COVID-19 infections rise in Australia as BA.2 begins to take hold

Martin Scott

In the past week, 203,275 COVID-19 infections were recorded in Australia, an increase of around 20 percent over the previous week, and the highest seven-day figure in a month.

The dangerous BA.2 sub-variant of Omicron has begun to take hold in Australia. According to covariants.org, BA.2 accounts for 24 percent of cases nationally. Across the country, the prevalence of BA.2 is growing at a rate of around 8.9 percent per day.

BA.2 accounts for 30 percent of recent samples sequenced in New South Wales (NSW) and 20 percent in Victoria. The small percentage of samples that are sequenced are mostly from seriously ill patients, meaning if there is an over representation of BA.2 in this data, it is because the sub-variant is causing more severe symptoms.

A drive-through COVID-19 testing clinic at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, Saturday, January 8, 2022. (AP Photo/Mark Baker)

Across the country, only a tiny handful of positive test specimens are subjected to genomic sequencing. Each week, fewer than 2,500 sequences are reported to GISAID, the largest repository of COVID-19 samples in the world.

This is part of the criminal attempt by Australian governments to hide crucial information about the pandemic from the population and conceal the devastating and continuing consequences of the “let it rip” policy.

The media is entirely on board with the cover-up. While Australians continue to die from COVID-19 at a rate of more than 36 per day, the pandemic has virtually disappeared from the headlines.

Nevertheless, it is clear that BA.2 is spreading rapidly and is likely to become the dominant strain in Australia within weeks.

NSW Health Minister Brad Hazzard today revealed in parliament that modelling from the University of NSW (UNSW) predicted daily cases could double by mid-April as the sub-variant takes hold.

While he said the preliminary evidence was “concerning,” Hazzard did not propose a return of indoor mask mandates, density limits, or other public health measures, but merely said “people need to go out and get the booster fast.”

Labor Shadow Minister for Health Ryan Park agreed, posting on Twitter: “Cases could double in as little as one month. COVID hasn’t been washed away with the floods. Please get boosted.”

Fewer than 60 percent of adults have received a booster in NSW, compared with double-dose rates well in excess of 90 percent. The low booster take up is clearly bound up with the official propaganda barrage claiming that the pandemic is a thing of the past.

While Park raised the need to “prepare hospitals” for a surge in cases, he said nothing about reintroducing measures to actually reduce transmission.

James Wood, from the UNSW School of Public Health, said he expected 90 percent of COVID-19 infections in the state will be BA.2 by the end of this month.

Wood said the emergence of BA.2 “is the main factor driving the rise in cases.”

The increasing spread of BA.2 in Australia mirrors what is taking place globally. The sub-variant is dominant in at least 34 countries, including 4 of the 10 highest-ranking countries in terms of daily infections.

In Hong Kong, where per capita death and infection rates in the current COVID-19 surge are smashing all previous records around the world, BA.2 accounts for all sequenced samples.

A recent University of Tokyo study found BA.2 is more transmissible, more vaccine evading and more resistant to previous infection than the original Omicron strain, BA.1.

In addition, the study found that BA.2 caused more severe illness than BA.1, because it reproduced deeper in the lungs of the animals studied.

Scientist Yaneer Bar-Yam told the World Socialist Web Site in a recent interview: “Now, obviously this is something that we still need to see in people, but if you realize that this is what’s happening in hamsters, you should stop assuming that it’s okay and you should go back and look at what’s going on now.”

Bar-Yam and the Tokyo study’s lead scientist, Kei Sato, agreed the designation of BA.2 as a sub-variant was incorrect, as it is different enough from BA.1 to warrant its own Greek letter.

With mounting evidence that BA.2 may be the most dangerous variant yet, the World Health Organisation’s refusal to classify it as a “variant of concern” in its own right is based on politics, not science.

Such a designation would conflict with the narrative relentlessly pushed by governments and the corporate media that Omicron is “mild,” COVID-19 will become “endemic,” and the pandemic is “over.”

These utterly false and unscientific claims are designed to force children and teachers back into schools, and workers back into factories and offices, in order to satisfy the demands of big business that nothing, even the deaths of millions of people, be allowed to stand in the way of ever-increasing profits.

In fact, the only thing that is “over” is any semblance of a public health response to COVID-19, anywhere in the world except China.

Australian governments, Labor and Liberal-National alike, have in recent weeks slashed virtually all of the few remaining COVID-19 safety measures.

Daily case numbers are increasing in NSW, Western Australia (WA), South Australia, Tasmania, and the Australian Capital Territory.

In addition to the rise of the more-transmissible BA.2, the surge is being driven by growing infections in schools after students and teachers were forced back into face-to-face learning last month despite massive levels of community transmission.

Details of COVID-19 outbreaks in schools are tightly suppressed, but the Committee for Public Education has collected reports of almost 1,000 schools affected by the virus in Term 1, a fraction of the total.

It has been reported on social media that 600–700 students (more than a quarter of the school population) at Castle Hill High School are absent due to a major outbreak of COVID-19.

The Hills Shire Local Government Area, where the school is located, currently has the second-highest number of active cases in NSW, with an average of more than 500 new infections reported each day.

The bipartisan character of the murderous “let it rip” policies is starkly revealed in WA.

The state was the last in Australia to maintain at least a partial suppression policy, and maintained a “hard border” until last week. This was in no small part due to massive public support for elimination of COVID-19 demonstrated in the landslide re-election of Labor Premier Mark McGowan in March last year.

Today WA reported 4,535 new infections, more than the total recorded in the state from the beginning of the pandemic until February 23.

Since the beginning of the year, 17,000 students and 1,400 staff have either tested positive for COVID-19 or needed to isolate due to exposure.

An outbreak among bus drivers in the state forced the cancellation of around 30 bus routes on Tuesday.

Following the blueprint established throughout the country, the WA Labor government’s response to the massive surge in cases was not to tighten public health measures in an attempt to stem transmission, but to slash close contact and isolation rules for school children, teachers and “critical workers”—essentially everyone who cannot work from home.

The emergence of BA.2 is an entirely predictable result of the decision by capitalist governments around the world to promote the rampant spread of COVID-19. The world has been turned into a massive petri dish for the development of an unlimited number of new and more dangerous strains of the virus.

Market convulsions could spark financial crisis

Nick Beams

Somewhere along the way, more likely sooner than later, a major speculative investor or financial institution could take a significant hit because of the gyrations in markets, with far-reaching consequences ripping through the global financial system.

Even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, financial markets were their most fragile since March 2020, at the start of the pandemic, due to fears of what interest rate increases and a tightening of monetary policy by the US Fed and other central banks would produce.

The Wall St. street sign is framed by the American flags flying outside the New York Stock exchange, Friday, Jan. 14, 2022, in the Financial District. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)

The sanctions imposed on the Russian banking and financial system by the US and NATO along with the bans on Russian oil by the US have sent commodity prices soaring—not only for oil and natural gas, but wheat and other grains together with industrial metals.

Oil has gone as high as $139 a barrel. Gas prices in Europe at one stage hit €345 a megawatt hour before falling back to €241. One year ago, the price was €16.

The financial flow-on effects of the escalation of commodity prices were starkly demonstrated this week in the market for nickel, of which Russia is a major producer.

On Monday, the price of nickel on the London Metals Exchange (LME) rose by 75 percent to $50,000 a tonne. The next day it doubled to $100,000, then fell back to $80,000 before the LME suspended trading in the metal.

Nickel prices usually move at most by a few percent a day and long-time traders in the LME said they had never seen in anything like it before.

The financial impact was soon revealed. Chinese billionaire Xiang Guangda, the founder of the country’s leading stainless-steel producer Tsingshan Holding Group, had shorted nickel, that is, had taken out contracts based on the assumption its price would fall.

The movement the other way left the company with paper losses totalling several billions of dollars. Initial estimates in the Chinese media were that losses could be as high as $8 billion.

Announcing the suspension of nickel trading, which is not expected to resume before the end of this week, the LME said the decision was taken on “orderly market grounds.”

The extreme turbulence extends well beyond commodity markets and the institutions that trade in them, often making large bets based on where they consider prices will move. It also impacts on banks that have invested in Russian financial markets.

The Italian bank UniCredit, the world’s 34th largest, has warned it faces losses of around €7 billion in the face of an “extreme scenario” in which its entire Russian business is wiped out. The company said yesterday it had loans of about €7.8 billion in its Russian consumer unit and cross-border exposures to companies of €4.5 billion of which about 5 percent had been hit by sanctions.

The effect of the sanctions goes far beyond the companies and financial institutions that are directly caught up in them.

In an article earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal cited the remarks of Christopher Smart, a former special assistant to President Obama. He said the situation facing global businesses in the wake of the sanctions was reminiscent of that which accompanied the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008.

“We’ve never seen anything this comprehensive, this powerful and this sudden imposed on an economy this size and important to the global economy,” he said.

It recalled Lehman Brothers because of uncertainty about who had exposure to Russia. “I may know that I’m not exposed, but I’m not really sure who among my clients may be exposed, who has investments that they’re … going to have to write down,” Smart commented.

The surge in commodity prices, which is already lifting the inflation rate around the world, has enormously complicated the situation facing the world’s major central banks.

Before the war crisis they were on course to begin tightening monetary policy—already a delicate operation given that the financial markets have become so dependent on cheap money that even a small rise could provoke market turbulence and even a recession.

Now inflation is surging, and the financial system has become even more unstable. The first indication of how they intend to react will come today when the European Central Bank (ECB) announces the future direction of its monetary policy.

Last month the ECB’s governing council said it would undertake a “gradual normalisation” of monetary policy including a possible wind-down of its asset purchasing program and a lifting of interest rates at least by the end of the year.

The indications from ECB President Christine Lagarde and ECB Chief Economist Philip Lane are that these plans may be put on hold.

As the Financial Times noted, Lagarde has said the bank would “take whatever action is needed” in response to the Ukraine situation. Lane said it could accept inflation above its 2 percent target when dealing with “an adverse supply shock” and the bank could consider “new policy instruments” to support financial markets.

However, such measures could widen already existing divisions in the bank’s governing council. Some members may insist that the “normalisation” policy must continue under conditions where inflation hit a eurozone record of 5.8 percent in February and is expected to go to 7 percent later this year.

The FT cited one “hawk” on the governing council who said: “It is obvious that inflation will stay with us, so we have to do something. We cannot just say we will wait and see.”

The Fed will determine its monetary policy next week, having already pencilled in a rise of 0.25 percent, with further rises of the same size over the course of the year as well as starting to reduce its $9 trillion holdings of financial assets.

The expectation of interest rate rises has already had a major impact on Wall Street with the tech-heavy NASDAQ index now down by almost 20 percent so far this year.

The shares of tech companies, many of which have yet to turn a profit, are highly sensitive to interest rate increases because their “expectations” of future profits are discounted at the prevailing interest rate to determine their present market value—the higher the rate the lower the value.

An article by Robin Wigglesworth in the FT noted: “In dollar terms, the tech-heavy market has now lost well over $5 trillion since its November peak—more than the NASDAQ’s dollar losses through the entire dotcom bubble unwinding in 2000–02.”

The relatively stronger position of Big Tech companies—the well-known names such as Apple, Google and Microsoft—was obscuring the extent of the damage. But the rapid fall in the shares of Meta (the owner of Facebook) indicate that even Big Tech is not immune.

It has been estimated that almost two-thirds of the NADAQ’s 3,000 members have fallen by at least 25 percent from their 52-week highs. Almost 43 percent have lost more than half their value and a fifth had dropped by over 75 percent.

“The $5.15 trillion that has evaporated from the NASDAQ in recent weeks is like the entire UK stock market going ‘poof’,” Wigglesworth wrote.

Goldman Sachs has estimated that if the Fed decides to forcefully tighten monetary policy—and it may decide to do so with inflation predicted to rise even further in the US, possibly reaching double-digit levels—the NASDAQ could fall another 17 percent.

Wigglesworth concluded that a repeat of the dotcom bust may not come but added that “the scales of the wealth destruction is already enormous” and the “wider reverberations are still unknowable, and could be significant.”

Understanding the War in Ukraine

Vijay Prashad

kyiv ukraine

The war between Russia and Ukraine began much before February 24, 2022—the date provided by the Ukrainian government, NATO and the United States for the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. According to Dmitry Kovalevich, a journalist and a member of a now-banned communist organization in Ukraine, the war actually started in the spring of 2014 and has never stopped since.

He writes to me from the south of Kyiv/Kiev, Ukraine, and recounts an anecdote: “What’s there at the front line?” asks one person. “Our troops are winning as usual!” comes the response. “Who are our troops?” the first person inquires and is told, “We’ll soon see…” In a war, everything is in dispute, even the name of Ukraine’s capital (Kyiv in Ukrainian, and Kiev in Russian, goes the debate online).

Wars are among the most difficult of reporting assignments for a journalist. These days, especially, with the torrent of social media and the belligerence of network news television channels, matters on the ground are hard to sort out. Basic facts about the events taking place during a war are hard to establish, let alone ensuring the correct interpretation of these facts. Videos of apparent war atrocities that can be found on social media platforms like YouTube are impossible to verify. Often, it becomes clear that much of the content relating to war that can be found on these platforms has either been misidentified or is from other conflicts. Even the BBC, which has taken a very strong pro-Ukrainian and NATO position on this conflict, had to run a story about how so many of the viral claims about Russian atrocities are false. Among these false claims, which have garnered widespread circulation, is a video circulating on TikTok that wrongly alleges to be that of a “Ukrainian girl confronting a Russian soldier,” but is instead a video of the then-11-year-old Palestinian Ahed Tamimi confronting an Israeli soldier in 2012; the video continues to circulate on TikTok with the caption, “Little [girls] stand up to Russian soldiers.”

Meanwhile, disputing the date for the beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian war as February 24, Kovalevich tells me, “The war in Ukraine didn’t start in February 2022. It began in the spring of 2014 in the Donbas and has not stopped for these eight years.” Kovalevich is a member of Borotba (Struggle), a communist organization in Ukraine. Borotba, like other communist and Marxist organizations, was banned by the previous U.S.-backed Ukrainian government of Petro Poroshenko in 2015 (as part of this ongoing crackdown, two communist youth leaders—Aleksandr Kononovich and Mikhail Kononovich—were arrested by Ukrainian security services on March 6).

“Most of our comrades had to migrate to Donetsk and Luhansk,” Kovalevich tells me. These are the two eastern provinces of mainly Russian speakers that broke away from “Ukrainian government control in 2014” and had been under the control of Russian-backed groups. In February, however, before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin recognized these “two breakaway regions in eastern Ukraine as independent,” making this contentious move the stepping stone for the final military invasion by Russia. Now, Kovalevich says, his comrades “expect to come back from exile and work legally.” This expectation is based on the assumption that the Ukrainian government will be forced to get rid of the existing system, which includes Western-trained-and-funded anti-Russian right-wing vigilante and paramilitary agents in the country, and will have to reverse many of the Poroshenko-era illiberal and anti-minority (including anti-Russian) laws.

‘I Feel Nervous’

“I feel quite nervous,” Kovalevich tells me. “[This war] looks very grim and not so much because of the Russians but because of our [Ukrainian] armed gangs that are looting and robbing [the country].” When the Russians intervened, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy handed out weapons to any citizen who wanted to defend the country. Kovalevich, who lives in central Ukraine just south of the capital, says, “My area was not affected by military actions—only by the terror of [right-wing] nationalist gangs.”

During the first days of the Russian military intervention, Kovalevich took in a Roma family who had fled from the war zone. “My family had a spare room,” Kovalevich tells me. Roma organizations say that there are about 400,000 Roma in Ukraine, most of them living in the western part of Ukraine, in Zakarpatska Oblast (bordering Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia). “The Roma people in our country are regularly assaulted by [right-wing] nationalists,” Kovalevich says. “The nationalists used to attack them [Roma] publicly, burning their encampments, calling it ‘cleansing garbage.’ The police didn’t react as our far-right gangs always work in cooperation with either the police or with the security service.” This Roma family, who was being sheltered by Kovalevich and his family, is on the move toward western Ukraine, where most of the Ukrainian-Roma population lives. “But it is very unsafe to move,” Kovalevich tells me. “There are nationalists [manning these] checkpoints [along] all roads [in Ukraine, and they] may shoot [anyone] who may seem suspicious to them or just rob refugees.”

Minsk Agreements

The war in the Donbas region that began in 2014 resulted in two agreements being signed in Belarus in 2014 and 2015, which were named after the capital of Belarus, and were called the Minsk agreements. These agreements were aimed at “[ending] the separatist war by Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine.” The second of these agreements was signed by two leading political figures from Ukraine (Leonid Kuchma, the president of Ukraine from 1994 to 2005) and from Russia (Mikhail Zurabov, the ambassador of the Russian Federation to Ukraine, 2009-2016), respectively, and was overseen by a Swiss diplomat (Heidi Tagliavini, who chaired the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Conflict in Georgia, 2008-2009). This Minsk II agreement was endorsed by the UN Security Council resolution 2022 on February 17, 2015. If the Minsk agreements had been adhered to, Russia and Ukraine would have secured an arrangement that would have been acceptable in the Donbas.

“Two Ukrainian governments signed the Minsk agreements,” Kovalevich tells me, “but didn’t fulfill it. Recently Zelenskyy’s officials openly mocked the agreement, saying they wouldn’t fulfill it (encouraged by the U.S. and the UK, of course). That was a sheer violation of all rules—you can’t sign [the agreements] and then refuse to fulfill it.” The language of the Minsk agreements was, as Kovalevich says, “liberal enough for the government.” The two republics of Donetsk and Luhansk would have remained a part of Ukraine and they would have been afforded some cultural autonomy (this was in the footnote to Article 11 of the February 12, 2015, Minsk II Agreement). “This was unacceptable to our nationalists and [right-wing nationalists],” Kovalevich says to me. They “would like to organize purges and vengeance there [in Donetsk and Luhansk].” Before the Russian military intervention, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights found that more than 14,000 people had been killed in the ongoing conflict in Donetsk and Luhansk despite the Minsk agreements. It is this violence that provokes Kovalevich to make his comments about the violence of the ultra-nationalists and the right-wing paramilitary. “The elected authorities are a cover, masking the real rulers of Ukraine,” Kovalevich says. Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy and his allies in the parliament do not drive the governing process in their country but have “an agenda imposed on them by the far-right armed groups.”

Peace?

Negotiations are ongoing on the Ukraine-Belarus border between the Russians and the Ukrainians. Kovalevich is, however, not optimistic about a positive outcome from these negotiations. Decisions, he says, are not made by the Ukrainian president alone, but by the right-wing ultra-nationalist paramilitary armed groups and the NATO countries. As Kovalevich and I were speaking, the Washington Post published a report about “Plans for a U.S.-backed insurgency in Ukraine”; former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton implied an Afghanistan-style guerrilla war in Ukraine, saying, “We have to keep tightening the screws.” “This reveals that they [the U.S.] don’t really care about Ukrainians,” Kovalevich says. “They want to use this as an opportunity to cause some pain to the Russians.”

These comments by Clinton and others suggest to Kovalevich that the United States wants “to organize chaos between Russia and the Europeans.” Peace in Ukraine, he says, “is a matter of reconciliation between NATO and the new global powers, Russia and China.” Till such a reconciliation is possible, and till Europe develops a rational foreign policy, “we will be affected by wars,” says Kovalevich.

Brazil passes 650,000 COVID-19 deaths as ruling class adopts “endemic” narrative

Eduardo Parati

Last week, Brazil reached the terrible milestone of 650,000 recorded COVID-19 deaths, even as the administration of fascistic President Jair Bolsonaro is officially adopting the narrative that the deadly virus has reached an “endemic” stage.

In February, the country recorded 22,000 deaths, an average of nearly 800 deaths per day. In an interview with the daily Estadão, Fiocruz epidemiologist Jesem Orellana pointed to the seriousness of the pandemic in Brazil: “The number of about 650,000 known deaths in Brazil is tragically high (the second highest on the planet) and, in practice, is at least 15 percent higher due to underreporting.” Orellana added: “It is not impossible to reach 700,000 or even 800,000 known deaths from COVID-19, because if we continue to put the economic agenda above life, we will continue to have more and more preventable deaths… .”

In an interview with SOS Brasil Soberano, neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis gave the scale of the underreporting scenario in Brazil, which prevents determining the real development of the pandemic in the country. He pointed to estimates by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington of the real number of infections in Brazil during the spread of Omicron: “If the underreporting was already 10 to 20 times in the weeks before Carnaval, now we wouldn’t even be able to calculate... Some models suggest that we passed 2 million cases per day at the peak [of the Omicron variant in January-February].”

Countering the narrative promoted since November by the government and corporate media that Omicron is “mild,” Nicolelis explained, “If you add up all causes of death in the last two months, we had more deaths in those two months in 2022 than in the same two months in 2021.” In January and February of last year, Brazil was experiencing the wave of deaths provoked by the Gamma variant, which would reach its peak in March and April, driven by the reopening of schools.

Today, one month after the start of compulsory in-person learning and with only 45 percent of children between 5 and 11 having taken the first shot of the vaccine, there is a new outbreak of cases among children in this age group in Brazil. A recent Fiocruz bulletin showed that the number of daily cases of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in children aged 5 to 11 is already equal to its peak in the last week of 2021, with 400 cases per day. Fiocruz warns that “preliminary laboratory data suggest a halt in the drop in positive results for SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19).”

On March 4, Belo Horizonte, the capital of Minas Gerais, registered an increase in COVID-19 ICU bed occupancy from 40.1 percent to 43.7 percent in 24 hours. Today, the occupancy of pediatric ICU beds is 100 percent in Salvador, capital of Bahia, and the Federal District.

The increase in COVID-19 infections and hospitalizations contrasts with the response of the government and the media, with news about the pandemic having disappeared from the front pages of major newspapers even before the start of the war in Ukraine. Faced with the current situation, Bolsonaro, following the actions of governments and ruling classes around the world, tweeted on Thursday that his Health Ministry is “studying the downgrading the current situation of COVID-19 in Brazil to endemic,” with a decision expected in the coming days.

At almost the same time, São Paulo state Governor João Doria announced that mask mandates in open places will be dropped starting on March 9. In Rio de Janeiro state, mask mandates in any establishment are now to be decided by each city hall, and the Federal District and Belo Horizonte have completely dropped their mandates.

Public transportation after lifting of mask mandate in Rio de Janeiro. (credits: Agência Brasil)

Last week, São Paulo state Health Secretary Rossieli Soares declared that a decision will be made in the next two weeks on the wearing of masks inside school classrooms. Before being barred by the court this Saturday, mask mandates for children under 12 had already been dropped in the state of Rio Grande do Sul since February 26.

The statements by Bolsonaro and the governors criminally ignore the experience with the pandemic over the past two years. The continuous transmission of SARS-CoV-2 allowed the emergence of more transmissible mutations and the re-infection of people already infected by the virus. Although it has not yet become significant in Brazil, the more transmissible Omicron subvariant BA.2 is already the dominant strain in several countries.

On CNN Brasil, the vice-president of the Brazilian Society of Infectology, Alexandre Naime Barbosa, said about the subvariant: “We can say that in the next two months, the tendency is that there will be a drop in the number of cases, a drop in the number of hospitalizations. This if no variant arises. Now, if BA.2 starts to predominate, we may have problems within six, eight, or 12 weeks.”

After months of Omicron being declared “mild” by governments and the corporate media around the world, the pandemic is said to be reaching a supposed “endemic” stage, where large-scale death becomes acceptable.

Vaccination has been promoted as the only measure to control the virus, which should be treated like the flu. The misleading use of the concept of endemic by the Bolsonaro administration, following in the footsteps of Joe Biden’s administration in the US, is intended to justify the acceptance of a “new normal” of mass death and millions of people suffering the effects of long COVID.

Among the scientists denouncing the adoption of “endemic” COVID-19, Australian epidemiologist, Dr. Raina MacIntyre, explained:

“Denial of the science of epidemiology is widespread, even among ‘experts.’ We are told repeatedly that SARS-CoV-2 will become ‘endemic.’ But it will never be endemic because it is an epidemic disease and always will be. The key difference is spread. As an epidemic disease, SARS-CoV-2 will always find the unvaccinated, under-vaccinated, or people with waning immunity and spread rapidly in those groups. Typically, true epidemic infections are spread from person to person, the worst being airborne transmission, and display a waxing and waning pattern such as we have already seen with multiple waves of SARS-CoV-2. Cases rise rapidly over days or weeks, as we have seen Alpha, Delta and Omicron. No truly endemic disease—malaria, for example—does this.”

Moreover, in conjunction with the “endemic” narrative, the campaign for the end of protective measures against COVID-19 creates the conditions for the rampant exploitation of the working class, with ever-increasing pressure for workers with symptoms to return to workplaces, and children to remain in schools regardless of the risk of outbreaks to ensure that their parents go into crowded factories, warehouses and other workplaces to ensure the profits of big corporations.

The vaccine is a critical component in fighting the pandemic, but the campaign by the media and governments for acceptance of the pandemic are showing their catastrophic effect in the lowering of vaccination rates. Only 40.37 percent of people over 18 took the booster shot throughout Brazil, and in the state of São Paulo the number of booster shots given dropped from 1,734,966 in the second week of January to 443,662 last week.

In opposition to the capitalist governments’ campaign, forcing the population to accept the “new normal” of mass COVID-19 infections and death, the working class must fight to build a massive movement to end the pandemic.

Only seriously applied public health measures like temporary lockdowns, massive testing and contact tracing, vaccination of the entire world population and mask mandates are capable of ending large-scale infection and death.

Understanding the need for collective protective measures is decisive for the implementation of an elimination-eradication program. On the Facebook page of the Rank-and-File Committee for Safe Education in Brazil (CBES-BR), workers spoke favorably to this demand, denouncing the removal of restrictions against COVID-19.

Karla, a mother in the Federal District, denounced the campaign for the end of mask mandates and the covering up of the situation of COVID-19 in the schools: “Here in the FD, the governor has again dropped mask mandates in open environments. There is no news about the situation in schools, it has always been covered up and packed with lies, they will never expose any negative situation that there may be.”

She pointed to the possibility of new outbreaks after the Carnaval holiday, which took place last week, denounced the “endemic” narrative and advocated protective measures: “Let’s wait for the post-Carnaval period, where there were many crowds without any care and protection. I haven’t heard anything about the drop of mask mandates in schools. What I have heard today is that the crazy so-called health minister wants to change pandemic to endemic. The only absolute certainty I have is that I will continue wearing masks, keeping my social distance and taking 70 percent alcohol disinfectant with me; I have no difficulty or inconvenience in continuing to protect myself.”

Esmeralda, a teacher in the state of Ceará, criticized the end of mandatory masking in schools: “It seems to me that Rio Grande do Sul is going to dispense with the use of masks. I wouldn’t like the same thing to happen here. Wearing a mask is hard, but very necessary still.”

Academic boycott of Russia: Science in the service of German war policy

Gregor Link

Following the reactionary invasion of Ukraine by the Russian military, the highest levels of German academia are taking measures against Russia that are unprecedented in post-war history. In agreement with the German government, leading research institutions and universities have severed all relations with Russian partner organisations and announced that all ongoing research projects will be put on hold.

Only hours after the intervention began, the Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) announced that “all current and planned” cooperation, “scientific exchange” and all “previous, long-standing cooperation in science and research as well as in vocational training” would be frozen immediately and that there would be “ongoing coordination with the Foreign Ministry and the Chancellery.”

Minister Bettina Stark-Watzinger (Liberal Democrats, FDP) justified the step by saying that the country had “taken its own leave of the international community” and would have to bear “serious consequences.” The Russian intervention was “a blatant breach of international law and cannot be justified by anything.” However, she made it clear to broadcaster Bayrischer Rundfunk that her ministry’s actions were part of a “systemic confrontation” that required the “Bundeswehr [armed forces] to be strengthened” and to “think differently in geopolitical terms” in the future.

German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) main building in Bonn, Germany (Credit: Mkill/Wikimedia)

Almost at the same time, the “Alliance of German Science Organisations” published a statement “strongly supporting” the “consistent action of the Federal Government” against the Russian government. The Alliance includes the German Research Foundation (DFG), the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Fraunhofer and Max Planck Societies (MPG), the Helmholtz and Leibniz Associations, the German Rectors’ Conference, the National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and the government-affiliated Science Council.

The joint statement urges all member institutions “to freeze scientific cooperation with state institutions and business enterprises in Russia with immediate effect until further notice, to ensure that German research funds no longer benefit Russia and that no joint scientific and research policy events take place.”

According to the statement, “no new cooperation projects are to be initiated at present.” Further steps would be discussed “in close consultation with the federal government and other political decision-makers.” The measures are tantamount to breaking off all official academic relations with Russian institutions.

In the days since publishing the declaration, the academic organisations have outdone each other with anti-Russian boycott measures, which despite protestations to the contrary, are no longer directed solely against Vladimir Putin’s regime. The scientific and cultural damage caused by these steps is immeasurable and deeply reactionary.

On Wednesday, for example, the DFG confirmed that with “immediate effect, it is suspending all research projects” between German and Russian scientists that it funds, that it will not accept any German-Russian cooperation or continuation proposals, and that it will not review proposals that have been submitted. In existing cooperation projects, moreover, “no data, samples and equipment as well as other scientific material are to be exchanged” and “no joint events are to be held.”

The presidium of the Max Planck Society, which has not uttered a word of criticism of Western-led wars in the past 30 years, reacted with a one-sided appeal to Russia to immediately cease hostilities in Ukraine. MPG President Martin Stratmann called Russian President Vladimir Putin a “dictator” who “blatantly threatens the peoples of Europe with a nuclear strike” and announced that he would not tolerate any staff who publicly supported the Russian president.

On the same day, the DAAD decided to halt “application opportunities for Russia scholarships” and to cancel “selections for DAAD scholarships to Russia.” German scholarship holders who have already been selected will also be unable to receive financial support for a stay in Russia at present. There are approximately 750 cooperation projects and 100 DAAD scholarship holders in Russia.

The service, which is close to and funded by the Foreign Ministry, also expects German universities to immediately “suspend all DAAD-funded project activities with partner institutions in Russia and Belarus.” This threatens to bring university exchanges between Germany and the two countries to an almost complete standstill.

Several state rectors’ conferences, as well as countless individual universities and colleges, have already put most or all their academic relations with Russian institutions on ice. A survey by Forschung & Lehre names, among others, the three universities in Berlin, the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, the Bauhaus University in Weimar as well as the universities of Brandenburg, North Rhine-Westphalia, Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg.

The University of Erfurt even went so far as to suggest that for the next two semesters, Russian students should not come to Germany. As the state rectors’ conferences explained in public statements, the measures were taken in each case “in consultation with the Ministry of Science.”

The comprehensive boycott of Russian science by Germany’s academic establishment is unique in Europe and of hardly foreseeable consequence. As reported by Die Zeit, the German action threatens projects such as the €3 billion construction of the particle accelerator FAIR (Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research in Europe), polar and climate research, the international nuclear fusion reactor ITER—and even the Geneva-based particle physics research centre CERN, where almost 900 scientists from Russia are currently working.

Helmut Dosch, head of the German Electron Synchrotron (DESY) in Hamburg, was particularly aggressive. He compared the Russian invasion to “September 11” in Die Zeit and declared: “When the free world is attacked by a neo-imperialist kleptocrat, we hit back with full force.”

He said that to prevent technology transfers to Russia “at all costs,” he had already halted all collaborative projects, had withdrawn papers submitted to journals such as Nature and Science, and had arranged for visiting Russian scientists at the institution to leave Germany by the end of last week.

Punishing Russian academics and students for a government policy that is rejected by a large proportion of them has no progressive content whatsoever. On the contrary, it is an aggressive act, accompanied by a furious anti-Russia campaign in culture and public life, designed to demonise everything Russian and to put science at the service of foreign and war policy.

DAAD President Joybrato Mukherjee, for example, stressed to journalists that his service’s actions were part of an “overall strategy of the German government and the European Union to isolate Russia.” In the face of a “huge foreign, defence and security policy challenge” the likes of which “have not been seen in Europe since the Second World War,” he said, “investing in our defence readiness and investing in foreign cultural and educational policy are not opposites.”

Referring to a DAAD key issues paper from October last year, which had called for the development of a strategy to “manage unavoidable refugee movements” in “fragile contexts,” Mukherjee demanded a “gigantically large support programme” from the federal government on Tuesday. It should “strengthen the anti-government forces” in Russia, bring Ukrainian scientists to Germany and set up “leadership programmes for future leaders” who “will take on leadership tasks in Ukraine after the situation stabilises later on.”

The fact that the top echelons of the German academic establishment are so willing to go along with Berlin’s war policy against Russia brings back memories of the darkest chapters of German history and, at the same time, confirms the struggle of the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) against the transformation of universities into compliant cadres of German militarism.

As early as the Weimar Republic, the DFG, in particular, had supported anti-Slavic propaganda on which the Nazis’ war of extermination was based. After the Nazis were brought to power in 1933, key DFG scientists welcomed Hitler’s regime and joined in its aims of their own free will. The Nazi’s Volksforschung (“people research”) and research into “racial hygiene” funded by the DFG to the tune of billions, culminated in the drafting of the “General Plan East,” which envisaged the extermination of the Slavic population in Eastern Europe and was put into practice in the Nazis’ war of extermination.

After Hitler came to power, the professors of the Weimar Republic swung behind him, practised self-imposed conformity, expelled Jewish academics from their ranks and enthusiastically participated in the mobilisation against the Soviet Union. Even today, it is professors like Herfried Münkler and Jörg Baberowski who are whitewashing the historical crimes of German imperialism to promote a third German grab for world power.

The DFG database lists no fewer than nine funding projects in support of Baberowski—a professor who portrays the Nazis’ war of extermination as the result of the Red Army’s conduct of the war. As for Münkler, he recently called in Die Welt for European nuclear warheads for “a new order of great power rivalry.”

European Union employs double standards on refugees from Ukraine, discriminates against non-Ukrainians

Martin Kreickenbaum

More than 1.5 million people have fled Ukraine since the beginning of the war on 24 February. The UN Refugee Aid Organization (UNHCR) has described it as the “fastest growing refugee crisis since the Second World War” and expects up to four million refugees. However, while the European Union is granting protection to Ukrainian citizens for an initial year, refugees from other countries are being singled out and excluded.

Last Friday, for the first time, the European Union enacted the directive on the “mass influx” of refugees, which must be implemented by all Member States. The directive grants refugees the right to reside for an initial period of one year without going through a complex asylum procedure, with the option of extending it by a further two years. Refugees are also immediately entitled to social benefits, accommodation and access to education for children of school age.

A woman feeds her daughter after arriving at the border crossing in Medyka, Poland (AP Photo/Visar Kryeziu)

Poland has so far welcomed a total of almost one million refugees, half of whom are children. Last weekend alone, around 250,000 refugees arrived in Ukraine’s western neighbour via the Medyka and Korczowa border crossings. By Sunday, around 227,000 refugees had been registered in Romania, 163,000 in Hungary and 114,000 in Slovakia. In Moldova, which is not part of the EU, more than 250,000 people have already been admitted from Ukraine.

Aid for the refugees has mainly been organised thanks to an overwhelming willingness of the population to help. Government agencies are very cautious and hardly able to coordinate volunteers offering aid. In Poland, thousands of volunteers are working to sort and distribute donations, organise ridesharing or provide accommodation. The majority of the refugees are accommodated directly with relatives, acquaintances or former neighbours. Already before the outbreak of the war, almost one million immigrants from Ukraine lived and worked in Poland.

According to official data, around 37,500 refugees from Ukraine have been registered so far in Germany. Most of them are arriving to Berlin by train, where volunteers are also primarily involved in providing shelter, clothing and food for people seeking protection.

The German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser (Social Democrats) told the Bild am Sonntag that “we want to save lives, it doesn’t matter about the passport,” and claimed that all refugees from Ukraine would be admitted regardless of their nationality. But the reality is quite different.

The Tageszeitung reported on the systematic sorting out of refugees at the German-Polish border. Border guards of the Federal Police then go through the fully occupied trains and prevent people with dark skin from continuing. A police spokesman confirmed that the number of refugees who had to leave the trains to establish their identity in Frankfurt (Oder) was already in the three-digit range on Thursday, commenting, “And yes, most of them are from Africa.” The federal police, however, do not stop people based on their appearance, the spokesman insisted.

This claim lacks all credibility. According to official information, the border guards are looking for so-called “free riders,” as the Federal Police puts it. This refers to people who would “exploit” the situation in order to get to Germany. They are then accused of “unauthorised border crossing,” which the police say must be prosecuted. This inhumane criminalisation of refugees who are not in a position to legally acquire a visa almost inevitably leads to illegal “racial profiling” by the police.

This discrimination on the basis of the skin colour and ethnic origin of refugees demonstrates the hypocrisy of the EU’s refugee policy. According to official information, the temporary one-year right to reside is also granted to people who do not have a Ukrainian passport and who were living in Ukraine to work or study. However, evidence is required to prove permanent residency in Ukraine. Anyone who cannot provide this evidence is excluded. In addition, Ukraine has been a transit country for thousands of refugees from Afghanistan, Syria, Chechnya, Somalia and Iraq, who are now also not covered by the EU’s reception regime.

The division of refugees into those who are welcome and those who are unwelcome already takes place in Ukraine. Last week, the French television station France24 reported on students from Africa who had been rejected at the border with Poland.

Moustapha Bagui Sylla from Guinea, who fled from the city of Kharkiv, reported: “They stopped us at the border and declared ‘blacks are not allowed.’”

Michael from Nigeria added: “They don’t let Africans in. People with dark skin and without a European passport are not allowed to cross the border. They’re pushing us back just because we’re black. And yet we are all human beings. They should not discriminate against us because of our skin colour.”

Bagui Sylla went on to say that the Ukrainian soldiers had told him that they were rejecting non-Europeans on the orders of the Polish border guards.

News site InfoMigrants contacted refugees from Bangladesh who were to be deported by the Ukrainian authorities and were stuck in a deportation prison near the city of Mykolaiv in the middle of a combat zone.

Further refugees are being detained near the city of Kivertsi in a deportation complex whose grounds have recently been converted into a base for the Ukrainian military. “Russia has mainly attacked military facilities. That’s why we’re afraid of being bombed. They still locked us up here with hundreds of migrants from India, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Arab countries, including women and children,” Riadh Malik reported.

Confronted with the unequal treatment of refugees from Ukraine, Antonio Vitorino, Director General of the International Organisation for Migration, expressed concern about the violence and xenophobia against refugees from third countries who wish to leave Ukraine: “To put it plainly, discrimination on the grounds of race, ethnic origin, nationality or residence status is unacceptable.”

However, Vitorino did not mention the crying unequal treatment of Ukrainian refugees vis-à-vis the people who were prevented from entering the EU last autumn and winter by more than ten thousand Polish border guards using tear gas and pepper spray on the Belarusian-Polish border. Neither journalists nor aid organisations were granted access to the border area. At least 15 refugees from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan froze or starved to death in the forests, including women and children, due to the relentless determination to repel refugees at all costs at the EU’s external borders.

The EU member states continue to sort out the “unwelcome refugees” after their arrival. For example, last Wednesday at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, the Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijarto stated that although third-country nationals are allowed to enter Hungary, the Hungarian government only “organises transport to the nearest airport so that they can return to their countries of origin.” In other words, they are deported in cold blood.

The Bulgarian Prime Minister Kiril Petkov most clearly expressed the inhuman distinction between welcome and unwelcome refugees. The refugees from Ukraine are “not the refugees we are used to,” he told the press. “They are Europeans, smart and educated people, some of whom are even IT specialists. No European country is afraid of them.”

The same racist tropes were employed by many journalists who reported on the refugees. CBS and BBC correspondents stressed that the refugees are different because Ukraine is “not a third-world country,” such as “Afghanistan or Iraq,” but “European and civilized.”

The main reason for the unequal treatment of refugees is obvious. The refugees from Ukraine are fleeing the Russian intervention. Although NATO has provoked the invasion by its aggressive war drive against Russia, the refugees are shown exclusively as victims of “Russian aggression.” They are used to incite hostility against everything Russian and to justify NATO’s arms deliveries to Ukraine and plans for rearmament and war.

This does not change the EU’s thoroughly reactionary refugee policy. Even if the borders are currently open to refugees from Ukraine and they are spared the humiliating and oppressive asylum procedure, the walls of Fortress Europe remain insurmountable for all other refugees. More than 1,500 people fleeing the wars waged by the imperialist powers in Africa and the Middle East lose their lives every year in the Mediterranean alone.

In Libya, at least one hundred thousand refugees are being held in detention camps under appalling conditions. If they manage to escape from the camps, a life-threatening crossing in tiny inflatable boats across the Mediterranean and the associated risk of drowning or being brutally pushed back by the European border guards awaits them.

Sri Lankan government tables sham amendments to draconian anti-terrorism law

Sanjaya Jayasekera

Early last month, the Sri Lankan Foreign Minister G. L. Peiris tabled an amendment bill in parliament to the notorious Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) with debate to begin on March 8. Two petitions filed in the Supreme Court challenging the unconstitutionality of the amendments are yet to be heard.

The amendments, which introduce various cosmetic changes while maintaining its extra-judicial procedures, are a tactical manoeuvre to try and deflect domestic and international criticism of the government’s grave and ongoing abuses of human rights.

The PTA was enacted in 1979 by the United National Party (UNP) government of President J. R. Jayawardene under the pretext of combating “terrorism”—i.e., militant Tamil groups.

Colombo systematically employed it in its anti-Tamil provocations that preceded the nearly 30-year brutal war, which erupted in 1983 against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). The conflict ended with the military defeat in May 2009 of the separatist organisation and the death of tens of thousands of Tamil civilians. The war was used as a communal weapon to divide the working class along Sinhala, Tamil, Muslim ethnic lines.

Gotabaya Rajapaksa (AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena)

The hated PTA allows arrests without warrant for supposed “unlawful activities” and the detention of people for up to 18 months in places decided by the defence minister. Police have the power to use confessions by “suspects,” usually extracted under torture, as evidence in prosecutions against them.

It has been used by every successive government over the past 43 years for arbitrary arrests, detentions and torture. The UNP government also used it to suppress widespread rural unrest in 1988–1990 in the island’s south, in which tens of thousands of majority Sinhala youth were brutally murdered.

The Rajapakse government’s main amendments, which do not in any way change the repressive character of the PTA, include:

* Reducing the period of detention from 18 months to 12 months.

* Enabling magistrates to visit the place of detention, allowing detainees access to lawyers and relatives, allowing them to challenge their detention in higher courts, and enabling the appeals court or the high court to grant bail, pending trial. These measures are already legally available but rarely exercised.

* Removal of the clause prohibiting the publication of matters relating to offences under this law, or the incitement of violence or that which may cause violence, religious, racial or communal disharmony or ill-will. There are already other security laws that include these sweeping prohibitions.

Preisdent Gotabaya Rajapakse came to power in November 2019 on the basis of a reactionary “national security first” campaign following the Easter Sunday terrorist bombings of Catholic churches and big hotels by an ISIS-backed Islamic fundamentalist group in April that year. In the wake of the attacks, which killed 270 and injured more than 500 people, racist groups, encouraged by all the main parties, including the SLPP, launched violent attacks on Muslim communities.

In January 2020, the Rajapakse cabinet decided to abandon the Counter Terrorism Act (CTA) that had been drawn up by the previous Sirisena-Wickremesinghe government, and declared that it would continue with the PTA. Like the current amendments the proposed CTA supposedly protected democratic rights, but contained the central police-state provisions of the PTA.

Announcing the Rajapakse government’s decision to abandon the CTA, Cabinet member Bandula Gunawardena declared: “The PTA is back in the statute book, empowering the police and armed forces to face any threat posed to national security from any quarter.”

Along with its anti-Tamil propaganda, the Rajapakse government intensified its anti-Muslim provocations, arresting a series of Muslims on frame up charges under the PTA. These included the detention of human rights lawyer Hejaaz Hizbullah, poet and teacher Ahnaf Jazeem, Azath Sally, a former Western Province governor, and member of parliament Rishad Bathiudeen.

Jazeem, who was arrested on false allegations of advocating Muslim extremism, was detained for one year and then remanded for another seven months. He detailed in the court and to the media, including the World Socialist Web Site, how he was subjected to continuous physical and mental torture, forcing him to make self-incriminating admissions until he was released in December.

In March last year, the Rajapakse announced the Prevention of Terrorism (De-radicalization from holding violent extremist religious ideology) Regulations under the PTA. In the name of “rehabilitation” and “reintegration” of detainees into society, the measure prolonged the pre-trial detention for another two years.

Along with the PTA, Sri Lankan governments have also used the Public Security Ordinance and related emergency regulations, the Essential Public Services Act, International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights Act and Computer Crimes Act, among other legislation, to intimidate journalists, writers and political opponents. Hundreds of Muslims and Tamils have been arrested under the PTA and remain in jail while some so-called LTTE suspects have been imprisoned for years.

At the end of this month, the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) is scheduled to review a resolution passed last year on Sri Lanka. The US-backed resolution presented by a UNHRC Core Group, including Britain, Canada, Germany and France, called for an investigation into war crimes and human right violations under the PTA and other laws.

The US and other major powers sponsoring the resolution previously backed Colombo’s communalist war and are guilty of war crimes and the suppression of democratic rights elsewhere in the world.

The real purpose of the UNHRC resolution is to pressure the Sri Lankan government to end its relations with Beijing and unconditionally support Washington’s aggressive military preparations against China.

For its part, the EU has threatened to withdraw economic concessions under the Generalized Scheme of Preferences Plus (GSP+). Last June, an EU parliamentary resolution called for the repeal of the PTA and other laws violating human rights. It also called on the EU Commission to consider temporarily ending Sri Lanka’s GSP facility. This would be a major blow to the cash-strapped Sri Lankan government which is desperately trying to increase export incomes.

The US and EU are the largest export destinations for Sri Lanka. Colombo’s sham amendments to the PTA are a desperate and transparent attempt to deflect this international pressure.

Several civil rights organisations and a number of political parties, including Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB), the main parliamentary opposition party, have cynically demanded reform of the PTA or its replacement with a new “anti-terror law.”

The SJB is a breakaway party from the UNP, which originally enacted the PTA. SJB leaders, moreover, were members of previous regimes, including in the previous Sirisena-Wickremesinghe government, that suppressed basic democratic rights.

The pro-US Tamil National Alliance (TNA), the main parliamentary party of the Tamil elite, is currently involved in a public petition campaign for repeal of the PTA.

The campaign is utterly hypocritical. The TNA backed the Sirisena-Wickremasinghe government’s planned Counter Terrorism Act (CTA) and proposed amendments. Its leaders, including R. Sambandan from Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF), boycotted parliament in 1979, allowing passage of the PTA.

The TNA petition campaign has nothing to do with fighting for the democratic rights of Tamil masses but part of the organisation’s support for a US-led UNHRC rights campaign which it hopes will help secure a better deal for the Tamil elites in the north and east of the country.