Papua New Guinea registers first case of COVID-19 Delta variant

John Braddock

Papua New Guinea (PNG) health authorities last month confirmed the Pacific country’s first case of the highly virulent COVID-19 Delta variant.

Medical staff of Papua New Guinea’s Defense Force receiving COVID-19 training last year (Credit: World Health Organization/PNG)

The 65-year-old Philippine captain of cargo ship, the Grand Tajima, which arrived in Port Moresby earlier in July was escorted to the Pacific International Hospital where he tested positive. Because the ship had previously docked in countries with known cases of the Delta strain, additional quarantine precautions were taken.

The PNG government only recently re-introduced strict border measures in a bid to prevent the Delta strain entering. Given PNG’s close proximity to Australia and Indonesia, both facing uncontrolled outbreaks of the variant, it was only a matter of time before it appeared.

Even before the Delta strain’s arrival, however, PNG had experienced an upsurge of COVID-19 cases in recent months. After managing to keep the virus at bay for most of last year with strict border controls, PNG has now registered 17,774 cases and 192 deaths.

The vulnerable country is poorly equipped to deal with the deadly virus. National Pandemic Response deputy controller Daoni Esorom said the new case represented a serious threat. “As we all watch the number of deaths continue to rise in Fiji, in India and right around the world, we should take this as a wakeup call for us all to vaccinate. The only way for our people to survive COVID-19 is through vaccination,” he warned.

In fact, vaccination on its own is not sufficient to bring the deadly strain under control. The same strategy is being pursued by Fiji’s Bainimarama government. The Pacific’s second largest country is in the grip of an uncontrollable health and social crisis after the Delta variant entered through a quarantine breach in early April. There are currently 22,800 active cases, 272 deaths and an average daily test positivity rate of 32.3 percent. The World Health Organisation's threshold, indicating widespread and out-of-control community spread, is five percent.

PNG’s official figures vastly understate the real situation. For the past several weeks the government has not been testing for the virus, so the only information comes from people presenting at health facilities. The limited testing regime was scaled back on the pretext that it would allow authorities to “shift focus” to vaccinating vulnerable sections of the population.

However, less than 1 percent of the nearly nine million population has received a first dose of the vaccine. The government is blaming “misinformation” and widespread reluctance for the dangerous situation. Esorom said a survey had found that 62 percent of people “do not think they will catch COVID-19, and that is why they have not come forward to be vaccinated.”

In reality the fault lies with the crisis-ridden government of Prime Minister James Marape which has responded to the growing crisis with a mixture of incompetence and blatant self-interest. Like governments around the world, the PNG ruling elite is determined to prioritise business interests above public health.

In March, following a six-day surge that brought the total to over 4,000 cases, the government implemented a limited month-long isolation strategy. Restrictions were placed on travel, public gatherings and schools, but businesses, including markets and shops remained open, as did government departments. The measures inevitably failed to stem the outbreak, with cases exploding by over 6,000, including more than 40 deaths, during the four weeks.

While the virus ran rampant in the capital Port Moresby and elsewhere, Marape used the COVID-19 threat to abruptly suspend parliament in April to avoid facing a no-confidence motion. The move followed confirmation that a quarter of parliamentary staff and one MP—that is, 42 out of 167 people—had tested positive for the virus. As many as seven MPs had earlier tested positive.

During the surge in cases from March through May, infection numbers climbed at a rate of 1,000 a week, reaching nearly 17,000. This did not stop Health Minister Jelta Wong falsely declaring in early June that the government had the situation under control and the outbreak was “not out of hand.”

PNG is one of the most impoverished countries in the world. The working class and rural poor have an average life expectancy of just 65 years. Diseases including polio, malaria, and HIV-AIDS ravage the country, contributing to an annual death toll of more than one in every 13 children. The health system is now near collapse with hospital beds fully occupied and oxygen, gloves, antibiotics and other supplies running out. Over half the workforce at the main hospital in Port Moresby has tested positive for COVID.

Marape recently declared that the National Control Centre overseeing PNG’s pandemic response, under police commissioner David Manning, is to be disbanded by the year’s end and integrated into the failing health system. With the economy collapsing and an election due next year, Marape flagged that reopening international borders will soon be considered and “those who choose not to be vaccinated” will have to “face the consequences.”

Against this background, PNG has become a major arena in the escalating diplomatic and economic confrontation between Australia and China as part of the US-led drive to war against Beijing. The local imperialist powers, Australia and New Zealand, are seeking to assert their domination in what they consider their own “backyard” and push back against emerging Chinese influence.

Last month the Chinese state-run Global Times accused Australia of “sabotaging” China’s vaccine rollout in PNG. At a press conference a Foreign Ministry spokesperson criticised Australia for “undermining vaccine cooperation” in the region.

Amid the surge in cases in March, PNG agreed to offers of vaccine supplies from both China and Australia. PNG initially held off using 200,000 doses of the Chinese Sinopharm vaccine until they received emergency use approval from the World Health Organisation. By the time the vaccine was approved in May, PNG had found alternatives. Beijing claims Canberra was “planting” consultants in Australia’s former colony to obstruct the authorisation of the Chinese-supplied vaccines.

Australia’s minister for the Pacific, Zed Seselja, hit back at Beijing’s claims, telling CNN the country’s commitment to the Pacific “is longstanding and comprehensive.” “We support Papua New Guinea making sovereign decisions,” he maintained. In fact, Canberra has a long history of interference in PNG’s affairs in order to protect its geo-strategic interests and the profits of Australia’s massive mining corporations.

Canberra has supplied 600,000 doses to its Pacific neighbors and Timor Leste and has promised to another 15 million doses to the region by mid-2022. PNG has also received 132,000 AstraZeneca vaccines from global vaccine alliance COVAX while New Zealand sent 146,000 doses in June. Last Tuesday, New Zealand sent 100,000 AstraZeneca doses to Fiji adding to an earlier promise of 500,000 doses.

China meanwhile has donated 270,000 vaccine doses to the Solomon Islands, PNG, and Vanuatu. Chinese President Xi Jinping has also offered to provide vaccines to Fiji and at an online meeting of APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) leaders on July 17, announced a $US3 billion fund to combat the COVID pandemic.

None of these measures go anywhere near meeting the escalating disaster unfolding globally and in the impoverished semi-colonial countries of the Pacific. PNG and Fiji need vastly more financial, medical and aid resources than the paltry offerings provided so far.

Vaccines have not been distributed on the basis of need, let alone a global public health strategy, but to advance the economic and strategic interests of competing ruling elites. International tensions have only escalated as a result of the pandemic, heightening the danger of open military conflict.

Wildfires rage in Turkey and across the Mediterranean region

Ulaş Ateşçi

Forest fires have spread to several Mediterranean countries since July and continue to burn fiercely. Massive forest areas are burned out, many people have died in the firefighting, countless animals have perished, thousands of people have lost their homes, and the smoke of the fire has spread over wide areas. Moreover, scientists warn that wildfire smoke may greatly increase susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

A woman uses a fire extinguisher to save a burning tree in Cokertme village, near Bodrum, Mugla, Turkey, Tuesday, Aug. 3, 2021. (AP Photo/Emre Tazegul)

Internationally, the indifference and bankruptcy of governments in the face of the disaster contrasts strikingly with the solidarity and self-sacrifice of working people and youth fighting the wildfires.

At the end of July, wildfires raged through the Italian island of Sardinia, where it is the worst disaster in decades. Over 50,000 acres (20,000 hectares) around the historic Montiferru area have burned. Smaller fires are blazing in Spain and France. In addition to fires in Albania, Macedonia and Morocco, blazes erupted in Lebanon spread to its neighbor, Syria, and Cyprus has also fought against fires that killed at least four.

In Turkey, which has witnessed the most severe forest fires, many areas in the Mediterranean and Aegean regions of the country have faced fires for about ten days. As of Wednesday, Forestry Minister Bekir Pakdemirli announced that 183 forest fires erupted in Turkey from July 28 to August 4, 2021. While 167 fires in 33 provinces have been taken under control, 16 fires are still raging in 16 provinces of Turkey. Reportedly, an area of at least 40,000 hectares have burned, and eight people have lost their lives.

The fires, which could not be brought under control due to high air temperature, strong winds and insufficient measures of the government, reached the thermal power plant in Milas district of Muğla on Wednesday evening, creating a great danger.

Experts had been warning for days that the fire could reach Kemerköy Thermal Power Plant in Milas. A ditch was started to be dug around the power plant, which was stated to contain nearly 40,000 tons of coal, but the flames reached the power plant. Muğla Metropolitan Mayor Osman Gürün has announced that the hydrogen tanks in the plant have been degassed.

The Defense Ministry announced that “As the forest fire in Muğla’s Milas district came closer to the thermal power plant, our citizens who gathered in the dock are being evacuated to safe places by the landing ships of our Naval Forces.” It was announced that the fire, which continued for ten hours at the power plant, was brought under control yesterday morning.

Greece is another epicenter of the wildfires in the Mediterranean. Since the forest fire disaster in 2018 while the pseudo-left Syriza (“Coalition of the Radical Left”) party was in power, there have been more than 150 fires across the country. Because of wildfire smoke, scientists recommend the use of masks in the capital, Athens.

More than a dozen villages have been evacuated on the island of Evia near Athens since Tuesday, Reuters reported: “Fires that had threatened the northern outskirts of Athens on Tuesday were under control.”

According to the Greek daily Kathimerini, “The Defense Ministry on Thursday is expected to announce plans to deploy the armed forces in the ongoing battle against several major wildfires tearing through forestland and villages in Evia, the Peloponnese and other parts of the country.” It also reported that “12,500 hectares of land was scorched and a hundred houses were either destroyed or suffered lighter damage.”

Moreover, Greek Deputy Civil Protection Minister Nikos Hardalias warned that “conditions over the next few days and weeks will be even more difficult than they are today.”

After years of EU austerity, Greece is unprepared for these fires, though they were widely expected. Many people accused the right-wing New Democracy (ND) government of not taking action against the fires.

On social media videos, people who lost their houses during the fire said that there were no fire trucks to put out the fire. One user tweeted: “Athens is covered by smoke. Evia and Mani are burning. Inferno. No money for health, civil protection or education. Just for more cops and for the mainstream media.”

As the World Socialist Web Site has explained, floods and wildfires around the world are the “direct product of the climate crisis produced by the capitalist profit system” and “the deadly effects of climate change are the product of decades of under-funding and cuts to infrastructure” by the capitalist governments, whose policies also led to disaster during the COVID-19 pandemic.

After the government opened up the economy as part of a global “herd immunity” policy by ruling elites under conditions of the more contagious and more deadly Delta variant spread, Greece has seen a surge of the pandemic. Active cases are closing on the peak point reached last April, more than 30,000.

The Turkish government’s inadequate handling of wildfires has also provoked widespread popular anger. On social media, many people rightly compared it with its response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

As a result of the “herd immunity” strategy of the government, nearly 6 million people infected and over 51,000 died so far due to COVID-19. A study on the “excess deaths” shows that real death toll is well over 150,000. After President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government fully removed all restrictions since early July under conditions of Delta variant spread, Turkey has recently begun to see more than 25,000 daily cases.

After decades of under-funding and cuts, Turkey, one of the epicenters of wildfires in Europe, does not have any usable firefighting aircraft. In response to the widespread criticism over the lack of such planes at the end of July, Erdoğan declared that “the Turkish Aeronautical Association does not have any planes to fly here [fire area] comfortably.” He added, “As of today, the number of planes has increased to five or six with the planes from Russia and Ukraine.”

The president’s Communications Directory recently announced that they deploy 16 planes, nine drones, 52 helicopters and more than 1,000 vehicles, including water trucks and fire engines, as well as over 5,000 personnel. Air and land support came from Spain, Croatia, Iran, Azerbaijan, Moldova, and Georgia, as well as from Russia and Ukraine.

A recent report by the General Forestry Directorate shows that the government has made no preparations against forest fires. In its goals for 2021, it planned to spend 55 million Turkish liras for “Forest Protection and Fire Fighting Projects,” but only spent 28,000 liras. While it announced plans to buy 26 helicopters against fires, it did not buy them.

On Saturday, Erdoğan’s visit with a huge escort convoy to Marmaris district of the city of Muğla on the Mediterranean coast, which was largely hit by fires, also caused massive anger on social media. Recalling former US President Donald Trump, who tossed paper towels at hurricane victims in Puerto Rico, Erdoğan threw packets of black tea to the people from his bus, reflecting the ruling elites’ distance and contempt for working people suffering.

In contrast, in addition to a 1,000-room presidential palace in Ankara, the state is also building a 300-room summer palace in Marmaris for president.

The government, which initially refused to seek international aid, causing the fires to spread, is reacting fiercely to calls for help on social media, seeking to suppress social anger with police state measures. The Ankara Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office has launched an investigation into related messages, claiming that “it has been detected that some people and groups, in an organized manner via real or bot accounts, tried to create worry, fear and panic in society and degrade the state and government of the Republic of Turkey.”

US faces resurgent COVID-19 catastrophe

Andre Damon

With daily new cases hitting levels unseen since the worst days of the pandemic in January, it is becoming clear that the United States is facing a catastrophic surge of COVID-19 for which the country is totally unprepared.

In this Dec. 22, 2020 file photo, signs advising facial covering requirements are shown as travelers stand in line at a Delta Air Lines desk at San Francisco International Airport during the coronavirus pandemic in San Francisco. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu, File)

The United States recorded over 120,000 daily new COVID-19 cases Thursday, exceeding the peak of the first and second waves and rising at the highest rate ever. Cases have risen 10-fold in just the past six weeks, with experts warning that the darkest days of the pandemic lie ahead.

“Things are going to get worse,” National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Dr. Anthony Fauci said over the weekend.

Hospitals in Florida, which leads the country in daily new cases, are “suspending elective surgeries and putting beds in conference rooms,” noted the Associated Press, while “Mississippi had just six open intensive care beds in the entire state.”

“We are seeing a surge like we’ve not seen before in terms of the patients coming,” Dr. Marc Napp, chief medical officer for Memorial Healthcare System in Hollywood, Florida, told the Associated Press. “It’s the sheer number coming in at the same time. There are only so many beds, so many doctors, only so many nurses.”

Deaths have likewise surged, with the daily death rate in Florida more than doubling.

In the midst of this developing disaster, Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis ranted against vaccination and mask wearing, both of which are crucial to saving lives in the pandemic. “Florida is a free state, and we will empower our people. We will not allow Joe Biden and his bureaucratic flunkies to come in and commandeer the rights and freedoms of Floridians,” DeSantis declared.

DeSantis claimed that it was immigrants, not his anti-scientific policies, that were to blame for the surge in his state, while threatening to defund schools that require children to wear masks.

In recent days, it has become clear just how dangerous the Delta variant of COVID-19 is to children in particular.

On Tuesday, the American Academy of Pediatrics reported that nearly 72,000 children and teens caught COVID-19 last week—five times as many as at the end of June.

“Let this sink in — 1 percent of all #COVID19 confirmed cases in kids lead to hospitalization,” noted epidemiologist Eric Feigl-Ding. “Is that really an ‘acceptable’ level of kids morbidity that we will allow in society?”

“I am as worried about our children today as I have ever been.” Dr. Mark Kline, physician-in-chief at Children's Hospital New Orleans said at a press conference on Monday. “This virus, the Delta variant of COVID, is every infectious disease specialist’s and epidemiologist’s worst nightmare. I don’t think as Americans in our lifetime we have ever seen an organism that possesses the dual characteristics of the contagiousness that this virus has together with the virulence – its ability to produce disease.”

Children now account for nearly 20 percent of COVID-19 new cases in the state of Louisiana, according to figures from local broadcaster WWL-TV.

Feigl-Ding warned Thursday about the threat of “brain damage and IQ declines” from COVID-19, demanding to know why the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was not raising the alarm. “We epidemiologists have known and highlighted this for 9 months,” he said, noting figures from the UK that show that COVID-19 patients who had been on ventilators had seen a seven-point drop in intelligence quotient.

For the past six months, the US government has focused its efforts on convincing the public that the pandemic was over, dismantling facilities for monitoring breakthrough infections, diverting funding for COVID-19 preparedness to fund the police, and enforcing the return to school.

The CDC discouraged mask wearing and social distancing for vaccinated people before reversing course last week in a backhanded acknowledgment of the incorrectness of its guidance.

As cases, deaths, and hospitalizations rise at a dizzying rate, crucial medical resources for monitoring the spread of the disease and treating the ill are in short supply. On Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal reported nationwide testing shortages, noting turnarounds in some areas as high as 3 to 5 days.

“It's August 2021, where are the rapid antigen tests that should have been supplied for free for every household to accurately screen for infectiousness—which is what really matters?” fumed Eric Topol, professor of molecular medicine at Scripps Research Institute. “The tests that were ready here in May 2020.”

The United States still has no centralized system of contact tracing, no program of mass testing, and no nationwide app for tracking cases, vaccinations status, and exposure.

“We've now exceeded hospitalizations in the 1st and 2nd waves, but an additional concern is their rate of rise in the 4th, Delta wave,” Topol tweeted. “That this has happened with a surfeit of vaccines reflects both how formidable this strain is and our big miss in not suppressing it far better.”

Fauci, in an interview with McClatchy, warned about “long COVID” among people with breakthrough infections, saying, “We already know that people who get breakthrough infections and don’t go on to get advanced disease requiring hospitalization, they too are susceptible to long COVID.” He added, “You’re not exempt from long COVID if you get a breakthrough infection.”

Most ominously, Fauci warned that COVID-19 is being given “ample” opportunity to mutate, warning, “The virus will continue to smolder through the fall into the winter, giving it ample chance to get a variant which, quite frankly, we’re very lucky that the vaccines that we have now do very well against the variants — particularly against severe illness,” Fauci said. “We’re very fortunate that that’s the case. There could be a variant that’s lingering out there that can push aside Delta.”

This was in line with warnings made earlier by Adm. Brett Giroir, formerly the COVID-19 testing czar in the Trump administration’s White House Coronavirus Task Force, who declared, “The next variant is just around the corner.”

In other words, the ongoing unmitigated community spread of COVID-19 is creating the circumstances for dangerous new variants of the disease to emerge, which even further negate the effectiveness of vaccines.

The US government’s response to the pandemic has already produced a catastrophe, leaving more than 630,000 people dead, and an even worse disaster is just around the corner.

The present surge has made one thing abundantly clear: The United States’ strategy in response to the pandemic has been a catastrophic failure. The policy of “herd immunity”—or “learning to live with the virus”—pursued by governments around the world has produced one of the most dangerous strains of infectious disease known to man, and the threat of an even deadlier variant soon emerging, with no strategy to contain it.

The only response to this disaster is a complete reversal of the present policy. COVID-19 must be eradicated. This means the emergency closure of all schools and non-essential businesses, together with the surging of trillions of dollars for testing, contact tracing, quarantine facilities, hospitals, public health staff, with the aim for totally eradicating the disease so that new variants do not develop.

Fearful of the conclusion that will be drawn by millions of people, the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed Thursday entitled “Eradication of Covid Is a Dangerous and Expensive Fantasy,” arguing that the disease must be allowed to become endemic because the “costs of any eradication program are immense.”

The Wall Street Journal speaks for America’s billionaires, whose wealth has collectively surged 60 percent in the first year of the pandemic, and who see measures to stop the spread of COVID-19 as an obstacle to their further enrichment.

The fact is that, for America’s workers, millions of whom are threatened with death and debilitation by the pandemic, the eradication of COVID-19 is an inescapable necessity.

Germany: Opel (Stellantis) raises pressure on employees

Marianne Arens

Despite the pandemic, the automaker Stellantis, which includes Opel, massively increased its net profit to 5.9 billion euros in the first half of 2021. At the same time, Opel management and the works councils are putting workers under increasing pressure.

Opel works in Rüsselsheim

Employees at the Opel International Technical Development Center (ITEZ) in Rüsselsheim were the latest to be confronted with this. Engineers from research and development and employees from the forge, of the design department and of the tool and prototype construction departments received letters from Opel personnel manager Ralph Wangemann in which they are asked to look for another job within the group—or to “voluntarily” take their leave. This was reported by the news service Business Insider.

Business Insider also quoted the passage in the letter in which Wangemann insists that every measure threatened lies expressly “within the framework of the procedure agreed upon by the works council.” The works council immediately distanced itself from this statement in an internal handout and described the management’s actions as “unacceptable.” But who are they trying to fool? This amounts to a feeble attempt to cover their tracks.

As every worker knows, the works council and IG Metall union at Opel signed an agreement to cut 2,100 further jobs by the end of the year. At the time of the takeover by PSA Group in 2017 the union had already signed a so-called “future contract” called PACE! which doomed thousands of jobs to dissolution. Within ten years, half of the 19,000 jobs existing at the time were to be axed, and these plans are being mercilessly implemented. The merger of PSA with Fiat Chrysler (FCA) last January to form Stellantis is further propelling the process.

The media are presently bursting with praise for outgoing Opel CEO Michael Lohscheller, who is leaving the Stellantis Group to lead an electric car company in Vietnam. Lohscheller is celebrated for taking the Opel-Vauxhall group out of the red and into the black over the past four years since its acquisition by PSA. Over the past three years he has produced a cumulative profit of 2.5 billion euros.

There are two things to say about this: first, it is the Opel and Vauxhall workers who are bearing the cost in the form of layoffs, wage sacrifices, and grueling workloads. And second, every single step has proceeded in close consultation with the union.

Even before the merger with Opel, the top managers of Groupe PSA and Opel-Vauxhall met with the leading German union leaders, IG Metall chairman Jörg Hofmann and then-Opel works council chairman Wolfgang Schäfer-Klug. At the time, the group’s website stated that “in constructive talks” and “in close cooperation with the European Works Council and IG Metall,” the course was being set for a “European automotive champion with German-French roots.” The unions enthusiastically welcomed the Stellantis merger to become the world’s fourth-largest auto group.

Both Schäfer-Klug, who still heads the European Works Council, and the current head of Opel’s General Works Council, Uwe Baum, hold high-paying posts on the supervisory board of Opel Automobile GmbH. They have long been privy to all restructuring plans. These include the conversion of the main plant in Rüsselsheim to electric mobility, as well as the effective dismantling of the ITEZ, which just a few years ago employed around 7,000 workers.

Today, the ITEZ has 3,000 employees, less than half of what it once had, and the job cuts keep coming. During the plant recess in July, workers even discovered that machines and tools from their halls were being sold off on eBay. Several hundred workers have already been forced to transfer to the French development services provider Segula, and Opel's forging and transmission divisions are scheduled to close entirely by the end of 2021.

Unionized works councils are feverishly promoting the “voluntary” abandonment of jobs via severance pay, partial retirement, early retirement and a specially-created internal transfer company. As recently as the end of May, Wolfgang Schäfer-Klug claimed at an IG Metall rally in Rüsselsheim that any job cuts would be made exclusively “on a voluntary basis.” Wangemann's threats now show the value of those promises. If not enough workers come forward “voluntarily,” the thumbscrews of layoffs for “operational reasons” are ready. In either case, the jobs will be lost for future generations.

It is for this reason that the World Socialist Web Site and the German section of the International Committee of the Fourth International, the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (SGP), propose that workers create action committees that can fight independently of unions to defend jobs. We urge workers to take the fight for their interests into their own hands.

In an analysis of the Stellantis merger, the WSWS pointed out that auto workers around the world are forced to work in difficult and dangerous conditions because there is supposedly no money for their needs, while Stellantis’ top managers and shareholders rake in fabulous profits and multi-million-dollar bonuses.

We said, “To wage a successful fight against the transnational corporations, workers need new organizations of struggle, independent of the nationalist unions, and an internationalist strategy to unify their struggles, uniting every nationality, ethnicity and race.”

This perspective is based firmly in contemporary reality. Around the world, there is a rising tide of radical strikes and labor struggles. Just two years ago at General Motors (to which Opel belonged for nearly 90 years), the first national strike in decades by 46,000 auto workers occurred in the US. In the state of Virginia this summer, Volvo workers carried out five weeks of industrial action against the will of the United Auto Workers union (UAW). They formed an independent action committee in the course of this struggle.

The union officials are not only deeply corrupted and integrated into the management structures; they are also, by their history and function, intimately tied to capitalism and nation-states. They divide workers based on which country a plant is located and play them off against each other.

Globalization is far advanced. This can be seen and felt at every turn in the auto industry. This is why workers must unite internationally. They must wrest production and advanced technology from the profit interests of the financial aristocracy and put them at the service of society. No one else will do it for them.

Delta outbreak spreading across Australia as infections and deaths rise

Oscar Grenfell

With the exception of the Victorian coronavirus crisis of late 2020, much of Australia is in the grip of one of its worst coronavirus crises with Thursday and Friday among the grimmest days since the pandemic began early last year. On top of mounting infections and deaths, the geographical spread of the virus has expanded dramatically, into cities, states and regional areas where there was previously minimal to no community transmission being recorded.

Inner-west Sydney COVID-19 testing station (Photo: WSWS Media)

The New South Wales (NSW) state Liberal-National government yesterday reported 262 new locally-acquired infections, the vast majority of them in Sydney, as well as five deaths, the most since the current outbreak began. The record number of cases was immediately surpassed, with 291 infections announced this morning.

The same mass spread that is resulting in hundreds of infections every day in Australia’s largest city is threatened in many other parts of the country. An estimated 15 million out of a national population of 25 million people are now under some form of lockdown measure.

A seven-day lockdown of Victoria, the country’s second-most populous state, was reimposed on Thursday, after new community cases were detected. Restrictions remain in place in parts of Queensland, including the capital Brisbane, with infections being recorded each day. The island state of Tasmania registered its first COVID-positive result in 12 months.

The scenario unfolding of an increasingly unchecked, nationwide surge of Delta, among the most infectious variants of the coronavirus, was both foreseeable and foreseen. The months-long warnings of epidemiologists that governments had created a perfect storm for a major outbreak and that immediate action, including stringent lockdown measures, were required to prevent one after cases were first identified, are being confirmed.

The NSW government has been at the forefront of a ruling-class campaign against the necessary public health measures, aimed at safeguarding corporate profits. NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian, acting with the full support of the state Labor opposition, and in collaboration with the national cabinet, composed of state and territory leaders, most of them Labor, as well as the federal government, has persistently refused to implement lockdown policies required to curb the Sydney outbreak.

For ten days, when cases were first detected on June 16, no restrictions were put in place at all, except for expanded mask mandates. Belated, localised and limited stay-at-home measures, which were subsequently instituted as the outbreak spiraled out of control, continue to fall short of the measures required to halt transmission.

The government, having blamed working-class residents, especially of south-west Sydney, for the consequences of its own criminally-negligent policies has acknowledged this week that workplaces are the key drivers of transmission. But the vast majority of them, including many non-essential retail outlets, remain in full operation.

This includes in eight working-class local government areas (LGAs) of west and south-west Sydney, that are supposedly the subject of more stringent measures because they have been epicentres of transmission. While the areas have been flooded with police officers and some 300 military personnel, a host of exemptions, covering non-essential factories, retail, the postal service and more, have been granted.

At least 12 workers at a Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) restaurant in the south-western suburb of Punchbowl are among the latest cases, with the store listed as a potential exposure site for at least a week. This morning, Premier Berejiklian declared that transmission was growing at an especially fast rate in the nearby suburb of Bankstown, a lot of it driven by shopping centres. Rather than announce any greater restrictions, however, the government indicated a further boost to the police presence.

The vast majority of new cases announced each day are not linked to an existing cluster, indicating unknown chains of transmission, and were in the community for all or part of their infectious period, meaning further contagion. Of the 4,581 infections since the outbreak began, 1,488, or fully 30 percent, are of unknown origin. As many as 200 of today’s cases, well over two thirds, were in the community while potentially contagious.

The figures demonstrate that NSW contact tracing, previously touted as the “gold standard” by Berejiklian, Prime Minister Scott Morrison and the corporate media, has broken down.

The claims that the virus can be isolated to the eight working-class LGAs are also a transparent fraud. The outbreak began in the city’s relatively-affluent eastern suburbs, and has since spread through to every area of Sydney. Of today’s infections for instance, 30 were from the central Sydney local health district, 24 are from Nepean Blue Mountains, 13 from South Eastern Sydney and five from Northern Sydney. The localised focus, in addition to scapegoating the working-class for the crisis, is simply to avoid the city and state-wide restrictions demanded by medical experts.

The refusal to implement lockdown measures outside of Sydney, or to enforce a nominal travel ban between the city and regional areas, has resulted in the extension of the crisis elsewhere in NSW. The Upper Hunter and Newcastle areas, several hours north of Sydney, were placed under lockdown yesterday after several infections were detected, followed by 12 more today. COVID-19 fragments have also been found in sewage samples from central NSW, including the towns of Dubbo and Armidale, despite no new cases being detected there.

The NSW government has abandoned any pretence of attempting to eliminate transmission. The official discussion all but accepts that Delta is virtually endemic in Sydney, even though it is less than two months since there were no locally-acquired cases of COVID in the city. The entire focus is on lifting restrictions, including through the recent resumption of construction activity and plans to push year 12 students and teachers into face-to-face teaching.

The government has signaled a planned reopening as soon as woefully-low vaccination levels reach 50 percent of the eligible population. This would account for only around a third of the total population. It would exclude all children under 16 and many young adults, even though they have recorded the highest infection rates.

This threatens to create a full-blown catastrophe. Five deaths were announced yesterday, and another one today, taking the total to 22. Earlier this week, a 27-year-old worker, with no underlying health conditions, died suddenly from COVID in his home. There are currently 304 people in hospital with COVID-19, 50 of them in intensive care and 22 requiring ventilation, meaning the tragic fatalities will continue.

The criminally-negligent official response is not limited to NSW or the Liberal-Nationals. Yesterday, the Victorian Labor government announced a seven-day lockdown, less than a week after previous restrictions were lifted. The reopening was carried out under conditions in which Delta infections were still being recorded, though supposedly among people already in isolation, and involved the resumption of retail, restaurant and gym operations and a return to face-to-face teaching.

In the past two days, 12 infections have been recorded in Melbourne. At least three of them are unlinked, indicating that Delta may have continued circulating after the previous lockdown was lifted. Schools are again being impacted, with a student at the Warringa Park special-needs school, among the latest positive results. A teacher at the Al-Taqwa College in the city’s west also tested positive, forcing 300 staff and more than 2,000 students into isolation and prompting the closure of two other schools that were potentially exposed.

In the north-eastern state of Queensland, schools have also been drivers of transmission. Students account for 38 of the state’s recent 79 cases, and four teachers have been infected.

As is the case internationally, Australian governments are pursuing a policy that is homicidal in design and intent. They are reopening schools, forcing workers into unsafe places of employment and rejecting pleas from epidemiologists for sharper restrictions, all to ensure that the largest corporations continue to make massive profits. This program, of allowing the virus to spread, will continue to result in mass infections and growing numbers of deaths.

Canada Is Waging an All-Front Legal War Against Indigenous People

Justin Podur

Canada is developing a new image: one of burning churches, toppling statues, and mass graves. There are thousands more unmarked graves, thousands more Indigenous children killed at residential schools, remaining to be unearthed. There can be no denying that this is Canada, and it has to change. But can Canada transform itself for the better? If the revelation of the mass killing of Indigenous children is to lead to any actual soul-searching and any meaningful change, the first order of business is for Canada to stop its all-front war against First Nations. Much of that war is taking place through the legal system.

Canadian politicians have said as much, adopting a motion in June calling for the government to stop fighting residential school survivors in court. A long-standing demand, it has been repeated by Indigenous advocates who have expressed amazement in the face of these horrific revelations that the Canadian government would nonetheless continue to fight Indigenous survivors of systematic child abuse by the state.

To get a sense of the scope of Canada’s legal war on First Nations, I looked at a Canadian legal database containing decisions (case law) pertaining to First Nations. I also looked at the hearing lists of the Federal Court of Canada for ongoing cases. My initial goal was to identify where Canada could easily settle or abandon cases, bringing about a harmonious solution to these conflicts. Two things surprised me.

The first was the volume and diversity of lawsuits Canada is fighting. Canada is fighting First Nations everywhere, on an astoundingly wide range of issues.

The second thing: Canada is losing.

The Attack on Indigenous Children and Women

In his 1984 essay “‘Pioneering’ in the Nuclear Age,” political theorist Eqbal Ahmad argued that the “four fundamental elements… without which an indigenous community cannot survive” were “land, water, leaders and culture.” Canada fights Indigenous people over land, water, fishing rights, mining projects, freedom of movement, and more. The assault on Indigenous nations is also a war against Indigenous children and women.

In the high-profile case of First Nations Child & Family Caring Society of Canada et al. v. Attorney General of Canada, laid out in detail by Cindy Blackstock, “the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada and the Assembly of First Nations filed a complaint under the Canadian Human Rights Act alleging” in 2007 “that the Government of Canada had a longstanding pattern of providing less government funding for child welfare services to First Nations children on reserves than is provided to non-Aboriginal children.” The Canadian Human Rights Tribunal (CHRT) found in favor of the First Nations complainants in 2016.

Note that this isn’t about the history of residential schools. It’s about discrimination against Indigenous kids in the present day. “In fact, the problem might be getting worse,” writes Blackstock, compared to “the height of residential school operations.” As evidence, she refers to a 2005 study of three sample provinces showing a wide gap between the percent of First Nations children in child welfare care (10.23 percent) compared to a much lower rate for non-First Nations children (0.67 percent). In 2006, following the Canadian government’s repeated failures to act on the inequity described in this report (which also included comprehensive suggested reforms that had both moral and economic appeal), Blackstock writes, “the Caring Society and the Assembly of First Nations agreed that legal action was required.” The CHRT was very clear in its 2019 decision that the federal government should compensate each victim the maximum amount, which addressed the victims as follows:

“No amount of compensation can ever recover what you have lost, the scars that are left on your souls or the suffering that you have gone through as a result of racism, colonial practices and discrimination.”

In May 2021, Canada, which has spent millions of dollars fighting this case, tried to overturn the CHRT’s ruling.

Canada’s war on Indigenous children is also a war on Indigenous women. The sterilization of Indigenous women, beginning with Canada’s eugenics program around 1900, is another act of genocide, as scholar Karen Stote has argued. Indigenous women who had tubal ligation without their consent as part of this eugenics program have brought a class-action suit against the provinces of Alberta and British Columbia, both of which had Sexual Sterilization Acts in their provincial laws from the 1920s in Alberta and 1930s in British Columbia until the early 1970s, and Saskatchewan, where sexual sterilization legislation was proposed but failed by one vote in 1930. A Senate committee found a case of forced sterilization of an Indigenous woman as recently as 2019.

The Legal-Financial War on First Nations Organizations

As Bob Joseph outlines in his 2018 book 21 Things You May Not Know About the Indian Act, Canada first gave itself the right to decide Indian status in the Gradual Civilization Act of 1857, which created a process by which Indigenous people could give up their Indian status and so become “enfranchised”—which they would have to do if they wanted to attend higher education or become professionals. The apartheid system was updated through the Indian Act of 1876, from which sprang many evils including both the residential schools and the assertion of Canadian control over the way First Nations govern themselves. In 1927, when Indigenous veterans of World War I began to hold meetings with one another to discuss their situation, Canada passed laws forbidding Indigenous people from political organization and from raising funds to hire legal counsel (and from playing billiards, among other things). The Indian Act—which is still in effect today with amendments, despite multiple attempts to repeal it—outlawed traditional governance structures and gave Canada the power to intervene to remove and install Indigenous governance authorities at will—which Canada did continuously, from Six Nations in 1924 to Barriere Lake in 1995. As a result, at any given moment, many First Nations are still embroiled in lawsuits over control of their own governments.

Canada controls the resources available to First Nations, including drinking water. In another national embarrassment, Canada has found itself able to provision drinking water to diamond mines but not First Nations. This battle too has entered the courts, with a class-action suit by Tataskweyak Cree Nation, Curve Lake First Nation, and Neskantaga First Nation demanding that Canada not only compensate their nations, but also work with them to build the necessary water systems.

Canada dribbles out humiliating application processes by which Indigenous people can try to exercise their human right to housing. When combined with the housing crisis on reserves, these application processes have attracted swindlers like consultant Jerry Paulin, who sued Cat Lake First Nation for $1.2 million, claiming that his efforts were the reason the First Nation received federal funds for urgent housing repairs.

Canada uses the threat of withdrawal of these funds to impose stringent financial “transparency” conditions on First Nations—the subject of legal struggle, in which Cold Lake First Nations has argued that the financial transparency provisions violate their rights. Canada has used financial transparency claims to put First Nations finances under third-party management, withholding and misusing the funds in a not-very-transparent way, as the Algonquins of Barriere Lake charged in another lawsuit. An insistence on transparency is astounding for a country that buried massive numbers of Indigenous children in unmarked graves.

Win or lose, the lawsuits themselves impose high costs on First Nations whose finances are, for the most part, controlled by Canada. The result is situations like the one where the Beaver Lake Cree are suing Canada for costs because they ran out of money suing Canada for their land. When First Nations are winning in court, Canada tries to bankrupt them before they get there.

Land and Resources Are the Core of the Struggle

The core issue between Canada and First Nations is land. Most battles are over the land on which the state of Canada sits, all of which was stolen and much of which was swindled through legal processes that couldn’t hold up to scrutiny and are now unraveling. “[I]n simple acreage,” the late Indigenous leader Arthur Manuel wrote in the 2017 book The Reconciliation Manifesto, this was “the biggest land theft in the history of mankind,” reducing Indigenous people from holding 100 percent of the landmass to 0.2 percent. One of the most economically important pieces of land is the Haldimand tract in southern Ontario, which generates billions of dollars in revenue that belongs, by right, to the Six Nations, as Phil Monture has extensively documented. Six Nations submitted ever-more detailed land claims, until Canada simply stopped accepting them. But in July, their sustained resistance led to the cancellation of a planned suburban development (read: settlement) on Six Nations land.

Many of the First Nations court battles are defensive. Namgis, Ahousaht, Dzawada’enuxw, and Gwa’sala-’Nakwaxda’xw First Nations have tried to defend their wild fisheries against encroachment and pollution by settler fish farms. West Moberly, Long Plain, Peguis, Roseau River Anishinabe, Aroland, Ginoogaming, Squamish, Coldwater, Tsleil-Waututh, Aitchelitz, Skowkale, and Shxwha:y Village First Nations challenged dams and pipelines. Canada has a history of “pouring big money” into these court battles to the tune of tens of millions—small money compared to its tens of billions subsidizing and taking over financially unviable pipelines running through Indigenous lands—including that of the Wet’suwet’en, whose resistance sparked mass protests across Canada in 2020. The duty to consult First Nations on such projects is itself the outcome of a legal struggle, won in the 2004 decision in Haida Nation v. British Columbia.

First Nations who were swindled or coerced out of their lands (or water, as with Iskatewizaagegan No. 39 Independent First Nation’s case against Winnipeg and Ontario for illegally taking their water from Shoal Lake for use by the city of Winnipeg starting in 1913) fight for their land back, for compensation, or both. The Specific Claims Tribunal has 132 ongoing cases. In Saskatchewan in May, the tribunal awarded Mosquito Grizzly Bear’s Head Lean Man First Nation $141 million and recognition that they never surrendered their land as Canada had claimed they had in 1905. In June, Heiltsuk First Nation won a part of their land back.

First Nations also fight for their fishing rights in courts and out on the water, as settler fishers have physically attacked and tried to intimidate Mi’kmaw fishers on Canada’s east coast. In June, on the west coast, after the British Columbia Court of Appeals found against Canada, the federal government announced it wouldn’t appeal, dropping a 15-year litigation that restricted Nuu-chah-nulth First Nations fishing quotas.

Decolonization Just Might Be Inevitable

Why does Canada keep fighting (and losing) even as its legitimacy as a state built on theft and genocide crumbles? It’s not merely the habits of centuries. It’s also the absence of any project besides the displacement of First Nations and the plunder of the land. Canada could take the first step to ending all this by declaring a unilateral ceasefire in the legal war. Too few Canadians understand that this would actually be a very good thing. First Nations lived sustainably for thousands of years in these extraordinary northern ecosystems. Then the European empires arrived, bringing smallpox and tuberculosis among other scourges. Local extinctions of beaver and buffalo quickly followed, as well as the total extinction of the passenger pigeon. Today’s settler state has poisoned pristine lakes with mine tailings, denuded the country’s spectacular forests, and gifted the atmosphere some of the world’s highest per capita carbon emissions (seventh in the world in 2018—more than Saudi Arabia, which was 10th, and the U.S., which was 11th). Indigenous visionaries have better ideas, such as those presented by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Arthur Manuel, or for that matter the Red Deal and the People’s Agreement of Cochabamba.

Under Indigenous sovereignty, Canadians could truly be guests of the First Nations, capable of fulfilling their obligations to their hosts and their hosts’ lands, rather than the pawns of the settler state’s war against those from whom the land was stolen.