Russian Green Deal: Light at the End of the Tunnel?

John Feffer

In October 2021, the Russian government finally released its plan to achieve carbon neutrality—by 2060. That’s 10 years after the target date most other countries have adopted. The plan relies more on offsets—like forests that absorb carbon dioxide—rather than significant cuts in emissions. But for the world’s fourth largest emitter of carbon dioxide—and the world’s largest exporter of natural gas, second largest exporter of petroleum, and third largest exporter of coal—Russia’s announcement was an important policy shift.

“Before this year, Russia was rather skeptical about climate change and the role of people in climate change,” reports Tatiana Lanshina. “But this year, the official rhetoric actually changed a bit.”

One reason for that shift in rhetoric was the very real impact of climate change on Russia over the last year. Flames consumed huge stretches of Siberian forest over the summer in what turned out to be a record year for wildfires. Flooding in southern agricultural regions disrupted farming which, combined with droughts elsewhere, has threatened the country’s food security.

“The number of dangerous natural disasters has grown more than three times over the last decade compared to previous ones,” observes Vasily Yablokov. “According to Roshydromat, the Russian Federal Service for Hydrometeorology and Environmental Monitoring, there were a thousand dangerous natural disasters in 2020, 372 of which caused significant damage to people and the environment.”

Another reason for the shift in government rhetoric has been greater public awareness of climate change. According to a Romir public opinion poll in December 2020, more than 80 percent of Russians believe that climate change is a real problem and that Russia suffers from climate change rather than benefits from it. More than half of Russians consider climate change a current threat, not just a future threat.

At least some of that concern has translated into public action. In March 2019, Arshak Makichyan took his cue from Greta Thunberg to launch a Fridays For Future climate protest in Russia. At first, he was protesting by himself, but gradually more and more people joined him. “We were organizing this movement, and it was growing,” Makichyan says. “Then the pandemic came, and the government used it as an excuse to restrict human rights in Russia.”

In 2020, Tatiana Lanshina and Greenpeace produced a Russian Green Deal that provided a framework for the government to decarbonize and transform the Russian economy. It hasn’t yet attracted the support of the Russian government. But a number of Russian politicians have endorsed the initiative, and parts of the plan have been taken up by provincial authorities.

The situation in Russia remains bleak. The government is committed to increasing fossil fuel production and exports in the medium term, and the share of renewables in electricity production in the country remains negligible. The space for environmentalism activism has narrowed. Russia even vetoed a recent UN effort to treat climate change as a global security threat.

But economic realities such as the falling price of renewable energy and the pressure on Russian businesses to meet new decarbonization standards in other countries may accelerate the timeframe of transition. Much will also depend on the work of environmental organizations and courageous activists.

One thing is for sure: no global just transition can take place without the participation of Russia.

Russia Hit Hard

Russia is a vast country that stretches across 11 time zones, so climate change has had widely different effects throughout the territory, beginning with temperatures. “In the western part, it is colder than normal by 15 degrees,” reports Vasily Yablokov, “while in the far east it is warmer by 20 degrees. On average, the warming has been a half a degree per decade in Russia, which is 2.5 times higher than the global average.” In all, 2020 was the warmest year on record for Russia.

There have been an unprecedented number of weather anomalies. “Some regions report drought damage that has cost 10 percent of their total budget, for example in Tatarstan,” Yablokov continues. “In other places, the rainfall has resulted in flooding, for instance in the southern agricultural regions. Floods in Krasnoyarsk led to the evacuation of 1,500 people. Flooding along the Black Sea coast caused serious damage to the tourism industry. This year, 40 regions declared emergencies because of natural disasters. The droughts, crop failures, and flooding threaten the food security of country.”

But perhaps the most widely reported impact of climate change has been the wildfires in the taiga forests of Siberia and the Russian Far East. “This year was a record year, not only in the scale of forest fires by area—approaching 19 million hectares and growing—but also in the number of fires in the Arctic zone,” he adds.  “These disasters are happening for the fourth year in row. According to experts, the fires in Yakutia alone produced 800 million tons of carbon dioxide, and they predict that such disasters will continue, possibly every year. The fires are producing smoke in large cities, especially in Siberia, which is extremely dangerous for human health, especially during the pandemic.”

Smoke from wildfires is not the only side effect of climate change to threaten the health of Russians. Heat waves have put a burden on the health system and caused excess deaths. Overall warming has encouraged the spread northward of Lyme disease, hemorrhagic fevers, and other ailments.

Meanwhile, the permafrost that covers nearly 60 percent of Russia has begun to melt, and the consequences are close to catastrophic. In melting, the organic mass begins to release methane. “Some experts call it a methane bomb,” Yablokov reports. “It’s a feedback loop: burning fossil fuels leads to an increase in temperature, which releases methane, and the temperature goes up even higher. I’m not sure we can stop this process. Nevertheless, Greenpeace activists believe we must do everything possible to slow it down.”

The melting of the permafrost also puts a stress on Russian infrastructure such as roads and oil and gas facilities. In May 2020, an oil tank collapsed near Norilsk, a city in Siberia, releasing 21,000 tons of petroleum into a nearby river. A major reason for the collapse was melting permafrost. “Several hundred oil spills occur annually,” Yablokov says, but it’s unclear the role that melting permafrost plays “because there is no systematic observation.” Another result of the melt is the outbreak of diseases like anthrax, which infected more than 2,000 reindeer in 2016. Siberia is home to innumerable frozen corpses of animals and humans killed by diseases like smallpox and the plague, which a thaw could re-release into the general population.

Another feedback effect can be found in the Arctic where higher temperatures melt the ice. The disappearance of the ice cover produces what is called the ice-albedo effect, which gradually eliminates the ability of the land to reflect back the sun and boosts the temperature accordingly. “Last year was another record for the ice-albedo effect and a large increase in the absorption of heat in the Arctic Ocean,” Yablokov continues. “The Arctic is one of the most vulnerable parts of the planet, and climate change shows more strongly in the polar region. Nevertheless, this hasn’t stopped the Russian government from starting new infrastructure projects in the region, which are not economically feasible and are very dangerous under current conditions, like drilling wells for oil and gas production.” On top of that, the polar ice melt has increased sea traffic, which has only further exacerbated environmental conditions in the region.

“Russia doesn’t evaluate climate risks, so we don’t know the exact costs of these policies,” Yablokov laments. “Russia doesn’t yet have a clear plan on how to adapt to climate change. It has no clear understanding of climate risk. Meanwhile, according to surveys this year, most Russian citizens are worried about their future and perceive climate change as a threat.”

Russia’s Green Deal

This year, the Russian government announced that the country would achieve carbon neutrality by 2060. It then released a strategy on how to achieve this goal. However, other strategies, such as the Energy Strategy up to 2035 (adopted in 2020) provide for plans to extract and export more gas and coal through 2035 while keeping the level of oil extraction about the same.

“So, this means that we are not going to change the economy or diversify it very much,” notes Tatiana Lanshina.

These plans on fossil fuel production and export run counter to global trends. On coal, for instance, Russia may find it difficult to identify buyers. “Many countries especially in Europe have already decided to phase out coal, and European demand for Russian coal has already decreased,” she continues. “Russia plans to substitute exports to Europe with exports to Asia. So far, many Asian countries can’t phase out coal because their economies are developing rapidly. Despite the fact that they are introducing a lot of renewables each year, they need more and more energy, which at the moment can come from coal. But Asia has huge health and environmental problems, which is understood at the official level. In several years, we’ll see Asia begin to limit the use of coal. Before 2030, coal demand in Asia will start to decrease significantly.”

To achieve carbon neutrality by 2060 in the face of this medium-term expansion of fossil fuel production, Russia plans to focus on carbon offsets, primarily its forests. Emissions will continue to rise until 2030 and then, by mid-century according to the most optimistic scenario, they will go down by only 14 percent (over 2019 levels).

The current structure of Russian energy production and use is heavily tilted toward fossil fuels. Like most countries, 75-80 percent of carbon emissions come from burning fossil fuels. Most fossil fuel use in the energy sector goes to the production of electricity and heat.

“So, if we want to substantially decrease emissions, we must emphasize the energy sector,” Lanshina points out. “A transition to clean energy is needed to achieve the goal of carbon neutrality.”

The Russian Green Deal plan that she developed with Greenpeace prioritizes changes in Russia’s energy sector. There’s plenty of room for improvement. For instance, the Russian energy sector has a very small share of wind and solar. “On average, globally, wind and solar produces 10 percent of all electric power,” she notes. In Russia, in 2019, the share for wind was .01 percent and for solar .03 percent. “Only Indonesia and Saudi Arabia are lower among large economies,” she adds. “So, we have a long way to go to change our energy sector and make it greener.”

The Russian Green Deal proposes a much faster shift toward renewables so that, excluding large hydropower, they would represent 20 percent of electricity production by 2030 and 100 percent by 2050. The Russian energy sector is also very inefficient, with energy intensity of GDP almost twice that of the global average, so the Green Deal argues that Russia should become as energy efficient as the rest of the world by 2050.

Russia is a major producer of industrial materials like aluminum, steel, and cement, and these industries produce a disproportionate amount of the country’s carbon emissions. According to the circular economy recommendations in the report, the metal and cement industries should achieve carbon neutrality by 2050, in part by recycling metals and through improved technologies such as using electric arc furnaces to melt steel. In the agricultural sphere, the report recommends a 50 percent reduction in the manufacturing and consumption of animal products, which would entail a significant change in the Russian diet. Additionally, the report recommends reducing municipal waste generation by 60 percent by 2050 through increased recycling.

A third priority is sustainable forestry. The Russian government emphasizes the absorptive capacity of forests, but the Green Deal focuses instead on preventing forest disasters and locating intensive forestry on already developed lands.

Response from the Regions

In one unlikely future scenario, the Russian federal government adopts the Green Deal and implements it from the top down. Another scenario would be for regions and municipalities to adopt these recommendations and build a Green Deal from the bottom up.

“At Greenpeace, we did a ranking of openness to the Green Deal in Russian regions,” reports Vasily Yablokov. “We see that no one region in Russia is green. But if we collect all the green measures from different regions, we can create one green region.”

Tatiana Lanshina cites the examples of new plans adopted in summer 2021 in the Kuzbass and Komi republics to diversify their economies away from a reliance on coal mining in the first case and oil in the second, though neither region is currently opting for green development.

More promising is the Ulyanovsk region’s development of a wind energy cluster. “They want to reach a 30 percent share of energy in renewables by 2025,” Vasily Yablokov notes. “It’s quite ambitious for a Russian region and we appreciate this.” The Sakhalin region, meanwhile, has established a goal for carbon neutrality. “We have some questions about this,” he continues. “But it’s the first region with this goal.”

“Some regions have some achievements in circular economy and they want to reduce waste and not just through recycling,” he adds. “Some regions have quite beautiful plans for reducing carbon emissions across the whole economy of the region. We found that 42 regions have different renewable energy projects. That’s half of Russian regions. That gives us some inspiration that we can make a green energy transition. We want to collect these different experiences of the regions to share with other regions. We can create a jigsaw puzzle of green regions to create a Green Russia.

Green activism can also be found throughout Russia. “Moscow is the biggest Russian city with 20 million people and when we organize climate strikes there they attracted 50-70 people,” Arshak Makichyan reports. “But in smaller cities with a million or two people, we attracted the same number of protesters.” He predicts that the impact of climate change in the regions, such as desertification or permafrost melt, will lead to greater action.

He also cites other environmental actions in the regions. “There were protests in the Archangelsk region about accepting garbage from Moscow,” he recalls. “They won, and the project was canceled. It was an unusual thing for Russia: a real protest with camps and civil disobedience and they won! And after that, the government started to do something about recycling at a national scale. There was victory in Bashkortostan for those protesting against the extraction of limestone from a mountain. So, there are some victories in Russia. But it’s just the environment. If the protest is political, it’s hard to win.”

Climate Activism

Arshak Makichyan was studying violin at the Moscow conservatory when he read about Greta Thunberg’s climate actions. He’d never learned about the climate crisis at university. The materials he found on the subject were mostly in English, which complicated his attempts to learn about the topic. But reading about the Fridays For Future movement was a life-changing moment.

“I gave up my career as a violinist,” he says, “because I knew that we should do these climate strikes in Russia and it was quite impossible to combine a career as a professional violinist with being a climate activist.”

It has not been an easy task. “A lot of weeks, I was striking alone,” he recalls. “When I started, people couldn’t understand what I was doing, like I was some insane striker about bad weather.

Then people joined me. We created the first climate movement on a national scale. Every Friday, there were five to seven cities striking for climate. We organized a great campaign in Krasnoyarsk when the government declared a ‘black sky’ emergency there. Greta Thunberg retweeted our actions and we got good coverage in the Russian independent media. Protest is unusual thing for us in Russia. People are afraid to protest. Before the pandemic, the situation for human rights in Russia was better, but now it’s getting worse.“

Even before the pandemic, though, the government often refused to provide him with a permit to strike. He applied ten times for permission to protest before the COP25 in 2019. Ultimately, he and two other people decided to hold their action without permission. One day that December, they spent three days with their banner in Pushkin Square in Moscow. The police detained all three, and threw Makichyan in jail. The arrest spurred protests around the world, and he was released after six days. “It could have been worse,” he says drily about this experience behind bars.

One major obstacle to climate activism is the Russian media. “The media is owned by the government or fossil fuel corporations, so they are lying about the climate crisis,” Makichyan complains. “In other countries, the media is reporting on wildfires and how they’re connected to climate, but here the media talks about wildfires but doesn’t make the connection. Even the independent media is silent about activism. They write about us when we are arrested, but they don’t support us when we are doing our work.”

“We don’t have an activist culture here in Russia, because of our terrible twentieth-century history,” he continues. “We’re trying to change this. Young people are different. They’re afraid because the government is jailing people, but they want to change something because it’s our future. A lot of people are leaving for other countries because of political persecution. But not everyone can leave Russia!”

The case of Alexei Novalny is particularly chilling for activists. Government agents poisoned the noted political activist and then, when he returned to the country after treatment in Germany, they put him on trial and sentenced him to three-and-a-half years in prison. “Even though you’re famous, they can still jail you,” Makichyan notes. “This situation is influencing young people. They are starting to feel unsafe. Even big NGOs are starting to be afraid for their safety. Most of the independent media have been labelled ‘foreign agents.’”

Beginning in 2012, Russian law has required all non-profits that receive financial support from outside the country to register as “foreign agents.” The law was more recently expanded to include news organizations. “I have a joke on my wall that Russian can become carbon neutral by 2024,” Makichyan laughs, “because the government will jail everyone and the people who aren’t jailed will be labelled foreign agents whose emissions are therefore foreign.”

“Now I talk not just about climate but about politics,” he continues. “I’m starting to understand the connections and feel part of a bigger civil society. Even though there is a lot of repression, people are educating themselves. They’re starting to understand that one single person decides everything in Russia and that’s not a good situation. We need system change in Russia. The current government is failing us. They did nothing for 20 years, how can we expect action from them now? How can we believe their promises if they are arresting people, if they are prosecuting people, if they are calling people ‘foreign agents’?”

This change, he argues, is coming from below. Following the lead of the government, the media is starting to report more about the climate crisis and people are more anxious about climate change. “Of course, people see around them all these climate anomalies – a very cold winter, strong rains, drought—which drives them to care about this issue,” he concludes

Push Factors

Change is also being pushed on Russia from the outside. The European Union for instance is considering a Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) which would effectively levy a tax on all goods coming into Europe that are deemed too carbon-intensive. That would cover a large portion of Russian exports. “Russian businesses care about this and are pushing the government to do something so that they do not lose the possibility of selling to the European market,” Makichyan points out.

“It’s not just CBAM,” Tatiana Lanshina adds. “Increasingly, foreign partners and foreign investors want to do business only with companies that are willing to reduce their emissions.  Economics is perhaps the strongest motivation in Russia to decarbonize and to combat climate change.”

The price of renewable energy—wind, solar—is dropping by the month. “This year, Russia explored the option to build solar and wind plants. It was shown that wind could produce electricity for 1.7 rubles per kilowatt. That is cheaper than the cost of electricity in the wholesale market even including capacity payments. In several years, wind energy will be totally competitive.”

As an economist, she remains hopeful. “The situation in the world and inside the country is changing very quickly, and many green solutions are becoming more economically attractive and new industries are emerging. Right now, we’re not planning an energy transition, but in a couple months or a year we might have a complete change. A year ago, very few people would have imagined that we would have a carbon neutrality goal. And now we have it.”

“The Russian government’s main plan for energy transition is to develop nuclear energy,” Vasily Yablokov reports. “But that’s super expensive and it takes too long to build new facilities. Every month, renewables become cheaper and cheaper. I think it will be a natural process that renewables will replace all other energy sources.”

Toward that end, he recommends that outsiders support these green initiatives in Russia. “Don’t be afraid of Russian business and help us improve and develop green technology,” Yablokov continues. “On the other side, pay attention to what Russian activists are saying. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs talks about how beautiful Russia is and how green our energy is. We provide an alternative picture of Russia along with suggestions for a green transition and green future.”

“Economics is a positive trend, but maybe not now, not when our renewable share is almost nothing,” Arshak Makichyan says. “Right now we have fossil fuel lobbyists, not renewable energy lobbyists in Russia.”

He believes that justice should be the main driver for climate action. “Russia is one of the richest countries in the world,” he explains. “We are in second place in the world in terms of supply of fresh water. We have to deal with the economic and social consequences of the climate crisis. We need to play our role in saving the planet.”

That requires solidarity. Not the kind of political solidarity, he hastens to add, that Russia provides to regimes like Belarus or the kind of nuclear energy promotion Russia has done throughout the world. “The Russian government only cares about power,” he continues. “For young people, it’s not about power. When I was arrested, many people in Fridays For Future around the world supported me. So, this is a new kind of global solidarity that’s not about money or power.”

“In the twentieth century, the world united to fight evil,” he concludes. “The same should be done today. Activists applying pressure, NGOs doing their stuff, economists explaining why green solutions are best: everyone should play their roles.”

The Age of Discontent: What Drives the Rising Wave of World Protests?

Walden Bello & Isabel Ortiz

In recent years, the world has been shaken by protests. From the Arab Spring to the social uprisings in Chile and Latin America, the world has seen a dramatic rise in protests. In a polarized world, the COVID-19 pandemic has only accentuated feelings of outrage and discontent.

New research brings evidence of this by analyzing nearly three thousand protests since the beginning of the 21st century, in over a hundred countries covering more than 93 percent of the world population.

Beginning in 2006, there was a steady rise in overall protests each year up to 2020. As the global financial crisis began to unfold in 2007-08, demonstrations increased, and further intensified after 2010 with the worldwide adoption of austerity cuts.

Frustration grew over the lack of decent jobs, inadequate social protection and public services, unfair taxation and a perceived lack of real democracy and accountability of decision makers to the people.

This led to a new and more political wave of protests in 2016, often becoming “omnibus protests” (protests addressing multiple issues) against the political and economic status quo. Polls worldwide reflect dissatisfaction with democracies and lack of trust in governments.

Increasingly, demonstrations are not only the purview of activists and trade unionists, but have become an outlet for the middle classes, women, youths, pensioners, indigenous and racial groups. These citizens do not consider themselves activists and yet they protest because they feel disenfranchised by official processes and political parties.

Decades of neoliberal policies have generated huge inequalities and eroded the incomes and the welfare of both the lower and middle classes, fueling feelings of injustice, disappointment with malfunctioning democracies, and frustration with failures of economic and social development.

Whist the media often portrays protests as sporadic, disorganized riots, most of the world protests studied were planned, with clearly articulated demands. The main cause of discontent (in 1,503 protests) relates to the failure of democracies and political systems, lack of real democracy, accountability and justice; corruption; as well as the perceived power of a deep government or oligarchy, sovereignty and patriotic issues; and protests against wars, the surveillance of citizens, and anti-socialism/communism.

A second cause relates to economic justice, expressing grievance and outrage against unequal austerity cuts and policy reforms (1,484 protests), demanding improved jobs, wages and labor conditions, better public services and housing, agrarian and tax justice; and against corporate influence, deregulation, privatization, inequality and low living standards; as well as against pension reforms, high energy and food prices.

The third main cause of protests is the demand for civil rights (1,360 protests) on indigenous and racial rights; women’s rights; labor rights; LGBT and sexual rights; right to the commons (digital, cultural, atmospheric); immigrants’ rights; freedom of assembly, speech, and press; prisoners’ rights and religious issues.

A last cluster of protests encompasses demands for global justice (897 protests) on issues such as environmental and climate justice; against the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the European Union/European Central Bank; against imperialism (United States, China); against free trade or the G20 – demanding a better and more equitable world order.

Not only has the number of protests increased, but also the number of protestors. Crowd estimates suggest that at least 52 events had one million or more protesters.

The period 2006-2020 has evinced some of the largest protests in world history; the largest recorded was the 2020 strike in India against the government’s plan to liberalize farming and labor, estimated to have involved 250 million protestors.

The second decade of the 21st century has also seen a global rise of the far right, attracting dissatisfied citizens to a radical right “counterrevolution” that typically includes an assault on the tenets of liberal democracy by authoritarian leaders.

Falling into this category were the QAnon protests in 2020 in the United States and globally; opposition to Muslims, migrants, and refugees in Europe; and the protests against the Workers Party in Brazil in 2013 and 2015.

While the rhetoric is anti-elite, far right politics does not seek significant structural power change, rather directing the popular fire and fury against minorities, denying rights to migrants, blacks, gays or Muslims, who are depicted as a threat to the jobs, security and values of the majority.

Other rallying cries include calls for personal freedoms (to carry a gun, not to wear a mask, not to be quarantined), nationalism, and the promotion of traditional values. To counter radical right authoritarianism, societies must fight misinformation and expose the contradictions of far right politics.

Nonetheless, the overwhelming majority of protests have made progressive demands for real democracy, civil rights, economic and global justice. Peaceful protests are a fundamental aspect of a vibrant democracy. Historically, protests have been a means to achieve fundamental rights at the national and international level.

While new research shows that global political instability is increasing, there are solutions. Governments need to listen to the grievances coming from protesters and act upon them. The demands of people around the world have much in common and ask for no more than established Human Rights and internationally agreed UN development goals.

The FDA grants emergency use authorization to Pfizer and Merck’s anti-COVID pills

Benjamin Mateus

Just before the Christmas holiday, with Omicron’s dominance confirmed, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) gave emergency use authorization (EUA) to two new oral antiviral medications, Pfizer’s Paxlovid and Merck’s Molnupiravir. These are intended to treat people with mild to moderate COVID-19 disease confirmed by SARS-CoV-2 testing and who are considered high-risk for progression to severe illness, including hospitalization and death. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) are expected to endorse these recommendations soon.

First, on December 22, the FDA announced Pfizer’s Paxlovid, a two-drug regimen consisting of two tablets of Nirmatrelvir and one tablet of Ritonavir, taken twice daily for five consecutive days (30 tablets in total). The treatment would be available to patients 12 years and up, by prescription only, after the diagnosis of COVID-19 and within five days from the onset of symptoms.

This colorized transmission electron microscope image shows SARS-CoV-2—also known as 2019-nCoV, the virus that causes COVID-19—isolated from a patient in the U.S. Virus particles are shown emerging from the surface of cells cultured in the lab. (Source: NIAID-RML)

Primary data supporting the FDA EUA comes from the EPIC-HR [Evaluation of Protease Inhibition for COVID-19 in High-Risk Patients] trial that enrolled participants 18 years and older, but was extended to include high-risk pediatric patients. The active ingredient Nirmatrelvir is a protease inhibitor that stops the virus from replicating. The second drug Ritonavir helps slow the metabolism of Nirmatrelvir, allowing it to remain in the body at higher concentrations.

Then, on December 23, the FDA granted Merck’s Molnupiravir an EUA with similar parameters for initiating treatment—within five days of symptoms and confirmation of infection with viral testing. A prescription from a medical provider is also required. However, the medication is only authorized for those 18 or up due to the drug’s potential impact on bone and cartilage growth. Like Paxlovid, the treatment has not received approval for use before exposure to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, or for patients after exposure if they have not tested positive. The regimen for Molnupiravir requires four tablets taken twice daily for five consecutive days (40 pills total).

The two oral antiviral treatments against COVID-19 have different mechanisms of action.

Molnupiravir works by introducing errors into the SARS-CoV-2’s genetic code. The active ingredient, a molecule called N4-Hydroxyctyidine (NHC), once it has been incorporated into the virus’s RNA, can undergo a chemical reaction called tautomerization, allowing it to rapidly flip back and forth between two nucleotides, Cytidine and Uracil. When the virus attempts to replicate again, multiple errors are incorporated because of the change in forms of NHC during RNA strand replication, leading to a lethal mutation that leaves the virus unable to infect or reproduce.

Pfizer’s medicinal chemists designed their drug against the virus’s main protease enzyme known as Mpro or 3CLpro, with the caveat that it be given orally. After the virus creates a long polyprotein chain, the protease enzyme cleaves the chain into functional proteins used to assemble itself and multiply. Speaking with Chemical and Engineering News in March 2020 , Professor Matthew Todd, chair of drug discovery at University College London, said, “The protease is essential [for the virus], but has no human homologs [a gene related to a second gene by descent from a common ancestral DNA sequence].”

The implication is that viral protease inhibitors would have little chance of affecting human protease enzymes. Additionally, the protease of the Omicron variant is similar to the protease of the ancestral strain, meaning current mutations of SARS-CoV-2 remain susceptible to this line of treatment.

After initiating a phase one trial in late March 2021 on healthy adults to assess safety and tolerability profiles for their new drug, Pfizer unveiled their oral SARS-CoV-2 inhibitor to the public in April 2021 at the American Chemical Society’s spring meeting. By the end of July, the Pfizer pill had demonstrated both tolerability and more than adequate concentration levels needed to inhibit SARS-CoV-2 replication. This prompted a phase 2/3 clinical trial with the plan to enroll 3,000 participants in a randomized double-blinded study.

On September 1, Pfizer told regulators that the first participant in their trial had been enrolled. They also indicated they were adding a low dose of Ritonavir to the treatment regimen. Ritonavir is an antiretroviral medication used to treat HIV/AIDS. It helps slow the metabolism of Nirmatrelvir, allowing it to remain at higher concentrations in the body for a more extended period.

Then, more than a month after Merck’s interim findings demonstrated a 50 percent reduction in risk of hospitalization and death among COVID-19 positive high-risk patients treated with Molnupiravir, Pfizer announced on November 5 an interim analysis showing a remarkable 89 percent reduction in hospitalization and death as compared to those taking the placebo pills. Only three out of 389 participants (0.8 percent) taking Paxlovid were hospitalized, and no deaths occurred among those receiving the investigational drug. By comparison, in those receiving a placebo, 27 out of 385 participants (7.0 percent) were hospitalized, with seven subsequent deaths.

At the recommendation of the independent Data Monitoring Committee and in consultation with the US FDA, further enrollment into the study was discontinued so that the drug could be put into general use more rapidly. Based on the overwhelming efficacy of the data, Pfizer requested emergency use authorization from the FDA.

Subsequently, at the end of November, Merck announced the discouraging results of their final analysis from their final trial. They had to revise downward to 30 percent their estimates on Molnupiravir’s ability to prevent hospitalization among high-risk COVID patients (68 out of 699 (9.7 percent) in the placebo group versus 48 out of 709 (6.8 percent) in those receiving Molnupiravir). On a brighter note, they highlighted that while there were nine deaths among the placebo group, only one participant died taking the investigational drug, suggesting it is highly beneficial in preventing deaths.

By contrast, Pfizer’s recent final analysis results remained unchanged, suggesting that Paxlovid can prevent far more hospitalizations than Merck’s Molnupiravir. The two drugs appear to have similar efficacy in preventing deaths, though the numbers were too small to offer a cross-study comparison. In the last Pfizer study, 12 people died in the placebo group while no one died taking Paxlovid.

However, concerns have been raised that the use of Paxlovid in people with uncontrolled or undiagnosed HIV-1 infections could lead to possible HIV-1 drug resistance. Those with pre-existing liver or kidney disease or who use medications that could interact with Paxlovid should consult their physician to ensure the treatment is suitable.

According to CNN last month, on news of positive results for Paxlovid, the Biden administration announced it would purchase 10 million treatment courses for $5.3 billion. This is on top of 3.1 million treatment courses for Merck’s Molnupiravir, at a cost of $2.2 billion. Biden promised that more than 250,000 courses of Paxlovid would be available in January, and both giant pharmaceuticals are intending to ramp up production to meet continued demands for the treatment of symptomatic COVID-19.

With $36 billion in worldwide sales of its COVID-19 vaccines this year and a projected $18 billion in sales for Paxlovid next year, Pfizer is in a position to enrich their investors with obscene sums of money. The spread of Omicron and the White House opposition to any form of lockdown or other significant public health effort have assured Wall Street that pandemic profiteering will continue unabated. The White House has guaranteed it will not lift a finger to prevent the spread of infection, while SARS-CoV-2 enjoys a wide berth in finding new ways to mutate continuously.

The development of these treatments is without doubt a testament to the scientific ingenuity and collaborative effort that have made possible designing, testing and producing these drugs in a few short months. However, they also underscore the criminal negligence and failures of governments to implement broad public health measures that could have ended the pandemic once and for all, instead of ensuring dependence on such treatments to save just a fraction of lives that could have been saved through an elimination strategy.

Making a killing: Pfizer’s domination of the market for COVID jabs

Jean Shaoul

Pfizer, the pharmaceutical giant that dominates the market for COVID vaccines in the imperialist countries of North America, Europe and Japan, with bilateral agreements for more than six billion doses, is also set to become the main supplier to COVAX, the global vaccine programme to the world’s poorer countries.

Its displacement of AstraZeneca, whose shot is cheaper and easier to deliver, comes despite many receiving countries lacking the cold storage facilities needed to keep the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine. Of the 600 million or more shots delivered to nearly 150 countries, more than 220 million are AstraZeneca’s and about 160 million Pfizer/BioNTech’s. But according to Gavi, the vaccine alliance that runs COVAX, Pfizer is far ahead in terms of “allocated” jabs, with about 470 million doses delivered or ready for delivery in the next few months, against 350 million from AstraZeneca.

The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine (credit: WSWS media)

While AstraZeneca, whose vaccine was developed by Oxford University, agreed to sell its vaccine at cost during the pandemic, at less than $4 a dose, Pfizer sought to maximise its profits, selling to the highest bidder, typically at around $20 a dose. One biological engineering expert told Britain’s Channel 4’s Dispatches programme, Vaccine Wars: The truth about Pfizer, that the vaccine costs just 76 pence per shot to manufacture, although this does not include distribution, marketing and other costs. With the UK government paying a £22 a dose, this represents an almost 3,000 percent mark-up on the manufacturing price.

Pfizer has denied this, saying its profit margin as a percentage before tax is in the “high-20s”, a figure impossible to verify, on predicted revenues this year of $36 billion for 2.3 billion vaccines. Even on its own admission, profits are at least $10 billion.

Last month, CEO Albert Bourla told investors that the company expected to achieve $80 billion revenues this year, a record for any pharmaceutical company, with the vaccine accounting for more than a third. This makes the vaccine one of the top selling pharma products this year and possibly the biggest seller ever in the pharmaceutical industry’s history.

As the Financial Times noted in The inside story of the Pfizer vaccine: a once-in-an-epoch windfall, “The vaccine has transformed Pfizer’s political influence.” Since the vaccine’s approval at the end of last year, its “decisions have helped shape the course of the pandemic. It has the power to set prices and to choose which country comes first in an opaque queueing system, including for the booster programmes that rich countries are now scrambling to accelerate.”

The vaccine was not developed by Pfizer but by BioNTech, with €375 million funding from the German government. Lacking the resources to manufacture and market the jab, BioNtech turned to Pfizer to manage commercial operations. As a former US government official involved in vaccine procurement told the Financial Times, the fact that the vaccine is now known universally as the Pfizer shot is “the biggest marketing coup in the history of American pharmaceuticals.”

While BioNTech would get half the profits, Pfizer would control the commercialization of the vaccine everywhere except Germany and Turkey, BioNTech’s founders’ home countries, and China where BioNTech had already signed an agreement with Fosun Pharma. Pfizer, unlike Moderna, deliberately turned down public funding to keep control of the vaccine and pricing policy. It initially sought to charge the US government an obscene $100 a dose, or $200 a course, before eventually settling for $19.50 a dose after Moderna settled for considerably less, as it became clear that holding out for a higher price would damage its reputation.

Even this was four times Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose vaccine and five times higher than AstraZeneca’s jab. Casting light on the commercial interests behind the policy of herd immunity, Pfizer comforted its investors with assurances that it would be able to increase the price when the virus became endemic, thereby guaranteeing an indefinite profit stream.

Pfizer took advantage of its powerful position, aggressively negotiating bilateral agreements with rich nations that are shrouded in secrecy, binding even independent scientists with non-disclosure agreements and insisting that governments provide it with indemnity against lawsuits. Governments, including those of Lebanon and the Philippines, had to change legislation to secure contracts with Pfizer.

Jarbas Barbosa, the assistant director of the Pan American Health Organization, told the Financial Times that Pfizer’s conditions were “abusive, during a time when due to the emergency [governments] have no space to say no.”

The company refused to release doses until it was sure that the countries had the necessary cold storage capacity. Its negotiations with South Africa were particularly belligerent, even stipulating public assets be set aside as collateral to cover any legal claims for compensation, a demand described as “equivalent to surrendering national sovereignty.”

In the case of Britain, large parts of the contracts have been redacted. In the event of a dispute, Pfizer cannot be taken to court but only to arbitration proceedings that will be kept secret in what is apparently the only such agreement with a high-income country. Boris Johnson’s Conservative government is, along with the US and major European countries, blocking the efforts of more than 130 countries to increase vaccine production and drive down prices by waiving the World Trade Organization’s (WHO) intellectual property rules on COVID-19 vaccines and treatments for the remainder of the pandemic.

Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) has paid £2.57 billion for 135 million Pfizer jabs—£18 a dose for the first 100 million and £22 a dose for the next 35 million—with a £1.903 billion mark-up above production cost. The almost 75 percent profit margin could have funded a pay rise more than six times the £302 million the government has allowed NHS England to spend on increases for its 300,000 or so nurses this year. After inflation, the nurses’ £1,000 uplift is effectively a pay cut.

According to the People’s Vaccine Alliance, it is not just Pfizer, but Moderna and BioNTech that are reaping astronomical rewards. The Alliance estimates that the three corporations are pricing their vaccines by as much as $41 billion above the estimated cost of production while paying little in taxes. It estimates that Moderna has made $4.3 billion profit on revenues of more than $6 billion in the second quarter of this year, an obscene 69 percent profit margin. Moderna expects total vaccine sales to reach $20 billion in 2021. With no other commercial products than their COVID jabs, their profits are derived solely from the vaccines.

The Alliance says that in the first half of 2021, Moderna paid US taxes at 7 percent and Pfizer at 15 percent, well below the US tax rate of 21 percent, thanks to a system that allows corporations earning billions of dollars to pay a significantly lower tax rate than working families.

Since the identification of the Omicron variant in November, Big Pharma’s top executives and shareholders have seen their wealth skyrocket as their share prices rose, with eight of Pfizer and Moderna’s shareholders increasing their wealth by a massive total of $10.31 billion. It has prompted accusations of pharma executives “making a killing from a crisis they helped to create” by refusing to waive their patent rights and share vaccine technology.

Last year, the WHO set up Covid-19 Technology Access Pool (C-TAP) to facilitate the transfer of vaccine technology and know-how to accredited manufacturers, but Big Pharma boycotted the scheme, with Bourla, Pfizer’s boss, dismissing it as “nonsense.” This, together with their practice of selling to the highest bidder and creating grotesque levels of vaccine inequality, has been one of the factors enabling the conditions for the Omicron variant to emerge.

Now, they are set to create another profits bonanza with the development of the new COVID pill. Pfizer is set to dominate the $20 billion market next year as the rich countries rush to collar the supply, with poorer countries having to wait for the generic drugs, not expected until 2023. The company is expected to rake in revenues of $17 billion from its experimental therapy Paxlovid in 2022, while Merck’s molnupiravir will pull in about $2.5 billion as these new drugs displace existing, costlier treatment for high-risk patients.

UK Johnson government takes no new measures against pandemic

Robert Stevens

Britain’s government is in full herd immunity mode, taking no further measures yesterday to combat the staggering spread of COVID in England, after supposedly reviewing hospital data.

Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson met with his chief medical and scientific advisers to discuss data on the length of stay in hospitals for COVID patients, their transition rates to Intensive Care Units and new daily COVID death figures.

Health Secretary Sajid Javid then ruled out any new COVID restrictions, if any were to be imposed, until the New Year. Johnson confirmed later in a tweet that “there will be no new restrictions introduced in England before the New Year.”

A man walks past a COVID-19 vaccination tent at St Thomas' Hospital, near the National Covid Memorial Wall in London, Monday, Dec. 27, 2021. Over 12.2 million people have neen infected with COVID in the UK and over 173,000 are dead from the disease. (AP Photo/David Cliff)

The decision was a fait accompli. Johnson is under instruction from his party’s most fascistic wing in the COVID Recovery Group (CRG) to ignore numerous warnings that the Omicron variant of the virus is surging out of control, infecting millions and rapidly overwhelming the National Health Service (NHS).

Sky News cited information seen by COVID data expert Tim White on the situation in England’s hospitals. As of Sunday, just one month after Omicron was first detected in Britain on November 27, “there were 7,536 COVID patients in English hospitals—up 17.1 percent” week-on-week.

In London, the epicentre of the Omicron spike, there were 2,425 patients with COVID, a rise of 45.5 percent. In the Midlands 1,345 people are in hospital with COVID (up 17 percent), the East of England 681 (up 16 percent), in the North West 945 (up 8 percent) and in Yorkshire/North East 847 (up 3 percent).

Dr Paul Donaldson, general secretary of the Hospital Consultants and Specialists Association (HCSA), warned in the Guardian, “There is a high probability we are moving too late. We will soon start to see the impact of Christmas. We are holding out hope that hospitalisations are at the lower end of projections. But given the uncertainty we face it would be ludicrous not to take additional precautions.”

Nearly 1,000 health workers are being forced off work each day with COVID. The latest figures available, up to December 19, showed that 18,829 NHS staff at acute hospital trusts were absent, up from 12,240 a week earlier. At the Barts NHS Trust in London, COVID absences rocketed from 91 to 338. Dr Claire Harrow, chief of medicine for Scotland’s biggest health trust, told the press, “We’re experiencing staffing challenges due to COVID-19 and our teams are tired from the relentless pressure being put on them.”

Despite this emerging catastrophe, the message from the authorities is “Don’t’ Panic!” Chris Hopson, chief executive of NHS Providers, representing hospital trusts, declared that COVID admissions to hospitals were “not precipitous” or “going up in an exponential way.” It was, in addition, too early to see the impact of intergenerational mixing over the Christmas period and, therefore, hospitals were not “seeing the numbers of older people who’ve got real respiratory problems, needing critical care, needing very large amounts of oxygen support.”

Hopkins stands reality on its head. The government has just encouraged possibly the biggest super-spreader event in the entire course of the pandemic by opposing any restrictions on Christmas shopping, socialising and family parties. Millions will have been infected as a result.

December 24 saw the largest daily number of COVID cases ever with 122,186 infected. On Christmas Day, 113,628 cases were reported and 108,893 Boxing Day—a staggering 443,222 in just four days. Monday saw another 98,515 cases and 143 deaths.

These figures will be massive underestimates. Over 12.2 million people have been infected in the UK, with the Office for National Statistics (ONS) reporting Christmas Eve that an estimated 1.7 million people in England had COVID in the week ending December 19. This equated to around one in 35 people, the highest rate since the ONS began conducting its survey in May last year. But it is presently taking around 5 days to order, send in and get the result of a PCR test. Those living in England were unable to book a PCR test at a testing centre on the Government website for two hours on Monday, as none were available.

Lateral flow test results are not recorded nationally at all. But everyone will know of parties cancelled or relatives absent Christmas Day due to COVID infection.

The Omicron variant is hitting all age groups, but particularly the young. In minutes published December 24, the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) warned, “Infections have been concentrated in younger age groups to date; hospitalisation rates will increase as older age groups are infected... a large wave of hospital admissions should be expected.” Monday’s hospitalisation figures for England revealed that a record 470 children 0-17 years old had been admitted ill with COVID in the previous seven days.

Nothing medical will sway the government from its course. In the run-up to Christmas around a third of Tory MPs voted against Johnson’s extraordinarily limited Plan B measures and demanded that no more restriction be put in place. Sunday’s Observer reported a “hardening” of the mood against all restrictions. One CRG member warned, “In any future leadership contest, we will all remember how they acted this week. We need real, gutsy, freedom-loving Conservatives to rescue us from this madness.”

Sir Graham Brady, the leader of the Tory’s backbench 1922 Committee wrote in the Mailon Sunday that cancelling New Year celebrations “must not happen. Enough is enough.” The Mail editorialised that by opposing “Christmas-wrecking restrictions to tackle the Omicron surge”, Johnson had been “at his bold, freedom-loving best… In the strongest possible terms, this paper urges him: Stick to your guns.”

The nominally liberal media plays its own despicable role in minimising the threat posed. An Observer story, “Omicron: bleak new year or beginning of the end for the pandemic?” cited Dr Julian Tang, professor of Respiratory Sciences at Leicester University, who began his personal soporific with the words, “ My gut feeling is that this variant is the first step in a process by which the virus adapts to the human population to produce more benign symptoms,” before adding, “ I think the virus will evolve itself out of the pandemic strain very soon and become milder…” [emphasis added]

The Guardian for its part published a Christmas Eve op-ed by Professor Devi Sridhar, chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, insisting that “In spite of Omicron, Britain’s schools must remain open.”

This demand is made under conditions in which schools have become the main vectors of community transmission. Staff absences due to COVID are already so bad that Robert Halfon MP, the Tory chairman of the education select committee, warned, “I’m concerned that even if the Government says they want to keep schools open, schools will continue to send hundreds of thousands of children home.”

There is of course no opposition from the Labour Party and the trade unions to any of this, with Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer refusing to endorse even a two-week circuit breaker that many scientists insist is the minimum that must be done and the unions doing nothing except calling for improved sick pay for the infected.

But despite the constant magnifying of anti-lockdown, anti-vaccination sentiment by the media, tens of millions of working people are doing all they can to oppose the herd immunity maniacs in government by mounting what the media has described as a “self-imposed lockdown”. This was evident in the collapse in the number of shoppers during the annual Boxing Day (December 26) sales, down by 41 percent overall and by almost half in shopping centres.

French government rejects lockdown as COVID-19 cases skyrocket past 100,000

Will Morrow

French Prime Minister Jean Castex and Health Minister Olivier Véran delivered a joint press conference yesterday evening in response to skyrocketing COVID-19 cases in France and internationally, propelled by the Omicron variant. They made clear that despite the record and rapidly rising case numbers, the Macron government’s policy of rejecting lockdowns and social distancing measures would be maintained.

The seven-day average of coronavirus cases is now at over 70,000, almost 50 percent higher than the previous high in November 2020. More than 104,000 cases were recorded on Christmas Day, equivalent to approximately half a million cases in the United States in a single day. More than 16,000 people are currently hospitalised, 3,299 of them in intensive care. The Pasteur Institute has warned that at current trends, hospitalisations will reach 1,000 per day by the beginning of January, with more than 250 new intensive care patients a day.

Castex and Véran themselves described a situation of the utmost urgency and danger. “What we have observed for the past three weeks, notably in Britain and Denmark, justifies at once prudence and vigilance,” said Castex. “If we do not yet see at this stage the same hospital levels tied to Omicron, the strong contagiousness, the speed at which it propagates, must lead us beyond” promotion of vaccination.

French President Emmanuel Macron. (Ludovic Marin, Pool via AP)

“We are faced with two simultaneous waves,” said Véran. Omicron “is circulating so quickly that, unlike the previous variants, we do not have enough delay in relation to the countries that have been hit before us to have a full understanding of the impact of the variant. The variant is spreading travelling the entire planet. Spain and Italy, which were relatively spared by the Delta variant, are experiencing epidemic spikes dwarfing what they have seen since the beginning of the pandemic.”

Véran added that an “unknown is: Can Omicron be stopped by completely classic measures, such as those that have been put in place in our country so far? To this point, Denmark which has put in place some measures, has not recorded a breaking impact on the epidemiological dynamic because Omicron is so contagious that besides a completely general lockdown, nothing seems capable of blocking its path.”

In other words, the government openly states that only a lockdown policy, similar to that adopted in March 2020, involving the closure of schools and non-essential production, would be able to prevent the spread of the Omicron variant. Yet it has rejected these measures out of hand.

In fact, the government’s announcements involve a significant loosening of restrictions. Predicting an explosion of cases, it is reducing or eliminating the period of mandatory isolation for positive and contact cases. “We are going to adjust our doctrine on the period of isolation,” Castex stated. “We will fix these new rules by the end of the week.” According to FranceInfo, contact cases will have no period of mandatory isolation if they are fully vaccinated, compared to seven days at present, despite the fact that they can catch and transmit the disease. Positive cases will reportedly be required to isolate for seven days, not 10.

Castex announced only that indoor gatherings would be limited to 2,000 people, that patrons in bars and cafes must be seated and not standing, and that “where it is possible” employees are to switch to working from home for three days per week. Masks are to be made mandatory outdoors in larger cities.

Castex and Véran presented the response to the coronavirus as almost exclusively based on the expansion of third booster vaccine doses throughout the population. The “health pass,” which previously could be satisfied by a negative test, will now only be satisfied by a complete vaccination schedule. Vaccines are also being extended to children aged 5–12.

Even if it were the case that vaccination provided a guarantee to not catch and transmit the virus (which it does not), the government’s own timeline makes clear that its policy is predicated on an unprecedented surge of cases and mass death. More than 20 percent of the population is currently totally unvaccinated, while only just over 22 million people have received a third booster dose, less than one-third of the French population. It is established that two vaccine doses provide insufficient protection against the Omicron variant.

Moreover, a policy of vaccination alone is incapable of preventing the continued spread of the virus and the flooding and breakdown of hospital systems and deaths on a mass scale.

The government’s focus on vaccination is driven solely by corporate profit interests. Shutting down of non-essential production and switching to online learning are rejected because these measures would involve a reduction in corporate profits.

That is why Véran announced that the government would not postpone the reopening of schools after the Christmas break, despite a skyrocketing of cases among children, with more than 190 currently hospitalised and 35 in intensive care. While the incidence rate nationally is at almost 700, it is at more than 900 among children.

His comments were aimed at cutting across growing calls from medical professionals for the closure of schools to protect children and prevent schools from functioning as transmission vectors for the pandemic. On Sunday, the Sunday’ s newspaper published an open letter by more than 50 medical professionals demanding the postponing of the school reopening.

“Since the beginning of November,” they write, “more than 300,000 children and adolescents have tested positive to COVID-19. The hospitalisation of children in regular and intensive care have surpassed the peaks of all the precedent waves, with more than 800 children under 10 and 300 adolescents from 10–19 hospitalised in six weeks, and these figures continue to rise.”

“We are anticipating an unprecedented wave in the weeks to come with incoming patients of children hit by multisystem inflammatory syndrome, and other consequences tied, in certain cases, to Long COVID.”

They noted that recent studies showed that “the virus circulates more in school establishments, in primary as in secondary, than in the community over the same period, showing that contacts in schools increase the potential transmission of the virus for the community. In numerous departments, the epidemic acceleration clearly began in the autumn with clusters in school settings. One of the first clusters of the Omicron variant was in a school setting… We note a suffocation of pediatric hospital services, a marked tension in hospitals and an increase in cases in city medical clinics.”