UK government spent billions on substandard PPE, as private sector made a killing

Rory Woods

Britain’s Conservative government wasted billions of pounds buying Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) that was not fit for purpose.

The amount wasted—almost £9 billion—could easily have provided over one million National Health Service (NHS) workers a 25 percent pay rise, instead of the well below inflation 3 percent increase imposed by the government. Even building 14 new hospitals would not have cost this amount of money.

Buried in page 199 of the 346-page Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) annual report is a damning admission: “The Department estimates that there has been a loss in value of £8.7 billion of the £12.1 billion of PPE purchased in 2020-21. Of this £8.7 billion impairment, £4.7 billion relates to reductions in market prices since the goods were purchased.”

NHS supply chain lorry delivering supplies to a hospital in south west England during the pandemic (WSWS Media)

The other key features of this massive “impairment” include:

• £0.67 billion of PPE which cannot be used, for instance because it is defective.

• £2.6 billion of PPE which is not suitable for use within the health and social care sector but which the Department considers might be suitable for other (as yet uncertain) uses.

• £0.75 billion of PPE which will expire before it can be used.

Citing a Freedom of Information response, the Good Law Project revealed that “between April 2020 and August 2021, the Government spent £677.6 million storing excess equipment. And it continues to spend £500,000 a day on this.”

Of every £13 spent on PPE, £10 was wasted.

The DHSC cynically claimed in response that its “absolute priority throughout this unprecedented global pandemic has always been saving lives.” It peddles this lie even after the preventable deaths of thousands of health and other key workers. At every stage of the pandemic, the government put the profits of a few before lives.

When the virus began to rip through the population in 2020, there was a severe shortage of necessary PPE—the result of years of underfunding of the NHS and social care. Between 2013 and 2016, the national stockpile of PPE was slashed by 40 percent as a part of £20 billion in NHS “efficiency savings.” In March 2020, the government had the opportunity to join the European Union’s joint procurement scheme but refused to do so.

Leaving frontline NHS staff and social care workers with no or inadequate PPE as infections soared, the government and Public Health England—along with the Health and Safety Executive—changed the safety guidelines. COVID-19 was criminally downgraded to a non-High Consequence Infectious Disease (HCID) from March 19, 2020—reducing the standard of what constitutes safe PPE for staff.

As a result, many health workers were forced to look after patients with highly contagious coronavirus without satisfactory protection. Only flimsy aprons, simple surgical masks, visors and gloves were provided when carrying out tasks such as personal care, turning patients, feeding, oxygen therapy, nebulisations and physiotherapy. Highly effective FFP3 masks and gowns, along with higher quality gloves and visors, were available only to those who conducted aerosol generating procedures, i.e., in intensive care and theatres.

Some of the PPE used in NHS hospitals (WSWS Media)

The first priority of the Tories was to seize on the PPE shortage to enrich their cronies. A “VIP lane” was established to offer lucrative contracts, bypassing the usual tendering processes. Some 68 companies were able to profiteer at public expense, several even without any prior experience supplying PPE. The Good Law Project revealed that these “68 VIPs were awarded a total of £4.9 billion in PPE contracts—all without competition.”

An analysis of the DHSC figures by Open Democracy found that almost 60 percent of PPE procured from firms with links to the Tory government was unusable. A company owned by David Meller, who has donated over £63,000 to the Tory party since 2009, supplied over half a million items at a cost of £8.5 million that went unused. MedPro, referred to the VIP lane by Conservative peer Baroness Mone, supplied 25.5 million items worth £124.6 million that were not used.

Following a legal challenge mounted by the Good Law Project, Justice O’Farrell found that two companies, PestFix and Ayanda, had been unlawfully awarded contracts to supply PPE through the VIP process. PPE valued at £225 million supplied by the two companies went unused.

Last year, the parliamentary Public Accounts Committee revealed yet another multi-billion-pound scandal in relation to the NHS Test and Trace Service (NHST&T). The committee found that despite the unimaginable amounts of public money thrown at it, NHST&T failed to have a “measurable difference to the progress of the pandemic.” Private companies involved in the delivery of test and trace services reaped huge financial benefit from these contracts.

The government ensured its friends in the private health sector did not miss out on the feeding frenzy, spending an estimated £2-5 billion purchasing treatment services from private hospitals during the pandemic. With 8,000 beds, these hospitals only contributed to the delivery of 0.08 percent of COVID care for patients but provided rich rewards for their shareholders.

Describing the character of this government, the World Socialist Web Site wrote last year: “There has been much talk of ‘cronyism’ in response to such revelations. The more appropriate term is kleptocracy—the form of government associated with dictatorships and military juntas whose political leaders steal public funds to enrich themselves and their corporate backers.”

Having robbed the public purse to enrich the oligarchy, the government now demands that workers pay an extra 10 percent in National Insurance Contributions to fund a collapsing NHS and social care services. More cuts in public spending, wage freezes and the slashing of welfare benefits and pensions are on the agenda.

Corporate looting of public funds over PPE occurred while key workers, including health and social care staff, transport workers and teachers, were being compelled to work without adequate protection, with catastrophic consequences. Thousands succumbed to COVID-19, while tens of thousands are still suffering the debilitating effects of Long COVID. By January 2021, nearly 50,000 health care workers had contracted the virus. With the emergence of the Omicron variant, an order of magnitude more have contracted the disease.

This suffering is the direct result of the government’s inadequate PPE guidelines. Studies among nurses and other health workers have shown that significant numbers were working without PPE. A survey conducted by the Royal College of Nursing several months after the beginning of the pandemic found that more than a third of nursing staff (34 percent) “say they’re still under pressure to care for patients with possible or confirmed COVID-19 without adequate personal protective equipment (PPE).” The British Medical Association found that “a significant proportion of doctors still report struggling to access basics: masks, gowns, and protective glasses”.

In January 2021, hundreds of health professionals, including doctors, nurses and consultants, issued an open letter demanding higher-grade PPE. They pointed out that healthcare workers on general wards were about twice as likely to contract COVID-19 as intensive care unit staff, who could access the best equipment. These demands fell on deaf ears despite the airborne transmission of the virus having been conclusively demonstrated by scientists.

Grotesquely, the government will now dump useless or expired items deemed unfit for NHS settings on schools—where over 115 million face coverings have been supplied, but where masks are no longer mandated and in fact actively discouraged—or in poorer countries still desperate for any sort of PPE at all.

Canada to arm Ukraine with lethal weapons as part of US-led war drive against Russia

Matthew Richter

Ukrainian soldiers use a launcher with US Javelin missiles during military exercises in Donetsk region, Ukraine, Wednesday, Jan. 12, 2022. (Ukrainian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP)

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced Monday that Canada will provide $7.8 million worth of lethal weaponry and a $500 million loan to the right-wing Ukrainian regime as part of the US-led drive to war with Russia. The announcement was tacked on to the end of a press conference at which Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act to end the ongoing far-right “Freedom Convoy” occupation of Ottawa.

A news release from the Department of National Defence noted that the weaponry, referred to cynically as “lethal aid,” would include machine guns, pistols, carbines, sniper rifles, 1.5 million rounds of ammunition, and other small arms equipment. Canada has previously gifted Ukraine more than $23 million in “non-lethal” military aid, including communications equipment, body armour, and a mobile field hospital.

The Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC), a rabidly anti-Russian, vocal pro-Kiev lobby group, enthusiastically greeted the announcement of the delivery of Canadian “lethal aid.” Alexandra Chyczij, the UCCs president, said, “Canada has shown again that it is a true friend to Ukraine and the Ukrainian people.”

The $500 million loan is in addition to a $120 million loan announced on January 21. Both of these loans are being provided through the Bretton Woods and Related Agreements Act R.S.C 1985, which also regulates Canada’s collaboration with the IMF. They bring the total Canada has lent Ukraine since 2014 to $1.02 billion. In February 2014, a US-orchestrated, fascist-spearheaded putsch overthrew Ukraine’s democratically elected, pro-Russian president, Victor Yanukovych, paving the way for the current crisis.

Foreign Minister Melanie Joly, reiterating the common line of all NATO governments, stated that “Canada will not stand idly by while the rules-based international order is challenged ... Any further invasion of Ukraine by the Russian military will be met with severe consequences.”

Canada’s foreign ministry ratcheted up the anti-Russia propaganda Thursday after reports emerged of an exchange of shellfire between Ukrainian government forces and pro-Russian separatists in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. In a grotesque distortion of the reality on the ground, where the first shells were fired by Ukrainian government forces, Joly declared in a statement, “Canada strongly condemns the unprovoked Russian military activity in the Donbas region of Ukraine. Innocent civilians were put in danger by this clear effort by Russia to escalate the crisis. We commend the restraint shown by Ukraine.”

The endless stream of lies about finding a “diplomatic solution” to “Russian aggression” is intended to dupe the public as to who the actual aggressor is. With every day that goes by, it becomes ever clearer that Canada, like its NATO allies, is recklessly inflaming the conflict with Russia in order to provoke an all-out war.

The present crisis is the product of the Stalinist bureaucracy’s dissolution of the Soviet Union three decades ago, which unleashed a period of aggressive NATO expansion into Eastern Europe. In 1990, the US, UK and France offered Gorbachev assurances that they would not expand NATO into the former Warsaw Pact countries in exchange for the Soviet Union not exercising its legal veto power against the unification of Germany. Intent on offsetting its economic decline with its considerable military might, American imperialism has overseen the integration of numerous Eastern European states, which are riddled with virulent nationalist, fascistic, and outright neo-Nazi movements, into NATO. Ultimately, the NATO war drive is part of imperialism strategy to carve up Russia, reduce it to semi-colonial status, exploit its resources, and consolidate a hegemonic geopolitical position on the Eurasian continent in preparation for war with China.

Canada—a junior partner of American imperialism with extensive and lucrative cross-border economic and military supply chains and its own strategic rivalry with Moscow in the Arctic—has assumed a major role in NATO’s military buildup and encirclement of Russia. Barely two months after the far-right coup in Kiev, Canada offered its military assets to Operation REASSURANCE, the ongoing NATO deployment in Eastern Europe. Military deployments undertaken since 2014 include: a rotating task force of six CF-18 Hornets for what is euphemistically called “air policing”; 540 soldiers of the Enhanced Forward Presence Battlegroup in Latvia, who will be deployed there until at least 2023; and the dispatch of Halifax class frigates to the Standing NATO Maritime Group 2 in the Baltic Sea.

Canada plays a significant role in Ukrainian political life. Two weeks ago, a report in the Globe and Mail noted that pressure from Ottawa played a decisive role in persuading President Volodymyr Zelensky not to detain former President Petro Poroshenko on corruption charges following his return to the country. Poroshenko, the first Ukrainian president following the 2014 coup, is seen as even more loyal to US imperialism and its allies than Zelensky and is being held in reserve as possible replacement for the latter.

Through Operation Unifier, the Canadian Armed Forces provides training to the Ukrainian army, which is infested with far right and outright fascist forces. Trudeau recently announced the expansion of Operation Unifier from 200 to as many as 400 troops.

Operation Unifier sheds some light on the sort of “democratic” forces Canada is cultivating in Ukraine. In November, it was revealed that Canadian soldiers provided training on firearms usage and infantry tactics to the neo-Nazi Azov battalion. Canadian officers and diplomats actively tried to cover this fact up.

The cultivation of relationships with outright fascist forces abroad is complemented by a similar process domestically. Sections of the political establishment—including leading Conservatives, like Pierre Poilievre and Candice Bergen, and Maxime Bernier, the former Harper Conservative cabinet minister who now heads the ultra-right People’s Party of Canada— have enthusiastically promoted the Freedom Convoy. They have used it to press for the elimination of all remaining anti-COVID public health measures, so as to remove any impediments to big business maximizing its profits, and to push politics far to the right.

The Liberal government has been continuously berated by the Conservatives and the corporate media for being insufficiently aggressive in confronting Russia. In a written statement in response to the Trudeau government’s announcement of the extension of the military training mission in Ukraine in January, Shadow Foreign Minister Michael Chong—widely considered a “moderate” in a party that is ever more closely following in the far-right footsteps of the US Republican Party—and two other front-bench Conservative MPs attacked Trudeau. They claimed his failure to provide Kiev with lethal weaponry “calls into question the Liberal government’s support for Ukraine in their fight against Russia’s aggression. “The time for half measures has long passed,” the statement continued. “Ukraine needs Canada’s support and today Mr. Trudeau let them down.”

The social democratic New Democratic Party—which has propped up the minority Liberal government for the past two-and-a-half years—is no less vociferous in its anti-Russia, pro-war rhetoric. NDP Foreign Affairs Critic Heather McPherson declared in a January 31 statement that the party was “alarmed by escalating threats of further Russian invasion into Ukraine,” and claimed to support an “independent and democratic Ukraine.”

In reality, the NDP, like the entire Canadian political establishment, wants Ukraine to serve as a loyal client state to the Western imperialist powers on Russia’s doorstep.

South Korean logistics workers strike against brutal conditions

Ben McGrath

Nearly 2,000 logistic workers in South Korea are on strike to protest the brutal conditions in their industry. Extreme overwork and low wages are the norm while package delivery companies have reaped huge profits throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. The strike takes place as part of a series of struggles by delivery workers over the past year.

A food delivery rider shouts slogans during a rally to demand better working conditions in Seoul, South Korea, Thursday, Dec, 23, 2021. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)

Workers are fighting to expand a strike that initially began December 28, when 1,700 workers at CJ Logistics, the largest logistics company in South Korea, walked off the job. The strike enjoys wide support. In the approval vote, 93.6 percent of workers voted to take strike action from among 2,290 participants. Workers also struck in January and June of last year, while some logistics workers also took part in a larger, one day strike held by the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) in October.

On February 14, the Parcel Delivery Workers Union (PDWU) stated that it would consider an industry-wide walkout if CJ Logistics refused to hold talks with striking workers within a week. The previous Thursday, approximately 200 members of the KCTU, to which the PDWU belongs, also occupied the company’s office in a sit-down protest. A demonstration is scheduled for February 21 of up to 7,000 delivery workers in Seoul. Jin Gyeong-ho, the head of the PDWU, claimed, “We will fight to the end to prevent CJ Logistics’ unfair profiteering and achieve the fulfillment of the social deal (in preventing overwork).”

Conditions in the package delivery industry are harsh. Logistics workers are often on the job for 12 to 14 hours a day, six days a week. They are paid per package delivered and are not compensated for sorting the parcels, which takes up a great part of their work day. Not only do workers face low pay and long hours, but the physical stress and demands have led to gwarosa, literally, death from overwork. Throughout the course of the pandemic, at least 21 logistics workers have died from causes related to these conditions on the job.

Last June, the PDWU reached an agreement with CJ Logistics, Hanjin Transportation, and Lotte Global Logistics under which workers would no longer sort packages and the work week would be limited to 60 hours. It followed a similar deal in January in which the companies promised to hire more workers and to pay them for sorting packages.

These pledges were not kept. Instead, workers are accusing CJ Logistics of raising delivery prices and pocketing most of the additional income. Last April, the company claimed it increased prices by an average 140 won ($US0.12) per package, with workers receiving only a paltry 50 percent from this increase. The union, however, states prices increased to 170 won per package, from which workers only receive 51.6 won.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, delivery companies have enjoyed a surge in profits as more and more people ordered goods online. CJ Logistics reported on February 11 that its net profit for 2021 reached 158.3 billion won ($US132 million), an 11 percent increase from the previous year. CJ CheilJedang, the conglomerate that owns 40.16 percent of the logistics firm, saw its net profit rise 13.5 percent to 892.3 billion won ($US745 million), beating market expectations.

Like the previous agreements, any deal reached with CJ Logistics or other companies, will be ignored. It is simply the means to get workers back on the job to ensure these huge profits are maintained. In this, the PDWU is entirely complicit.

The PDWU does not represent the legitimate interests of its members. Instead it works to limit the impact of strikes and end them as quickly as possible in the interests of big business. This was summed up by an industry official, speaking anonymously, who told the Joongang Ilbo in December, “Of the 20,000 CJ Logistics delivery workers nationwide, 1,700 is not a big number. And whether all those 1,700 will take part in the strike, which requires taking days off, is uncertain.”

From the beginning of the strike, the PDWU, with a total membership of approximately 7,000, has attempted to isolate the workers. The union branch at CJ Logistics has a membership of 2,500, meaning the union has ensured that at least 800 union workers are crossing the picket line. Furthermore, there has been no genuine appeal to the other 17,500 delivery workers at CJ who are not in the union nor to the tens of thousands of other delivery workers in other companies. There are approximately 50,000 delivery workers nationwide.

During the week-long strike last June, the union called off the struggle while negotiations were ongoing. The PDWU had reached a sell-out deal with several companies, but Korea Post, the country’s national postal service, rejected the agreement. Union head Jin Gyeong-ho claimed that the PDWU would never sign a deal if the dispute with the postal service was not resolved. However, this did not stop the union from sending its members back to work.

The PDWU and the KCTU as a whole, posture as militant worker organizations. However, the KCTU has spent the pandemic keeping workers on the job, while holding phony one-day general strikes, to let off steam and to give the impression of a fight for better conditions. During such “strikes,” workers in major industries such as auto manufacturing are typically kept on the job. Only a small portion of the KCTU’s membership is actually called out to participate in the one-day protests.

That the PDWU and KCTU now take action more than a month after the initial delivery workers’ strike began is due to the pressure they face from rank-and-file workers. The unions, however, have no intention of leading a genuine struggle. Instead, they will resort to cheap stunts while reaching new sell-out agreements behind workers’ backs.

Deadly BA.2 subvariant of Omicron spreading in more than 74 countries

Benjamin Mateus

The BA.2 subvariant of Omicron accounts for a rising proportion of COVID-19 cases across the globe. The World Health Organization (WHO) reported this week that it was present in more than 74 countries worldwide.

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)

The WHO’s Technical Lead for COVID-19, Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, elaborated on Omicron and its sublineages during a press briefing, underscoring the critical distinction that infections with Omicron are not mild and continue to hospitalize and kill at record numbers across the globe.

She noted, “It’s really quite incredible how quickly the Omicron, the latest variant of concern, has overtaken Delta around the world. Most of the sequences are this sublineage BA.1. We are also seeing an increasing in proportion of sequences of BA.2. Omicron is more transmissible than Delta—all of the sublineages [are].”

Van Kerkhove continued, “But within the sublineages, Omicron BA.2 is more transmissible than BA.1. And so, what we are looking for in the epi[demic] curves, we’re looking at not only how quickly those peaks go up, but how they come down. And as the decline in cases occur, we also need to look at is there a slowing of that decline or will we start to see an increase again? If we start to see an increase, we could see some further infections of BA.2 after this big wave of BA.1.”

Worldwide, there were more than 16 million new infections and over 73,400 deaths last week. Since December 27, 2021, weekly global deaths have been rising for six consecutive weeks surpassing the Delta peaks seen in the late summer of 2021. Currently, based on sequenced coronavirus genomes uploaded into GISAID, the BA.1 subvariant remains dominant.

BA.2 appears to be increasing steadily in several countries where it is displacing BA.1. Its prevalence has notably risen in South Africa, Denmark and the UK.

COVID cases and deaths in South Africa

In South Africa, where Omicron was first sequenced, the seven-day moving average of new infections has plateaued at 2,500 per day. The death rate, however, has risen tenfold since mid-November, with an average of 164 deaths per day. Of note, more than 9,000 South Africans have died during the Omicron wave accounting for almost 10 percent of all COVID deaths. Rates of children dying were up by a factor of 2.2.

On February 17 there were 435 deaths reported, a single-day high during the Omicron phase of the pandemic. In line with these findings, the moving average case fatality rate of COVID-19 in the country has been rapidly climbing. Viral sequences submitted to GISAID between January 24 to February 7, 2022, found that BA.2 accounted for 65 percent of cases.

The question that has arisen from these developments is what role BA.2, with all studies supporting its increased infectivity, will have on the course of the pandemic.

Dan Barouch, an immunologist and virologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts, told Nature, “It might prolong the Omicron surge. But our data would suggest that it would not lead to a brand-new additional surge.”

In an earlier report published in the BMJ at the end of January, the UK Health Security Agency warned that BA.2’s “apparent growth advantage is currently substantial.” They also reported that those infected with BA.2 were more likely to pass it to others in their household. Dr. John Edmunds, professor at the Centre for the Mathematical Modelling of Infectious Disease at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, told the BMJ, “It is difficult to say what the implications of this will be. It may well extend this wave of infection, or even lead to another peak. The good news is that at present there is no evidence to suggest that it is more severe than Omicron and, as the UKHSA analysis shows, the vaccines appear to be as effective against it as they are against BA.1.”

However, a much-discussed new animal- and cell-culture-based study from the University of Tokyo, conducted by lead scientist Dr. Kei Sato, found not only was BA.2’s effective reproductive number 1.4 times higher than that of BA.1, but also that BA.2 was more pathogenic, showing in their animal models that the BA.2 virus had a more deleterious impact on lung tissue.

Additional findings found BA.2 was both more evasive of previous immunity from vaccines or infections and found to be resistant to several monoclonal antibodies, which raises the critical concern that the current arsenal of therapeutics may be limited considering these mutations in SARS-CoV-2. Indeed, one of the much-vaunted justifications for treating COVID as endemic was the plethora of treatment options people have if they become infected.

The paper summarizes the findings:

Although BA.2 is considered an Omicron variant, its genomic sequence is heavily different from BA.1, which suggests that the virological characteristics of BA.2 are different from that of BA.1. Here, we elucidated the virological characteristics of BA.2, such as its higher effective reproduction number, higher fusogenicity [ability to fuse to cells], higher pathogenicity when compared to BA.1. Moreover, we demonstrated that BA.2 is resistant to the BA.1-induced humoral immunity. Our data indicate that BA.2 is virologically different from BA.1 and raise a proposal that BA.2 should be given a letter of the Greek alphabet and be distinguished from BA.1, a commonly recognized Omicron variant.

The study remains in the peer review process, and one of its main limitations is its reproducibility in human populations. Jeremy Kamil, an associate professor of microbiology and immunology at Louisiana State University Health Shreveport, told Newsweek, “the study looks highly credible and rigorous and was from an excellent research group. I think it’s always hard to translate differences in animal and cell culture models to what’s going on with regards to human disease. That said, the differences do look real.”

Dr. Daniel Rhoads, section head of microbiology at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, who reviewed the study, told CNN, “It might be, from a human’s perspective, a worse virus than BA.1 and might be able to transmit better and cause worse disease.” In terms of severity, it has been compared to Delta. Also, it harbors multiple distinct mutations that distinguish it from the original Omicron strain leading many to recommend that the WHO designate it with a Greek letter.

According to the WHO, the BA.2 subvariant accounts for about one in five new Omicron cases recorded across the globe. Indeed, how all this will translate for countries will largely be determined by how aggressively measures are implemented to stem infections or if policies are enacted that will allow the virus to spread unchecked.

On February 1 all COVID-19 restrictions were lifted in Denmark. According to the government rules and regulations for COVID-19, the only stipulation in place is that “there [would] continue to be recommendations for the use of face masks and corona passport for an example at hospitals and in elderly care. It is also still possible for private businesses and private cultural institutions as well as associations etc. to make demands, for example, Corona passport or the use of a facemask/shield.”

COVID cases and deaths in Denmark

The BA.2 variant became dominant in Denmark by mid-January, displacing BA.1, and presently accounts for more than 90 percent of all sequenced SARS-CoV-2 samples in Denmark. Cases peaked at the end of January, where they have remained consistently high with a seven-day moving average of over 40,000 cases per day. Worrisome has been the acceleration of the daily death counts, which have edged above last winter’s peak. Thirty-three people are now dying every day.

Placing these figures into context for comparative purposes, Denmark has 5.83 million people while the US has 331 million. If Denmark had an equivalent population, the case rate would be over 2.2 million infections daily and the daily death close to 1,900 per day.

With efforts underway by states and federal officials in the US to lift all measures against COVID-19, the Department of Health and Human Services has reported that COVID-19 cases due to the BA.2 sublineage are beginning to climb. The highest figures are on the east and west coasts, accounting for 6 percent of sequenced cases. It remains too early to predict how the next few weeks will transpire, but if the objective findings prove valid, then the US may experience another crushing wave by the end of March.

As journalist Chris Turnbull recently observed on his social media account, “Maybe I’m just pointing out the elephant in the room here, but if Delta waves have been blunted by vaccines, and you have a variant such as BA.2 that looks theoretically just as severe as Delta, but is 1.4 times more infectious than BA.1—which was already more infectious than Delta … and on top of that, you have vaccine immunity resistance of BA.1, then that’s a combination for the worst variant we’ve seen since the start. It’s obviously early days, and I’m just speculating here, but theoretically, that does seem quite possible.”

Turnbull’s comments underscore the importance of adhering to the precautionary principles that deem taking any threat posed by the SARS-CoV-2 virus to the population as serious, necessitating the implementation of broad public health measures to protect the life and livelihood of its citizens. In this context, Dr. Rochelle Walensky’s recent comment about giving the population a “break” from wearing masks is profoundly disturbing and outright criminal.

COVID-19 disaster intensifies across the Pacific

John Braddock

After thousands of COVID-19 cases, including of the virulent Omicron strain, gained a foothold in the Pacific last month, the pandemic is running out of control across the region.

The impoverished island countries, which recorded virtually no infections in 2020–2021 due to their geographic isolation and strict border controls, are now battling the virus and seeking to prevent it from overwhelming fragile health and social systems.

Medical staff test shoppers who volunteered at a pop-up community COVID-19 testing station at a supermarket carpark in Christchurch, New Zealand. (AP Photo/Mark Baker)

Case numbers are climbing in Tonga as the kingdom reels from the devastating January 15 volcanic eruption and tsunami. Recovery work is hampered by the COVID-19 outbreak, with 208 confirmed cases, up from 139 last Monday. Infections are in both main islands of Tongatapu and Vava’u, including the suburbs of the capital Nuku’alofa. Thirty cases are in Hu’atolitoli prison.

Tonga’s government imposed a five-day lockdown on February 2, after five people tested positive. The virus appears to have spread from foreign ships bringing aid. The initial cases included two workers who were helping unload ships at the Queen Salote Wharf in the capital. The Australian navy vessel, HMAS Adelaide, reported 23 of its crew had the virus when it arrived on January 26 and made a “contactless” delivery of supplies.

Twenty-five passengers who arrived in Tonga earlier this week have also tested positive. The infected passengers were among 180 Tongan nationals on three repatriation flights from Fiji, New Zealand and Australia.

Conditions in Tonga are dire, with the United Nations warning that more international help is desperately needed. An estimated 85,000 people, about 85 percent of the population, have been directly affected. The government says the recovery will take years. According to World Bank estimates, there is $US90.4 million in immediate damage, the equivalent of 18.5 percent of Tonga’s GDP.

Journalist Kalafi Moala told Stuff on February 12 that the psychological effects of the eruption and now the COVID-19 outbreak are a major concern. Tonga had recovered from natural disasters before, but this is a “different ball game altogether,” Moala said, involving “a huge sense of grief and despair.”

As governments across the Pacific ease border controls and public health measures in line with their international counterparts, COVID-19 is escalating in their communities. The Cook Islands, a semi-colony of NZ with fewer than 20,000 inhabitants and one of the last remaining countries without COVID-19, has now reported its first cases.

A New Zealand tourist tested positive upon their return home on February 8, after 8 days in the Cook Islands, while the second case arrived on a flight from New Zealand on February 10. The traveller was asymptomatic on arrival but returned a positive result a few hours later. Two close contacts have since tested positive and Prime Minister Mark Brown warned that “silent transmission” in the country is likely.

The Cook Islands and New Zealand governments re-opened a “travel bubble” on January 14, enabling travel between the two countries without quarantine restrictions. Cook Islands authorities told TVNZ that despite the danger of an outbreak “the border remains open” and “it’s business as usual.” Children under the age of 5 can head to the Cooks from March 1 after a travel ban on them was lifted this week. Cook Islands Tourism manager Graeme West declared the move will make the destination “even more attractive to families.”

The Kiribati government extended its nationwide lockdown by another two weeks from Friday, due to widespread community transmission of COVID-19. There have been 2,757 infections across the atoll islands and nine deaths. There were 1,844 cases reported in the last two weeks, the majority in South Tarawa where the capital is located.

The virus was first detected in Kiribati on January 14, when 36 passengers on a charter flight from Fiji tested positive. They were the first travellers to arrive since the borders reopened in over two years, during which time the country had been COVID free.

Fiji’s own borders had reopened on December 1 with the health ministry reporting the first Omicron case on January 4, followed quickly by a sharp surge in cases. While numbers have since dropped away, 396 cases were reported from February 4–17. The health crisis has been exacerbated by recent outbreaks of leptospirosis, dengue fever and typhoid, with 14 deaths thus far.

Fiji’s government lifted its nationwide curfew on February 7, ending almost 22 months of night-time restrictions. Measures governing public transport, sports events and nightclubs were also relaxed while the use of a contact tracing app is no longer required. Classes in schools and early childhood centres have resumed.

Acting Prime Minister Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum claimed Fiji is “past its worst” with over 90 percent of the population over the age of 15 fully vaccinated (two doses), and the number of people hospitalised declining. Repeating the lie of capitalist governments elsewhere, Sayed-Khaiyum said: “We are moving to a stage where we can remove our blinders and treat COVID as an endemic disease instead of a pandemic, not unlike the common flu.”

The Solomon Islands, free of COVID-19 a month ago, has now recorded nearly 5,000 infections and 61 deaths. The Red Cross said last week authorities reported one in every two people had COVID-19 symptoms. Health Minister Culwick Togamana told the Solomon Star that the speed at which the virus spreads “is beyond our testing capabilities, meaning we are under-reporting the actual number of cases, which may be much higher.”

The outbreak began with the illegal entry of a vessel from Papua New Guinea to the atoll of Ontong Java in mid-January. A lockdown in the capital was imposed after a passenger on a ferry that travelled into Honiara tested positive.

A health catastrophe is developing. Only 12 hospitals cover more than 347 inhabited islands, with 340 health care clinics serving the rural population. The country has just 157 doctors, equating to two fully trained doctors for every 10,000 people. Infectious disease epidemics, including malaria and tuberculosis, have left the health system overwhelmed. Just 11 percent of the 700,000 population are fully vaccinated.

The French Pacific territory of New Caledonia recorded 18,357 cases from February 4, but the French High Commission in Noumea decided against another lockdown. The territory was COVID-19 free until last September when Delta infected thousands and killed more than 280, mainly indigenous Kanaks. There are now a total of 42,848 recorded cases and 287 deaths.

French Polynesia also reported 8,739 cases over the past fortnight. The territory first opened its borders in July 2020 for quarantine-free travel to boost tourism. President Edouard Fritch declared that without re-opening, the economic consequences would be “catastrophic.” COVID quickly spread to 45 islands, including Tahiti, and has reached a total of 58,260 cases with 637 deaths.

Papua New Guinea (PNG), the largest and most vulnerable country in the region, is open for quarantine-free travel for vaccinated visitors from this week. Domestic regulations have also been loosened with the lifting of all COVID-19 restrictions on public transportation. PNG has recorded over 2,000 cases this month but with testing having all but collapsed, the figure will be much higher.

Prime Minister James Marape cut short a visit to China this month after catching the virus. Marape absurdly declared that when people get infected, they can “live with it in almost a normal manner.” PNG has one of the lowest vaccination rates in the world, with less than 3 percent of the 9 million population fully vaccinated.

Macron announces withdrawal of French troops from Mali

Alex Lantier

On Thursday, as a European Union (EU)-Africa summit opened in Brussels, French President Emmanuel Macron announced the withdrawal of French troops from Mali. French troops have been stationed in Mali ever since 2013, when Socialist Party (PS) President François Hollande intervened in Mali after the 2011 NATO war in Libya.

French President Emmanuel Macron, second right, flanked by Ghana's President Nana Afuko Addo, right, Senegal's President Macky Sall, and European Council President Charles Michel, left, holds a joint press conference on France's engagement in the Sahel region, at the Elysee Palace in Paris, Feb. 17 2022. (Ian Langsdon, Pool via AP)

This withdrawal is driven by explosive popular opposition to French imperialism, notably in the aftermath of NATO’s humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan last year and after repeated massacres committed by French troops or local militias set up with tacit French backing in the Sahel region of Northern Africa. Macron made very clear, however, that Paris will not fully withdraw from its former African colonial empire but will rather step up its diplomatic intrigues in the region.

Standing next to Senegal’s President Macky Sall and European Council President Charles Michel, he referred to NATO’s threats of war with Russia over Ukraine: “At this time, as other strategic threats loom over the security of the European continent and legitimately attract our diplomatic attention, it was first of all necessary to send a signal of continuity in the struggle against terrorism in the Sahel.” He hailed the “federating role” France has supposedly played, overseeing the deployment of 25,000 troops from over a dozen countries to Mali, including 5,000 French troops.

Macron made clear France’s role in its former African colonial empire would remain essentially unchanged and that it would now work through a broader Coalition of the Sahel alliance. “We will continue, as I told my partners yesterday, to play this federating role and, when a military dimension is needed, the role of the leading nation. Beyond the continuation of our engagement, these discussions also have made clear a consensus exists to develop our action in the Sahel,” he said.

Macron laid out a strategy of isolating Mali by surrounding it with a broader alliance of neo-colonial regimes, like that of Sall in Senegal, that are closely allied with French imperialism.

In addition to a UN military contingent and the Takuba task force of European troops, Macron currently works with the so-called G5 alliance of Sahel states who provide the French military with cannon fodder for its operations in Mali. These states are Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Chad. However, Macron also proposed to integrate the countries of the “Accra Initiative” along the Gulf of Guinea coast—Ivory Coast, Ghana, Togo and Benin—into his Coalition of the Sahel.

Without referring to protests against the French military presence in Mali, Burkina Faso and beyond, Macron admitted that it was necessary for him to “change the parameters of our military presence. In the Sahel and in the Gulf of Guinea, the expectations of our partners have developed. The sensibilities of public opinion in the region have, also, changed.”

On this basis, Macron announced the withdrawal of French troops and the Takuba coalition of German and other EU troops. He said, “This withdrawal will involve the closure of bases in Gossi, Ménaka and Gao. It will be carried out in an orderly manner, together with the Malian armed forces and the UN mission in Mali. … With the agreement of the authorities in Niger, European elements will be redeployed alongside Niger’s armed forces in the border region with Mali.”

Macron insisted that he “completely rejects” the notion of a French “failure” in Mali, blaming the withdrawal instead on the Malian military junta and its supposed disloyalty to France. He said, “We cannot remain militarily engaged alongside authorities whose strategy we do not share, any more than we share their hidden objectives. This is the situation we face in Mali today. The war on terror cannot justify everything. It must not, on the pretext of being an absolute priority, become an exercise in indefinitely maintaining oneself in power.”

Macron’s attempt to cover up mass opposition provoked by the French war in Mali is based on hypocrisy and lies. The withdrawal from Mali is driven not primarily by the Malian military, which has a long record of collaborating with French forces, but by rising opposition among workers and rural toilers across Mali and all of West Africa to the French military presence. The decisive issue is unifying this movement, together with that of the working class in Europe, in an international struggle against war and for the withdrawal of French-EU troops from Africa.

Throughout the Mali war, the pretext Paris advanced was a fraud. In response to revolutionary uprisings of the working class in Tunisia and Egypt in 2011, Paris worked closely with the CIA and Persian Gulf oil sheikdoms to arm Islamist terror groups in wars for regime change in Libya and Syria. Even as it relied on Al Qaeda-linked “rebel” militias in Syria, however, it invaded Mali, claiming it would save the regime in Bamako from these same Islamist networks.

Anger mounted in Mali, especially over the last several years, amid atrocities such as the French bombing of a wedding ceremony in Bounty that killed 22 and massacres by rival local self-defense militias set up across the region with tacit French backing. Dozens or hundreds were slaughtered in Ogossagou, Sobane Kou and Solhan in neighboring Burkina Faso. In 2020, the army toppled Malian President Ibrahim Bouba Keïta and then, after Malian unions shut down a planned general strike in Bamako, launched another coup in May 2021.

Bitter debates erupted inside the French ruling elite over how to deal with the new Malian junta led by President Assimi Goïta, which tacked back and forth between pledges of loyalty to Paris and statements in line with mounting popular anger at the French presence. Moreover, the junta began seeking out ties with Russia, as well as the Russian private security firm, Wagner Group.

Last October, Malian Prime Minister Choguel Kokalla Maïga accused Paris in an interview with Russia’s RIA Novosti of arming Islamist terrorists to feed the war in Mali and justify a continued French military presence. Four days later, however, Maïga granted an interview to the French daily Le Monde to insist that the junta still supported a French military presence in Mali.

Asked point-blank whether the Malian government wanted French troops to leave its territory, Maïga replied: “We have never said this. We have never broken the bilateral defense accord that unites us with France. But in June, we woke up one morning to media reports that France was suspending military operations with the Malian army, without warning or explanation, because a new government had been set up that they did not like.” Maïga stressed that the Malian junta was in talks with Moscow and with the Algerian military regime.

Paris refused to be won over, however. The Macron government provoked mass protests last month across Mali when it backed sanctions by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) cutting off trade in nonessential goods with Mali and freezing Malian state assets at the Central Bank of the West African States. Hundreds of thousands marched, with many holding signs that read: “Down with Emmanuel Macron, Long Live Russia.”

As NATO threatens Russia with war over Ukraine, Paris is clearly doubling down on its strategy of isolating Mali and seeking to assert its neocolonial hegemony over West Africa, despite explosive popular opposition and the deep unpopularity of its Africa policies among workers at home.

As NATO works to instigate a war with Russia in Ukraine, the key issue is building an international movement in the working class against war and neo-colonial occupations. Moscow and the Malian junta are clearly trying to exploit an explosive growth of working class and popular anger against Paris. However, neither the Malian junta nor the Algerian dictatorship—which in 2019 faced mass anti-government hirak protests by millions of Algerian workers—nor the Putin government in Moscow stand for either democratic rights or opposition to imperialism.

Indeed, it is more or less apparent that an important calculation in France’s support for the emerging NATO war against Russia in Ukraine is that it will put more pressure on the Malian regime to cut ties with Moscow and instead deal only with Paris. Moscow, which is responding to NATO threats by desperately seeking to leverage its economic ties with the EU, will not prove a reliable ally of the Malian workers and oppressed masses.

Strikes, protests engulf Haitian capital as workers demand higher wages, better conditions

Alex Johnson

Thousands of garment workers in Haiti’s capital city Port-au-Prince continued their demonstrations Thursday following several weeks of strikes and protests demanding livable wages and an end to the super-exploitative conditions at the hands of US-based clothing retailers. The citywide eruption of protests, uninterrupted even in the face of mounting police brutality, is an indication of growing working class opposition to the regime headed by Prime Minister Ariel Henry and backed by US corporations.

Factory workers during a protest demanding a salary increase, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Thursday, Feb. 10, 2022. (AP Photo/Odelyn Joseph)

Protests first arose in late January as videos circulating on social media showed workers in Caracol Northern Industrial Park in Haiti, a major industrial hub employing upwards of 60,000 workers. Workers had been forced to labor in sweatshop conditions nine hours a day for a daily wage of $4. Police immediately responded to the walkout with brutal aggression. One graphic video showed an officer shooting a protesting worker in the back with live ammunition as he lay on the floor with blood trailing down his back.

A little more than a week later, the Valdor Apparel’s Tabarre 27 site, which is just outside Port-au-Prince, attempted to shut down the facility without compensating workers, triggering massive protests from workers who surrounded the building for several days. The owner of the facility, Robert Rothbaum, was reportedly trapped inside the factory. Workers claimed slave-like treatment, verbal and psychological abuse and the theft of pension and health taxes deducted from their miserable pay.

Last week, sweatshop workers at the SONAPI complex in the capital walked out to denounce the $4 a day wage, which many say cannot cover basic meals and transportation. Police were sent to the area where they unleashed tear gas against the protesting workers.

One worker spoke on video denouncing Rothbaum and the oppressive attempts to close the factory without paying workers. She said: “When we arrived … we learned that the factory was closing down and they were fleeing with our money. He [Rothbaum] has 11 factories in other countries. Robert is a multi-millionaire.

“For him to steal our money like this. We spent seven years working the machines. They’ve been sucking our blood for seven years. Working in these factories is not easy. It takes up all your energy. We have to pay for our children’s school. We have to pay for housing. All these things. Robert can’t do this to us. I will not lose my money.”

Union leader Dominique St. Eloi, who is also a coordinator for the National Union of Haitian Workers, told Reuters in a telephone interview that workers are seeking to raise their daily wages to approximately 1,500 gourdes (USD $15) from an appalling 500 gourdes (USD $5) a day. “With 500 gourdes per day, without any government subsidies, we cannot meet our needs while the price of basic goods, transport costs have increased,” said St. Eloi.

A spokesman for the office of Prime Minister Henry said he has been in discussion with the High Council of Salaries, the organization responsible for adjusting the country’s minimum wage, on how best to end the demonstrations. Henry also reportedly met Tuesday with industry leaders of dozens of US apparel makers operating in Haiti, but no information from the meeting has been released. There can be no doubt that the employers are deeply shaken by the uprising and are relying on Henry to crush social opposition.

Haiti has for decades been a haven for American apparel manufacturing companies to generate super-profits from operating massive sweatshops where workers are not paid enough to eat three meals a day. The destitution and exploitation of Haiti’s textile and garment workers can be traced back to the early 1990s, when the United Nations and the Organization of American States declared a trade embargo of Haiti but still granted concessions to US companies to reap booming profits from the impoverished workforce.

More than 60 US corporations are involved in shipping a torrent of goods intended for assembly into Haiti and then reimporting the assembled products back into the United States. Among the traded products are toys, fishing lures, cord, clay floor tiles, brooms, baseballs, softballs, pajamas, pants and T-shirts. The corporations received incentives offered under the Caribbean Basin Initiative, the US program to promote economic development in the Caribbean Basin, and the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP), which allows goods from developing countries to enter the United States tax-free.

The incentives for US corporations to move labor-intensive, low-technology assembly operations to Haiti helped reinforce an already lucrative enterprise for US multinational companies, which could pay low wages and virtually no taxes while reaping fabulous profits. In the decade prior to the election and ouster of President Jean Bertrand Aristide, the real wages of Haitian apparel workers were slashed by more than 50 percent, while assembly exports from Haiti to the United States skyrocketed. Apparel exports more than doubled from 1983 to 1989, rising from $81 million to $180.9 million.

Tensions had been burgeoning inside Haiti’s garment factories for the past two years due to the companies’ persistent non-compliance with social security payments and the disastrous health consequences for workers. This was detailed in a report in August of 2020 issued by GOSTTRA, a syndicate of the global union federation IndustriALL, describing the struggle for basic survival facing thousands of workers amidst the deepening social and health crisis triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Earlier that year, two workers employed by the investment and manufacturing firm Palm Apparel Group died after being denied medical care after their employer reportedly failed to pay their social security contributions on time. Sandra René died from complications during her pregnancy, while Lionel Pierre died after being denied dialysis treatment. Workers at both factories downed tools in protest shortly after both deaths to oppose their egregious treatment at the hands of management.

Palm Apparel management had also clamped down on GOSTTRA union leaders and rank-and-file workers who had been fighting against the anti-democratic and oppressive atmosphere inside several factories. In one instance, dozens of union leaders and members were dismissed after protesting against the company’s decision to send them home in the middle of the day. At a Horizon facility, union leader Sandra Emilion was dismissed after lodging a complaint against excessively high target quotas and company speedups. In the MBI factory, union leader Sonia Saintvil was unfairly dismissed after rejecting an offer of promotion on condition she quit the union.

At the time of the GOSTTRA report, roughly a third of the 57,000 workers in the country’s garment industry were suspended or terminated and had yet to receive any compensation from the government in spite of earlier promises to the contrary. The rest had been, and still are, working reduced hours in unsafe factories that lack even the most basic precautions to help prevent the spread of the coronavirus.

The leaders of the trade unions organizing the strikes have resorted to fruitless appeals aimed at pressuring management and the Haitian government to address the workers’ demands. National Union of Haitian Workers leader St. Eloi told Associated Press (AP) news that if factory managers did not respond with concessions to protesting workers, the union would ask Haiti’s government to raise the minimum wage, a totally bankrupt strategy.

Countless protests have taken place at Haitian factories in the nation’s poorest slums, which have for years seen waves of strikes over abysmal salaries and deplorable conditions. The recent demonstrations bear a resemblance to the mass protest movement that began in 2018 following an announcement in July of that year from then-President Moise that fuel prices would rise astronomically, further plunging the nation’s desperate workers and peasants deeper into poverty.

Opposition to the hike in the price of gas and other consumer goods eventually evolved into widespread demands for the immediate resignation of the corrupt president, who was at the center of scheme carried out by Haitian officials accused of stealing billions of dollars from a development fund subsidized by Venezuela that was intended to help low-income Haitians and rebuild dilapidated social infrastructure.

The mass protest movement would go on to plague the presidency of Moise and his Parti Haitien Tet Kale (PHTK) party for the next three years all the way up until the president’s assassination. Moise routinely made use of armed gangs and police to crack down on the protesters and terrorize the population, which included the infamous massacre of 57 people in Port-au-Prince’s La Seline neighborhood in 2019.

The widely despised president also faced social upheavals as a result of his own refusal to relinquish his position at the end of his term in early 2021 and his moves toward consolidating an authoritarian government.

The main demand of the demonstrators has been higher wages in the face of a surge in the cost of living that has made life intolerable for the population. According to the latest government statistics, the inflation rate in Haiti increased to 24.60 percent in November of 2021 from 19.70 percent in October. The social crisis has been magnified by the deterioration in the world economy as increases in commodity prices on the international market have substantially raised Haiti’s import spending and amplified inflationary pressures.

Exacerbating these conditions is the extraordinary uncertainty and instability surrounding Haiti’s political and social crisis. Prime Minister Henry, whose INITE party represents ruthless sections of the venal Haitian bourgeoisie, presides over an illegitimate government implicated in the assassination of President Moise last summer and has refused to step down despite his term ending on February 7. The country has also seen a sharp spike in violence and kidnappings by warring gangs acting in the interests of rival sections of the nation’s ruling class.