Scientific health policies contain delta variant outbreak in China

Alex Lantier

In a devastating exposure of anti-scientific policies pursued by Washington and the European powers that have led to millions of COVID-19 infections and deaths, mass implementation of scientific public health policies in China is containing the latest delta variant outbreak there. This highlights the potential for a global campaign of eradication of the virus to end the pandemic, if the resistance of the ruling class internationally to a scientific policy can be smashed.

A man and a child wearing masks to protect from the coronavirus walk through a shopping area in Beijing, China, Sunday, Aug. 15, 2021. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)

Last month, after a vast public health mobilization ended the epidemic inside China last year, a new outbreak emerged at the Nanjing airport. The delta variant brought aboard Air China flight CA910 from Moscow infected vaccinated maintenance workers at the airport and rapidly spread across China. Detected on July 20, the outbreak had sickened 381 people by the end of July in over a dozen provinces. While the outbreak at its peak infected over 140 people a day, this number is now falling significantly; broad areas of China are reporting no new cases.

Overall, there were 29 COVID-19 cases reported across China yesterday. Jiangsu province, where Nanjing is located and which was the outbreak’s initial epicenter, reported only three new cases. Nearby Shanghai recorded two and the southern border province of Yunnan, the next worst-hit in this outbreak after Jiangsu, eight. The southern industrial hub of Guangdong province reported nine. Hunan province, initially badly hit when tourists from Nanjing brought the delta variant there, reported no new cases.

While the situation in China remains dangerous, this initial success testifies to the enormous power of scientific methods against even the virulent delta variant. Vaccination and lockdowns of affected city districts—together with mass testing of entire cities, including Nanjing, Wuhan and Yangzhou, to find, isolate and rapidly treat the sick—are stopping a virus that is exploding out of control elsewhere around the world.

This comes after the success of the lock-down imposed at the beginning of the pandemic in Wuhan and across Hubei province, from January 23 to April 8 of last year. This strict lockdown, lifted only after new cases of the virus stopped appearing, ended transmission of the coronavirus inside China except for outbreaks imported from outside China’s borders.

In the imperialist countries and most of the rest of the world, however, governments pursued a diametrically opposed strategy. They rejected strict lockdowns or, when forced to implement them by wildcat strikes as in Italy and the United States, lifted them before transmission of the virus was over and programs for mass testing and to track-and-trace new cases were in place.

The resulting difference in health outcomes is staggering. Fewer than 5,000 died of COVID-19 in China, but over 643,000 died in the United States and 1,155,000 in Europe. The contrast is even sharper in the period since the lifting of lockdowns in the spring of 2020.

Since May 1, 2020, after the Wuhan lockdown, two people have died of COVID-19 in China, over 500,000 died in the United States, and over 950,000 in Europe. In India, whose population is similar in size to China’s, somewhere between 2.9 and 5.8 million have died, according to demographers’ estimates, and mostly left uncounted.

Fighting and ending the pandemic requires an international strategy, however. The Nanjing outbreak underscores yet again the impossibility of ending the pandemic with a national policy. Scientific policies must be employed to eradicate the virus on a global scale—otherwise, given the rapidly-mutating, highly contagious nature of the virus, new variants inevitably develop and spread back to areas where the virus has been eradicated.

The main obstacle is the refusal of the imperialist financial aristocracy in North America and Europe to implement a scientific policy. Instead, they gorged themselves on trillions of dollars, euros and pounds in bank and corporate bailouts and demanded that lives be sacrificed so workers could stay at work to generate profits. As millions died needlessly, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson infamously said: “No more f***ing lockdowns, let the bodies pile high in their thousands!”

Now, as the delta variant is set to provoke record losses worldwide, US and European media are launching a campaign to discredit Chinese health policies. It is more or less apparent that their target is not only China, but opposition in the working class internationally to policies of needless mass death.

In its report “China’s Delta outbreak shows signs of slowing,” CNN demanded Beijing stop trying to limit contagion. While admitting that a “‘zero transmission’ model … has so far proved broadly effective in curbing widespread transmission,” it said: “However, this approach requires punishing, oppressive measures that many argue are simply not sustainable in the long term, especially as new variants spread and other countries open back up. Experts say fortress territories will eventually have to shift away from this strategy—they can’t stay shut off from the world forever.”

Imperialist media are also trying to exploit the political crisis caused by the pandemic in China itself to discredit a scientific policy of saving lives. In France, the conservative daily Le Figaro claimed that Chinese scientists and doctors themselves reject Beijing’s policy and want to adopt President Emmanuel Macron’s call to “live with the virus.” Le Figaro cited the recent controversy in China over statements by leading virologist Dr. Zhang Wenhong.

Le Figaro claimed: “Zhang Wenhong, the well-known expert in infectious diseases in Shanghai, expressed doubts in late July about China’s zero-Covid strategy, calling on them to ‘learn to live with the virus.’” It added that this comment “put in question the viability of China’s pandemic management” and “had provoked bitter debate in the country.”

In reality, Zhang is not a supporter of European governments’ politically-criminal approach to the pandemic, and attempts to portray him as such are a fraud. In his latest post on the Weibo internet platform, Zhang unambiguously endorsed China’s health policy: “The international anti-epidemic situation is still very serious and China still faces enormous epidemic challenges. But we must have the firm conviction that our country’s anti-pandemic strategy is currently the best strategy for ourselves. ‘You tell whether a shoe fits by wearing it.’”

Le Figaro was citing a July 29 Weibo post by Zhang that was criticized in China. After this, his employer, Fudan University in Shanghai, began an investigation of potential plagiarism in Zhang’s PhD thesis. In a distorted echo of the imperialist press campaign itself, there were nationalist criticisms of Zhang on Chinese social media for supporting Western culture.

In the earlier July 29 post, Zhang had written: “As to how the world co-exists with the virus, each country gives its own response. China has given a beautiful response. After the Nanjing outbreak, we will certainly learn more. China must build a shared future with the world, arrive at communication with the rest of the world and return to normal life, while protecting its citizens from fear of the virus. China should have such wisdom.”

Zhang’s statement is ambiguous, because it avoids directly condemning the politically-criminal pandemic policies adopted by the imperialist countries and their allies. This ambiguity is not, however, simply an issue of Zhang’s individual opinions. Zhang, who is a physician and not a politician, is speaking under constraints imposed by his membership in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), a bureaucratic Stalinist party that restored capitalism in China in 1989 and now has deep economic and financial links to world imperialism.

Enmeshed in capitalist relations, and increasingly afraid of the working class at home, the CCP has largely avoided openly denouncing the health policies of imperialist countries. However, the CCP has not prevented Zhang and other Chinese medical and health workers from implementing policies that saved millions of lives in China.

Two important conclusions flow from this. Firstly, Zhang and other Chinese scientists working to eradicate COVID-19 are neither supporters of the imperialist powers’ reactionary pandemic policy nor agents of “the West” against China. The work that they and the working people of China have done is a great service to workers internationally: it shows that science and collective mobilization can end the pandemic.

DAAD Masters Scholarships 2022/2023

Application Deadline: 31st August 2021

Type: Masters

Eligibility for the DAAD Masters Scholarships:

• Excellently-qualified graduates who have completed a first degree (Bachelor, Diploma or comparable academic degree) at the latest by the time they commence their scholarship-supported study programme.
• For applicants from artistic disciplines and the field of architecture, the DAAD offers subject-specific scholarship programmes.

Selection Criteria:

• As a rule, applicants should have taken their final examinations no longer than six years before the application deadline.
• Applicants who have been resident in Germany for longer than 15 months at the application deadline cannot be considered.
• Notification of admission from the German host university for the desired degree course; please note that you yourself are responsible for ensuring that you apply for admission at the host university by the due date. If notification of admission is not yet available at the time of application, it must be subsequently submitted before the scholarship-supported study begins. A Scholarship Award Letter from the DAAD is only valid if you have been admitted to study at the desired host university.
• If the degree programme includes a study period or work placement abroad lasting several months, funding for this period abroad is usually only possible under the following conditions:
  The study visit is essential for achievement of the scholarship objective.
  The study period is no longer than a quarter of the scholarship period. Longer periods cannot be funded, even partially.
  The study period does not take place in the home country.

Eligible Countries for the DAAD Masters Scholarships: International

To be Taken at (Country): Germany

Number of Awards: Not specified

Value of DAAD Masters Scholarships:

• Participation in a postgraduate programme after a first undergraduate course of study for the purpose of technical or scientific specialisation
• Specifically, the following is supported:
  a postgraduate or Master’s degree programme completed at a state or state-recognised university in Germany
  or
  the first or second year of study at a state or state-recognised German university as part of a postgraduate or Master’s degree programme completed in the home country or in another foreign country; recognition of the academic achievements rendered in Germany must be guaranteed. The standard period of study of the postgraduate or Master’s degree programme should not be exceeded as a result of the study year in Germany.

Value

• Scholarship payments of 861 euros a month
• Payments towards health, accident and personal liability insurance cover
• Travel allowance
• One-off study allowance

Under certain circumstances, scholarship holders may receive the following additional benefits:

• Monthly rent subsidy
• Monthly allowance for accompanying members of family

Duration of Award: For a postgraduate or Master’s degree completed in Germany:

• between 10 and 24 months depending on the length of the chosen study programme
• The scholarships are awarded for the duration of the standard period of study for the chosen study programme (up to a maximum of 24 months). To receive further funding after the first year of study for 2-year courses, proof of academic achievements thus far should indicate that the study programme can be successfully completed within the standard period of study.
• Applicants who are already in Germany in the first academic year of a 2-year postgraduate or Master’s programme at the time of their application may apply for a scholarship for the second year of study. In this case, it is not possible to extend the scholarship.

For a study period in Germany as part of a postgraduate or Master’s degree completed in a foreign country:

• usually one academic year; an extension is not possible.

The scholarship usually begins on 1st October, or earlier if the student takes a language course prior to the study programme.

How to Apply for DAAD Masters Scholarships: The application procedure occurs online through the DAAD portal.Please note that the access to the application portal only appears while the current application period is running. After the application deadline has expired, the portal for this programme is not available until the next application period.

• It is important to go through all application requirements in the Award Webpage (see Link below) before applying.

Visit DAAD Masters Scholarships Webpage for Details

Invitation to a Fiasco: U.S. Policy toward China and Iran

Eve Ottenberg

U.S. foreign policy since World War II has been a screaming disaster. Coups, regime change operations and CIA-sponsored slaughters drowned the globe in blood. So did imperial wars, from Korea to Vietnam to Afghanistan to Iraq – all of which, incidentally, were lost. Washington’s pursuit of its “interests” inexcusably piled tens of millions of corpses to the heavens. So when Biden, early in his presidency, cited those interests as guides to his foreign policy, it was only natural to expect the worst.

That expectation has proved correct, except for the military withdrawal from Afghanistan, which paints a slightly more ambiguous picture of U.S. global relations. That retreat was a principled though painful diversion from the generally bellicose and dreadful trend. And even that became an unnecessary debacle – especially for the tens of thousands of Afghans who helped the U.S. Many observers warned that the Taliban were poised to sweep the country. The Biden team did not listen. It could have expedited the U.S. departure and the exodus of its Afghan employees back in winter. But it didn’t for one simple reason: fatal, imperial hubris. This flaw scars all of Washington’s awful policies. And that is the only way to describe Biden’s seamless continuation of Trump’s policies: abysmal. Just take China and Iran.

Sometime during the Trump administration, U.S. politicians and military honchos discovered to their horror that China is a communist country. Chinese commissars lifted over 850 million people out of poverty – how dare they! China takes pride in its centralized economic planning – anathema! Chinese leaders promote anti-colonialism by investing in infrastructure in the Global South, which they then hand off to the local governments – those brazen show-offs! China’s robust public health effort contained covid while it flamed out of control in the U.S. – they must be lying!

All this Chinese razzle dazzle success contrasts most shockingly with the image of corrupt, chaotic and destructive western capitalism. People might even get the idea that other economic systems are, well, superior; that maybe having, as the U.S. does, 500,000 vagabonds, millions of students indentured to the tune of nearly $2 trillion, a vast gulag caging over 2 million people, starvation wages for many, astronomical rents for all, no health care, lousy infant mortality and life expectancy stats compared to the rest of the industrialized world, 15 million people just a paycheck away from homelessness and, a global grasp causing the destitution of billions of people and the trashing of a habitable planet and a livable climate – maybe all this ain’t so great. Maybe there are other, better ways to do things besides the savagery of the American economic system. Maybe exporting that system around the globe, often at gunpoint, is a fiasco.

U.S. politicos and military bigwigs are determined to slam the brakes on this critique before it becomes action. The method of choice, mentioned in informed corners of the internet, involves arming Japan with nukes and then egging Japan, South Korea and India into attacking China. Our geniuses in the pentagon no doubt consider such a nuclear war “containable.” Our intellectual heavyweights in the CIA and state department, as Moon of Alabama has noted, probably salivate at the prospect of the U.S. stepping in after this mass murder and cleaning up financially, while enhancing Washington’s planetary power. Unfortunately for this grandiose scheme, China is already wise to it. Even now it expands its nuclear arsenal and builds new nuclear missile silos – the inevitable response to U.S. hostility and the apparent American appetite for a supposedly limited nuclear war.

This all seems like some wild fantasy to you? Consider this: For decades the One China policy has kept the peace not only between China and Taiwan, but between China and that perennial, compulsive aggressor, the U.S. China has made abundantly clear that attempted official Taiwanese severing from China is a casus belli. Since the reign of Richard Nixon, Washington has let this sleeping dog lie. But in July, the U.S. announced a $750 million weapons sale to the territory. This, predictably, infuriated China. That presumably was the intention, as the U.S. agitates for Taiwan to declare its independence and thus start a war.

To make sure everyone gets the message, Biden has stated that the U.S. is in “extreme competition” with China, which, economically, may be true, but it’s not true militarily. Or at least it wasn’t till this self-fulfilling prophecy started, with “extreme competition” serving as the perfect excuse for arming China’s neighbors and the Taiwanese territory to the teeth and goading them all into displays of martial prowess.

This lousy $750 billion arms deal had a record number of predecessors recently under – you guessed it – Trump. “These military transactions are a violation of Washington’s own avowed One China Policy,” wrote an Information Clearing House editorial on August 6, “which purports to acknowledge Beijing’s territorial sovereignty over Taiwan.” But Biden chose to ditch a policy that dates back to the 1970s, because clearly Trump, provoking clashes and ready to rumble with China and Iran, was a geopolitical brainiac. If that’s not Biden’s view, then he should prove it. But proving it involves a rational, peaceful policy toward China, not one driven by insecurities over whose whatever is bigger.

It’s not as if Washington isn’t constantly challenging Beijing. According to Connor Freeman, in the same publication, U.S. aircraft carrier group strike forces and warships roam the South China Sea. Reconnaissance planes skirt China’s coast – roughly three to five per day. What would Washington do if Beijing behaved thus in the Gulf of Mexico? Declare war. But the U.S. has ramped up even more provocations. The August 6 editorial notes that recently the seventh American warship travelled “between Taiwan and mainland China since Biden took office in January.” Seven U.S. warships. Is Biden drifting toward war? Ya think? “This week sees the U.S. navy engaging in huge military drills in the South China Sea,” the editorial continues, and then cites the many other NATO warships surrounding China. Either Biden wants war or he’s asleep at the wheel, while fanatical anti-China Dr. Strangeloves in the pentagon steer policy. My guess is the latter.

Over in Vienna, things aren’t going much better. That’s where negotiations jammed over the U.S. rejoining the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran. Biden surged to power claiming he intended to bring the U.S. back into compliance with the Iran nuclear pact, one of Obama’s few foreign policy successes, which Trump so highhandedly stalked out of. So how’s that going? Don’t even ask.

Once again, Biden seems mesmerized by Trump’s belligerence and unable to renounce it, despite Washington being clearly in the wrong. The U.S. had a deal, then showed itself as utterly untrustworthy as any gangster by reneging. That may go over great in Trump’s mafia-infested world of real estate, but on the international stage, it spells ruin. Biden, however, refuses to do the right thing, namely, end illegal U.S. sanctions on Iran. If he did, Iran would come back into compliance – a compliance that, it’s worth noting, prevented Iran, for the duration of the intact deal, from even approaching enriching uranium to weapons grade. Once Trump idiotically busted up the pact, guess what? Iran, unbound by JCPOA constraints, sped forward and now has attained a position where it could soon produce a bomb. Thus Trump’s oafish international bungling, which Biden just can’t wait to imitate.

The Biden negotiating team lives in the past, according to Moon of Alabama on August 7, in the fantasy that it has the upper hand that Washington held nine years ago. “But this is no longer 2012. Back then, China and Russia agreed with the U.S. to put pressure on Iran. That pressure led to the nuclear deal. But today the situation is much different. It was the U.S. that left the deal. Iran, China and Russia are all in a stronger position than they were a decade ago. Why would the latter two agree to support Biden’s malign foreign policy and unilateral U.S. sanctions against Iran?”

In other words, if Biden doesn’t cease his additional and ridiculous demands, he’ll kill the Iran nuclear pact. This is in no one’s interest. It is certainly not in the interest of Washington and its Mideast allies. No deal could very well mean catastrophic regional war, which, by the way, would ensnare the U.S. All of Biden’s talk about extricating the U.S. from military adventures in that region would be exposed as hot air.

So there you have it. When not living in the past, Biden can’t bring himself to shed Trump’s insane and capricious aggressions. The result is no Iran deal and an American drift toward nuclear war with China. Both are calamitous. Neither will end well for the world or for Washington. Somebody, like maybe the president, needs to grab that steering wheel and change course, pronto.

Carbon Capture Technology Won’t Solve Our Emissions Problems

Wenonah Hauter

The world is processing the dire warnings in the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report: We are on a path to see global temperature rise to surpass the 2-degree threshold, bringing more intense heat waves, droughts, and sea-level rise—unless we shift rapidly away from fossil fuels. And the climate movement is grappling with both a sense of urgency and profound disappointment with the Biden administration. It was bad enough that the administration backed a bipartisan infrastructure proposal that jettisoned many key clean energy provisions, but it’s even worse that the infrastructure plan includes billions of dollars in new fossil fuel subsidies.

That spending would support “carbon capture,” a category of technologies that are misleadingly categorized as climate-friendly. State agencies and lawmakers are making sure that Pennsylvania positions itself as a “carbon capture hub,” which means fitting existing power plants with technology to capture emissions, along with miles of new carbon dioxide pipelines and underground storage facilities in western parts of the state. There is even a plan to build a new “zero emissions” coal-fired power plant, thanks to the magic of carbon capture.

Proponents like to argue that this suite of technologies will help us reach our net-zero goals, envisioning a world where power plants can capture carbon dioxide from smokestacks—stopping the problem before it starts—or capturing CO2 from the atmosphere (what’s known as direct air capture). Either option would require massive amounts of energy or water. Despite billions of dollars in investments already, there is little progress to show for it.

But it’s just as revealing—and troubling—to see that the other goal is to actually increase our dependence on burning fossil fuels. When Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm recently touted the billions of dollars in new funding for carbon capture, she said it “will help the oil and gas sector to be able to ramp up production, but in a way that’s clean.” While that sounds nice, the catch is that there is no sign that you can make burning fossil fuels “clean.”

After billions of dollars in public and private investments, there are no carbon capture success stories. The Petra Nova coal plant in Texas, once the poster child for CO2 removal, consistently underperformed before closing last year. Another high-profile example—the San Juan Generating Station in New Mexico, pushed as the largest capture project in the world—may meet a similar fate.

Look beyond these examples and you find more bad news. A 2020 review of scientific research found that popular carbon capture methods have actually put more CO2 into the atmosphere than they have removed. “Successful” capture projects exist at facilities where the carbon is injected into existing wells to extract more oil, known as “enhanced oil recovery.” If you think that doubling down on fossil fuels is an effective climate solution, the planet begs to differ.

Even assuming these burgeoning capture projects are ever successful, their practical effects would be extremely limited. The Energy Department recently announced $12 million to fund “direct air capture” projects, with a goal to remove 100,000 tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. To put this in perspective, the largest corporate polluter in 2018 was responsible for releasing 119 million tons of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. And expanding these technologies would present other insurmountable problems: Removing one billion tons of carbon emissions (a fraction of our country’s yearly total) through direct air capture would require nearly the entire electricity output of the United States.

It’s not hard to see why swooning over carbon capture has been a bipartisan enterprise. There’s an unmistakable appeal to the idea that someday, somehow, we might bottle up climate-warming greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, install this technology on fossil fuel infrastructure, dust off our hands, and move on.

But this kind of wishful thinking is dangerous. Counting on carbon capture’s effectiveness squanders the opportunity to enact stronger measures (a phenomenon known as “mitigation deterrence“). In other words, we would extend the fossil fuel era instead of ending it, all while telling ourselves that we are doing the right thing. So long as techno-futurists, fossil fuel companies, and government officials are enraptured by carbon capture, there will be less pressure to stop climate pollution by putting an end to drilling and fracking.

The IPCC report is telling us—in no uncertain terms—that the worst-case climate scenarios are looming, and things are all but guaranteed to get worse before they get better. The energy industry’s advertisements promise us an easy fix: No need to transform these systems entirely when we can just capture the bad stuff and bury it. Any climate plan that relies on carbon capture is a foolish bet. Unfortunately, right now it is one the White House seems enthusiastic to make.

Oxford University study shows herd immunity a fiction as UK infections rise

Thomas Scripps

A major study by Oxford University, not yet peer reviewed, provides more proof that a strategy for combatting COVID-19 cannot rely on vaccination alone.

A Health Department worker fills a syringe with Moderna COVID-19 vaccine before administering it to emergency medical workers and healthcare personnel. (AP Photo/Matt Slocum)

The study is the largest yet of the effectiveness of vaccines against the Delta variant. Working with the Office for National Statistics (ONS) and the Department of Health and Social Care, the Oxford scientists looked at over 3.4 million test results from over 740,000 different adults in the UK.

According to their research, Pfizer’s efficacy in preventing symptomatic infection against the Delta variant was 90 percent after one month, 85 percent after two months and 78 percent after three months. AstraZeneca’s efficacy was 67 percent after one month, 65 percent after two and 61 percent after three. The faster decline for Pfizer led the researchers to speculate that efficacy for the two vaccines would converge after 4-5 months.

These numbers are significantly lower than those for protection against the Alpha variant.

Oxford’s findings are in line with those of two smaller studies conducted in the United States and Qatar, both of which found a higher-than-expected number of “breakthrough” infections in vaccinated people. Research in Israel has also reported substantially reduced vaccine effectiveness against symptomatic infection.

The study chimes with data from Imperial College London’s REACT survey for May to July, which found that, for adults up to the age of 64, the likelihood of someone who comes into contact with a positive COVID case themselves being infected is only reduced by half by full vaccination.

Another difference between the variants identified by the Oxford study was that those infected with Delta after full vaccination had a much higher viral load than those fully vaccinated and infected with Alpha. The viral load refers to the amount of virus carried by the infected person, in this case in the nose and throat, which can be “shed”, for example through coughing and sneezing, and transmitted to others. Fully vaccinated adults infected with Delta had similar peak viral loads to unvaccinated individuals.

Although the exact amount of transmission from vaccinated people cannot be estimated from this study, its findings clearly indicate that the Delta variant has reduced the effectiveness of vaccination in bringing the pandemic under control.

Sarah Walker, professor of medical statistics and epidemiology at the University of Oxford, commented, “We don’t yet know how much transmission can happen from people who get Covid-19 after being vaccinated—for example, they may have high levels of virus for shorter periods of time.

“But the fact that they can have high levels of virus suggests that people who aren’t yet vaccinated may not be as protected from the Delta variant as we hoped.”

If vaccinated people can still contribute substantially to the spread of COVID-19, then even high levels of immunisation will not be enough to stop the virus circulating, especially in the face of more transmissible variants. 'The fact that you see more viral load [with the Delta variant] hints towards herd immunity being more challenging,” warned Dr Koen Pouwels, one of the lead researchers on the Oxford study.

Although every effort is made in the capitalist media to downplay the dangers of this development, the continued spread of COVID-19 poses a serious threat.

Firstly, there are still huge numbers of people globally who remain unvaccinated. In the UK, this applies to most children. Even those who are vaccinated can still suffer severe disease and death in a small minority of cases, which nonetheless translates into large numbers of hospital patients in situations of high community transmission, stretching healthcare services.

Secondly, the more prevalent the virus is, the more chance it has of developing new, more dangerous variants. The Delta variant is the product of the herd immunity strategy pursued by the world’s governments, likely arising in the massive surge of cases which swept through India this spring and then allowed to spread across the world.

There are already two further mutations of the Delta variant that are causing concern. Eight cases have been identified in Upsala in Sweden of the E484Q mutation, which studies indicate could be more transmissible. All these cases are linked to travel abroad.

In the US, the AY.3 subtype of Delta now accounts for roughly 9 percent of cases, and it appears to be outcompeting the Delta variant in the UK, although currently at very low numbers. Early data from India suggests it is more immune evasive than its predecessor.

The only rational conclusion to draw from these developments is for public health measures to be urgently implemented as the first step of a globally coordinated programme for the eradication of the virus. But capitalist governments the world over are pursuing the opposite policy, removing restrictions and allowing the virus to spread freely.

The Oxford study comes with the UK already well into the early stages of a resurgence of the virus, after a brief fall in recorded infections. Another 36,572 cases were recorded yesterday, taking the total for the last seven days to 214,736, a 7.8 percent increase on the week before.

Deaths and hospitalisations are also increasing. 113 new deaths were recorded yesterday, bringing the total for the last week to 674, a 9.6 percent increase.

The latest data for hospitalisations shows 804 people were admitted with COVID-19 on August 15, giving 5,698 in the prior seven days, a 5.6 percent increase. There were a total of 6,379 people in hospital with COVID-19 on Wednesday, 909 on ventilators.

Dr Simon Clarke, associate professor in cellular microbiology at the University of Reading, commented last Friday that high and rising case numbers and rising hospitalisations were giving “an early sense of what living with COVID-19 looks like. As restrictions are lifted and the economy rebounds, we are 'running hot' when it comes to managing COVID spread.” He warned that although vaccines currently significantly reduce rates of hospitalisation, high case numbers “still place an unnecessary burden on the NHS.”

Infections will rise far more sharply in the next months as schools and universities, major vectors for the spread of the virus, reopen with next to no mitigation measures in place. The latest available data from the ONS shows that infection rates are still highest among, in descending order, secondary school-age pupils, young adults up to 24 years old, and primary school-age pupils.

Other factors like the ending of self-isolation for doubled-jabbed contacts and all under-18s, the ongoing efforts to force the last workers back into workplaces, the continuous propaganda that things are back to normal, and the worsening of the weather will add fuel to the fire. Leading government modeler Professor Neil Fergusson told BBC Radio 4 ’s Today programme that the country confronts a “sobering situation,” with “the potential of quite a large wave of infection in September, October”.

Heading into winter, when the under-resourced, understaffed NHS was annually put under extreme pressure before the pandemic, the crisis will be all the more severe.

Professor Peter Openshaw, a member of the government’s New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (Nervtag), spoke to Times Radio yesterday and described the recent daily increases in new infections as “very worrying”:

“This is a very large number. If you think, 34,000 people, that’s a lot of people testing positive, and to be seeing over 100 deaths a day at this stage, you know before schools have gone back, while the weather is still relatively good, we’re not back into winter yet.

“I think we’re all really anxious about what’s going to happen once we return to normality.

“We’re going into the winter with really very high levels of infection out there in the community and we just don’t really know what’s going to happen.”

New Zealand ruling elite whitewashes its “contribution” to Afghan war

John Braddock

The New Zealand government this week dispatched an Air Force Hercules plane with 40 military personnel to Afghanistan to evacuate over 100 NZ citizens, plus foreign nationals and Afghanis who collaborated with the allied occupation of the country.

New Zealand Army soldier and NZLAV in Afghanistan (Credit: Wikimedia/NZ Defence Force)

Following the ignominious collapse of the US-backed regime in Kabul, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern told a press conference that the “security situation” in the beleaguered country had deteriorated far more quickly than could have been predicted. “What will matter,” Ardern intoned, “is the actions, particularly around human rights, and particularly from New Zealand’s perspective, we’ll be looking to see how women and girls under a Taliban regime will be treated.”

The comment underscores the attempt by the government, media and entire ruling elite to whitewash the country’s near 20-year involvement in the US-led imperialist invasion and occupation involving 3,500 New Zealand troops and 10 combat deaths.

Asked to reflect on New Zealand’s role, Ardern bluntly declared that it would be “a complete disservice to go back and rewrite history.” Decisions were made at the time, she said, “that we could make a contribution for the better.” New Zealand’s “contribution” was not a “failure,” she added, baldly claiming: “It made a difference for those living in Afghanistan and their daily lives.”

Defence Minister Peeni Henare concurred, declaring: “our contribution was a positive one.” The Dominion Post also assured readers that New Zealand’s “peacekeeping presence” in Afghanistan was essentially a “human story,” that had brought “advances like education and plumbing to the community.”

The invasion and occupation of the impoverished country was in reality a filthy criminal enterprise from the start that ensured the virtual destruction of an entire society. New Zealand’s Labour-Alliance government had joined the invasion primarily to fully restore relations with the US following the Labour-led “anti-nuclear” posturing in the 1980s, and as a quid-pro-quo for Washington’s endorsement of its own neo-colonial operations in the Pacific.

On October 3, 2001, the NZ parliament approved a motion presented by Prime Minister Helen Clark that it endorse Labour’s despatch of Special Air Services troops and “totally” support the US in Afghanistan. The record shows Labour in favour with 49 votes; it’s “left wing” coalition partner the Alliance with 10 votes for, and the conservative opposition parties ACT and National both in favour. The Greens with 7 votes opposed the deployment, but would later justify NZ’s role in the ongoing occupation as “peacekeeping.”

The media hailed the operation. The Evening Post in December 2001 excoriated “doubters” who dared to make any comparison with Vietnam. “In the space of little more than two months,” the Post insisted, “America, with the support of opposition Afghan forces, has routed the Taleban… President George W Bush’s war against terrorism has been far more decisive than his critics ever imagined.” The newspaper brushed aside concerns about “civilian casualties,” asserting that “the world is a safer place” because of the invasion. It added that America was sending a “blunt message” to “countries such as Yemen and the Sudan”: “If you follow Afghanistan’s example, we will come after you too.”

Speaking to media this week Clark decried the “surreal and devastating” outcome, but declared she had “no regrets” about the decision to join the occupation. She told Stuff: “There’s so much effort gone on to investing in human development, and people’s rights, and better governance. And it’s just gone up in smoke.” The US should have played the role it had after the Korean War, Clark said, i.e., deploying 50,000 soldiers in the country for decades.

Tens of thousands of civilians were killed during nearly two decades of war. Drone strikes, bombings, assassinations and torture were routinely used to instill terror in the population. The NZ military, which received a unit citation from Bush, was complicit in serious war crimes. A royal commission of inquiry into Operation Burnham, a night-time raid on a village by the SAS in 2010, confirmed that a child and at least seven other people were killed. Labour’s Attorney-General David Parker defended the killings, saying they were “undesirable” but “legal.”

Several civilians, including children, were also killed by unexploded ordnance left behind by NZ troops.

Green Party co-leaders James Shaw and Marama Davidson have issued a statement condemning “the new surge in terror by the Taliban.” Employing the nostrums of “human rights” imperialism, they declared: “It is heart-breaking to know that Afghans face the prospect of living under Taliban rule once again, with women and girls at the greatest risk of sexual and gender-based violence.” The pair called on “allies and partners” to ensure the Taliban has no more funding and resources, “even if that means standing up to our trading partners”—thus inviting a confrontation with China.

Meanwhile, the pseudo-left fraternity who in 2001 gave their imprimatur to Labour’s imperialist venture are now scrambling to wash their hands of any culpability. Writing in the Daily Blog on August 16, Liz Gordon, one of the 10 Alliance MPs who voted in support, described how the party leader, Jim Anderton, “for some reason that is still not clear,” was “set on” sending the troops. Gordon described how she was later pressured against her “instincts and beliefs” to speak in defence of the party’s pro-war position. “Not a moment of great glory in my life. I hope you can all forgive me now,” she wanly pleaded.

Others simply engage in blatant lying and historical falsification. Laila Harre, at the time a cabinet minister and another hand-raiser in parliament, tweeted on February 17, after the announcement of NZ’s troop withdrawal in May: “20 years since the Alliance stood against this predictably destructive deployment. 20 years wasted on war.”

Alliance operative and former Pabloite Mike Treen also posted on Facebook this week: “We can collectively be proud that ultimately we stood up against war and empire and were proved right.” The word “ultimately” betrays the fact that Treen has nothing to say about this bourgeois party’s abject capitulation in parliament. Treen then moved to cover his tracks by reposting a December 2001 letter to the Labour Party, written on behalf of the so-called “Antiwar coalition,” in which he unsuccessfully appealed for it to reverse course.

The horse had, by then, well and truly bolted. In April 2002 the Alliance split, just seven months out from a general election, and after six months of internecine warfare, brought on by the rightward, anti-working class trajectory of the coalition government and its craven support for the US-led war in Afghanistan. The Alliance is now defunct, a case study in the dead-end of opportunist, pro-capitalist politics.

German militarism and the debacle in Afghanistan

Peter Schwarz

The takeover of power by the Taliban in Afghanistan has not only led to the complete collapse of the puppet regime headed by President Ashraf Ghani and the Afghan army, it has also exploded the mountain of lies used to justify the longest, biggest and most expensive military mission conducted by Germany’s post-war army (Bundeswehr).

Soldiers of the German army in Afghanistan

For 20 years, the government, the opposition and the country’s servile media have led the German public to believe that the Bundeswehr was in Afghanistan to drill wells, enable girls to go to school and encourage nation building. None of this was true. The Afghan war was a dirty colonial war from the very start, with all that entails: massacres, torture, crime and corruption.

Bagram was not only the largest American airbase in the country, but also a prison and torture centre where political prisoners from all over the world were interrogated and transferred to Guantanamo. Two Kabul prisons alone held close to 10,000 political prisoners who were set free by the Taliban when they took over the city.

According to official figures, almost 165,000 Afghans were killed during the war. The actual number is probably many times higher. Thousands of civilians died under a hail of bombs from American planes. The largest such massacre, which claimed the lives of over 130 civilians and numerous children, was ordered by a Bundeswehr officer, Colonel Georg Klein, near Kunduz, on September 4, 2009.

Even before the Bundeswehr entered the north of the country, the ally of the Western powers, Abdul Rashid Dostum, had murdered between 3,000 to 8,000 captured Taliban fighters. They were squeezed like sardines into containers, where they died in agony from lack of oxygen, overheating and thirst. Those who survived the ordeal were shot.

The Afghan governments of Hamid Karzai and Ashraf Ghani, who installed, propped up and funded to the tune of billions by the Western powers, were, like other imperialist puppet regimes in Africa, Latin America and Asia, brutal, ruthless and corrupt to the bone.

The Afghanistan Papers—internal US government documents leaked in 2019—estimate that 40 percent of the US aid of over a trillion dollars landed in the pockets of corrupt officials, officers, warlords and criminals. President Ghani had $169 million in cash when he fled the country last week, according to the Afghan ambassador to Tajikistan, Mohammad Zahir Aghbar.

This is the reason for the precipitous collapse of the Afghan government and army after imperialist troops left. Ghani’s supposedly democratic regime lacked any social support, apart from a layer of Kabul’s narrow middle and upper class. For the vast majority of the Afghan population, his regime and the imperialist occupation were hell on earth.

When the German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas and Chancellor Angela Merkel now declare in unison that “we misjudged the situation,” this can only mean that they earnestly believed their own propaganda and have lost all sight of social reality. In fact, there was never the slightest doubt, even in Berlin, about the real aim of the war.

When the US used the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 as a pretext to attack Afghanistan and overthrow the Taliban regime, it was putting into action plans prepared long before. In reality, the American strategy was, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, to dominate a region of extraordinary importance with regard to geopolitics and energy supplies.

“By attacking Afghanistan, setting up a client regime and moving vast military forces into the region, the US aims to establish a new political framework within which it will exert hegemonic control,” wrote the WSWS, three days after the war began, in the statement “Why We Oppose the War in Afghanistan.”

German imperialism could not and would not stand aside. Since the reunification of Germany in 1991, there have been intensive discussions in leading political and military circles about how Germany could once again play a global political and military role in line with its economic interests. In 1999, the SPD and the Greens dispatched the Bundeswehr to Yugoslavia to conduct its first post-World War II foreign combat mission. Then the opportunity arose to gain a foothold in one of the world’s most important geostrategic regions.

On October 11, 2001, four days after the start of American hostilities in Afghanistan, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder (Social Democratic Party, SPD) announced to the Bundestag a fundamental reorientation of German foreign policy. The period during which Germany had merely participated in “international efforts to secure freedom, justice and stability” through “secondary aid” was “irretrievably over,” he declared. “We Germans in particular ... now also have an obligation to do full justice to our new responsibility. This explicitly includes—and I say this unequivocally—participation in military operations.”

One month later, the Bundestag decided by an overwhelming majority to provide 3,900 Bundeswehr soldiers for the fight “against international terrorism.” In addition to the governing parties, the SPD and the Greens, the conservative opposition at that time led by Angela Merkel, also voted in favour of the Afghanistan mission.

In addition to foreign policy aims, the intervention also served domestic political purposes. German soldiers were once again expected to get use to killing and dying on the battlefield, following decades of abstinence from war, while the broad mass of the population was expected to overcome its deep, historically rooted anti-militarism and become enthusiastic about war missions.

Since then, more than 150,000 German servicemen and women have received their baptism of fire in Afghanistan, 59 died and thousands more have been injured and traumatised. At the same time, the mission has become a breeding ground for right-wing extremist tendencies. When the extent emerged of the influence of far-right elements in the Special Forces Command (KSK)—which carried out behind-the-lines operations in Afghanistan—the German Defence Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer felt compelled to disband one of the four KSK companies.

The debacle in Afghanistan is a major blow to German militarism. “The willingness of the already pacifistically inclined Germans to choose militarily robust means to enforce security policy interests will decline even further in view of the images of the past few days,” complained the right-wing Neue Zürcher Zeitung.

However, this will not stop the German ruling class from pushing ahead with its militaristic plans. It will rely even more than ever on the far-right Alternative for Germany and repressive measures against opponents of war. The plans by the Berlin police to ban demonstrations and the hanging up of posters throughout the entire government district during the course of the official ceremony to salute soldiers returning from Afghanistan on August 31 must be seen as a warning.

Militarism is supported by all parties represented in the Bundestag. While they blame each other for the Afghanistan debacle in the current election campaign, not one of them denounces the criminal character of the war. This is also true of the Left Party, which has long signaled its willingness to support Bundeswehr war missions if the party is accepted as a coalition partner by the SPD and the Greens at the federal level.

White House doubles down on reopening schools as COVID-19 cases surge

Andre Damon

The Biden administration doubled down Wednesday on its efforts to force schools to resume in-person education amid a surge of COVID-19 cases, with Education Secretary Miguel Cardona declaring “our priority must be” to “return to school in person.”

Caleb Laurent, a Minnesota teen intubated while suffering from multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children, or MIS-C, a COVID-related illness that crops up in children and teens. (Courtesy photo)

The White House’s statement came as COVID-19 cases continued to surge nationwide, with 155,000 cases reported Thursday, a more than ten-fold increase in the span of just two months.

In states throughout the country, hospitals were filled to capacity as the number of hospitalized COVID-19 patients hit 85,000, a six-fold increase since June.

And most troubling of all, 967 people died Thursday, representing a quadrupling of the daily deaths compared to two months ago.

Cardona opened his statement Wednesday by boasting that “more than 62 percent of students across the country will complete their first day of school” this week.

“As educators, we know in our hearts how important in-person learning is for student success,” Cardona said, adding, “The truth is that we know what works to keep students and educators safe: following the science-based strategies for preventing the spread of COVID-19 recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).”

In reality, the CDC, under political pressure from a White House determined to reopen schools at any cost, is directly contradicting public health guidance that has been used to successfully control the spread of COVID-19 in China.

In July, the CDC encouraged schools to reopen at any level of community spread and with any level of social distancing—even if they cannot guarantee three feet of distance between students.

The CDC took another step this month, encouraging students who come into contact with infected students not to quarantine if both were wearing masks.

As Yahoo News reported, “Under many school systems’ quarantine protocols, spending 15 minutes within a six foot radius of an infected individual—sitting next to them in class, for example—can force students to stay home for up to two weeks. The new exemption allows schools to bypass that rule in cases where both individuals mask up.”

The practice of quarantine—practiced for millennia—is critical to stopping the spread of infectious diseases like COVID-19, and its abandonment effectively guarantees the uncontained spread of COVID-19 in classrooms.

The reopening of schools is already fueling a massive surge in cases. At least 5,993 Mississippi students tested positive for COVID-19 in the last two weeks, a case rate 30 times higher than in the previous school year. This has been accompanied by 1,496 teachers getting sick—a six-fold increase over the previous school year.

In Mississippi, only seven ICU beds were available in the state, and 96 patients needed them, the state Department of Health said Thursday.

Despite this disaster, Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves made clear that the state would continue its efforts to reopen as cases surge throughout the state.

Children’s of Mississippi, the only pediatric hospital in the state, said it was treating the largest number of COVID-19 patients during the entire pandemic.

“Today, Children’s of Mississippi and the University of Mississippi Medical Center reported 28 children with confirmed or suspected cases of COVID-19, the highest number of pediatric COVID-19 patients at the state’s only children’s hospital since the beginning of the pandemic,” the hospital said in a statement on Facebook. “Of these hospitalized children, 100% are unvaccinated. This number includes eight children in the ICU, including five who are too young to receive the vaccine.”

As cases continue to surge throughout Florida, the Florida Hospital Association said in a statement that hospitals will soon run out of capacity.

“While hospitalizations continue to increase, three out of four Florida hospitals expect to face critical staff shortages in the next seven days, an increase of nearly ten percent since last week, and half of our hospitals will no longer accept transfer patients from other facilities,” the FHA said in a statement.

The continued drive to reopen comes amid a torrent of new information pointing to the dangers of in-person instruction not only to children, teachers and school staff—but to the families of students.

Research published this week showed that children eight and under are 40 percent more likely to spread COVID-19 than the general population. Commenting on the data, epidemiologist Eric Feigl-Ding warned, “Kids transmit damnit. And younger kids transmit even more!!”

It is becoming clear that the ongoing reopening of schools amid a massive surge of the COVID-19 pandemic is a recipe for the preventable deaths of tens or hundreds of thousands of children, educators, family members and the general public.

The Biden administration, speaking for the entire political establishment and with the support of the pro-corporate trade unions, is determined to push ahead with the reopening of schools with the aim of getting parents back to work—increasing the pool of labor available to major corporations and pushing down wages to boost profits.