“Younger, sicker, quicker”: Doctors plead for vaccinations as US hospitals fill with young patients

Norisa Diaz

As the Delta variant of coronavirus continues to overwhelm the globe, a growing number of young people in their twenties, thirties, and forties are being intubated and succumbing to the virus, particularly in the poorest states in the Southern United States where vaccination numbers are the lowest. The phrase now used by doctors to explain this new stage of the pandemic is “younger, sicker, quicker.”

With many states breaking infection records daily, Florida is the epicenter of the crisis in the South. On Saturday, Florida reported 23,903 new cases of COVID-19 in a 24-hour period, raising the state’s total number of cases to 2,725,450. The Florida Hospital Association reported a record high for the state's hospitalization rates, with 13,348 patients hospitalized as of Saturday.

According to figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), more than 80 percent of people between 65 to 74 are fully vaccinated, but the figure is less than half of that for ages 18 to 39. Across the South, cases are skyrocketing and the trends are toward a lower age group—particularly among those ages 18-49, who now make up 50 percent of all cases.

A medical student performs an endotracheal intubation on a dummy. (AP Photo/Aaron Favila)

Doctors and healthcare staff throughout the region are pleading for the population to get vaccinated. Compared to an earlier time in the pandemic when the majority of deaths were among the elderly, health care staff are seeing large numbers of young people in the prime of lives, often parents with young children, succumbing to the virus.

Dr. Brytney Cobia of Grandview Medical Center in Birmingham, Alabama made an appeal in a Facebook post, stating that “One of the last things they do before being intubated is beg me for the vaccine,” Cobia wrote. “I take them by the hand and tell them I’m sorry, but it’s too late. A few days later, when I call the time of death, I hug [their] family members and tell them that the best way to honor your loved one is to get vaccinated and encourage everyone you know to do the same. “

In disbelief at their loss, Cobia stated that patients and their families explain to her the various reasons that discouraged them from taking a vaccine: “They tell me they didn’t know. They thought it was a hoax. They thought it was political. They thought that because they had a certain blood type or a certain skin color, they would not get as sick. They thought it was ‘just the flu.’ But they were wrong. And they wish they could go back. But cannot.”

Alabama and Mississippi have the lowest vaccination rates in the nation with only 35 percent of residents fully vaccinated against COVID-19, according to data from Johns Hopkins.

In another powerful statement, Dr. Michael Bolding at Arkansas’ premier Washington Regional Medical Center recently made an impassioned plea in a Facebook video to beg Arkansas residents to get vaccinated, describing the conditions faced in the hospitals. “Recently I’ve seen a dramatic rise in twenty-year-olds and thirty-year-olds, unvaccinated patients, who are not coming in to the ER requiring a little bit of oxygen and being hospitalized for a day or two, but younger healthier patients with no comorbidities ending up on ventilators, BiPAP, high flow oxygen and extremely sick.

“I have had to call multiple mothers and fathers of preschoolers in their 20s and 30s and tell them that their spouse may not survive this hospital stay. I cannot explain in words the fatigue that your local hospital providers have right now.

“What I really wish you could see, is to look into the eyes of a young father or a gentleman who knows that they may be short for this world because they didn’t get their vaccine, and the regret and remorse on their face—and fear. I can’t show you, I can’t describe, it will certainly be with me forever, but that look on a patient's face would be more motivating than anything to go ahead and get your vaccine if you have not already.”

Scott Harris, chief executive of the Alabama Department of Public Health told the Washington Post, “We find that there’s a lot of mistrust with messages that come from state government, from public health, in particular, from the media,” he said. “It’s just a multilayered problem. There’s just a lot of different people who have a lot of different reasons for not getting the vaccine. And it’s just hard to address them in a big way.”

In Tulsa, Oklahoma, Dr. Ryan Parker, chief of emergency medicine for Saint Francis Health System, told the Tulsa World, “I’ve had a lot of ‘I was going to wait and see what it did for other people,’ ‘(see) if other people had side effects,’ or ‘there are too many unknowns.’”

“My youngest patient is 20 years old. So 20s to 50s is a very common age group right now, which is very scary,” added Dr. Kamran Abbasi. “It breaks my heart. We’ve got people coming to the ER, and I’m admitting them to the hospital. They realize this is worse than they thought it was going to be—whatever perception they had of COVID was incorrect. Now they’re here and they feel horrible and they’re terrified.”

Dr. Mike Angelidis, chair of Saint Francis’ hospitalist services and chief of internal medicine, stressed, “There is so much ‘wait and see,’” and confusion about side effects with regards to the vaccine. “What I try to tell patients is that this is different than any other vaccine we’ve had in a lot of ways, and one of those ways is the widespread use of it. There is so much research and data on these vaccines. But they already have these ideas about it ... Where are they getting their information from, and why are they so scared? It’s very frustrating.”

In addition to the impassioned pleas from frontline doctors and healthcare workers, a growing number of parents who have lost their children are speaking out.

Christy Carpenter of Alabama lost her 28-year-old son Curt, who was also unvaccinated. She told the Washington Post that her family had not received the vaccine because they had concerns about how soon it was rolled out. She said her son was healthy prior to catching the virus, and that he initially believed the pandemic to be a “hoax.” She said his last words were: “This is not a hoax, this is real.”

In St. Louis, Missouri, Kimberle Jones lost her 37-year-old daughter Erica Thompson, who was a mother to three boys, ages 8, 11 and 17, now orphaned. “I just watched my baby slipping away from me every day,” Jones told KCRG News. Thompson was in the hospital for a total of 50 days. She died July 4. “The doctor basically called and told me that she got to go on the ventilator or she’s going to die,” Jones said.

“My daughter was not vaccinated and I really do believe, I really do believe had she been vaccinated that she’d still be here with me today,” Jones added.

Father of five, Michael Freedy, 39, contracted the virus after going on holiday with his fiancée Jessica DuPreez. He died in hospital, where he was placed on a ventilator, on Thursday. Freedy sent DuPreez a heartbreaking message before dying of COVID-19 in hospital: “I should have got that damn vaccine.” Freedy leaves behind five children—the youngest of them just 17 months old.

In Los Angeles, 34-year-old Stephen Harmon died last week from COVID-19 just weeks after expressing his opposition to taking the vaccine. Dr. Oren Friedman, who treats COVID-19 patients at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, told KCBS-TV the hospital has seen a tenfold increase in COVID-19 admissions, and that “Virtually every single person that is getting sick enough to be admitted to the hospital has not been vaccinated.”

“I can tell you that for the respiratory therapists and nurses and doctors that are having to go into rooms and take care of patients who are this sick at this stage—and to know that it’s preventable if people simply had taken the vaccine—it is an awful feeling of PTSD and frustration,” Friedman added.

The influx of young people admitted to hospitals includes not only adults, but large numbers of children, still too young to get vaccinated. For the week ending July 29, the American Academy of Pediatrics reported an 84 percent increase in new COVID-19 cases among children. Numerous hospitals have reported a large number of admissions of children and youth, with dozens in intensive care units and on ventilators.

The British medical journal The Lancet recently reported that 1.5 million children have been orphaned in the pandemic. The current deaths are even more tragic as the virus is cutting down young people and parents of young children in the prime of their life.

US Senate nears passage of infrastructure spending bill

Patrick Martin

Infrastructure legislation backed by the Biden White House and a substantial section of Senate Republicans cleared several procedural votes on the weekend and was set for final passage through the Senate by midweek. A bill to limit debate passed the Senate by 67-27 on Saturday, a second such vote passed Sunday by 68-29, and a vote to waive budget rules passed by 64-33 on Sunday evening.

The legislation would provide about $1 trillion to repair crumbling roads and bridges and shore up other critical pieces of economic infrastructure, including the electrical grid, water system and internet connections. Barely half the funds provided in the bill represents new money—about $550 billion in all—while the remainder represents reallocation of funds already appropriated by Congress, either in the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan enacted in March, or the series of bailouts and emergency measures passed last year under the Trump administration.

For example, $50 billion in spending under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act comes from federal supplemental unemployment compensation, provided under the American Rescue Plan, which two dozen Republican-run state governments refused to spend when they terminated the supplemental benefits earlier this summer, in advance of the official September 6 cutoff.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

Another $50 billion is to come from recouping “fraudulent” unemployment compensation payments in 2020 and this year under the various federal supplemental programs. In plain English, impoverished and jobless workers will be hounded by debt collectors employed by the Biden administration to give back money they are retroactively deemed ineligible to receive.

The 11 Republican senators who negotiated the legislation with the Democrats flatly rejected even a penny’s increase in taxes on the wealthy and big business, and the Biden White House and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer capitulated in order to obtain Republican support for the legislation.

This is essence of the “bipartisanship” hailed by the corporate media and touted by President Biden as his preferred approach. The Republicans dictate, while Democrats cite the necessity for bipartisanship as their pretext for moving ever further to the right.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell joined the faction of Republicans who voted for the infrastructure bill, but a majority of his caucus followed the advice of ex-president Donald Trump, who demanded rejection. In a fascistic statement issued before the vote, Trump ranted, “No deal is better than a bad deal. Fight for America, not for special interests and Radical Democrats. RINOs [Republicans in Name Only] are ruining America, right alongside Communist Democrats.”

Despite White House boasts that the bill will generate jobs, the total will hardly make a dent in the overall US economy, since it is only one-tenth the size of the $6 trillion in new spending authorized last year under the Trump administration, in the CARES Act and subsequent legislation. Most of these trillions went to bailing out Wall Street and corporate America, while a pittance was provided to workers and the unemployed.

While the amount of the investment in roads, bridges, water pipes, ports and internet connectivity is invariably described in the media as “huge” and “massive,” the actual scale is far more modest. The spending is spread out over five to ten years, meaning that $550 billion in new money averages under $60 billion a year—less than one-tenth of what the Pentagon spends every year on the vast US military establishment.

Thus the $110 billion for roads and bridges averages to $11 billion a year, compared to a recent industry estimate that $231 billion each year is required to maintain existing roads and bridges and repair those in poor condition.

Similarly, $39 billion for public transit is spread over ten years, and would not even cover the deficits and capital needs of the largest US system, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which serves the New York City area, let alone the needs of dozens of other transit systems around the country.

The budget for water infrastructure, including a much-touted plan to replace all lead piping in the country to avoid new catastrophes like that in Flint, Michigan, was cut in half, from an initial proposal of $111 billion to $55 billion, or $5.5 billion a year—less than half what the Pentagon spends on a single new aircraft carrier.

It is same with airports ($25 billion) and seaport infrastructure ($17 billion). No doubt these are socially necessary, but the amounts spread over ten years are pathetically small. There will still be pockmarked runways and ports choked with debris when this legislation has run its course.

Such comparisons demonstrate the vast scale of the unmet social needs in America, for which this bill is barely a Band-Aid, let alone a down payment.

Many of the provisions of the bill are nothing more than boondoggles for construction companies and other giant enterprises, whose lobbyists outside Congress and representatives in the Senate itself have spent the last week drafting special provisions in the 2,700-page bill that will benefit their corporate patrons.

Significantly, the White House aide who headed the negotiations with the Republican is Steve Ricchetti, a former corporate lobbyist who joined Biden’s vice-presidential staff in 2012 after many years as a representative of hospital chains, the pharmaceutical industry, and telecommunications companies.

There is another and quite sinister aspect of the infrastructure bill: many of its provisions are aimed, not at improving the lives of ordinary Americans, or even at improving the transportation facilities required by American corporations. They are instead part of a process of “hardening” American society in preparation for a full-scale military confrontation with China.

This certainly is a major purpose of such measures as $73 billion for the electrical power grid, including a transition from above-ground to underground lines, the $50 billion to help communities ward off cyber attacks, and the $65 billion to improve internet speeds to the level that would be required for effective American military operations in every part of the US.

Biden has made little effort to disguise the anti-Chinese thrust of much of the spending he has proposed, particularly in the area of electrical vehicles and cyber industry. Senate Republicans agree. One of the amendments still outstanding, and expected to come to a vote, is their proposal to add $50 billion to the Pentagon budget, for construction of “infrastructure” on US military bases.

Wildfires rage across Greece as austerity hobbles firefighting effort

Katerina Selin

“Hell,” a “nightmare,” and a catastrophe of biblical proportions: these are just some of the expressions from residents and journalists as they struggle to describe what is happening before their eyes in Southern Europe. The forest fires across the Mediterranean region have continued to rage over recent days, especially in Greece, where the situation is totally out of control.

While the solidarity and spirit of sacrifice are tremendous, with residents and firefighters waging a bitter struggle day and night against the fires, rage is mounting over the lack of action by the right-wing New Democracy (ND) government, which is responsible for this crime against humanity and the environment.

A dangerous heat wave with temperatures of over 40 degrees Celsius and numerous fires have swept the country. The fires in Attica north of Athens have been temporarily suppressed, but they left behind skeletal shells of burned-out houses, charred trees and dystopian landscapes covered in ashes. At least 1,300 electricity poles have burned.

A man runs as fire burns trees in Kirinthos village on the island of Evia, about 135 kilometers (84 miles) north of Athens, Greece, Friday, Aug. 6, 2021. (AP Photo/Thodoris Nikolaou)

Firefighters are currently battling a blaze on the southern Peloponnese peninsula, including the regions around Mani and Olympia, and on Greece’s second-largest island, Euboea. Two fires broke out on the island of Zakynthos in the Ionian Sea on Sunday.

The northern parts of Euboea, an idyllic region with pine forests, mountainous villages and small beaches and bays, have been transformed into an inferno. One week ago, a fire erupted in the village of Limni before rapidly spreading across the north of the island. “If no help is sent, we will be burned alive. The fire is coming on two fronts, and there is no way out, only the sea. We are thousands of people. Where are we supposed to go?” a terrified resident said on Saturday to Open TV. More than 2,000 residents of the northern region have been evacuated. Many people had to flee from their villages to the town of Istiaia, where around 10,000 people are holding out.

The fire reached the village of Pefki and nearby villages on Sunday evening. Flames shot 100 meters into the air, consumed the forest and attacked the houses. Since the villages are surrounded by the fire, residents fled to the beach. Under a dusty red cloud, 400 residents found refuge on a ferry. The traumatised people were even forced to pay for tickets on some of the first evacuation trips. Only after outrage on social media did the government order the shipping companies to operate for free.

Desperate residents directed angry appeals and despairing pleas for help to the government. Litsa Efstathia, a resident from Pefki, told Open TV that there were no preparations, clear orders or support from the air against the fires. “We have not seen a single plane. Today is the fifth day. Nothing. Are there no planes to extinguish the fires? All of northern Euboea will burn down. Residents are trying to save themselves and fight. Everyone here is beside themselves with anger. We appeal, no we demand that aircraft come.”

Since Greece has a lack of operational personnel and firefighting planes due to decades of austerity measures, the firefighting service has been totally overwhelmed by fires breaking out all over the country. A large percentage of the force was deployed on Thursday and Friday to combat the fire approaching the capital Athens, with the result that few aircraft were deployed to Euboea, allowing the fires to spread unhindered.

Residents everywhere have sought to save themselves and protect their villages from the flames by all available means. They have tackled smoldering sections of forest with buckets of water and transformed their cars and small trucks into auxiliary fire engines to help extinguish the blazes.

The mayor from Istiaia, who initially downplayed the fires, was also beside himself with anger. He warned Open TV on Sunday, “Today we expect total destruction by fire here. We are alone. The fire brigade only gives us ridiculous evacuation plans. The villages are burning or are only being saved by the residents’ self-sacrifice. Aircraft must now be deployed to stop our region from burning. It is a disgrace to the country what is happening here. We have not extinguished a single front.”

While other countries like France, Ukraine, Cyprus, Croatia, Sweden and Israel have already sent help for the Greek emergency services, Germany only responded after a week. According to the Interior Ministry, units from the THW aid organisation and fire brigades from North-Rhine Westphalia and Hesse will be sent to Greece.

The fact that the German government has watched without taking action while Greece is ablaze is shocking but not surprising. It was the German government that has imposed with ruthless brutality the European Union’s austerity measures on Greece’s working class over the past ten years.

Responsibility for the systematic neglect of the catastrophe prevention system and infrastructure, together with the bleeding dry of public sector budgets, lies with the Greek and German ruling class. For them, the concern about saving human lives and protecting the environment is merely a bothersome expense that cuts across their profit-making interest.

These policies are supported by all parties, including the ND, social democratic PASOK and pseudo-left Syriza, leading to a series of avoidable wildfire disasters. In 2007, flames raged in the Peloponnese, Attica and Euboea. The inferno in the resort town of Mati under the Syriza government of Alexis Tsipras in 2018 claimed over 100 lives.

The government’s priorities are underlined by the 2021 budget. The defence budget is increasing by one-third from last year to a total of €5.5 billion. The entire rearmament plan over the coming years is comprised of €11.5 billion. In addition, the government pumped another €30 million into the police to control the universities. Large sums of money flowed to pro-government media outlets, which are controlled by Greek oligarchs.

By contrast, savings are being made in health care and wildfire protection. Of the €17.7 million for fire protection requested by forest fire centers this year, the government approved just €1.7 million. Fire departments are hopelessly under-resourced, even though the government claims that the number of personnel has risen by 15.6 percent since 2018. In a country like Greece, which struggles with wildfires every year, this is a drop in the bucket.

Disaster protection infrastructure is also totally inadequate. Expenditure rose in 2021 from €400 million in 2018 to €616 million, the government boasted. But it remains silent on the fact that disaster protection is also responsible for conducting the coronavirus measures and contact tracing. Alongside the heat wave and catastrophic fires, the spread of COVID-19 is accelerating with over 3,000 cases per day.

Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has sought to divert attention away from the political record of his government by referring to the higher power of climate change, which created the exceptional emergency situation. But the reality is that it is the capitalist nature of their policies, like the ruling class around the world, that have both produced the environmental crisis to begin with and created the extent and misery of the fires.

The forest fire crisis is not restricted to Greece, but is striking new areas. In Italy, fires are spreading in Sicily, Apulia and Calabria. In the Balkans, Bulgaria, Albania and Kosovo are also affected.

In Turkey, forest fires now largely brought under control raged for 10 days. In the area around Mola, up to 60,000 hectares was burned as of August 6. Up to 36,000 people had to be evacuated. On Friday, residents in Milas protested in Mugla province against the forestry minister Bekir Pakdemirli. The police arrested a woman who shouted, “Where were the firefighting aircraft? The people’s houses are burned, shame on the government! The government should resign!”

Another hot spot is Russia. A state of emergency has been declared in many areas. Sakha, in the country’s northeast, has been hit especially badly. Observers describe the fires as the worst they’ve ever seen. A total of 180 fires are currently burning. Already destroyed are 1.3 million hectares of forest and several villages have been evacuated. In the city of Sarov in Nishny-Novgorod Oblast, an even larger catastrophe looms. There, the flames are threatening the national nuclear weapons research center.

The wildfire disaster is a direct product of climate change produced by the capitalist profit system, which threatens the future and lives of millions of people.

The International Panel on Climate Change will release today the initial stages of a report warning that the current wildfires and heat waves are only just the beginning. The Mediterranean region, with 500 million inhabitants, is a hot spot for climate change. The IPCC projects here a more rapid increase in average temperatures than in any other region, according to AFP.

By 2050, a further 93 million people could be affected by heat waves, with more than 20,000 heat-related deaths each year. Global warming will lead to ever more extreme weather events: droughts and heat waves like now in the Mediterranean on the one hand, and storms and floods on the other, as was recently seen in Germany and Belgium.

French health unions file strike notices against mandatory vaccination

Anthony Torres

In the context of protests called by the far right against the Macron government’s “health pass,” the health wing of the Sud trade union has filed a notice for indefinite strike action by health personnel against the law. Protests were held again on Saturday, involving approximately 240,000 people across the country, according to the government’s own figures, including approximately 17,000 in Paris. On Thursday, the Constitutional Council published a statement that the government’s law was legal, including the requirement that health personnel be vaccinated.

The healthcare branches of Sud and the General Federation of Labour ( Conféderation générale de travail —CGT) are demanding the “ending of compulsory vaccination” for health care workers and the “freedom to choose” for every individual whether or not to be vaccinated. In a statement, Sud denounced sanctions against health workers who refuse vaccination: “The exemptions open a dangerous precedent. They permit the employer to carry out sanctions (suspension of work contract and of pay), for a reason that should fall under medical secrecy and the jurisdiction of occupational health and safety.”

In addition to the repeal of the health pass and ending compulsory vaccination, Sud’s statement includes other demands, including for a minimum wage of 1700 euros, the reopening of closed beds or the unconditional recognition of coronavirus infection as an occupational disease for all health staff and social workers.

Anti-vaccine protesters march during a rally in Strasbourg, Saturday, July 17, 2021. (AP Photo/Jean-Francois Badias)

In Marseilles, Sud and the CGT have published notices for an unlimited strike at the Marseille Public Assistance hospital beginning August 4 and the Édouard Toulouse hospital beginning today. In Lyon, Sud Santé has also published a strike notice, which began on July 29. In Corsica, in Bastia, the CGT of the hospital centre of the Haute-Corse municipality filed a strike notice on Friday, July 30, while a rally was held the same day.

There is legitimate anger among nursing staff against the criminal policy of “herd immunity” that has been pursued by the Macron government and the European Union. The pandemic has brought the health system to the brink of collapse as a result of the austerity policies of successive governments, sacrificing the lives of health care workers. Macron’s “health pass” is part of a policy pursued by the ruling class throughout the European Union to impose a return to work and school reopening, allowing the virus to spread in defiance of scientific recommendations.

However, the policy of the trade union bureaucracies is reactionary, diverting the anger of health workers behind an anti-scientific, anti-vaccine perspective advanced above all by the extreme right, which advocates for an unchecked spread of the coronavirus.

Compulsory vaccination against many diseases, including COVID-19, is not an attack on democratic rights. It is part of the social gains obtained by the struggles of the working class in the 20th century, which have improved working-class life expectancy. Vaccination against the coronavirus is a basic requirement of public health and self-defence of the working class, including health care workers.

The fight against the pandemic and police dictatorship is an international one, which must be conducted scientifically through the mobilisations of workers independently of the trade unions, which are in the thrall of the financial aristocracy. The strike notice filed by the CGT and Sud occur under conditions of demonstrations called by neofascists Florian Philippot, Nicolas Dupont-Aignan and Marion Maréchal Le Pen against vaccination and for the lifting of all health restrictions.

This phenomenon is not isolated to France; all over Europe, far-right forces are organizing demonstrations against the health restrictions advocated by scientists.

In Italy, in Milan, Turin, Rome, Naples and other cities, several thousand people took to the streets this weekend at the call of the far-right party Fratelli d’Italia to demonstrate against the requirement of a Green Pass for certain activities from August 6.

In Germany, in Berlin, hundreds of hostile people defied the ban on demonstrations and gathered illegally in the streets of the city on Sunday, causing scuffles with the police. They were politically dominated by far-right and fascist forces who openly display their attitudes via Third Reich war flags and anti-Semitic symbols.

Sud falsifies the origin of the demonstrations called by the far right to conceal their alignment with the political activities of neofascists across Europe. It claims to call for workers “to participate in the social mobilizations and the defence of freedoms that are being built and that have nothing to do with the rallies initiated by the extreme right and conspiracy movements, which we are fighting against.”

Notwithstanding the fact that Sud and the CGT call for workers to join separate rallies, in parallel with those of the extreme right, the protest movement as a whole against Macron’s law has been initiated by the far right.

Moreover, the site Permanent Revolution, which is close to the Sud trade union, admitted that the anti-vaccine demonstrations were called by the far right: “While the far right was able to intervene and call for a mobilisation, the general tint of the demands is marked by confusion, expressing an initial politicisation. A politicisation that is marked by the discrediting of the claims of the government, which has opened up space for doubts, some of them legitimate, about vaccination.”

Explosive anger is rising across Europe and internationally against the ruling elite, which has refused to take the necessary health measures to stop the pandemic. An international health and political crisis has developed, with the possibility of an independent intervention by the working class to impose a scientific health policy. In March 2020, it was the spontaneous walkouts by workers across Italy and Europe that imposed a strict lockdown to allow workers to shelter in their homes.

The CGT and Sud are trying to line up angry and desperate health care workers behind the far right, to prevent a fight for a scientific policy against the virus.

The anti-vaccine campaign of the neofascists, encouraged by the financial aristocracy, is aimed at enforcing a further turn to the right in official politics, so that the billions of euros that are required to vaccinate the population will not be diverted from the corporate bailouts adopted by the EU. Indeed, the trade union apparatuses will be well compensated via the bailout funds that pass via the major corporations and their labour relations “social partners.”

Spain’s PSOE-Podemos government to ban Castilian nationalist party

Alejandro López

The Socialist Party (PSOE)-Podemos government is moving to ban Izquierda Castellana (Castilian Left), a separatist-nationalist party active in central Spain.

The outlawing of a political party claiming to be socialist, republican and internationalist is part of an escalating campaign by the European ruling class on free speech and democratic rights, intensified with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Terrified at growing social opposition to “herd immunity” policies and bank and corporate bailouts which have left over 1.1 million dead across Europe, the ruling class aims to suppress all forms of opposition.

Podemos is playing a leading role in this attack on democratic rights. Drawn from the affluent middle class and based on the anti-Marxist postmodernist identity politics of race and gender, it is entirely devoted to protecting the privileges its members enjoy in the existing order. Podemos will use all means at its disposal to crush social opposition, as it carries out policies of austerity, war, and police repression, as well as the criminal “herd immunity” policy which has already led to the deaths of over 100,000 people in Spain of COVID-19.

Spain's Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez (PSOE), second left, walks next to Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias, second right, and First Deputy Prime Minister Carmen Calvo, left, at the Moncloa Palace in Madrid, Spain, Tuesday, Jan. 14 2020. (Image Credit: AP Photo/Manu Fernandez)

This also constitutes a warning on the reactionary role that Podemos’ international allies like the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), Unsubmissive France (LFI) and the German Left Party will play. Were they to come to power, they would implement the same anti-democratic policies as Podemos.

The International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) opposes the persecution of Izquierda Castellana (IzCa). It has unbridgeable political differences with IzCa, which promotes Castilian nationalism, seeking a “united Castille” involving Cantabria, Castile and León, Madrid, La Rioja and Castile-La Mancha. This works to divide workers along national lines, amid a decades-long promotion of Basque, Catalan and Galician separatism, and the whipping up of Spanish chauvinism.

Nonetheless, IzCa’s persecution is an attempt by the Spanish bourgeoisie to intimidate political opposition, set a precedent of groundless bans of political parties, and install a police-state climate.

On Friday, IzCa published a statement describing the attempted ban. It explains that the National Court, descended from the Public Order Court set up under the fascist Franco regime to punish “political crimes,” has notified them about a resolution sponsored by the PSOE-Podemos Ministry of Interior, through the Solicitor General of the State. The resolution “calls for the ‘extinction’ of Izquierda Castellana, that is, its disappearance as a legal political organisation.”

IzCa explains that the Ministry of Interior “is resorting to administrative tricks, arguing that IzCa’s statutes do not comply with the changes introduced by the Organic Law 3/2015 legislative reform of March 30, on the control of the economic-financial activity of Political Parties.”

Such tricks are ludicrous. Spain’s main opposition party, the conservative Popular Party, has been illegally financed by corrupt deals with big business for over two decades, and has never been threatened with a ban. In 2018, the Gürtel case demonstrated that the PP kept off-book accounts, stemming from a sweeping kickbacks-for-contracts scheme affecting scores of local and regional PP officials who awarded no-bid contracts to business networks. This money was then used to finance political campaigns and provide a lavish lifestyle to select politicians.

According to an official investigation, the PP had “a financing system outside the legal economic circuit” between 1990 and 2008.

“It is paradoxical,” IzCa states, “that a political organisation that … never in its entire history requested or received any subsidies from the state, will be outlawed based on such reasons, especially when most of the political parties that ostensibly breach the law and regulations on such matters are not even warned of such a possibility.” The ban, IzCa adds, is part of an increasingly repressive policy of the Interior Ministry, “accentuated since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic.”

IzCa is an alliance of Stalinist, feminist and petty-bourgeois Castilian nationalist groupings founded in 2002, including Comunero Left, Popular Castillian Unity, Revolutionary Castillian Youth, Castillian Women and a hard-line Stalinist group, the Communist Party of the Castilian People, which left soon afterwards.

An earlier attempted ban on IzCa was closed by the National Court in 2008. Its leaders, now-deceased former leader Doris Benegas and current general secretary Luis Ocampo have repeatedly been targeted. In 2012, Benegas was arrested on suspicion of organising an anti-government demonstration, the so-called Surround the Congress protest. In October 2014, Benegas was arrested at an anti-monarchy protest in Madrid, held for 24 hours and prosecuted. In that trial, prosecutors requested a year and a half in prison. Finally, Benegas and two others were acquitted.

The principal target of the PSOE-Podemos government’s groundless threat to ban IzCa, a bankrupt organisation that poses no threat to Spanish capitalism, is not so much IzCa as the broader rise of political opposition in the working class. IzCa serves only as a pretext to try out methods of political repression as strikes, protests and broader opposition to “herd immunity” policies and bank bailouts mount among workers.

Podemos has stepped up its efforts to create not the “radical democracy” it promised, but a police state. The threat to ban IzCa takes place on the six-month anniversary of the jailing of Stalinist rapper Pablo Hasél on charges of insulting the Spanish state and the Bourbon monarchy. Hasél is the first musician imprisoned in Spain since 1978 and the fall of the fascist regime led by Francisco Franco.

Podemos has escalated internet censorship, whipped up a MeToo witch hunt against opera singer Plácido Domingo and implemented a fascistic anti-migrant policy. This has led to the drowning of over 2,000 migrants off the Canary Islands, a surge in violence against migrants across Spain and reports of sexual abuse of dozens of minors at PSOE-Podemos government-run migrant concentration camps.

The working class must oppose these authoritarian moves, beginning by opposing those who are ramming them through: Podemos and its pseudo-left hangers, which while posting solidarity statements with IzCa, continue to provide Podemos with a “left” cover.

This includes Izquierda Revolucionaria (Revolutionary Left), formerly affiliated with the Committee for a Workers’ International, which posted a statement against the “antidemocratic action,” one more “proof of the authoritarian and reactionary character of the regime of 1978, but also of the drift to the right of the current Executive.” It forgot to add that IR acts like a faction of Podemos. In last May’s elections in Madrid, it proudly stated it distributed 120,000 leaflets, organised 70 campaign tables and produced 80 large banners calling for a Podemos vote.

Anticapitalistas, which left the PSOE-Podemos government last year to better suppress social opposition from the outside, has yet to publish a statement, or even an article on its online paper Poder Popular. Instead, it posted an empty, one-sentence tweet from its regional branch of Castilla y León, stating: “The Regime of [19]78 will not be able to bend the will of the people who take control of their future… We are still together, not a step back.”

The Morenoite Revolutionary Workers Current posted a statement criticising the ban and calling for a “united front in defence of democratic rights and against the repression by the self-named ‘progressive’ government and the Monarchical regime.” It did not mention whom this united front would include. However, the Morenoites have a long record of seeking alliances with satellites of Podemos like the Revolutionary Left and Anticapitalistas.

COVID catastrophe fuels unrest in Southeast Asia

Mike Head

Popular disaffection is rising across Southeast Asia as millions of people, mostly impoverished, suffer the worsening impact on lives and livelihoods of the failure of capitalist governments throughout the region and worldwide to protect society from COVID-19.

Home to more than 650 million people, Southeast Asia has become an epicentre of the global Delta surge that has resulted from the corporate profit-driven policies by which governments have refused to impose, or prematurely lifted, safety restrictions, allowing more virulent mutant strains to spin out of control.

Across the region, the disaster has been compounded by the near-collapse of chronically underfunded health care systems, lack of access to vaccines and widespread losses of jobs and incomes.

People wait to have medical oxygen tanks refilled outside the Naing oxygen factory at the South Dagon industrial zone in Yangon, Myanmar, Wednesday, July 28, 2021. (AP Photo)

One of the most severely affected countries, Indonesia, last week passed a damning milestone—100,000 officially confirmed COVID-19 deaths.

Just days earlier, President Joko Widodo eased restrictions on July 29, allowing small businesses and some shopping malls to reopen. To appease the financial elite, Widido lifted the already limited lockdowns, even in the worst-hit areas, such as Jakarta and Bali, despite warnings by health experts that this would lead to a resurgence of infections.

Virologists also warned of the potential for new variants to emerge, which has occurred when the virus has been allowed to run rampant in countries with large populations. “The decision doesn’t seem to be related to the pandemic, but to economics,” Pandu Riono, an epidemiologist at the University of Indonesia, told Reuters.

It took 14 months for Indonesia to exceed the 50,000-death mark at the end of May, and just over nine weeks to double it. Despite a fall from July’s peak of more than 57,000 new daily infections, the Health Ministry is still recording more than 1,700 new deaths of COVID-19 every day.

As in other countries, these figures are believed to be a substantial undercount. Low testing rates and a lack of contact tracing means many thousands of deaths are going unrecorded.

Since the beginning of June, more than 2,800 people have died at home, according to LaporCOVID-19, a non-government virus data group. Some of those deaths were counted in official figures but others were not.

“They were rejected by the hospitals, so they went back home and did the self-isolation at home with limited access to medicine, no oxygen and no monitoring from doctors until they died,” Ahmad Arif, one of LaporCOVID-19’s founders, told Associated Press (AP).

The World Health Organisation said hospitals remained in need of isolation rooms, oxygen supplies, medical and personal protective equipment, as well as mobile field hospitals and body bags. Indonesia’s vaccination rate remains at less than 8 percent.

The world’s fourth most populous country has now recorded more than 3.6 million COVID-19 cases since March 2020. An immense social crisis is developing. East Java’s child protection agency revealed last week that 5,082 children in that province alone had lost one or both parents to the virus. Some estimates suggest that figure nationally could be as high as 35,000.

About 30 percent of Indonesia’s 277 million people are officially regarded as living in poverty as a result of the pandemic, soaring from less than 10 percent in 2019.

In Thailand, facing a rising tide of opposition to its calamitous pandemic response, the military regime of Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha is trying to use emergency decrees to outlaw dissent.

Last week, as the country’s confirmed infections and deaths hit record highs, the regime moved to block online reports that may “instigate fear,” even if true. Alleged offenders could be jailed for up to two years.

The health ministry said the new cases had exceeded 20,000 per day for the first time, with deaths nearing 200 daily. By last Wednesday, total cases had reached 672,385 and 5,503 deaths.

The public healthcare system is breaking down. As hospitals filled up, the authorities scrambled to set up ad hoc isolation wards in airport terminals, warehouses and decommissioned railway carriages. One hospital resorted to renting freight containers to store dead bodies after its morgue ran out of room.

Only about 6.5 percent of Thailand’s 70 million people were fully vaccinated as of Thursday. In recent weeks, protests have demanded Prayuth’s resignation. In July, police used rubber bullets, tear gas and water cannon against demonstrators in Bangkok.

The regime last week tightened partial containment measures in the capital Bangkok and several high-risk provinces, and said the rules were likely to remain in place until the end of August.

There is a political crisis in Malaysia, which reported 20,889 new COVID-19 cases last Friday, breaking its record for daily infections for a third consecutive day. The cumulative total number of infections now stands at 1,224,595, according to the health ministry.

This figure is also far below the reality. Deputy health director-general Chong Chee Kheong said 80 percent of COVID-19 cases who were “brought in dead” were never diagnosed with the disease. Out of the 1,000 deaths reported weekly, about 80 to 100 were “brought in dead” and the number of such cases had been rising over the past few weeks.

Thousands of contract doctors staged a walkout on July 23, demanding permanent postings and better pay. “Almost 150 medical staff have resigned this year because they are fatigued with the current system,” a doctor told Reuters at a protest in the capital Kuala Lumpur. The doctors said an offer by Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin to extend their contracts did not go far enough.

Facing growing unrest, the government last week said it would no longer use the number of recorded daily infections as a metric to ease safety curbs for states once they entered the second phase of a “national recovery plan.”

Muhyiddin has refused to quit, despite losing the support of some members of the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), the biggest bloc in his unstable ruling alliance, and faces a no-confidence vote in parliament next month.

The Delta variant is also ravaging Myanmar. Daily cases, taken as an average over seven days, have risen from around 5,000 to 6,000 over the past month, and deaths have reached about 350 a day, but limited testing indicates that this is a gross underestimate. The share of tests that return positive results has exceeded 35 percent since mid-July, which suggests widespread, uncontrolled transmission.

Officially, just over 7,500 people have died from COVID-19 since the February 1 military coup, but few people are treated at public hospitals, so the real death toll is unknown. In recent weeks funeral homes and crematoriums have been overwhelmed.

The inability of many people to work safely, coupled with a shortage of oxygen, medicine and a properly functioning hospital system, is fueling the health crisis. Exacerbating it is the arrest of more than 150 doctors and nurses, who have been at the forefront of a civil disobedience movement. Another 600 medics are estimated to have stopped working after the junta issued warrants for their arrests.

After having contained the virus for much of the pandemic, Vietnam is facing its worst outbreak, with Ho Chi Minh City and surrounding provinces accounting for most new infections.

The government reported 8,324 new infections last Friday, up from 7,244 cases on Thursday, taking the pandemic total above 193,000. It reported 296 additional coronavirus deaths on the same day, raising the country’s death toll to 3,016.

Only 820,000 people have been fully vaccinated, or less than 1 percent of the country’s 98 million population, according to official data.

About a third of Vietnam’s 63 cities and provinces are under coronavirus restrictions. The capital Hanoi will extend them until August 22, its health ministry said last Friday, warning of new clusters of infections detected in the city of more than 8 million people.

In the Philippines, cases are now averaging about 8,000 a day, with deaths rising to around 200 a day. Chaos overtook several COVID-19 vaccination sites in Manila last Thursday as thousands of people tried to receive a shot before the capital headed back into a partial lockdown for two weeks.

With around 1.6 million COVID-19 cases and more than 28,000 deaths, the country has the second-worst record in Southeast Asia after Indonesia. Just 9.3 percent of the 110 million population have been fully vaccinated. In an attempt to divert blame from his government, Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte has threatened to arrest people who do not get a vaccine.

Many people are out of work, unable to buy food and other essential items to survive, but the government has offered only paltry support payments of $US20 to $80 per fortnight to low-income households.

The utter indifference and nationalist program of governments in the imperialist centres has been epitomised by the Australian government’s offer of limited assistance to neighbouring Indonesia. Canberra has promised just 2.5 million vaccine doses and $A12 million worth of ventilators, oxygen cylinders and testing kits. During the past five years, Australia’s development budget to Indonesia has more than halved, from around $600 million in 2014–15 to less than $300 million this year.

Australia: Major hospitals cancel surgeries as they strain under Delta outbreak

Gary Alvernia

As Sydney’s population faces around 300 new daily cases of the COVID-19 Delta variant, actions by major hospitals to cancel surgeries reflect the rapidly rising burden on the public hospital system in Australia’s largest city.

Last week the Royal Prince Alfred, St. Vincent’s and Liverpool hospitals all suspended category 3 surgeries, considered “non-urgent/elective” by New South Wales (NSW) Health, the state authority responsible for managing Sydney’s public system. The measures were required due to an increasing proportion of intensive care unit (ICU) beds being occupied by COVID patients, and a loss of available staff from COVID exposures.

Hospitals in southwest Sydney have been particularly affected, as the working-class region of over one million inhabitants bears the brunt of the current outbreak. As well as Liverpool Hospital, nearby Campbelltown Hospital suspended elective surgeries three weeks ago after hundreds of staff were forced to isolate.

People queuing for coronavirus tests at Royal Melbourne Hospital last year(Credit: WSWS)

Additionally, Fairfield and Bankstown-Lidcombe hospitals have similarly confronted a loss of 400 healthcare workers, and concerns now exist for the biggest hospital in Sydney’s west, Westmead Hospital, which reported a positive case among a member of staff. While the Westmead worker was fully vaccinated, transmission risks mean that 36 other staff have been required to isolate.

NSW Ambulance has been reported to be at breaking point due to the increased workload. Hundreds of paramedics are in isolation. Last week, a lack of available beds resulted in ambulances containing COVID patients ramping outside Westmead Hospital.

The Delta mutant that is driving the outbreak in Sydney, as well as smaller outbreaks throughout Australia, is deadlier and more contagious than previous COVID variants. It is particularly dangerous in Australia because of its disastrous vaccination program. The country has among the lowest rates of inoculation for the advanced capitalist countries, with many healthcare workers unvaccinated.

By August 8, the NSW outbreak had already caused 28 deaths, including a man in his 20s, and a woman in her 30s, both reported as previously healthy. Due to inadequate protective equipment and a lack of isolation rooms, hospitals are serving as sources of transmission, with tragic consequences. Five deaths were attributed to an outbreak at Liverpool Hospital. One health worker told SBS news: “A lot of nurses [are] refusing to go to the COVID wards or just calling in sick, non-stop.”

By the same day, 362 COVID-19 patients had been admitted to hospital, with 58 people in intensive care, 24 of whom require ventilation. This already represents a significant strain on existing ICU capacity in the state, which has only 930 beds for a population of over eight million people. As noted by Australian and New Zealand Intensive Care Society vice-president Dr Mark Nicholls in comments to the Sydney Morning Herald: “Intensive care is a finite resource, and even under normal circumstances, it’s almost full.”

ICUs are necessary for managing the sickest patients with life-threatening medical conditions, including (among others) post-surgical patients, victims of traumatic injuries, cancer patients, and organ transplant recipients. Any substantial increase in COVID patients needing ICU beds will divert critical resources from these patients.

Nor is the cancellation of elective procedures a trivial matter. While not required immediately to save a person’s life, category 3 surgeries include joint replacements for mobility, eye surgeries to prevent blindness, and even certain cardiac surgeries to prevent heart attacks. As a result of COVID outbreaks in the past 18 months, elective surgery waitlists have already been prolonged. These delays most severely impact the working class, as many cannot afford to pay exorbitant costs for private treatment and must rely on the increasingly beleaguered public system.

The developing hospital crisis, in what may yet be an early stage in this current outbreak, exposes the criminal character of calls to “live with virus,” championed by the Australian ruling elite. When asked at a media conference about the dangers, NSW Health Minister Brad Hazzard replied “of course” the system was under stress, but claimed it was being managed.

Hazzard sought to blame members of the public “not complying with the public health orders.” No evidence has been provided for allegations of widespread “non-compliance.” However, NSW Chief Medical Officer Kerry Chant admitted that workplaces are the main source of transmissions in Sydney. Those infections are inevitably spread to workers’ families in the highest density working class areas of the western and southwestern suburbs.

Blame can squarely be placed on the Liberal-National Party Coalition state government of Premier Gladys Berejiklian. It has pursued a policy of only limited lockdowns, with the overt support of Prime Minister Scott Morrison, and tacit backing of the opposition parties, Labor and the Greens.

Rejecting hard lockdowns called for by epidemiologists and infectious diseases experts in order to protect business interests, Berejiklian allowed the present outbreak to spread, allowing factories to continue operations and construction work to resume, despite workplaces fueling community transmission.

The dangerously inadequate lockdown, accompanied by only paltry support for unemployed workers facing financial ruin, has been maintained with the support of the opposition Labor Party and the trade unions, which have joined hands with employers to demand further exemptions from workplace closures.

A similar hospital crisis is developing in Brisbane, the capital of the northern state of Queensland. With just over 100 cases over the past week from its Delta outbreak, the state Labor government of Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk has conceded that the health system is buckling, even as it ends a week-long lockdown with active cases present.

Hundreds of health workers are in self-isolation, including the entire cardiac surgery department at Queensland Children’s Hospital. This is due to the majority of infections being among school children, causing a risk to their parents, many of whom are health workers.

Queensland’s Labor government is aware of the crisis it has created. In June the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported that the largest hospital network in Brisbane was forced to cancel elective surgeries for two weeks due to bed shortages, despite no significant COVID outbreaks at the time.

Even before the COVID crisis, public hospitals were at the breaking point, a product of decades of cuts to public healthcare by both Liberal-National and Labor governments. Waiting lists for most category 3 surgeries were one year or greater, and hospitals, particularly in rural and remote regions, were understaffed and underfunded, resulting in a greater number of preventable deaths.

These conditions have sparked stoppages by hospital workers. Last year, nurses and midwives took strike action at Blacktown Hospital, in Sydney’s west, and senior obstetricians threatened mass resignations over serious deficiencies in obstetric services, leading to the avoidable deaths of 4 new-born babies in just 18 months.

In June, hundreds of nurses and midwives in Sydney and across NSW walked off the job over ongoing staff shortages, excessive overtime and lack of clinical staff, as well as the state government’s cap of 1.5 percent on public sector pay increases this year—a real wage cut.

Yet the NSW Nurses and Midwives Association, refused to mobilise its 72,000 members across the state in a united struggle, and has instead ensured that industrial action has remained confined to individual hospitals, across different days and for different lengths of time.

Health workers cannot leave their protection, or that of their patients, in the hands of the unions or governments. They must form rank-and-file action committees, independent of the unions, to fight for the necessary safety measures and for the urgent pouring of funds into the public hospital systems.