Pandemic and surge in food prices deepens global hunger

Jean Shaoul

Global food prices have risen 33 percent in the last 12 months, according to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). Basic staples such as vegetable oil, grains and meat have shown some of the highest increases.

Coming on top of the economic catastrophe visited on billions by the pandemic, these pressures will fuel inflation making it difficult for workers to feed their families as hunger surges across the globe.

With the world’s poorest countries lacking the resources to provide food subsidies or social support; rising grain, oil and sugar prices threaten masses of people already living a hand to mouth existence with malnutrition and starvation.

Analysts are expecting prices to continue rising, as extreme weather, the surge in fertiliser and freight costs, shipping logjams, supply chain blockages, export bans on key foodstuffs by some producer countries, stockpiling by others, and labour shortages compound the problems. They also point to the growing demand for corn and vegetable oils for biodiesel as well as China’s rising demand for grain imports.

Women wait in line for food donated by the Covid Without Hunger organization in the Jardim Gramacho slum of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Saturday, May 22, 2021. (AP Photo/Silvia Izquierdo)

While climate change and unfavourable weather conditions have played a role in driving up food prices, this does not explain the fact that lumber prices have also reached record highs and metals, such as iron ore, tin, copper, palladium and silver, have risen along with oil.

What most analysts will not mention is the role of market manipulation, profiteering and speculation in pushing up prices. Speculation has been fueled by the supply of ready cash provided by capitalist governments, particularly in the US and Europe in response to the financial market meltdown of March 2020 at the start of the pandemic.

The US has kept interest rates close to zero, while expanding the money supply via “quantitative easing”, currently running at $120 billion a month, and bought up corporate debt via its “asset purchasing programme.” These measures, along with Congress’s giant $2 trillion package for support to US corporations, including funds to cover the Federal Reserve’s losses and enable it to lend more than $4 trillion, flooded the market with cash and fueled speculation in basic commodities.

When inflation is taken into account, food prices are higher than at almost any time in the last 60 years, including during the 2008 and 2011 food crises. Consumer price inflation for food rose 6.3 percent in 2020, with the most affected regions being South America facing 21 percent food price inflation, Africa and South Asia 12 percent and Oceania 8 percent.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) said the impact would be “felt most by consumers in emerging markets and developing countries still wrestling with the effects of the pandemic.” The UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) pointed out that whereas the 2008 and 2011 food crises that triggered dozens of riots across Asia, the Middle East and Africa were caused by either price increase or falling incomes, both are a feature of the current crisis.

According to the WFP, 270 million people could face potentially life-threatening food shortages this year, up from 150 million before the pandemic. It estimates that the number of people on the brink of famine, the most acute phase of a hunger crisis, has risen to 41 million people, compared to 34 million last year.

According to a report just published by the FAO, the UN Development Programme (UNDP) and the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), more than 800 million people experienced chronic hunger in 2020, while 3 billion—more than a third of the world’s population—could not afford a healthy diet. This increase was equal to that of the previous five years combined. Almost 1 billion were food insecure, a 20 percent increase on 2019.

Last month, the WFP and FAO warned that “conflict, the economic repercussions of Covid-19 and the climate crisis are expected to drive higher levels of acute food insecurity in 23 hunger hot spots over the next four months.”

Lebanon’s food inflation soared to 400 percent last year due to its plummeting currency as the government defaulted on its debt amid continuing economic turmoil exacerbated by US sanctions on Syria—to which Lebanon’s economy is closely linked—the pandemic and the after-effects of the Beirut port explosion. Both Lebanon and Syria have seen food prices double this year, with cooking oil in Syria quadrupling in price and forcing the government to limit the import of foodstuffs to preserve its dwindling foreign currency reserves and safeguard wheat imports.

The situation is particularly bad in Africa, where many countries are engulfed in wars and conflicts and others have experienced climate-related floods, drought and locust-swarms that have exacerbated the growing food crisis. Ethiopia, where there is a civil war raging in Tigray that has spilled over into Amhara and Afar, as well as other conflicts in the south-west of the country, has more people affected by famine than anywhere in the world.

The price increases will hit hardest those countries dependent on imports for their staple foodstuffs. In West Africa, the price of staples is up 40 percent over a five-year average, with Nigeria experiencing food inflation of 23 percent, the highest level in 15 years. In Sudan, workers face food inflation of more than 200 percent.

Since the start of the year, protests have raged in Sudan, while the rising cost of food contributed to protests in Lebanon, Iraq, Tunisia, Cuba and South Africa. In this last week, Aden, Yemen’s southern port city, has been rocked by five days of mass protests. These are over the lack of basic services and the more than fourfold decline in Yemen’s currency against the US dollar since the start of the Saudi Arabia-led invasion and war that has led to soaring food prices in a country where 80 percent of the population rely depend on aid.

But it is not just poor countries that have seen the impact of rising food prices. In the US, the world’s richest country, a recent survey revealed that 8.6 percent of people said they sometimes or often didn’t have enough to eat in the previous week. According to the Food Research and Action Center, more than 38 million Americans (11.8 percent) lived in households that struggled against food insecurity, or lack of access to an affordable, nutritious diet, a 9 percent increase on 2019. One in 25 (3.9 percent) of households experienced very low food security, forcing them to regularly skip meals or reduce their food intake because they could not afford more food.

In middle income countries such as Turkey, a major food producer, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s popularity has slumped as food inflation increased for a fourth month in August to 29 percent. Russia, the world’s top grains exporter, introduced a wheat export tax in February to curb exports, reducing its market share and foreign currency earnings, while doing nothing to limit rising food prices at home that are now at a five-year high. Romania, despite being the EU’s top grain exporter this year, has seen prices soar at a double-digit pace, with inflation this year set to be the highest in eight years.

Arif Husain, the WFP’s chief economist, warned that rising food insecurity could fuel migration as people from poorer countries flee to richer ones in search of the means to feed their families. Joe Glauber, a senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington and a former chief economist at the US Department of Agriculture, said that food insecurity was often a trigger for unrest.

What can be expected from a red-green federal government in Germany?

Christoph Vandreier

At the last three-way debate between the candidates for German Chancellor on Sunday, Olaf Scholz (Social Democrats) and Annalena Baerbock (Greens) went to great lengths to promote a government coalition made up of the SPD and the Greens as a progressive alternative. Both politicians spoke out in favor of such an alliance and engaged in friendly back-and-forth exchanges on the minimum wage and tax increases.

Scholz and Baerbock in the last three-way debate (screenshot)

But a coalition between the SPD and Greens, a so-called red-green government, would be nothing of the kind. It would continue and exacerbate the hated policies of social spending cuts, mass infection with COVID-19 and militarism. This can already be seen in the absurd election promises. After all Bundestag parties forked over hundreds of billions of euros to the super-rich at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, the SPD and the Greens are calling for a marginal increase in the top tax rate of just 3 percent, and only for extremely high incomes. They promise to raise the minimum wage by €2.40.

The last time there was a red-green change of government in 1998, the two parties rolled out far bigger guns in the election campaign. The SPD advertised en masse for health care, the protection of social welfare systems, an action program for jobs, higher pensions and against poverty. The Greens called for the “demilitarization of international politics.”

In reality, the red-green government of Gerhard Schröder then carried out the most violent social attacks in West German history in every single political area. With Hartz IV and the Agenda 2010 reforms, the red-green government created a massive low-wage sector. With the so-called Riester pension, it lowered pensions and privatized provision, and with the deregulation of the financial markets it organized a veritable orgy of enrichment on the stock exchanges.

In addition, the former pacifists of the Greens and their Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer waged the first German war of aggression since the Second World War with the bombing of Serbia. This was followed by the barbaric war of occupation in Afghanistan and countless other war missions in which German soldiers again committed atrocities all over the world.

Since then, the SPD and Greens have shifted even further to the right. For the past 16 years, with the exception of four years, the SPD ruled the country together with the conservative Christian Democrats/Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU). The party made the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) the official opposition in parliament, organized a massive rearmament drive, strengthened the regime of refugee deportations, and implemented the “Profits before life” policy in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

The Greens not only supported the billions gifted by the government to banks and corporations, they implemented deportations and the policy of mass infection in 11 of the 16 federal states in which they are involved in the government. On foreign military interventions, they regularly criticized the government from the right and called for participation in the wars against Libya and Syria.

A new edition of the red-green coalition would implement policies that would eclipse anything adopted by the previous federal government and the Schröder red-green government.

Like the Left Party, the SPD and the Greens have ensured that an unprecedented redistribution of wealth from the bottom upwards has taken place during the coronavirus pandemic. Because hundreds of billions of euros were handed over to the banks and corporations, the 10 richest Germans alone were able to increase their wealth by $178 billion in 2020. At the same time, 40 percent of the population was affected by a loss of income.

A red-green federal government would aim to squeeze the money to pay for the corporate bailouts out of the working class. Even the measly campaign demands are not worth the paper they are written on. Real wages are already being massively reduced due to the horrendous inflation of up to 5 percent. A red-green government would also slash social welfare spending and attack all workers’ rights.

The pandemic policy of the SPD and the Greens provides particularly clear confirmation of this. For the last year and a half, the federal government, in cooperation with all state governments, has pursued a policy that tramples corpses under foot in order to guarantee the profit interests of banks and corporations. Instead of carrying out life-saving lockdowns, businesses were kept open, producing one wave of the pandemic after another. In the three-way debates between the chancellor candidates, both Scholz and Baerbock spoke out repeatedly against limited lockdowns in order to break the fourth wave of infections.

The politics of death go hand in hand with the politics of war. During a debate on RTL television in August, Scholz emphasized that international military operations by the German army would also be necessary in the future. He boasted, “the greatest increase in the military budget had taken place” since he became Minister of Finance. “We are now over 50 billion (euros). I worked very hard to make this possible, and I will continue to do so in the years to come,” he said. Without a social democratic finance minister, such a large increase would not have taken place.

Baerbock attacked this policy from the right. She accused the grand coalition of constantly ducking out of the way when things get difficult and placing domestic political motives above foreign policy responsibility. “I would change that,” she declared. “As Germans, we have a responsibility in the world.” The NATO target of spending 2 percent of GDP on defence is not enough, she continued, adding “If economic power declines, then we have no more security, but nominally we have achieved our goal.”

With this outrageous rearmament policy, the SPD and Greens are reacting to the Western powers’ debacle in Afghanistan and the growing conflicts between the great powers. They want to enforce German economic interests militarily across the globe and are thus heading for a third world war. This will result in levels of brutality that far exceed those witnessed during the Afghanistan war.

A red-green government would implement a reactionary program in domestic and foreign policy and is therefore increasingly being promoted. Since the SPD and the Greens currently enjoy the support of only between 25 to 26 percent and 15 to 17 percent respectively, according to the latest polls, they would probably have to rely on another coalition partner to form a government.

On Sunday, Free Democrats (FDP) leader Christian Lindner extended an olive branch to the Greens. After avoiding any concrete coalition statement at the FDP party congress, he had a friendly exchange with the Greens chairman Robert Habeck on Sunday evening on the talk show “Anne Will.” The FDP, which represents the interests of the financial oligarchy most openly, is predicted to secure 10 to 13 percent of the vote.

The Left Party has also been offering its services to secure a majority for a red-green federal government for weeks. Their involvement would not change the character of the alliance in the least. This is already evident in Berlin, Bremen and Thuringia, where the Left Party is in coalitions with the SPD and the Greens and is implementing the same ruthless policy in the interests of the financial oligarchy. Over the past few weeks, the leaders of the Left Party have repeatedly emphasized that they support NATO, the German army and missions abroad.

That is why even the house organ of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, the FAZ, finds such a government constellation attractive. “It’s not just cynics who say: If in doubt, social cuts can be implemented better and more credibly by left-wing governments—see the red-green agenda reforms from 2003 to 2005,” the newspaper stated with regard to a possible red-red-green federal government.

College football season continues in front of full crowds, risking massive COVID-19 super-spreaders

Andy Thompson

With the college football regular season continuing into its fourth week of games, a major public health disaster is looming. Despite the continued spread of the more infectious Delta variant, colleges and universities have essentially removed any safety measures and are allowing games to resume with full audience capacity.

The motivating factor for the schools to allow these deadly events is profits. In the last year’s season, limitations on in-person attendance, imposed in piecemeal fashion by state and local governments, as well as a handful of game cancellations due to outbreaks in teams caused schools to lose out on hundreds of millions in anticipated revenue.

Arkansas fans call the hogs during the first half of an NCAA college football game Saturday, Sept. 4, 2021, in Fayetteville, Ark. (AP Photo/Michael Woods)

College football in the United States is among the most-attended sporting competition in the world, with more than 42 million tickets sold to Division 1 games in 2019, according to the National Collegiate Athletic Association, the governing body for college sports. The top 25 college stadiums all have a capacity of 69,000 people or more, and seven stadiums hold over 100,000. The largest is Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor, home to the University of Michigan Wolverines, with a capacity of 107,601.

Most major programs, including Michigan, Penn State, Ohio State and Texas A&M, are not requiring fans to show any proof of vaccination or enforcing mask wearing. Some schools like Louisiana State University are requiring guests either show proof of vaccination or a negative COVID-19 PCR test.

However, these limited measures are only intended to save face, not prevent the spread of the virus. They are fully in line with the Biden administration’s insistence that the population must “learn to live with the virus,” or in plain language, to live with constant infection and death as all measures necessary to end the pandemic are being rejected out of hand by both Democratic and Republican politicians.

It has been well documented that tens of thousands of “breakthrough cases,” or infections of vaccinated individuals, have taken place each day for the last several months, driven by the surge of the more aggressive Delta variant. In an environment of tens of thousands of people who are encouraged to scream and yell, mass transmission is practically guaranteed.

In Georgia, where the University of Georgia has held two home games with over 90,000 fans in attendance, COVID-19 cases are higher than they have ever been. The state has seen a seven-day average of over 5,000 new cases since August 9, reaching a high of 15,000 new cases on September 13. Deaths in Georgia continue to rise and are at their highest point since the previous peak last winter, with a current seven-day average of 125 deaths per day.

But the danger of holding these massive events is not limited to the surrounding school community. Last year ESPN published an interactive article, Mapping College Football Crowds and Covid Risks, using information gathered from epidemiologists and anonymous cell phone data which mapped out out how far the virus could potentially spread after being contracted at a game.

For example, after a game in front of 99,590 fans at Alabama’s Bryant-Denny Stadium, within just 18 hours fans traveled back to their homes throughout the region in neighboring states, including Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee and others. At another game in Nebraska, fans traveled from southern Florida, Illinois, Oregon and Connecticut.

The amount of wealth caught up in college football is staggering. The annual revenues generated by the top NCAA schools has exceeded $4 billion. In 2019, 39 schools saw revenues of over $100 million with the top 3 richest football programs, University of Texas, Texas A&M and Ohio State, each bringing in over $200 million.

While the financial data for the 2020 season has not yet been made publicly available, initial reports suggest that many teams earned millions less than expected due to game cancellations and reduced ticket sales due to COVID-19 restrictions. Another significant loss of revenue came from the cancellation of almost all non-conference games last year for major programs.

In non-conference games, schools make agreements directly with one another for large sums paid to the visiting team, frequently a weaker team brought in for an easy win, while the home team earns money off ticket sales, TV deals and advertising. According to a report in USAToday, the non-conference direct payments alone for 2021 add up to over $171 million. Kent State is earning the most off these deals, bringing in over $5.2 million for its non-conference guest appearances. Forty-five other schools will bring in over $1 million from these contracts.

There are 50 non-conference games planned this year that have at least a $1 million contract agreement, and 289 non-conference contract games in total planned for the 2021 season. In one of these games, played on September 11, Ohio State paid $3.5 million to the University of Oregon.

In order to recover their losses from last year’s cancellations, teams are planning as many non-conference games as they can. Some canceled games, like that between Kent State and Penn State, have been “rescheduled” several years in the future to make up the millions in lost payments.

Mario Moccia, the New Mexico State University athletics director, told USA Today that in the last year the school ended with a $3.5 million loss. “Those [non-conference] games alone added up to $2.725 million,” he said. “It just shows, if you’re just going to play those two games, the economic impact wouldn’t have been nearly as drastic for us.”

Any interests of the health and well-being of students, athletes, fans and ultimately the population as a whole have been totally abandoned in favor of the profit interests of the billion-dollar college football industry. The colleges and universities with major athletic programs have been completely transformed into businesses, with financial resources monopolized by athletic departments. At some schools, such as Louisiana State, the athletic department receive more in alumni donations, which are then squandered on expenses such as futuristic locker rooms, coaching salaries and stadium expansions, than the university itself.

As with other major industries the decision has been made by the schools that not a single dollar more can be spared to protect human life. The continuation of the massive super-spreading games will have a devastating impact on the population already reeling from the pandemic.

Former French health minister charged for “endangering the lives of others” over COVID-19 policies

Anthony Torres

On September 10, the French Court of Justice questioned former Health Minister Agnès Buzyn and charged her for “endangering the lives of others.” Buzyn was health minister in the Macron government from 2017 to 2020, including during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Her indictment underscores the widely felt understanding in the populations of France and internationally that the ruling class pursued a policy of social murder in response to the pandemic.

While France’s political establishment either supports Macron’s policies or has backed the reactionary anti-vaccine campaign launched by the far right and supported by the trade unions, another response to the bankruptcy of the capitalist class is developing from elsewhere. The public prosecutor has so far received 14,500 complaints about the lack of protective equipment for health care workers and the public, a reflection of the enormous social opposition in the working class. To date, nine complaints have been deemed admissible by the court.

The charging of Buzyn follows the opening of a judicial investigation by the General Prosecutor’s Office of the appeals court on July 3, 2020. The plaintiffs, including representatives of a group of doctors, were interviewed at the beginning of September and documented their claims of “endangering the life of others,” “involuntary manslaughter” and “non-assistance to a person in danger.”

The investigation led to several searches in October 2020 at the homes and offices of Buzyn, but also of the Minister of Health, Olivier Véran; of the former Prime Minister Edouard Philippe; of Sibeth Ndiaye, former spokesperson for the government; of the Director General of Health, Jérôme Salomon; and of the General Director of Public Health France, Geneviève Chêne. Buzyn is the first public figure to be charged in this case.

Buzyn has also been placed under the status of witness for “refusal to take appropriate measures to combat a disaster.” This offence, punishable by two years in prison and a fine of 30,000 euros, concerns “anyone who voluntarily refrains from taking or initiating measures that would allow, without risk to himself or to third parties, combating a disaster likely to endanger people’s safety.”

The current Minister of Health, Olivier Véran, the former Prime Minister Edouard Philippe and current Prime Minister Jean Castex will also be questioned.

Not surprisingly, these ministers have the support of the major media outlets and hope to turn the trials to their advantage and legitimize their ongoing policy of permitting the virus to spread.

On the morning of her hearing, Agnès Buzyn declared: “Today is an excellent opportunity for me to explain myself and to restore the truth of the case. I will not let the government’s action, my action as a minister, be tarnished when we have done so much to prepare our country for a global health crisis which, I remind you, is still ongoing.”

The decision to indict Buzyn and the hearing of high officials by the court is the product, above all, of the fear of popular opinion in official circles. Large sections of the working class are convinced that the Macron government has perpetrated a social crime by allowing the coronavirus to kill around 115,000 people in France.

Buzyn’s statement before her hearing contradicts her admission at the beginning of 2020 to the newspaper Le Monde that for months, all the top leaders of the Macron government had knowingly minimized the danger posed by the virus. She explained then that “on December 20, an English-language blog detailed a strange infectious lung disease. I alerted the General Director of Health. On January 11, I sent a message to the president about the situation. On January 30, I warned [Prime Minister] Edouard Philippe that the elections should probably not be held. I was wrestling against my restraints.”

According to Buzyn, she warned at that time that there “would be thousands of deaths.”

For months, presenting the coronavirus as a simple flu, the French authorities did nothing to prepare for an epidemic. They did not even buy masks when government stocks were empty. Not only were the municipal elections held as Europe became the world center of the pandemic, but Buzyn lied publicly, stating on January 24 that “the risk of propagation of the coronavirus in the population is very low.”

The reaction of the political class, including the opposition parties, to the indictment of the former health minister, show the complicity of the entire political establishment with the strategy of the Macron government and the EU of “herd immunity.” No political or trade union organization warned of the deadly danger workers would be exposed to, because they were all agreed to keep workers on the job.

The prime minister’s office defended Buzyn, stating, “No one can doubt the seriousness and commitment that [Agnès Buzyn] showed at the first signs of the epidemic. France took the necessary measures very quickly.”

Damien Abad, president of the Republicans group in the National Assembly, and deputy for the region of Ain, told BFMTV that he “does not share the desire to charge everyone; that’s not how we do politics.” Laurent Berger, secretary general of the CFDT trade union, said he was “uncomfortable” with the fact that politicians who had done their job as best they could were being “thrown into the public eye.”

The decisive question in this case is to politically mobilize the working class, who cannot expect the capitalist courts to rule on the responsibility of the Macron government and the international financial aristocracy. Nor can any faith be placed in the trade union apparatuses to lead a struggle.

It is the workers themselves who through wildcat strikes forced European governments, including Macron’s, into the initial lockdowns in March 2020. The ruling class, however, refused to organize systematic contact tracing and limitation of the virus after the ending of the first lockdown, while refusing to re-implement a lockdown of non-essential industries and schools. The entire ruling class is responsible for a social murder that has killed 115,000 people in France and 1.2 million in Europe.

This is in contrast to China, which pursued a serious scientific policy against the pandemic from the beginning, and thus limited the number of deaths to 5,000. However, in order to carry out this policy on an international scale and put an end to the pandemic, the international working class must be mobilized, independently of the trade union apparatuses, which are allies of governments and the capitalist elite’s policy of “herd immunity.”

Such a struggle will be fiercely opposed by the financial aristocracy and its military and political leaders. In April, thousands of retired and current French officers signed tribunes proposing to conduct military operations to repress social opposition in France and kill thousands of people. Far-right politicians speak openly of their terror at the danger of revolution and of their plans to establish a military dictatorship.

“Today, to the security crisis is added the pandemic, all against the backdrop of an economic, social and political crisis, while there is no confidence in government leaders,” said retired General Philippe de Villiers. “I fear that this pent-up anger will explode, all at the same time. … The rule of law is obviously important, but at some point, it is also necessary to think strategically.”

Scientists find new evidence of the natural origins of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19

Andre Damon

Earlier this month, scientists revealed the closest discovery yet to a “smoking gun” in the search for the origins of the deadly COVID-19 pandemic.

In a new pre-print paper by the French Institute Pasteur and the University of Laos, an international team of scientists say they have found a group of viruses that are the closest relatives of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

A researcher swabs a bat's mouth to take samples at Sai Yok National Park in Kanchanaburi province, west of Bangkok, Thailand, Friday, July 31, 2020. Researchers in Thailand have been trekking though the countryside to catch bats in their caves in an effort to trace the murky origins of the coronavirus. (AP Photo/Sakchai Lalit)

In the part of the virus critical to infecting humans, called the receptor-binding domain (RBD), the newly discovered viruses are more similar to the original variant of SARS-CoV-2 than are the variants of that virus that have emerged in the past year, including the currently dominant Delta variant.

“Sequences very close to those of the early strains of SARS-CoV-2 responsible for the pandemic exist in nature, and are found in several Rhinolophus bat species,” concludes the paper.

Professor Stuart Neil, head of the department of infectious diseases at King’s College London told the Telegraph: “Two or three of these viruses have RBDs which is only two or three changes from that seen in SARS-CoV-2—essentially, closer to the original than some of the variants of concern we see out there in some respects.”

The authors continue, “These viruses may have contributed to SARS-CoV-2’s origin and may intrinsically pose a future risk of direct transmission to humans.”

The newly discovered viruses are more effective at infecting human beings than RaTG13, the bat coronavirus discovered in 2012 that had up to now been the closest relative to SARS-CoV-2.

The scientists note, “The RBDs of the viruses found in our study are closer to that of SARSCoV-2 than to the RaTG13 RBD, the virus identified in R. affinis from the Mojiang mineshaft where pneumonia cases with clinical characteristics strikingly similar to COVID-19 were recorded in 2012.”

In the narrative presented in the US media, the investigation of the origins of COVID-19 is a constant tug-of-war between two competing hypotheses, both backed by evidence. There is supposedly an ongoing “debate” between proponents of the natural origins of COVID-19 and the theory that the disease was released from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.

But in the scientific community, there is no debate. New revelations and discoveries are constantly emerging, but they only deepen humanity’s understanding of the natural origins of COVID-19 and the dangers posed by other animal-borne diseases to modern society.

The findings by the French and Laotian scientists refute the “lab leak” conspiracy theory, according to which scientists performed “gain of function” experiments on naturally occurring viruses in order to make them more infectious to humans, then released them, inadvertently or deliberately, into the city of Wuhan, China.

Nicholas Wade, the advocate of racist pseudoscience whose claims about a “lab leak” were cited uncritically by every major US newspaper, claimed that the RBD of SARS-CoV-2 “seemed optimized for the human receptor,” leading to the conclusion that “the virus might have been generated in a laboratory.”

But now a very similar RBD, with apparently the same capacity to infect humans, has been found in nature.

As scientists scour the bat caves of Indochina for potential predecessors of SARS-CoV-2, they are homing in, less than two years into the pandemic, on what for SARS took a decade and a half to discover—the specific natural origin of the virus.

In 2017, Nature reported, “In a remote cave in Yunnan province, virologists have identified a single population of horseshoe bats that harbours virus strains with all the genetic building blocks of the one that jumped to humans in 2002, killing almost 800 people around the world.”

The journal continued, “Although no single bat had the exact strain of SARS coronavirus that is found in humans, the analysis showed that the strains mix often.”

The author of the 2017 study, Shi Zhengli, has been falsely and absurdly demonized by the US media as having created the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead, she warned in 2017 that “The risk of spillover into people and emergence of a disease similar to SARS is possible,” and urged measures to control the spread of animal diseases in humans.

The authors of this month’s study note that, like the 2017 breakthrough that led to the identification of the origins of SARS, proof of the origins of SARS-CoV-2 may come in the form of finding individual pieces of the virus that may have arisen through recombination or “mosaicism.”

They write, “Although the identification of SARS-CoV-2 in bats is a major goal, it may be unattainable. A more realistic objective is to identify the sequences that contribute to its mosaicism.”

Of all the major English-language publications, only the UK-based Telegraph has reported the breakthrough discovery. This report, along with other findings pointing to the widespread prevalence of bat coronaviruses and their ability to infect human beings, have gone unreported by the same newspapers that gave breathless credence to the fabrications of Nicholas Wade.

The latest scientific findings, combined with the admission last month by most of the US intelligence agencies that SARS-CoV-2 was “not genetically engineered,” should put the final nail in the coffin of the Wuhan Lab conspiracy theory. Those newspapers and writers that promoted this conspiracy theory owe the world a public explanation and apology.

But none will be forthcoming, because the advocates of the “Wuhan lab” theory are serving definite class interests. Their shameless lies, using bogus pseudoscience, aim to further a right-wing, xenophobic, and racist campaign to demonize China, laying the ideological groundwork for imperialist war.

America’s deadliest pandemic: COVID-19 eclipses the Spanish flu

Benjamin Mateus

This month, COVID-19 officially became the deadliest outbreak of infectious disease in American history, eclipsing the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic that killed 675,000 Americans over two years.

This grim milestone comes as the daily death toll surges throughout the United States. A staggering 2,228 Americans lost their lives on Wednesday to COVID-19, after 2,152 died on Tuesday. By the time this article is published, the US death toll will have reached 700,000, according to Worldometers.info.

Visitors sit among white flags that are part of artist Suzanne Brennan Firstenberg's "In America: Remember," a temporary art installation to commemorate Americans who have died of COVID-19, on the National Mall in Washington, Tuesday, Sept. 21, 2021. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)

The official death toll in the US is higher than in any other country. The United States makes up just 4.2 percent of the world’s population, but it accounts for 14 percent of the nearly 4.7 million deaths worldwide, according to official figures.

The hidden toll of the pandemic remains far higher than what is reported. A study from January of this year concluded that approximately 35 percent of COVID-19 deaths remain uncounted, meaning that the real US death toll is greater than one million, a figure consistent with a recent study by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME).

More than 9.1 million years of life have been lost to COVID-19 in the United States, according to a study published this week in the Annals of Internal Medicine. “Our results demonstrate that COVID-19 has not been a pandemic just for the old and the vulnerable, but also for the younger and healthier groups,” noted the study’s authors.

The catastrophic impact of the Spanish flu, like the COVID-19 pandemic, was the product of the conscious decision of the ruling class to subordinate the preservation of human life to profit.

The Spanish flu pandemic originated in the state of Kansas, but it spread throughout the globe, infecting a third of the world’s population. It spread in the trenches of World War I, notorious for their lack of hygiene and adequate medical care.

The very name of the disease, the “Spanish flu,” reflected the efforts of the US and European political establishment to suppress popular knowledge of the disease’s existence. Wartime censorship prohibited serious and honest reporting on the disease, but the press in Spain reported its spread, leading to the misnomer.

US President Woodrow Wilson, who was keenly aware of the deadly nature of the flu, never uttered a single public statement on the epidemic. Historian John M. Barry, author of The Great Influenza, noted, “In terms of managing a federal response to the pandemic, there was no leadership or guidance of any kind from the White House. Wilson wanted the focus to remain on the war effort. Anything negative was viewed as hurting morale and hurting the war effort.”

The 1918 Great Influenza pandemic was intimately tied to the war that brought legions of troops across oceans together to fight a war for imperialist conquest. And despite the catastrophic toll that bullets, shells and land mines took on the troops, the influenza virus killed still more.

More than 100 years after the Spanish flu pandemic, human society is objectively far better prepared to stop and eradicate COVID-19. Highly effective vaccines against COVID-19 were developed in just 10 months. Revolutions in communications and information have made it possible to have detailed knowledge about the whereabouts and contacts of infected people. The ability to treat patients with effective and safe therapeutics is readily available.

However, the social relations of capitalism have prevented the rational use of these tools to save lives and end the pandemic. Even amid the massive surge of deaths from COVID-19, the American ruling class has doubled down on its efforts to reopen schools and workplaces, leading to what experts warn could be a massive resurgence of the disease.

Instead of using these tools to eradicate the pandemic, capitalism has “normalized” mass death.

Biden, Macron pledge to meet amid mounting US-EU conflicts over China

Alex Lantier

Less than a week after Paris recalled its ambassador to the United States over Australia’s canceling of a €56 billion contract with France to build submarines, amid the sudden signing of the Australia-UK-US (AUKUS) alliance against China, Paris and Washington announced moves to repair ties.

US President Joe Biden and French President Emmanuel Macron will meet next month in Europe to discuss the crisis. The two spoke in a 30-minute phone call yesterday, according to White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki. The Élysée presidential palace posted a brief communiqué on the Biden-Macron telephone call in English and in French on its website, which announced that Washington and Paris will “open a process of in-depth consultations” to try to reestablish trust.

President Joe Biden meets with Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison at the Intercontinental Barclay Hotel during the United Nations General Assembly, Tuesday, Sept. 21, 2021, in New York. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

Biden apparently accepted responsibility for not consulting Paris about AUKUS, according to the communiqué, which states: “The two leaders agreed that the situation would have benefitted from open consultations among allies on matters of strategic interest to France and our European partners. President Biden conveyed his ongoing commitment in that regard.”

Biden and Macron are to meet next month in Europe for discussions, and a French ambassador will return to Washington, it added. It reaffirms “the strategic importance of French and European engagement in the Indo-Pacific region, including in the framework of the European Union’s recently published strategy for the Indo-Pacific.” The statement commits Washington to supporting “a stronger and more capable European defense,” which it called “complementary to NATO.” It also endorses France’s ongoing neo-colonial war in Mali and the Sahel.

This brief statement does little more than paper over deep contradictions emerging between Washington and its European Union (EU) “allies,” however. The press has widely described these events as the deepest crisis in US-French relations since 2002-2003, when Paris joined Berlin and Moscow in opposing the US-led invasion of Iraq. The question of how to manage relations with China’s rising economy is provoking deep and bitter conflicts inside the NATO alliance.

While Biden endorses the EU’s strategy on the Indo-Pacific and European defense as “complementary” to Europe’s NATO alliance with Washington, the way the Australian-French contract was broken and the AUKUS alliance was announced gives the lie to these claims. Washington, London and Canberra did not discuss AUKUS or the breaking of the French contract with any of the EU powers before announcing these decisions September 15.

In 2015, all the major EU powers rejected US pressure and signed up for the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), the investment arm of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The BRI has led, however, to hundreds of billions of dollars in Chinese investment across the Middle East, Central Asia and beyond, and the signing of strategic alliances between China and countries like Iran, which US imperialism routinely threatens with war.

The Wall Street Journal, for its part, hailed Washington’s breaking of the French-Australian submarine contract as “smart” in a recent editorial, stressing that it was in retaliation for French policy: “French President Emmanuel Macron has made a point of emphasizing ‘strategic autonomy’ from the US, including on China, Russia and Iran. … Europe can’t play China’s game of divide-and-conquer on economic and strategic issues without consequences for its US relationship.”

While Biden formally endorsed the EU’s Indo-Pacific strategy, this strategy paper is incompatible with a US policy of arming Australia with nuclear submarines to threaten China. In it, the EU pledges to “pursue its multifaceted engagement with China, engaging bilaterally to promote solutions to common challenges, cooperating on issues of common interest and encouraging China to play its part in a peaceful and thriving Indo-Pacific region.”

The conflict between US and European imperialist policy on China underlay French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian’s criticism of the AUKUS alliance as a step towards war. Le Drian said, “We see the rise of an Indo-Pacific strategy launched by the United States that is militarily confrontational. That is not our position. … We don’t believe in the logic of systematic military confrontation, even if sometimes we must use military means.”

Indeed, conflicts continued between the AUKUS countries and the EU yesterday, as British Prime Minister Boris Johnson ridiculed French concerns: “It’s time for some of our dearest friends around the world to ‘prenez un grip’ about all this and ‘donnez-moi un break.’” Johnson’s mock-French call to “get a grip” and “give me a break” was his response to angry comments from the EU officials, criticizing the AUKUS alliance as a breach of faith, targeting not just France but the EU as a whole.

Such statements must be taken as a warning to workers around the world that, whatever the official attempts to downplay the crisis, tensions between the United States and Europe that twice in the last century exploded into world war are again reaching explosive levels.

EU Council leader Charles Michel denounced the United States for bad faith, adding, “The elementary principles among allies are transparency and confidence, these go together. But now, what do we see? An obvious lack of transparency and good faith.”

EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell of Spain said a meeting of EU foreign ministers amid the ongoing UN General Assembly meeting in New York had come out in support of France. The ministers “clearly expressed their solidarity with France,” Borrell said, adding that the AUKUS alliance is “not a bilateral issue” between Washington and Paris but “affects” the whole EU.

Foreign ministers of the EU imperialist powers made similar statements. “I can understand the anger of our French friends,” said German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas. “What was decided—and the manner in which it was decided—is irritating and disappointing, and not only for France.”

Belgian Foreign Minister Sophie Wilmès called the signing of the AUKUS alliance at France’s expense “a thunderbolt in contemporary life in France, in Europe certainly and geostrategically at the level of the entire world.” She called on Europe to be “more vocal” and “present on the international scene,” particularly on the issue of relations with China.

In Italy, former Foreign Minister Marta Dassù told La Repubblica that AUKUS “contains a risk: the division of the West between an Anglo-Saxon sphere aiming to contain China on the one hand, and a traditional Euro-Atlantic sphere with NATO concentrated against Russia. The question that is posed is how long these two Western alliances can remain united.”

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte responded to the AUKUS crisis by proposing to delay EU trade talks with the United States. “We support not having the meeting on economic safety at this point with the US,” Rutte told reporters on Tuesday.

Russian officials also said they see both the US-Australia-Japan-India “Asian Quad” alliance and the AUKUS alliance as targeting Russia. Speaking of the Quad, Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev said, “Washington will also try to involve other countries in this organization, especially to pursue anti-Chinese and anti-Russian policies. … Just now, another military bloc was formed in the region, AUKUS, which pursues the same objectives.”

Yet neither the EU imperialist powers nor the post-Soviet capitalist kleptocracy have a progressive policy to oppose the US war drive against China. They either seek to adapt themselves to the framework of US policy, or furiously arm themselves in an attempt to compete with Washington militarily—a policy that entails massive military spending and attacks on the living standards and social rights of the working class.

Spain’s PSOE-Podemos government calls for “normalization” of COVID-19

Alice Summers

As COVID-19 continues to spread through Spain, the coalition government of the social-democratic Socialist Party (PSOE) and the “left populist” Podemos party is campaigning to downplay the risks of the virus, calling for its “normalization.”

In a recent speech to a meeting of the Spanish Society of Epidemiology, Fernando Simón, director of the Centre for the Coordination of Health Alerts and Emergencies (CCAES), and one of the PSOE-Podemos government’s key advisors during the pandemic, made this policy clear. Presenting measures such as lockdowns as an overreaction to a relatively benign disease, Simón likened Spain’s pandemic response to “shooting a fly with a bazooka.”

People walk along a boulevard in Barcelona, Spain. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)

At the start of the pandemic, Simón stated, “We knew very little, we knew that it was very serious, but we didn’t know how serious…. It’s true that we had to take drastic action so that our health system did not collapse, but if we had had the information then that we had later, we could have organised a more direct response.”

Speaking on the current so-called “fifth wave” of the virus, he said: “It’s very likely that Spain will not have any more major epidemiological waves…. There could be a sixth, seventh, eighth or ninth wave, but they won’t be like the others.”

The situation now “has nothing in common with what we were seeing before,” the CCAES director claimed. “There could be another ripple [of the pandemic] in some specific groups, but the situation in Spain, right now, is very favourable, making it possible, bit by bit, to normalize the situation.”

Simón’s speech epitomises the Spanish ruling elite’s utter disregard for the lives of workers and youth, who will continue to get sick and die in these “sixth, seven, eighth and ninth waves.” His calls to “normalize the situation” amount to an acknowledgement that the PSOE-Podemos government aims to let the virus spread unchecked. In this, it is in the company of the bourgeoisie the world over, which is demanding that workers “learn to live with the virus”, that is, to accept mass death from a preventable disease as an inevitable part of life.

Throughout the pandemic, Simón has been one of the most reliable spokespeople for this “herd immunity” policy. Last November, as infections reached their highest numbers since the spring, Simón appeared in a press conference for the Ministry of Health to insist that no lockdown would be implemented, even if it could save thousands of lives.

“What we have right now in Spain is not a [stay-at-home] lock-down, and this will probably not be necessary,” he stated. “If we carry out a real and full confinement and nobody leaves their house for any reason, within around 15 days we would have this under control, or perhaps within a month. But this is impossible. There are people who need to work, to buy things, who need to leave… Total confinement is impossible.”

“If the objective is to completely eliminate transmission,” he added, “forget it, it is impossible.”

Spain’s Constitutional Court is also reportedly planning to declare unconstitutional the second state of alarm in Spain, which lasted from October 2020 until May 9 this year. The state of alarm is the juridical mechanism used to impose health-related restrictions, such as lockdowns.

The Court’s announcement comes in the wake of a previous ruling on the COVID-19 lockdown measures imposed from March to June 2020, which were also declared unconstitutional. The legal challenge to both states of alarm was brought by the far-right Vox party. While the second challenge will not be officially voted on by the 12 Court judges until October, right-wing magistrate Antonio Narváez has drafted a statement declaring that measures imposed to combat the pandemic during this time exceeded the remit of the October-May state of alarm.

The two judgements are the Spanish ruling elite’s pledge to allow no let-up in the “herd immunity” policy they are pursuing together with the entire European bourgeoisie. No matter how many new “waves” of the pandemic might engulf Spain—and regardless of how many thousands more needless deaths may occur—the ruling class insists that there will be no return to the lockdown measures forced upon it by a continent-wide wave of wildcat strikes in March and April last year.

In his efforts to downplay the virus and campaign against necessary health restrictions, Simón has aligned himself, like the PSOE-Podemos government for which he speaks, with Vox’s reactionary and criminal anti-lockdown policies.

Simón’s statements and the two legal rulings come under conditions in which the virus is far from under control in Spain. Many hundreds of people continue to die each week from COVID-19, and tens of thousands are infected. With the reopening of schools at the start of this month, cases will likely shoot up further, as millions of children are herded back into unsafe and overcrowded classrooms, taking the virus home to parents, grandparents and other family members.

Children and adolescents continue to be among the worst affected by the “fifth wave” of the pandemic, with significantly higher rates of infection reported among 12–19-year-olds than among the population as a whole. As of 13 September, the incidence rate per 100,000 people among this age group was 154.45, and 149.56 among under-12s, nearly double the rates reported among 60–69 and 70–79 year olds.

Spanish authorities consider any rate above 150 “high risk,” so that by the Spanish ruling elite’s own metric, all groups under 19 years of age are in a “high risk” position.

The PSOE-Podemos government allowed the virus to let rip over the summer, leading to spiraling infections and over 4,000 coronavirus deaths. Despite the constantly repeated adage that “children don’t get COVID,” 315,000 under-19s have been infected with the virus since June 20. Of these, 1,900 were hospitalized, 91 were admitted to Intensive Care Units (ICUs) and seven died, according to Spain’s National Epidemiological Centre.

Millions of children and youth remain unvaccinated, putting them at heightened risk of contracting the virus and getting seriously ill. Only slightly more than half of 12–19-year-olds in Spain have received both required jabs of the vaccine, with some regions having full vaccination rates of only 29 percent among this age group. Those under the age of 12 are not eligible for immunization, and remain completely unprotected from the virus.

The PSOE-Podemos government has proven utterly hostile to a scientifically-guided policy to eliminate the pandemic and save lives. Like the ruling class across Europe, it has placed corporate profits and the wealth of a super-rich elite above all else, seeing tens or even hundreds of thousands of deaths as simply the acceptable cost of doing business.

EU funds have bailed out banks and large companies to the tune of hundreds of billions of euros, while workers have been forced to continue working in unsafe factories, schools and offices and have died in droves from the coronavirus. The same “herd immunity” policies have prevailed across Europe, more or less openly, no matter the nominal political colouration of the party in power.