“Catastrophic” flooding cuts transportation links, forces thousands to evacuate homes in British Columbia

Roger Jordan

Floodwaters described as “once in a century” and “catastrophic” have engulfed wide swathes of southwestern British Columbia since Sunday night as the result of a record rainfall, attributable to an “atmospheric river.” Many Fraser Valley communities saw a month’s worth of precipitation fall in just two days.

Thousands of people have been forced to flee their homes, and damage to highway and rail networks has left Greater Vancouver, with a population of over 2.5 million, effectively cut off from the rest of Canada by land.

BC Premier John Horgan declared a 14-day state of emergency at a press conference Wednesday afternoon, noting that he expects the death toll to rise over the coming days. Horgan also requested federal assistance from the Canadian Armed Forces to provide services to thousands of evacuees and restore drinking water to communities whose supplies have been contaminated by the floods.

Abbotsford, BC inundated by flood waters on Tuesday (Credit: City of Abbotsford)

The floods are the product of climate change, which is at the root of a series of extreme weather events and other disasters that have devastated western Canada, and especially BC, in recent months.

An unprecedented heat dome in late June led to the deaths of over 600 BC residents. High temperatures and drought subsequently contributed to one of the province’s worst wildfire seasons ever. All of these natural disasters have been exacerbated by the utter failure of the provincial New Democratic Party and federal Liberal governments to take preventive measures and invest in crumbling infrastructure.

The current official death toll of one, a woman crushed in her car by a mudslide, is likely to increase considerably. Two other people are officially reported missing. Several areas of the province are only accessible by helicopter, making it likely that further casualties are yet to be discovered. Merritt (population 7,000) is largely underwater after authorities ordered all residents to leave because the town’s water plant has been inundated with flood waters. A gas line providing heat to residents in Princeton was cut, with utility FortisBC declaring that it will not be up and running again before the weekend.

Although the exact number of evacuees across the province is unknown, at least 20 evacuation centres have been set up. The city of Hope is hosting 1,100 evacuees alone.

The four highways linking the Lower Mainland to the BC Interior have been blocked by landslides, which trapped over 270 people in their cars Monday night. The provincial New Democratic Party government announced late Tuesday that a lane for emergency services traffic was open on Highway 7, which runs parallel to the Trans-Canada Highway. Two rail lines used to transport goods to the Port of Vancouver have also been severed, with one blocked by a derailed CN Rail train. While CN Rail and CP Rail say they hope to re-establish services within days, some of the highway damage could take months to repair. Pictures are already circulating of empty shelves in supermarkets across the province, driven primarily by panic buying.

A woman cleans out her flood-damaged home Wednesday, Nov. 17, 2021, in Sumas, Wash. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson)

City authorities in Abbotsford, which lies in the Fraser Valley about 70 kilometers east of Vancouver, issued an urgent evacuation order late Tuesday for residents in Sumas Prairie, a major agricultural area close to the US border. The low-lying region is threatened with inundation due to the imminent failure of the Barrowtown pump station, which is struggling to keep floodwaters from the Fraser River out of the Sumas Lake Canal. The pump station would most likely have already failed were it not for the efforts of 300 local volunteers and emergency services personnel, who built a 25-meter-long dam to protect the site.

Over 180 people were rescued overnight by air and water from Sumas Prairie. The region, where at least 300 people remained stranded as of Wednesday morning, accounts for about half of BC’s dairy and poultry products.

Gareth, a farmer from BC, told the World Socialist Web Site, “In September, we get on average two inches of rain, but this year we got six. The west coast of Canada will have drier summers and wetter winters due to the ice melting, jet streams slowing, and weather systems not moving through because of our ever-increasing emissions of green house gases and the resulting hotter temperatures.

“That was certainly the case as we experienced an unprecedented heat dome with record highs. This fall, in my 50 years, I have never seen rain this hard or for this long. As a farmer, these extremes are going to make growing food much more difficult.”

The floods and landslides were triggered by unprecedented rainfall that began on Saturday. Some areas, including Hope, recorded as much rain within three days as they typically see throughout the entire month of November. In Vancouver, a sea barge ran aground at English Bay due to high winds.

The unprecedented rainfall was caused by an “atmospheric river,” a dense column of water vapour that carries moisture from the tropics towards the poles. As it travels, the moisture falls as rain. Although atmospheric rivers are not unprecedented, climate change is increasing their sizes and making them more likely to dump large quantities of water over brief periods of time.

Criticism of the NDP government is building, which failed to send out an emergency warning to residents in the affected areas despite forecasts having projected the impending storm. BC is the only Canadian province never to have used the Alert Ready system, a nationwide emergency service that allows governments to send messages directly to cell phones. The Northwest Territories, which has less than 1 percent of BC’s population, has used the Alert Ready system four times this year alone, including for flash floods. All that BC Public Safety Minister Mike Farnworth could offer as an excuse Monday was, “It is in place for tsunamis. We have publicly said it’s in place for next season’s fire season.”

Beyond the lack of a coordinated response in the face of an “atmospheric river” that was forecasted, scientists have attacked the political establishment for its failure to listen to their repeated warnings about the likelihood of such extreme events becoming ever more common.

Peter Wood, a scientist who produced a recent report on the link between clearcut logging and community damage due to floods and wildfires, told the Guardian, “This is exactly what the best available science has predicted for years. We know the outcome when you log steep slopes…You reach sort of a tipping point where the forest is no longer able to provide that moderating service of controlling flow of water.” Wood added, “Over the last couple days, I’ve been looking at the areas that have been particularly hard hit, and it happens to coincide with some of the communities that have been logged the heaviest.”

Repeated warnings have also gone unheeded regarding the government’s failure to take precautionary measures against wildfires and the risk of flooding. Controlled burns of shrubs and vegetation can help limit forest fires and conserve older, larger trees, which can in turn act as a barrier against water flowing off slopes. But many of these programs were slashed during the austerity budgets imposed by the BC Liberal governments of Gordon Campbell and Christy Clark.

The NDP, which returned to power in 2017, has retained and even boasted about its commitment to a no less rigorous regime of fiscal discipline. The NDP’s callous indifference towards the plight faced by the population due to increasingly erratic weather patterns was underscored during last summer’s heat dome, when Premier Horgan notoriously declared that the hundreds of deaths were “a part of life” and that everyone ought to take “personal responsibility” when extreme weather events occur.

The fate of the area around Lytton, a small town in the Interior that made headlines around the world during the summer when it was almost burned to the ground by a wildfire, illustrates the close connection between out-of-control forest fires and an increased danger of flooding. A section of the Trans-Canada Highway was washed away by the Thompson River east of Lytton Monday.

The refusal to invest in basic infrastructure and preventative measures is being graphically exposed by the disaster unfolding near Abbotsford. The danger posed by flooding to the province’s prime agricultural region was identified in a March 2021 report from the Fraser Basin Council, which warned that the dyke system protecting the Sumas Prairie from the Fraser River was at risk of failure. The Council estimated the cost of an inundation of the region to be anywhere from $20 billion to $30 billion.

The devastation wrought across Canada’s third most populous province over recent days, and the crisis it is producing for the supply of foodstuffs and other basic necessities, provides a dire warning as to the urgency of a comprehensive international program to tackle climate change, and invest in infrastructure to protect people in Canada and around the world from ever more extreme natural disasters.

The last year alone has witnessed horrendous flooding in Europe, which claimed over 200 lives in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands; massive wildfires in Siberia which sent smoke to the North Pole for the first time on record; devastating flooding in New York City and New Jersey that drowned workers in their apartments; and the Texas winter storm which knocked out the state’s power grid and killed hundreds more.

But the ruling elite in every country has shown itself entirely unwilling and incapable of taking any measures that challenge the prerogative of the super-rich and big business to acquire vast profits. The globally coordinated strategy necessary to tackle climate change is inconceivable under conditions in which the ruling class in every country stokes geopolitical rivalries and military tensions, as was shown at the recently-concluded COP26 summit in Glasgow.

Major staffing shortages at schools throughout the US due to COVID-19 pandemic

Chase Lawrence

As winter approaches, the COVID-19 pandemic is accelerating in the US and schools coast to coast are experiencing major staffing shortages. As a result of widespread infections and a mass exodus of teachers from the profession, roughly 40 percent of all district leaders and principals describe their current staff shortages as “severe” or “very severe,” according to a survey by EdWeek Research Center conducted last month.

The entire fall semester has been utterly chaotic for educators, coinciding with the Delta surge of the pandemic that has killed over 150,000 Americans. The latest data from the American Association of Pediatrics released Monday showed another 122,000 official infections among children, an increase of 22 percent from two weeks ago. The AAP report indicates 11 additional deaths last week, bringing the cumulative number of child deaths to 625.

A student wears a face mask while doing work at his desk at the Post Road Elementary School, in White Plains, N.Y., Oct. 1, 2020. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)

The situation is most dire across the Midwest and Northwest, as well as some states in the West. One of the worst affected states is Michigan, where schools were once again the number one source of COVID-19 outbreaks last week. Overall cases in the state are quickly approaching record highs, with the number of active cases now exceeding all previous points in the pandemic at over 319,000. This number is over 25,000 more than the nearly 294,000 active cases at the last peak on April 25.

According to the Michigan state government’s website, schools account for half of all active outbreaks in the state, or 480 out of a total 821. Outbreaks forcing an end to in-person classes or the outright canceling of classes have been widespread .

Waterford Mott High School in Oakland County, Michigan, went virtual recently due to illness and a staffing shortage. A local ABC affiliate cited a letter from the school’s principal, Craig Blomquist, to families of students explaining that the building was closed until next Monday due to staffing shortages. The district stated, “like many industries, so too is the education field in need of more personnel in almost every capacity. Here at Waterford School District, we are actively hiring in many positions, for both full and part time, for permanent building substitute teachers, as well as transportation and food service workers.”

Galesburg-Augusta Community Schools in Galesburg also canceled classes for next Monday and Tuesday, citing a high number of absences due to illness and a shortage of certified teachers.

Grand Rapids Public Schools (GRPS) has canceled two days of school in December for “COVID-19 wellness days,” which will not be made up later in the school year. GRPS spokesperson John Helmholdt stated in a district email, “This school year has been particularly trying as we are facing a historic teacher and support staff shortage crisis coupled with the continued global pandemic.”

Helmholdt explained that the “COVID-19 wellness days” are being taken for fear of schools being shut down from a further hemorrhaging of teaching and other staff: “Our teachers are doubling up classes, principals are teaching every single day, we’re having to send our curriculum team into buildings to teach on almost a daily basis. At this point, we’re trying to fill the gaps and so we knew there was a need for these wellness days, and we wanted to find the best time that would work for all.”

In Detroit, COVID-19 cases are increasing at an alarming rate, with Detroit Public Schools considering going partially remote in order to slow the spread of COVID-19 among its staff. The district recently sent an email asking school board members for input on whether or not Fridays should be remote only. Terrence Martin, president of the Detroit Federation of Teachers (DFT), says the number of staff sick with COVID-19 increased 260 percent, from 20 to 52, in just one week.

The union refused to call for a strike to stop the mass infection of its members, instead opting for the district’s suggestion to have Fridays off. This hardly comes as a surprise, as the unions have been the spearhead for the reopening effort in the ruling class campaign to reopen schools in order to fully reopen the economy.

The massive loss in educational staff has not been exclusive to the pandemic, which merely accelerated ongoing processes. Enrollment in Michigan’s teacher preparation program dropped by more than 70 percent over the eight years between the 2008-09 and 2016-17 school year, according to an October 2019 Bridge Michigan article. The number graduating dropping 45 percent between 2011-2017, with Bridge citing “Low salaries and negative perceptions of teaching” as driving this process.

All restrictions to stop the COVID-19 pandemic in the state have been repudiated. In June, Michigan’s Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer ended mask mandates and social distancing, with a ban on mask and vaccine mandates signed into law as part of the state budget in September, drawing praise from Whitmer for its “bipartisan nature.” Michigan stopped its policy of closing schools with a certain threshold of cases and currently has no threshold that would trigger school shutdowns.

In Jefferson County, Missouri, the Northwest School District has turned to hiring students amid continuing labor shortages, with a local Fox News affiliate reporting, “The district is now hiring its own high school students to fill open jobs in the district.” The positions range from cooks to maintenance and after-school child care.

Kim Hawk, the district’s chief operating officer, stated that “Some of the positions have been short-staffed since last year.” She added, “We just have struggled to find any help at all, and if you drive around and look at the help-wanted signs everywhere, you know the competition is stiff. So, we knew we had to come up with some other plan.”

Twenty-five students have reportedly applied for the jobs, which pay minimum wage. Mark Catalana, the district’s chief human resources officer, said that the jobs would not involve working late nights, weekends, or holidays, which could only mean that students would be working on school days when they should be learning. This desperate move by the district once again disproves the feigned concerns about “learning loss” by advocates of school reopenings during the pandemic. The Fox affiliate also stated that, “The district said it would encourage other districts to do this as well.”

Last month, Missouri’s Department of Elementary and Secondary Education approved a 20-hour online course to certify substitute teachers in lieu of the original 60 college credit hours from an academic degree-granting institution in response to a severe shortage of substitute teachers.

In Washington State, Seattle, Bellevue and Kent school districts announced unexpectedly that there would be no classes Friday due to staffing shortages. The Seattle Times noted, “State Superintendent Chris Reykdal said he wasn’t shocked by the closures,” adding, “he even registered surprise that so few school districts had to close.” This year, the state has approved 10 percent more emergency substitute certificates, which allow workers without college degrees to teach a classroom.

In Kentucky, lawmakers passed a provision allowing retired teachers to return to classes full-time without impacting their pensions in response to the statewide teacher shortage. A local Spectrum news affiliate stated that school districts can temporarily go from hiring just one percent of retired teachers to up to 10 percent, with Jefferson County Public schools hiring 44 retired teachers under the provision. The district had 187 classroom vacancies as of early November.

The reason there has been such a mass exodus from the profession is because teachers have seen so many of their colleagues get sick and die, while the pandemic has totally destabilized an already precarious and under-funded public education system. Further, educators have endured the pressure of far-right parents at school board meetings, who are now literally advocating for the banning and burning of “undesirable” books, much as the Nazis did.

While teaching was once a highly-regarded profession in the US, it has been thoroughly undermined by capitalism. This decades-long, bipartisan process preceded the pandemic and has become qualitatively deepened over the past two years. As dire as the situation is now, further budget cuts are looming throughout the country, threatening to make permanent the staff losses that have already taken place once the limited pandemic funding runs dry. The unions have fully conspired with this process, before and during the pandemic.

Peronist government hammered in Argentine midterm elections amid record poverty

Miguel Andrade

The ruling Peronist Frente de Todos coalition of President Alberto Fernández suffered a staggering defeat in the midterm legislative elections held Sunday, losing almost 6 million votes. This represents 35 percent of the votes the Peronists won in the elections for the House in 2019, when Fernández was elected in the first round with 48 percent of the vote.

The Sunday elections renewed half of the House nationwide, and a third of the Senate. In the latter case, a direct comparison with previous results cannot be made, as votes were cast in only the third of the provinces that had not voted in 2019. The elections also renewed a number of provincial and municipal legislatures.

The thrashing suffered by the Fernández coalition resulted in the loss of 10 deputies and two senators, spelling the Peronists’ loss of the Senate majority for the first time since the return to civilian rule in 1983.

Alberto Fernández and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner after Peronist victory in 2019.

Sunday’s electoral defeat is even more significant as it took place under conditions in which all Peronist factions are united in the Frente de Todos ruling coalition, under the political leadership of former president Cristina Kirchner, who serves as Fernández’s vice-president and head of the Senate.

The government’s defeat will mean a political deadlock for the remaining two years of the Fernández presidency, as the main bourgeois opposition of the Juntos por el Cambio coalition led by the predecessor of Fernández, the right-wing billionaire Mauricio Macri, also lost 2 million votes and failed to secure a majority in Congress.

The elections also delivered the largest vote ever for the pseudo-left United Left and Workers Front (FITU), which increased their vote by 82 percent in comparison with 2019, to over 1.3 million votes. This will double their House delegation to four deputies. FITU won 25 percent of the vote for the party’s list in northern Jujuy province, where the unionist Alejandro Vilca will now serve in the province’s six-member delegation to the federal House.

Just behind the pseudo-lefts came the far-right list La Libertad Avanza of the fascistic economist Javier Milei, a supporter of Donald Trump and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro. It won three seats and over a million votes. In his campaign, Milei led rabidly anti-communist rallies with supporters menacingly chanting “the leftists are afraid.”

The results for Avanza Libertad are seen as a political earthquake in a country which barely 38 years ago was ruled by a fascist-military dictatorship that killed 30,000 socialist and left-wing workers and activists. That regime became known for particularly vicious methods such as stealing the children of political prisoners and executing prisoners by throwing them from planes into the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, where proof of the regime’s crimes could never be found.

Milei had as his running mate the lawyer Victoria Villaruel, who has for decades specialized in defending former military officers accused by Argentine courts of taking part in “dirty war” kidnappings and executions. She holds the view that the 1976 coup and the ensuing state terror regime were a necessary reaction to the actions of Peronist guerrillas. In his victory rally in the Luna Park entertainment venue in Buenos Aires, Milei spoke with a Gadsden flag being held in the background, while Confederate flags were seen in the crowd, which reportedly chanted “no more blacks,” a racist slur directed in Argentina against indigenous populations and immigrants from other nations in South America with indigenous background.

Such a political earthquake comes against the backdrop of an explosive social situation. Poverty now engulfs over 40 percent of Argentines, up from 35 percent in 2019. That is the highest rate since 2004, in the wake of the worst economic crisis in the country’s history in 2002, when the GDP fell by 11 percent. Last year, Argentina suffered the second worst GDP drop in its history, of 10 percent.

The almost 10 percent rebound of this year will do little to offset the losses for workers after three straight years of recession, with GDP drops of 2.6 and 2.2 percent in 2018 and 2019. Over 60 percent of children are now poor, while unemployment stands at 10 percent. A third of those employed are in the so-called informal sector, without access to pensions and other social rights. Inflation is running at 55 percent on an annual basis, while signs are growing that the government will be forced to agree to a major devaluation of the national currency, the peso, which is being traded in the black market for half of the official exchange rate.

The government is also facing popular hostility because of its disastrous handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, which claimed over 115,000 victims in the nation of 45 million, or almost 260 deaths per 100 thousand inhabitants – above the 232 dead per 100,000 in the United States and trailing only Peru and Brazil in Latin America.

Such a social catastrophe came despite the use by the Fernández administration of every bankrupt tool in the nationalist-corporatist arsenal of Peronism, including laws forbidding firings, mandating wage increases in the private sector and price controls over consumer goods deemed “essential,” a ban on meat exports and a cap on the amount of US dollars each person can buy in what is effectively a dual currency economy. None of this prevented the jump in poverty rates of over 5 percent. This year, the rate of inflation projected in the federal budget will be almost half of the real rate, meaning that all of the mandated adjustments to wages and social programs will fall far behind the rise in prices.

In the latest attempt to appeal to big business for “stability,” in October, the government announced that it was mandating a freeze on the prices of 1,400 goods, only to see inflation rise 3.5 percent over September prices. The price freeze mandate was a response to the scorching defeat suffered by the government in Argentina’s September open and mandatory primary elections (PASO), in which every party must clear a threshold of 1.5 percent of the votes to be able to run its candidates. Now, such fictitious – almost ritualistic – corporatist appeals to big business to freeze prices will be used by the government to delay its already ineffective wage rise decrees.

The elections also brought to the fore Argentina’s debt to the IMF, of over US $50 billion, the largest amount ever lent to any country. The deal was made in 2018 by former president Mauricio Macri, who lost his reelection bid to Fernández in 2019. During their presidential campaign, the Peronists toyed with the idea of defaulting on the debt, branding it “illegitimate” and even “illegal” based on the open support of the Trump administration for the deal in opposition to initial reservations on its feasibility on the part of the IMF’s technical body.

Taking office, Fernández initiated a brutal IMF-mandated austerity drive with the promise that cuts to poverty relief programs, reinstatement of taxes on basic goods and the end of inflation-adjusted pension corrections would be compensated by larger economic growth, which never came. As for the “legitimacy and legality” of the debt that was central to the Peronist campaign, the new government shunned the question as irrelevant, saying the only way forward was to attract foreign investment and show “credibility” by paying the debt.

When the pandemic hit the country, the Fernández administration blamed the right-wing opposition led by Macri and their “individual freedom” demagoguery, akin to that of the European, Brazilian and American far-right, for his government’s failure in stopping the catastrophic spread of the virus in the country.

Faced with a stunning defeat in the PASO in September, the government attempted to resurrect anti-IMF demagogy. Cristina Kirchner, who plays a more direct role in the corporatist “grassroots” Peronist organizations, from unions to so-called “social movements,” penned an open letter attempting to blame all of government’s problems on the failure of Fernández to listen to her and declaring she expected him to “honor the decision” taken “individually by her to put forward Alberto Fernández as a candidate for president of all Argentines” and criticizing the fact that the government was withholding authorized spending.

Kirchner made clear she was “not asking for radicalism,” but for the government to follow what she said “is happening widely in the United States and Europe, that is, the state acting to mitigate the tragic consequences of the pandemic.” The government then paid back US $1.9 billion to the IMF under more false promises that austerity would be relieved by negotiations with the fund. The government is now expected to agree to a major devaluation of the peso in order to meet the discrepancy of its real devaluation in the black market, bringing further inflation and impoverishment.

The historic significance of the 2021 elections cannot be underestimated. It has further exposed the historic bankruptcy of Peronism, which under the leadership of Kirchner and during the so-called “Pink Tide” was able to briefly dissociate itself from the brutal austerity measures of former president Carlos Menem, leading to the 2001 crisis.

From its first days, the return of Peronism was lauded by the financial markets as a possible means of imposing austerity while keeping the working class under control through the Peronist corporatist unions. The emergence of openly pro-dictatorship, fascistic forces in the form of Javier Milei’s La Libertad Avanza, is a sharp warning of preparations within the ruling classes to address the growth of class struggle with the most brutal methods.

Those warnings must be extended to the pernicious role played by the pseudo-left FITU. Despite its nominal references to socialism and class independence, the FITU forces are a collection of petty-bourgeois renegades from Trotskyism, led by the Socialist Workers Party (PTS), who specialize in sabotaging working class struggles by fostering illusions that the reactionary, anti-communist Peronist unions can be pushed to the left. That same role was played in the period preceding the 1976 coup, allowing the Peronist-aided Argentine Anticommunist Alliance (AAA) death squads to decapitate the working class organizations ahead of the military takeover. Later, in the 1980s, the predecessor of the FITU, the Morenoite Movement Towards Socialism (MAS), supported the Communist Party and the Alfonsín government in their amnesty for the torturers and murderers of the dictatorship, after the fascistic Carapintada military uprising.

Canada admits aerosols are major source of COVID-19 transmission after nearly two years of denying it

Roger Jordan

Almost two years into a pandemic that has claimed the lives of close to 30,000 Canadians, Canada’s Liberal government has admitted what scientific experts have long insisted—aerosols play a major role in the transmission of COVID-19.

Indeed, research has conclusively demonstrated that aerosols are the virus’ principal means of transmission.

Yet up until late last week, the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC), which is overseen by the federal Liberal government, stubbornly insisted that respiratory droplets are far and away the most important means by which COVID-19 is transmitted. This is because highlighting the key role aerosols play in spreading the virus points to the dangers people face when they congregate in workplaces, schools, buses and subway cars, and thus cuts across the ruling elite’s drive to corral working people to return to work amid the pandemic.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, left, with his British counterpart Boris Johnson, who infamously declared in Oct. 2020, “no more f***ing lockdowns, let the bodies pile high in their thousands!” (Jeff J Mitchell/Pool Photo)

Chief Public Health Officer Theresa Tam tweeted the new public health advice concerning aerosols late Friday afternoon. “Since the outset of the pandemic, we’ve learned a lot about the SARS2 virus that causes COVID-19,” the tweet read. “Importantly, we’ve learned how the virus can linger in fine aerosols and remain suspended in the air we breathe. Much like expelled smoke lingers in poorly ventilated spaces, the SARS2 virus can remain suspended in the air, with those in close proximity to the infected person inhaling more aerosols, especially in indoor and poorly ventilated spaces.”

The PHAC has not followed up Tam’s tweets, which appear to have been timed to minimize their impact, with a public information offensive to alert the population as to the dangers of aerosol transmission. Nor is it advocating any policy changes to prevent a surge of infections, as people increasingly congregate indoors during the cold winter months.

The PHAC’s belated admission constitutes a devastating indictment of the political establishment’s prioritization of corporate profits over human life, which has gone hand-in-hand with a systematic repudiation of a science-based response to the virus.

Until Tam’s tweet, the federal government had treated aerosol transmission of COVID-19 as little more than an afterthought. Not until November 2020, long after scientific investigations had demonstrated the centrality of airborne spread, did the PHAC even admit that aerosol transmission was possible. Moreover, as the CBC noted at the time, this change to the PHAC’s COVID-19 guidance was done “quietly,” and was not accompanied by any campaign to warn the public of the danger of aerosol transmission, let alone any changes in government policy.

The federal government’s insistence that droplets were the main mode of transmission, a claim followed by provincial governments across the country, was driven by political motives. The ruling elite’s “profits before life” pandemic policy, based on forcing workers back into unsafe workplaces so they could churn out profits for corporate Canada, required that airborne transmission be denied or at least downplayed. This enabled governments to avoid imposing any responsibilities on employers for taking adequate precautions to stop the airborne spread of COVID-19, while at the same time removing any obligation from governments to fund basic upgrades to improve ventilation and air quality in schools, colleges and other public buildings.

Speaking at the October 24 webinar “How to end the pandemic” organized by the World Socialist Web Site, Prof. Jose Luis Jimenez, a chemistry professor at the University of Colorado (Boulder), addressed this issue directly. Noting that governments and public health authorities around the world have concentrated above all on transmission via droplets that are inhaled at close proximity or transferred via contact with surfaces, he remarked, “Droplets and surfaces are more convenient for governments, organizations and companies. If you get infected, you didn’t wash your hands, you didn’t keep your distance, you didn’t wear your mask well, so the responsibility is mostly yours. But if it was airborne, your employer or your government didn’t provide you with good ventilation, and they have a horror of that.”

One of the most notorious examples of this outlook in practice came in the fall of 2020, when provincial governments across the country reopened schools with virtually no protections against virus transmission. Campaigners who pushed for the use of HEPA filters and other ventilation devices in overcrowded and poorly ventilated classrooms were contemptuously dismissed by the authorities, while the education trade unions connived with provincial governments to suppress opposition among teachers and education workers to the reckless return to in-person learning. The back-to-school drive, as a study carried out in Montreal later demonstrated, played a crucial role in fueling Canada’s second pandemic wave, which claimed over 10,000 lives last fall and winter.

Similar devastating scenarios played out at numerous workplaces. Over 600 Amazon employees at the company’s massive Heritage Road facility in Brampton—more than 10 percent of the workforce—were infected by COVID-19 in a massive outbreak last winter. Thousands of workers crammed elbow-to-elbow in meatpacking plants also got infected in Quebec and Alberta, with several losing their lives.

There is no indication that the Trudeau Liberal government, or any of its provincial counterparts, intend to pull back in the slightest from their back-to-work/back-to-school drive in response to Tam’s admission about the dangers of aerosols. On the contrary, Tam’s statement came as governments move to dismantle all remaining public health measures aimed at limiting the virus’ spread. Despite resurgent infections, the Ontario Progressive Conservative government led by Doug Ford is pressing ahead with a timeline that will see the abolition of all public health measures, including mask-wearing, by March.

In Quebec, the hard-right Coalition Avenir Quebec government lifted a mask mandate for high school students on Monday and eliminated restrictions on karaoke bars and dance venues. COVID-STOP, a group of health care experts, attacked the government for refusing to acknowledge aerosol transmission, which it says accounts for between 85 and 100 percent of all COVID-19 transmission. Nima Machouf, an epidemiologist and member of COVID-STOP, said in response to the lifting of the mask mandate in high schools, “It’s like replaying last year’s movie. We were expecting that the government would have learned from it. The timing is not right.”

In fact, the situation being provoked by the ruling elite this winter is arguably even worse than a year ago. Under conditions in which the significantly more infectious Delta variant is dominant, and the immunity provided by vaccines is beginning to wane, even the inadequate protective measures deployed earlier in the pandemic are being tossed aside. The health care system, which has operated at the breaking point for close to two years, is even less equipped to deal with an influx of patients than it was 12 months ago, with thousands of overworked, mentally-exhausted health care workers having left the profession.

Nonetheless, the ruling elite is determined to resist taking even the most basic public health measures to reduce COVID-19’s further spread. Tam’s admission that the virus is transmitted by aerosols was itself somewhat contradictory, with the Chief Public Health Officer unable to even bring herself to recommend high-quality N95 masks or equivalents for workplaces and other indoor settings. Instead, she merely suggested that a “well-fitted and well-constructed mask” should be worn.

Nicolas Smit, an Ontario-based engineer and scientist who has been a strong advocate for better access to personal protective equipment (PPE) throughout the pandemic, told the WSWS in an interview that protections for workers must be strengthened following the government’s admission that COVID-19 is transmitted primarily through the air. “There have been a lot of outbreaks at Canada Post facilities, for example,” he said. “Federal workers should get N95 masks at a minimum.”

Smit added that the revised PHAC guidance makes a “big difference” to how the threat of infection in schools should be viewed. Classrooms now become “a danger zone,” he continued. “As we enter the winter, it will be harder to open windows. They’re going to have to use other methods of protection and technology, like N95 masks and elastomeric respirators,” he said. “But in Ontario, you have teachers getting suspended for wearing N95 masks.”

Workers who have based themselves on the science ignored by the ruling elite and fought for improved PPE over recent weeks have been met with intimidation and reprisals from their employers and trade unions. In Ontario, a campaign initiated by the biostatistician and educator Ryan Imgrund, and supported by hundreds of teachers, calling for only N95 masks to be worn in schools was viciously denounced by the teachers trade unions. Teachers who wore N95s to school were suspended by their school boards, including some with immunocompromised children at home.

These events underscore that if science-based policies to combat the pandemic are to be implemented, they must be enforced through a mass movement led by the working class. This movement must be guided by the understanding that the only way to prevent an airborne virus like COVID-19 from inflicting further mass infection and death on workers across Canada and internationally is to fight for its elimination.

This requires the immediate closure of all nonessential production and in-person learning in schools, with full compensation paid to all workers from the vast wealth being hoarded by the pandemic profiteers. It also requires the development of a comprehensive program of testing, isolation of infected people, contact tracing and vaccinations, to bring community transmission down to zero.

Governments reject pandemic controls amid record COVID-19 surge in Europe

Alex Lantier & Will Morrow

It is two years exactly since the earliest documented case of COVID-19, which scientists have traced to November 17, 2019. Two years later, while lockdowns, social distancing and contact tracing policies have blocked the circulation of COVID-19 in China after less than 5,000 deaths, Europe is deep in yet another wave. Yesterday, over 290,000 people were diagnosed with COVID-19, and 4,141 died in Europe.

Thus, even if the pandemic stabilized and somehow did not accelerate further, over 400,000 people would die this winter. In fact, the World Health Organization (WHO) has projected that with current policies, 500,000 more people will die of COVID-19 in Europe by February 1. Virologist Christian Drosten of Berlin’s Charité hospital has warned of 100,000 more deaths in Germany alone.

A crowded COVID-19 isolation room at the University Emergency Hospital in Bucharest, Romania, October 22, 2021. (AP Photo/Vadim Ghirda)

Europe is currently reporting 2 million COVID-19 cases per week. Last week, daily infections set records in Germany (50,377), the Netherlands (20,168), Austria (13,152), and Greece (8,613) and continued at high levels in Britain (37,243), Russia (36,818) and the Czech Republic (11,514). France’s daily new cases nearly doubled over the last week from 10,050 to 19,778 yesterday. Over 1,000 deaths were recorded last week in Russia (8,593), Ukraine (4,590), Germany (1,194), Bulgaria (1,147), Poland (1,119) and Britain (1,083).

Yet governments across Europe are rejecting social distancing and especially strict lockdowns that can halt circulation of the virus on the present, massive scale. Only the international mobilization of the working class, fighting for scientific policies of social distancing and contact tracing, can stop the transmission of the virus, end the pandemic and avert a massive loss of life.

The strategy of the European ruling class is expressed most bluntly by the British government. Prime Minister Boris Johnson infamously stated, “No more f…ing lockdowns, let the bodies pile high in their thousands.” Now, London proposes to allow the virus to spread across the population and become endemic, as UK Secretary of State for Education Minister Nadhim Zahawi said earlier this month: “[w]e will, I hope, be the first major economy to transition from pandemic to endemic …”

If London boasts of its strategy of “herd immunity” via mass infection, the “mitigation” strategy of other European governments is not substantially different. Berlin, amid its greatest ever surge of COVID-19, is moving to end its official declaration of an “epidemic situation of national scope,” ending the legal basis for public health measures against the virus. In Paris, Health Minister Olivier Véran has boasted that vaccines are “100 percent effective against lockdowns.”

This would mean that every year thousands would die in Europe and millions worldwide of COVID-19. Arguments for this politically criminal strategy are being advanced on French television by Martin Blachier, a physician who left medical practice to run a “public health expertise consultancy” and promote state policy on the news. A week ago, he told CNews: “We are at the beginning of a phenomenon of pandemic resurgence, and there is no reason for it to stop.”

Blachier called for governments to avoid any change in policy. “The hysteria over this resurgence that is seizing Western Europe, which has high vaccination rates, is a bit exaggerated. I think we must calm down! We are not in the same situation as last year. … We must above all not get in the same frame of mind as we were in last year!”

If Blachier is worried, it was because in the spring of 2020, strikes erupted in Italy, Spain, France, Britain and beyond, as workers in nonessential industries demanded the right to shelter at home until the virus was contained. This terrified the ruling class, which was forced to allow public health personnel to implement lockdowns that massively reduced infections. This also cut across plans to use the pandemic to massively enrich the financial aristocracy, whatever the cost in lives.

Ultimately, it was not until workers could be forced back into workplaces to make profits for the banks that massive bank and corporate bailouts could be poured into the pockets of the super-rich. After the announcement of €2 trillion in European Central Bank and European Union bailouts last summer, the net worth of Europe’s billionaires rose by $1 trillion, while 1 million people died in Europe, in what the BMJ (former British Medical Journal ) correctly called a policy of “social murder.”

Now as the latest winter surge erupts, the Dutch and Austrian governments have announced partial lockdowns. These inadequate measures keep workers on the job and youth in school to keep making profits for the banks but limit the ability of the population (or the non-vaccinated population, in Austria) to meet others outside work. Most contagion occurs in workplaces, schools and medical facilities, however, and such measures—imposed during last year’s deadly winter surge—do not stop mass contagion and death from COVID-19.

This break with official opposition to lockdowns is manifestly a pre-emptive response to growing criticisms of state policy by medical professionals and social anger among workers.

Yesterday, hospitals in the southern Dutch province of Limburg warned that they could not cope with the onrush of COVID-19 patients and are again approaching collapse. “We are heading straight for a health care blockage, and the entire system is grinding to a standstill,” they declared in a public statement. “We are convinced that other parts of the Netherlands will soon follow.”

On Monday night, however, Blachier went on LCI to defend the policy of mass infection and denounce any move to re-establish social distancing policies. He admitted, “the infection levels we should reach by December 15 will be the highest we have ever seen. In terms of infections, we’ll probably get pretty high.” Nonetheless, he demanded that nothing be changed. “We must go towards vaccination and not go back to social distancing like the Netherlands. For me it’s crazy that they are doing that today.”

To be blunt, such declarations are politically criminal. As the World Socialist Web Site warned in August, “Vaccination is a powerful tool. However, disconnected from a broader strategy aimed at rapidly reducing new infections to zero and thus eradicating COVID-19, vaccination and other mitigations amount to nothing more than palliative care.”

Thus German health authorities reported that in the four weeks ending October 10, 55.4 percent of symptomatic cases were breakthrough infections of vaccinated patients. Vaccine effectiveness wanes over time, moreover, and in this time period, 28.8 percent of vaccinated COVID-19 patients over age 60 required intensive care unit treatment.

Last week, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus again warned, “COVID-19 is surging in countries with lower vaccination rates in Eastern Europe but also in countries with some of the world’s highest vaccination rates in Western Europe. It’s another reminder, as we have said again and again, that vaccines do not replace the need for other precautions. Vaccines reduce the risk of hospitalization, severe disease and death. But they do not fully prevent transmission.”

Profit instead of science: The German government’s COVID-19 policy

Peter Schwarz

“The fourth wave of the coronavirus pandemic is building before our very eyes at full power. The daily rate of new cases has reached the highest level since the beginning of the pandemic, with a continuing rising trend. Seven hundred people die every week in our country, with a continuing rising trend. Every day of waiting costs human lives,” warns a letter signed by 35 well-known professors and scientists addressed to Germany’s federal and state governments.

Initiated by the Braunschweig virologist Melanie Brinkmann and the Cologne internist Michael Hallek, the letter was signed by the well-known intensive care physicians Christian Karagiannidis and Uwe Janssens, among others. Dozens of other scientists have since joined them.

The scientists leave no doubt that the disaster in Germany could have been prevented and that the government is responsible for thousands of COVID-19 deaths. “Once again, the time for early action has passed despite all warnings,” they write, and express their “deep disappointment” about “the repeated negligent treatment of the well-being of the people who depend on the protection by the state.”

German Chancellor Angela Merkel [Credit: Stephanie Lecocq/Pool via AP]

For them it is “incomprehensible that decision-makers in this country have allowed such a situation, despite the existence of effective tools to stop the Sars-CoV-2 virus.” Although scientists have clearly communicated “various relevant recommendations for action,” these were “unfortunately only hesitantly, incompletely or not sustainably implemented.” The letter added, “Urgently necessary infrastructure for pandemic control, such as contact tracing, testing and vaccination centres” have been dismantled.

In the fourth wave, “pandemic management is not succeeding in the ways that should be expected in light of Germany’s prosperity and its technological and administrative capabilities.” Instead, politicians “shift responsibility for crushing the fourth wave to the individual. Such an attitude is totally inappropriate during a national health crisis of this magnitude.”

Scientists are not politicians. Their letter does not address the question of why the established parties ignored all the findings and warnings of science and instead accepted 5 million infected people and 100,000 COVID-19 deaths, the number of which threatens to double this winter. Instead, they appeal to the same politicians, whose irresponsibility they denounce in harsh words, to “fully meet their responsibilities” and to base their “decisions much more strongly than before on scientific findings.”

But this will not happen. The systematic disregard for scientific knowledge by those responsible in the federal and state governments is neither a mistake nor a misunderstanding. It is the result of a policy that systematically subordinates the health and life of people to the profit interests of capital.

The principle of “profits before life” has determined the coronavirus policy of the governments from the beginning. Not only in Germany, but with very few exceptions—in particular China, and initially also New Zealand, Singapore and Australia, where the number of infected and dead remained very low—all governments have followed this brutal policy.

Lockdowns were only imposed when the intensive care units overflowed and working class opposition threatened to spiral out of control. As soon as bailouts were handed to the banks and big business, and the pandemic situation relented slightly, restrictions were lifted again despite urgent warnings from scientists. In Germany, there was never a lockdown at all for workplaces—one of the most important sources of infection. Schools were kept open after the first lockdown, despite the lack of protective measures, so that parents were available to return to the labour force. Young people were and are being deliberately infected, in spite of the devastating health consequences.

Combined with the billions in COVID-19 aid from the federal government, the government’s pandemic policy led to an unprecedented orgy of enrichment. Many companies are posting record profits despite a drop in sales, the DAX has climbed from one record high to the next after two years of the pandemic, and the wealth of the 100 richest Germans rose by 19 percent to €722 billion. The working class is bearing the costs in the form of death, contamination, welfare cuts, real wage cuts and job losses.

The consequence of this policy is a fourth wave of the pandemic, which dwarfs all previous ones. The seven-day incidence, the average of the daily infections per 100,000 inhabitants, which was in the single-digit range at times in the summer, has reached a new record of 303 and continues to rise steeply. Sixteen districts now have an incidence of over 900. The front-runner is the district of Saxon Switzerland-Eastern Ore Mountains with 1,303. This means that 1.3 percent of the population was infected within a week.

The seven-day incidence rate is similarly high in Europe at 264 infections per 100,000 inhabitants. Slovenia is the front-runner with 1,058, followed by Croatia with 918 and Austria with 851.

The number of deaths is also rising exponentially again. In the past week, 1,159 people died of COVID-19 in Germany, 10 times as many as in the summer. The intensive care units in the east and south of the country are already overflowing.

Nevertheless, the Social Democrats, Greens and Free Democrats—the parties set to compose the incoming federal government—are stepping up the “profits before life” policy of the grand coalition before they have even formed a new government. On Thursday they intend to use their majority in the federal parliament, despite urgent warnings from doctors and scientists, to let the “epidemic situation of national scope” expire. This means that the containment of the pandemic will be left to the federal states, which are deprived of the ability to take necessary measures such as curfews, contact restrictions, school closings and vaccination mandates.

The chairman of the World Medical Association, Frank Ulrich Montgomery, called this decision “absurd” in view of the incidence rate of around 300. “The winter is going to be cold. It’s up to us that it doesn’t become bitter and deadly,” he told the Rheinische Post. Anyone who said “no vaccination mandate and never again lockdown” did not understand the epidemiology of the virus, he added.

The situation in schools is particularly devastating. In some districts, the seven-day incidence among children and adolescents is now over 900 infections per 100,000 people. So far, only about half of those over 12 and none of those under 12 have been vaccinated. Seven million out of 11 million students have no protection against the virus. Hans-Peter Meidinger, President of the German Teachers’ Association, recently warned of a “loss of control over the pandemic” in Germany’s schools this winter.

Nevertheless, all politicians, led by Britta Ernst (SPD), the chairman of the Conference of Education Ministers and spouse of the designated Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz, insist that “schools remain open.” In most schools, even in the second year of the pandemic, the most elementary safety measures are absent.

“I just can’t understand why the schools are unprepared for the autumn and winter again,” virologist Isabella Eckerle, who co-signed the scientists’ letter, said in an interview with Der Spiegel. “There were so many warnings. And there are now many recommendations for protective measures in schools, the effectiveness of which has been proven in valid studies. The summer should have been used intensively for this.” It “really hurts to watch how we slide back into a situation that is about to get out of control,” she added.

Ukrainian government deploys armed drones against separatists

Jason Melanovski

Despite its obligations under the signed 2015 Minsk Accords peace agreement, the Ukrainian government is continuing to ramp up its military capabilities against Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine. In late October, it deployed Turkish-made Bayraktar TB2 drones there for the first time ever.

In response to an ostensible shelling by separatists, Ukraine used the TB2 drone to destroy a Russian-made howitzer, provoking the deployment of Russian troops to the Ukrainian border and the renewed risk of a full-scale war between Moscow and NATO-backed Kiev.

Polish soldiers erect a fence on the Belarusian border (Photo: Attila Husjenow/Instagram)

The attack in the separatist-controlled village of Hranitne, which was reported on favorably by the New York Times on Tuesday, is another demonstration that the government of President Volodymyr Zelensky is committed to a policy of escalation as it seeks to reintegrate the breakaway provinces of Lugansk and Donetsk in eastern Ukraine.

For the past year the Ukrainian ruling class has sought to deepen military ties with the Turkish government, with both powers seeking to diminish Russian naval control over the strategic Black Sea region. The Ukrainian government offered Ankara advanced missile technology and in exchange received the coveted Turkish-made armed aerial drones.

Drones played a pivotal role in Azerbaijan’s defeat of Russian-backed Armenia last year in the Nagarno-Karabakh war, and the Ukrainian oligarchy quickly became enamored with their potential use against its own Russian-backed separatists.

Kiev received the first shipment of drones in July and plans to purchase approximately 50 of the TB2 drones. In September, the two sides signed a memorandum to create a joint drone training and maintenance center in Ukraine.

Russia has predictably reacted with hostility to the use of drones in Ukraine, which could spark a new wave of targeted bombings and assassinations by Kiev in the more than seven-year-long war that has claimed the lives of over 14,000.

Speaking Saturday on Russian state television about drones and Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin accused the Zelensky government of violating the 2015 Minsk accords, which specifically ban the use of aerial weapons:

“Now the current president cheerfully reports they’re using Bayraktars, that is, unmanned aerial vehicles. Europe said something incomprehensible and the US even supported it and officials in Ukraine openly say that they used them and will use them further.”

With Russian troops now amassed across its northern border in response to its drone use, the Zelensky government has continued to duplicitously depict Russia as the aggressor while domestically preparing for war and refusing to abide by the 2015 Minsk peace accords that call for a cease fire, free elections, and a special federated status for the breakaway provinces.

Speaking of the reported Russian troop buildup, Zelensky hypocritically stated via a recorded video speech, “I hope the whole world can now clearly see who really wants peace and who is concentrating nearly 100,000 soldiers at our border.”

In reality, the right-wing government of Zelensky, which originally came to power thanks to mass opposition to the militaristic, nationalist policies of former President Petro Poroshenko, has taken increasingly reckless actions in order to provoke Russia and gain military and economic support from its imperialist backers, namely the United States, France and Germany.

In March of this year, Zelensky and the country’s National Security and Defense Council provocatively approved a strategy that is aimed at retaking Crimea and reintegrating the strategically important peninsula. This step ultimately led to a similar Russian troop buildup along the border last spring, although Moscow later withdrew its forces.

In addition to the purchase of Turkish drones, Zelensky’s foreign policy since that time has only increased the risk of all-out war between the two countries.

Following the pull-back of Russian forces, the Zelensky government spent the summer begging for NATO membership and held a number of joint military and naval drills that were openly directed against Russia.

In August, the Zelensky government held its inaugural “Crimea Platform” summit, which brought together its imperialist backers in Kiev. Zelensky took photos with world leaders and declared “Crimea is Ukraine.”

In response, the Russian government openly declared its opposition to Ukraine’s NATO accession, stating, “President Putin has repeatedly noted the issue of the potential broadening of NATO infrastructure on Ukrainian territory, and (he) has said this would cross those red lines that he has spoken about before.”

NATO’s major powers have recklessly backed Kiev’s escalation. On Monday, French President Emmanuel Macron warned Putin via a phone conversation that he would be prepared to defend Ukraine in case of war between the two countries.

“Our willingness to defend Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity was reiterated by the president,” a French adviser to Macron told reporters regarding the phone call between the leaders of the two nuclear-armed countries.

The US has sent a missile destroyer, the tanker USNS John Lenthall and the staff ship USS Mount Whitney, to participate in the US Joint Forces Command Europe military drills in the Black Sea.

This past Sunday, the British press reported that the UK was preparing to send 600 troops to Ukraine.

Ukraine itself has deployed 8,500 troops to its side of the border with Russia and announced that parts of its naval fleet would move from the Black Sea to the Sea of Azov, whose waters are claimed by Russia.

The tensions between Moscow and Kiev are escalating as the conflict between neighboring Poland and Belarus escalates over a refugee crisis in which thousands of desperate migrants seeking safe harbor in the EU have been trapped at the border and brutalized by Polish forces. Russia, which is allied to Belarus’ government, is accused of playing a central role in orchestrating the crisis.