968, ‘The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more. I prefer, simply, to state the existence of things in terms of time and space.’”

This sort of comment reflected the disorientation and degeneration of the artistic intelligentsia, overwhelmed by tumultuous events, having been cut off from genuine left-wing thought, or consciously rejecting it, and deeply distant from wide layers of the population.

Instead of sculptures or paintings, Conceptual artists produced documents and photographs that recorded their investigations or symbolic interventions. They viewed these documents as mere evidence; the supposed idea was the work itself. Other artists, such as Barry and Yoko Ono, exhibited or published instructions for creating work.

Conceptual Art claimed to be anti-establishment. And no doubt there was a certain sincerity in the rejection of the work as a commodity that could be exchanged on the market. Weiner, for example, explicitly sought to create work that could not be sold, but that anyone could “own.” Many Conceptual artists also attempted to question the authority of the gallery or museum to endow work with the status of art. However, this “democratic” stance was far less significant in the long term than the refusal—or inability—of the artists to honestly confront and criticize in artistic terms, in concrete, convincing imagery, the world around them.

In this context, the refusal to create a work of art that could become a commodity was as much a gesture of despair as one of rebellion, and, in all too many cases, an all too easily “marketable despair.” On the whole, Conceptual Art accelerated the diminution of the artist’s critical presence, and, despite its superficially rebellious aspects, represented a further withdrawal from the fray.

The emergence of postmodernism in the late 1970s and beyond only deepened the problems and made a portion of the artists more cynical or confused.

Garau claims to have begun “a new, small, authentic revolution” with his invisible sculptures. The sale of I Am does seem to represent a new development in Conceptual Art. He has embraced the dematerialized art object and the commodification of art simultaneously. Like a financial speculator, he has realized a profit without creating any value. At a time when art institutions have lost billions of dollars and artists are struggling to survive, Garau’s intellectual fraudulence, as well as the fraudulence of wide portions of the art world, stands out in full relief.

McVitie's issues 472 redundancy notices in Glasgow plant

Steve James

Redundancy notices issued to the 472 McVitie’s workers based at the McVitie’s plant in Tollcross, Glasgow show that the McVitie’s owner Pladis intends to proceed rapidly with running down and closing the aging factory.

The HR1 notices issued by the company authorise management to begin shedding workers after 45 days. Pladis have said they intend to fully close the site by 2022. According to the GMB Scotland trade union, the first redundancies will take place at the end of this year.

The McVities biscuit factory in Tollcross, Glasgow (credit: WSWS media)

The notices demonstrate the company’s contempt both for the workforce and the over 54,000 people who have signed a petition, rapidly organised by groups of McVitie’s workers, against the factory’s closure.

The HR1s also expose the Action Group of the Unite and GMB trade unions, Glasgow City Council, local enterprise agencies and the Scottish government, as a hopeless diversion and a fraud. Their aim is to tie McVitie’s workers to a strategy based on appealing to Pladis and its profit margins while suppressing fundamental class issues.

By putting together a package of concessions from the workforce and tax handouts from government revenue, the Action Group hopes to entice Pladis to keep production in Glasgow. This would inevitably come at the expense of workers at another of Pladis’ British production locations, such as Carlisle, Harlesden, Liverpool or Manchester, and the increased exploitation of all workers internationally. One idea floated was of a new factory nearby.

Pladis is clearly not interested. Not nearly enough baubles have been offered to interest the vastly profitable transnational, hence some calibrated outrage from trade union officials.

GMB Scotland organiser David Hume complained of an “act of extreme bad faith on the part of the Pladis managing director David Murray and a gross insult to hundreds of workers and their families who are fighting for their livelihoods and community.” Unite industrial officer Pat McIlvogue complained that Pladis’ stance was a “disgrace” and bemoaned the company’s refusal to “engage with the Action Group established by the Scottish government.”

The bluster is all for show. Pladis’ refusal to pretend to be interested in discussion exposes the bankruptcy of the Action Group strategy of appealing to the company for compromise.

Pladis is a wing of Turkish-owned Yildiz Holding. Yildiz acquired the McVitie’s brand in 2014 when it bought United Biscuits. Pladis was established in 2016 to bring all Yildiz-owned confectionary producers under one umbrella. Besides biscuits, Yildiz produces over 300 brands of chocolate, cakes, chewing gum, frozen food, processed meat and personal care items. The vast company also has venture capital, retail and distribution wings.

Taken together, some 65,000 workers, including 51,000 in Turkey, labour daily in around 80 factories to enrich Yildiz’s private owners. 63 percent of Yildiz Holding is owned by one man, Murat Ulker.

Since Yildiz took over United Biscuits, Ulker’s personal worth has increased from $2.9 billion in 2016 to $6.3 billion. That is, every single Yildiz worker, including those at Tollcross, has over five years donated an average $52,000 (£38,000) to Ulker’s personal enrichment.

Ulker’s obscene personal wealth did not stop the company re-organising $5.5 billion of debts accrued in its expansion drive in 2018 and embarking on a programme of asset sales. One way or another, Tollcross workers’ livelihoods are being sacrificed as part of this process.

The brutal global reality is that McVitie’s workers’ daily efforts, like those of workers in every industry, and in every country, make them part of a vastly complex, globally integrated web of production and distribution in which every company deploys modern technology to maximise profits at their expense. But these same conditions hand workers immense power as an interconnected social force on which all production depends.

The corporations therefore rely on the trade unions to divide workers in every country and every factory and workplace against each other. Their functionaries have degenerated into local gang bosses. The role of Unite or the GMB in Tollcross is to keep “their” factory open by increasing the rates of exploitation in Glasgow and leaving open the prospect of closing another factory in Carlisle, or Belgium, Egypt or Turkey.

The Scottish government and Glasgow City Council, both run by the Scottish National Party (SNP), have the same position. Neither want the factory to close, but both are committed to defending Pladis’ profits. If they cannot offer the company enough concessions to keep the plant, they will set about applying the usual window dressing to its closure—task forces, action groups, employment advice and occasionally some token retraining. This has been seen repeatedly over the decades of sustained industrial destruction in Britain, which in the West of Scotland was particularly intense.

The SNP and the trade unions are assisted in this by pseudo-left groups such as the Scottish Socialist Party and the Socialist Party Scotland, whose position is that the Scottish government should nationalise the factory if and when Pladis close it. Such an unviable single plant operation would still be in global completion with Pladis and others. The job of ensuring the Tolcross workers’ exploitation would simply be transferred to the Scottish government, until the plant could hopefully be offloaded back to the private sector at some point. This policy serves only to sow divisions in working class by promoting Scottish nationalism, while covering for the collaboration of the trade unions with the companies.

All these organisations are primarily concerned with preventing McVitie’s from becoming a focal point in the class struggle. But this is precisely what is necessary for the Tolcross workers—the popular basis for which is indicated by the 54,000 signatures already garnered by McVitie’s workers.

The precondition for a broader, international struggle is a break with the trade unions and their suppression of workers fundamental interests. We urge McVitie’s workers to consider these questions:

• Why has the Tollcross closure threat been presented as a surprise when it is clear the company has been opposing investment for years?

• Why have Unite and the GMB only called one small demonstration to protest the closure?

• Why is there no ballot for immediate strike action across Pladis plants against the job losses?

• Why have Unite and the GMB not sought to link opposition to the McVitie’s closure with campaigns against the closure of library and community services in Glasgow and around Scotland, or with the many disputes emerging as pandemic support measures come to an end?

Spanish trade unions agree to 3,000 layoffs at BBVA bank

Santiago Guillen

Major Spanish corporations and banks are using the coronavirus crisis to implement long-planned mass redundancies and rationalisation plans even as they reap billions in profits.

In the latest outrageous betrayal by the trade unions, the CCOO and UGT federations have agreed to axe 3,000 jobs at BBVA (Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria) bank, one of the largest financial institutions in the world. This came just days after workers mounted the first strike in the sector for three decades.

BBVA head offices in Madrid (Álvaro Ibáñez/Flickr)

The BBVA is Spain’s second largest bank after Banco Santander. Listed on the Madrid Stock Exchange, the New York Stock Exchange and the Mexican Stock Exchange, BBVA operates mainly in Spain, South America, North America, Turkey, and Romania. As of December 2020, BBVA's assets amounted to €736 billion, more than the annual GDP of the combined ECOWAS countries covering nearly 400 million people in West Africa (Benin, Burkina Faso, Capo Verde, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Gambia and Togo).

BBVA earned €1.32 billion between October and December 2020, its highest quarterly result over the past two years, amid a pandemic that has pauperised billions of workers and ruined small businesses throughout the world. Despite this windfall, in late April BBVA announced its intention to lay off 3,800 workers, 16 percent of the workforce, using a redundancy scheme.

This began the familiar process through which corporations worldwide are sacking tens of thousands of workers.

First, the company announces a redundancy scheme. Then the trade unions cynically posture as indignant and horrified. Claiming it was unexpected, they enter negotiations while calling token protests to let off steam. The company then announces a slightly smaller figure of job losses, allowing the trade unions to claim a victory.

At BBVA the CCOO posted a statement declaring that the proposed redundancies were “unsustainable and scandalous.” Workers “are going to be left without a source of income while senior management maintains and increases millionaire salaries, which does not correspond to the seriousness of the situation.” It then announced, “BBVA’s approach leads us to the path of mobilization.”

On May 10, 6,000 people took part in demonstrations in 15 Spanish cities, followed a week later with another national protest of thousands in 18 cities. The trade unions also organised partial hourly stoppages.

This time, however, few were convinced by such gestures, having seen how the trade unions reached agreements to cut thousands of jobs at CaixaBank (8,291), Santander (3,572), Sabadell (1,800) and Ibercaja (750), without any real fight.

BBVA workers demanded more militant action, so the trade unions reluctantly called a 24-hour strike on June 2. This won immense support with over 70 percent of staff participating. The trade unions did all they could to sabotage a united struggle of workers in defence of jobs. Rather than calling for a united struggle of the 18,000 bank workers facing similar redundancy schemes, CCCOO called for a token 30-minute “strike” at CaixaBank against the dismissal of 8,291 workers. The CCOO and UGT had in fact already agreed to these dismissals weeks before.

Terrified of the threat of unified opposition, the CCOO, UGT and Association of Banking Staff (ACB) agreed to a new redundancy scheme of 2,935 workers, just 800 less than the original figure. This represents 10 percent of the BBVA workforce and the closure of 480 offices.

CCOO described the agreement as “clearly due to the success of the massive strike that occurred throughout Spain.” The UGT stated that “any reduction in the number of people affected is positive.” Now the discussion was about other questions, like compensations and “the establishment of decent exit conditions.”

This attack against bank workers, traditionally a well-paid sector of the working class, will be expanded to slash wages for the entire working class. Tens of thousands of white-collar and blue-collar workers are being forced to pay the price for the €70 billion handed out to the banks after the 2008 crisis and the €140 billion promised to Spain’s banks and corporations from the European Union pandemic bailout funds.

Sensitive to rising opposition to the larger union, the CGT is intervening to play its role as a lightning rod. Specialised in posturing as more radical and combative to suck in disenchanted workers from the larger bureaucracies, it has refused to sign the redundancy scheme while making clear it does not oppose job losses. Its main criticism is that redundancies should be implemented through early retirements and paid leave.

The pseudo-left groups’ “alternative” union has not proposed any plan of struggle, only banging pots and pans on Tuesday.

The CGT meet with the pseudo-leftist Podemos party, the Socialist Party’s (PSOE) main coalition partner in government, to request a legislative change that would prohibit dismissals in companies with benefits. But they know perfectly well that Podemos, which controls the Ministry of Labour, will not change any law and is an avid supporter of these redundancy schemes. Podemos leader and Deputy Prime Minister of the government, Yolanda Díaz, has shamelessly declared recently, “Companies, in general, have behaved very well during the crisis caused by COVID-19."

During the first months of the year, 29 large companies have announced collective layoffs involving over 35,000 workers. These redundancy schemes have been particularly brutal in the banking sector. Since 2010, the banks in collaboration with the trade unions have carried out a total of 70 collective dismissal processes which have destroyed 100,000 jobs. To give an idea of the magnitude of the figure, this would fill the Camp Nou football stadium in Barcelona or Wembley Stadium in London.

Opposition among workers is mounting against these layoffs. Joan Sierra, head of the financial sector at CCOO, told eldiario.es that workers today “have no trust and concerns [are] growing.” He warned that the banks “should take note of it.” His counterpart in the UGT, Víctor Miravete, said that people now feel “threatened."

The union bureaucracy fears above all the emergence of workers struggles that break out of its control. Internationally, the most significant struggle is currently in the United States, were nearly 3,000 workers at Volvo Trucks New River Valley plant in Dublin, Virginia, are on strike after voting by 90 percent to defeat the second pro-company contract proposal agreed to by the United Auto Workers (UAW) union.