Chinese vice premier signals shift from Zero-COVID based on lie that Omicron is mild

Benjamin Mateus

In the most explicit official acknowledgment that China is lifting its “dynamic Zero-COVID” policy, during a symposium Wednesday at the National Health Commission (NHC), Chinese Vice Premier Sun Chunlan remarked, “The country is facing a new situation, and new tasks in epidemic prevention and control as the pathogenicity of the Omicron virus weakens, more people are vaccinated, and experience in containing the virus is accumulated.”

Sun, who has been overseeing pandemic efforts, added, “The Party central committee and the State Council have always put people’s health and safety first, and optimized and improved prevention and control measures according to the time and situation … taking small steps continuously.”

It is worth recalling that Sun, who had been present during the initial phase of the partial lockdowns in Shanghai last March, had insisted at the time on the continuation of the Zero-COVID policy even against Omicron. Absent in her statement on Wednesday was any reference to the dynamic application of Zero-COVID.

Instead, Sun said that “preventing the epidemic” would take place through vaccination, especially of the elderly, making medical resources available, and preparing therapeutics, all the while “stabilizing the economy.” Disturbingly, she also said that a critical component of the new approach to COVID will be “traditional Chinese medicine.”

The essence of all this is the turn from a comprehensive elimination strategy aimed at stopping viral transmission to a mitigationist strategy, which accepts an unspecified level of COVID-19. Every country or region that has shifted from elimination to mitigation, including New Zealand, Hong Kong, Vietnam and more countries, has seen rapid, massive surges of infections and deaths.

Residents walk past stores in the district of Haizhu in southern China's Guangzhou province, Thursday, Dec. 1, 2022. (AP Photo) [AP Photo/AP Photo]

According to Chinese health authorities, there were over 36,000 COVID-19 infections across mainland China on Wednesday which appears to have plateaued compared to recent days. However, in the capital city of Beijing, there was a record-setting 5,000-plus cases, while Guangzhou and Chongqing both continued to report over 6,000 cases.

Despite these high figures, Beijing, Chengdu, Chongqing and Guangzhou have lifted their limited lockdown measures and allowed the resumption of businesses at shopping malls, including indoor dining services. Some cities now allow close contacts to quarantine at home and forgo testing for some groups. These shifts only cloud the scope of the surge in new cases where the epidemiological portrait had previously been sharp and exact.

In response to Sun’s comments, Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, warned, “In the absence of a road map for an orderly transition, her remarks might trigger unintended responses at the local level that make a rapid, nationwide surge of cases more likely.”

Even The Atlantic, a leading purveyor of pandemic misinformation, soberly acknowledged the potential for immense public health casualties in China if measures are loosened quickly and the virus is allowed to exploit the immunologically naive population during the cold winter months, when nearly everyone is sheltered indoors. The article noted that “a massive wave of new Omicron infections could overwhelm critical-care units and leave 1.55 million people dead.”

The claim that Omicron is “milder” and, therefore, pandemic measures may be loosened entirely is a relative matter compared to the Alpha and Delta phases of the pandemic. But it is a dangerous proposition in the face of an immune-evading and highly contagious pathogen that remains quite lethal and continues to kill more people globally than tuberculosis.

Since the first Omicron wave ended in late February, the US has tallied another 120,000 COVID-19 deaths in the last nine months, a figure far higher than the deadliest flu season in the previous two decades. By late February, population seroprevalence from prior SARS-CoV-2 infection had reached nearly 60 percent and large percentages of the population had been vaccinated and boosted with mRNA vaccines.

For Sun Chunlan to suggest that Omicron’s pathogenicity is much lower is a ruse that the Chinese working class must not accept. A population entirely naive to infections and an elderly population that has barely been boosted makes for a dangerous public health threat, especially for workers who will be crammed into factories to ensure Apple iPhones and other commodities are made available for purchase in time for the holiday shopping season.

The change in tone by Sun and the CCP, increasingly acknowledging the end of Zero-COVID, is also their response to the series of protests across China which took place over the weekend. These protests were centered among affluent middle class layers demanding an end to lockdowns and mass testing, which they perceive as impediments to their lifestyles.

The torrent of propaganda unleashed by the Western media in response to these protests has attempted to lump them together with far different protests staged by migrant workers in Guangzhou this week and Foxconn workers in Zhengzhou last week against unsafe conditions.

The recent protests among migrant workers in Guangzhou took place after garment factory workers exposed or infected with COVID-19 were removed from their apartments and placed in quarantine hospitals. Motivated by cost-cutting efforts justified by the “Twenty Articles” released November 11, which initiated the lifting of Zero-COVID, the local government kicked the workers out of the hospitals based on the new diminished time frames.

These migrant workers were then sent back to their remote villages and older cities, where strict anti-COVID measures remain, but were not granted travel passes out of fear of spreading infections to their communities.

These workers are thus waiting in limbo, unable to return home and banned from the factories, while having to take refuge under bridges because they lack the necessary travel passes. Many do not wish to go “home,” concerned about bringing the infection back to their families and elders but are being provided with no shelter to safely quarantine.

In their angry demonstrations, the occasional use of the slogan, “No lockdowns!” does not have the same meaning as the “freedom” slogans of the middle class students. Indeed, these demonstrations by workers will be the primary targets for repression by the CCP as the social crisis deepens in China with the lifting of Zero-COVID.

Global Health Corps Paid Fellowship 2023/2024

Application Deadline: 11th January 2023

Eligible Countries: GHC welcomes young professionals from Burundi, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Malawi, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe to apply for paid 13 month fellowships with health organizations in Malawi, Rwanda, Uganda, and Zambia. 

To be taken at (country): Health organizations in Malawi, Rwanda, Uganda, and Zambia. 

About the Award: Global Health Corps is building the next generation of diverse health leaders. We offer a range of paid fellowship positions with health organizations in Malawi, Rwanda, Uganda and Zambia and the opportunity to develop as a transformative leader in the health equity movement. Everyone has a role to play in the health equity movement.

Type: Fellowship

Eligibility: Global Health Corps Fellowship is looking for a global and diverse group of passionate and talented emerging leaders who:

• Are willing to push themselves outside their comfort zones, to embrace failure, and to approach a personally transformative year – with many challenges in the day-to-day – with integrity, humility, and self-reflection.
• Are ready to strengthen and use their voice — the most powerful tool for change that you have — in order to engage others, create space for critical conversation, and effect meaningful social change in global health.
• Are excited by a design-thinking approach to building a better world, creatively embracing wicked problems and ready to embrace failure as learning.
• Are committed to bringing your best and doing the work in the day-to-day, showing up as a critical part of the global health equity movement.
• Are passionate about social justice in global health and about finding and building their voices to effect health impact.
• Are committed to inclusivity and collaboration across sectors, cultures, and borders of all kinds, while investing in and supporting others.

Selection Criteria: By the start of the fellowship,  fellows must:

• Be 30 years or younger.
• Hold a bachelor’s or undergraduate university degree.
• Be proficient in English.

Number of Awardees: Not specified

Value of Global Health Corps Paid Fellowship: Yearlong paid placements within partner organizations in Malawi, Rwanda, Uganda and Zambia to address real-time capacity gaps and strengthen health systems.

• In addition to on-the-job training, we engage fellows in a comprehensive leadership training curriculum to build effective, empathetic, and innovative leaders of tomorrow.
• Fellow receive additional logistical and financial support during the year, including:
  • Monthly living and utilities stipend
  • Housing
  • Health insurance
  • Professional development grant of $600 and completion award of $1500
  • Travel coverage to and from placement site, all trainings, and retreats

Duration of Fellowship: 1 year

How to Apply for Global Health Corps Paid Fellowship:

• Applications for our 2023-2024 Africa fellowship class are now open until January 11, 2023. For more information, read on and check out our Africa Fellowship FAQs page and Find a fellowship role

• It is important to go through the Application Requirements before applying.

Visit Fellowship Webpage for details

In the Netherlands, a Discriminatory Algorithm has Impoverished Thousands of Families

Alexia Eychenne

Photograph Source: F.Eveleens – CC BY 3.0

Aided by an algorithm, the Dutch tax office has plunged into distress tens of thousands of families – in particular, foreign-born mothers, in wrongfully demanding from them staggering sums. The state is proving incapable of setting things right.

Rotterdam. Each day, Sabrina Sliep picks up her telephone to listen to the same despairing stories. There are families evicted from their residence, today camping with relatives or friends, mothers who work two jobs to keep their heads above water, parents who struggle with depression. Personal trajectories broken one day by a letter from the tax office and which remain fractured. “Some need counselling for what action to take, others just cry and want to be listened to”, sighs the nurse, emotional, in a café on Rotterdam’s periphery.

Sabrina Sliep provides a basic service for ‘Lotgenotencontact’ [‘fellow sufferers’ contact], a crisis hot line established in March 2022 for and by the victims of the ‘Toeslagenaffaire’ [the ‘family allocations’ affair]. Like them, the forty-something year old is facing demands from the tax office and the office responsible for the payment and control of social benefits for a reimbursement of a colossal ‘overpayment’ of the order of €70,000.

Like others, she has had no right to any recourse, and no explanation. Given that she lives alone with her two children, she has put her life in suspension to clear a debt while having no idea of its origins. Since 2012, 25,000 to 35,000 families could have been victims of this affair, product of a succession of failures of the state: presumption of guilt towards honest households, blind confidence in a xenophobic algorithm, intransigence of an administration deaf to warning signals and distress.

At Eindhoven, in the South-East of the Netherlands, in a workers’ quarter characterised by cookie cutter dwellings, Leigh-Anne Jansen recounts how she had received the first letter from the tax office in 2014. The young woman, today 32, was then in training and her husband, of Turkish origin, worked at the factory. The couple received assistance in financing child-minding for their 3 year old daughter. Around 583,000 households receive this allocation to cover a part of the costs of childcare of parents working or in training. The sum can cover the bulk of the bill of a creche or employment of a nanny but it fluctuates according to numerous parameters. Hence there is a more elevated risk of payment errors than for other forms of benefits.

In the Netherlands, the government has acquired a contempt for welfare measures. After the 1980s, the struggle against welfare fraud became a political hobby horse. In 2010 and 2012, the agreements between the coalition of the current Prime Minister, Mark Rutte (from the centre right party VVD [People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy]), promised to further enhance surveillance while slashing, in the name of efficiency, the staff of the dedicated services.

Beginning 2013, to augment the controls at least cost, an algorithm attributes to each beneficiary a risk score, from 0 to 1, according to the supposed probability that the claim should be incorrect or fraudulent. It functions as a ‘black box’; even the agents responsible for the dossiers after reporting don’t understand the criteria.

The consequences multiply

In 2014, Leigh-Anne Jansen and her husband are summoned to prove that their allocation has been used to pay for childcare. They furnish the particulars. “But the tax office just demands more documents, without specifying what document they want”, Jansen notes.

Then the allocation itself stops and a formal demand arrives to reimburse “€7,000, then €9,000, €5,000 …”, linked to the years of benefits that the couple is supposed to have received erroneously. Her requests for explanations stay dead letter. Leigh-Anne Jansen has no alternative but to pay up. “I have no more assistance, nothing to pay the nanny. I have stopped my studies to stay in the house and my husband flogs himself to work longer hours. We have borrowed money from friends to head off the bailiff and have moved house so many times in panic that we are broke.”

Everywhere in the Netherlands, parents describe the same Kafkaesque spiral. At the beginning of the 2010s, the lawyer Jaap Spigt is approached by 60 clients of a nursery school in Capelle aan den IJssel, a commune to the East of Rotterdam. One family has totted up €70,000 of debt, another more than €130,000 …

Rather than receive the benefit in their own account and then pay the creche, the families had accepted the demand of the creche’s director that the allocation be paid directly to the establishment. They discover much later that the employee responsible had overstated the hours to inflate its reimbursements from the state. This was a scam practised by other organisations at the time.

But in the eyes of the tax office, little import that the families have been unaware of the deception and had pulled no profit from it. “I have even asked them: ‘At least give them a delay to be able to pay, or let them reimburse more reasonable sums’, but they don’t want to hear”, remembers the lawyer Jaap Spigt. In nearly forty years of career, the criminal lawyer notes that he has never been so taken aback by a dossier. “Like in a game of dominoes, the families have suffered one catastrophe after another which finds their origins in the Toeslagenaffaire.”

One time accused of fraud, the parents are no longer able to seek any benefits for childcare. Those who have not the means to finance a place in a creche or hire a nanny abandon their employment or their training. More often than not, these are the mothers. At Capelle aan den IJssel, the municipality has released funds to avoid evictions of the most indebted renters. But elsewhere in the country, the cases pile up.

Because they receive the benefits the most consequential, the most precarious households – single mothers for example – have been confronted with quantitatively the most significant reimbursements. To settle their debt, the administration has engaged in aggressive recovery tactics: it cuts their other subsidies (rental assistance, family allowances …) and deducts directly from their bank accounts this that it judges its due. “Between 2014 and 2019, the tax office has left me only €800 per month to live”, notes Sabrina Sliep. “I have dropped my plan to retrain. I have had to entrust my children to my ex-partner to keep working and to not go down completely.”

In the centre of Rotterdam, Estephanie Zut, of Dominican origin, also single mother, seller of hair products, claims to have suffered the same fate: “I’ve had to throw other activities to one side, to work seven days on seven to survive. It was crazy, but I believed myself alone and I was ashamed”.

“Over the years, we have notified all the relevant authorities, but everywhere, the doors close on us”, sighs Willeke Ravenna, the ex-manager of the creche at Capelle aan den IJssel. Ms Ravenna (who was unaware of the scam perpetrated by her establishment’s administration) observes, helpless, some families topple over into poverty, some parents “broken from head to toe”, some couples split up.

The lawyer Eva Gonzalez Perez moves heaven and earth. Chance has it that her husband should be running a creche in which 157 clients find themselves accused of fraud. In taking their files before the courts, helped by a source from inside the tax office, this legal expert of Eindhoven has accumulated proof of dysfunctionality. She recounts: “I discover the existence of lists of fraudsters, but the tax office refuses to explain why such people are listed there. I also have proof that the taxation staff receive instructions to not furnish to justice all the documents in their possession.

In 2017, seized by Eva Gonzalez Perez, the Dutch Ombudsman looks into the first group of families and concludes that the taxation authorities have not proved the existence of fraud. This which has not prevented them from taking action “in presupposing that fraud was involved”, without consideration for the distress provoked by such “disproportionate” sanctions. The Ombudsman demands apologies, and compensation. They will take more than three years to arrive, in spite of other warnings and several overwhelming articles in the press.

It takes a Parliamentary inquiry to transform the story into an affair of state. In December 2020, outraged Deputies accuse the tax office, but also the justice system, which has dismissed the families’ pleas and the legislator – to have “violated the fundamental principles of the state of law”. The parliamentarians denounce an “injustice without precedent” and the doctrine of “all or nothing” which allowed the authorities to sanction the least error as if indicating malintent.

They reproach the authorities for their headlong rush to garner more money and to justify the integrity of the controls, all in seeking to mask to the end the ensuing fiasco. “If they had put an end to the system in 2017 instead of concentrating on covering their errors, we would not have had a scandal of such scale”, regrets Renske Leijten, a Deputy of the Socialist Party and spokesperson for the victims in Parliament, accompanied by his counterpart Pieter Omtzigt (Independent). Leijten notes: “Their denial has driven the families into anguish and poverty”.

A ‘xenophobic machine’

In total, between 2012 and 2019, 25,000 to 35,000 persons have been accused of fraud – wrongly in 94 % of the cases. Among them, a great majority of foreign-born or bi-nationals, select targets of the controls, as the government has belatedly admitted. Nationality counts as a risk factor for the algorithm blindly followed by the taxation agents. But its functioning as a ‘black box’ and its ‘auto-learning’ character which allows the algorithm itself to identify criteria associated with the risk of fraud, have concealed the discrimination, as has denounced Amnesty International in a report on this textbook case of a ‘xenophobic machine’.

Besides, in case of an inquest into a fraud attributed to a beneficiary of foreign origin, the tax office is able to target controls on beneficiaries of the same nationality. The Autoriteit persoonsgevens [the Dutch Commission overseeing personal data protection] has sanctioned this procedure as “illegal and discriminatory”.

In February 2022, the victims have received a letter from the Prime Minister who soberly admits: “Our modus operandi in the past has been prejudicial towards you. You have not committed fraud. We offer you our sincere apologies”. Sabrina Slieps retorts: “I care little for their apologies. I have not seen my children grow up, I have not been able to change professions and to decide how to live my life. All that has affected my mental health and will never be recoverable”.

The victims have begun to receive a lump sum indemnity of €30,000 which, for many, won’t even cover the ‘overpayments’ demanded. Without speaking of the intangible suffering. “I have messed up many things with my youngest daughter because I could only work, work, to avoid destitution”, witnesses Estephanie Zut. “This history has destroyed thousands of lives and of dreams.”

An assistance service has been established to attempt to find some personalised solutions. But numerous families denounce the too complex procedures, which serve only to revive their traumas. Estephanie Zut, irritated, notes: “These last months, I have still threatened to have my lawyer intervene to get a response to my demand for support. Many parents have no longer the energy to keep fighting”.

The Netherlands has not finished with the ‘Toeslagenaffaire’. The psychological and social consequences for the children, for example, involving more than 10,000 victims in turn, is yet to be the subject of inquiries. The Parliamentary Opposition denounces a fake soul searching of the government which has admittedly resigned after this scandal, in January 2021 … only better to return a year later. The Deputy Renske Leijten concludes that “Nobody has shouldered responsibility for this affair. The culture at the head of the administration has not changed, neither the contempt with respect to welfare recipient, nor the lack of transparence”.

As for the algorithms which are claimed to automate fraud detection, they multiply in Europe, including in France, with the same opacity and the same potential for excess. On 5 October [2022], the Dutch Deputy in the European Parliament Samira Rafaela (of the Renew centre-right grouping) has warned the member states in the Strasbourg Parliament in calling to prevent the utilisation of criteria involving ethnic discrimination. Otherwise “this Dutch scandal will not be the only one in Europe”.

Taiwan’s local elections a blow to ruling DPP and Washington

Ben McGrath

Taiwan’s local elections last Saturday resulted in a significant defeat for the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), with the opposition Kuomintang (KMT) securing a majority of the municipality, city, and county seats across the island.

Taiwan Kuomintang party Taipei city mayoral candidate Wayne Chiang celebrates his victory with supporters in Taipei, Taiwan, Saturday, Nov. 26, 2022. [AP Photo/Chiang Ying-ying]

The KMT took control of 13 out of 22 local government seats, including key cities like Taipei and Taoyuan. Notably, the KMT’s Chiang Wan-an, the great-grandson of dictator Chiang Kai-shek, defeated the DPP’s Chen Shih-chung for mayor of Taipei. Chen served as health minister for much of the COVID-19 pandemic. Chiang’s victory brings the KMT back to power in its traditional stronghold, currently held by Ko Wen-je of the minor Taiwan People’s Party (TPP).

The DPP lost two seats, reducing its total to five. Nominal independents took two others, while the TPP took Hsinchu City. A special election will be held December 18 for Chiayi City, which the KMT is also expected to win, bringing the party’s total to 14, the same number held before the election.

The results are less a sign of support for the KMT than an expression of dissatisfaction with the entire political establishment. Voter turnout was low compared to past local elections, with about 60 percent of people participating, compared to 66.11 percent in 2018. Both the DPP and KMT are deeply unpopular, with only 31 percent and 14 percent of people supporting the parties respectively.

The result has been received with apprehension in the US media, concerned over the impact on Washington’s confrontation with Beijing over Taiwan. The Biden administration following on from Trump has provocatively strengthened ties with Taiwan, thereby undermining the One China policy under which the US de-facto has recognized the island as part of China and Beijing as its legitimate government. In doing so, the US has encouraged the Taiwanese nationalist DPP to move towards independence—a step that Beijing has warned it will oppose with force.

In its efforts to goad China into a war over Taiwan, the US has relied on the support of Taiwan’s president Tsai Ing-wen and her DPP. Thus the election result comes as blow to the US, which routinely declares that Tsai and the DPP are the popular representatives of Taiwanese “democracy,” standing up to mainland China’s “aggression.”

Tsai herself attempted to make the local elections a referendum on her government’s handling of relations with Beijing. In a barely disguised challenge to the One China policy, she told a November 12 rally, “I want to tell everyone that the existence of Taiwan and Taiwanese people’s insistence on freedom and democracy are not a provocation to anyone.” She continued: “As president, my calling is to make every effort to let Taiwan still be the Taiwan of the Taiwanese people.”

While economic and social issues were major factors in the election, the result also reflects real fears about Taiwan being transformed into a US pawn for a war with China. Nina Chen, a 50-year-old Taipei resident who voted for Chiang Wan-an told the Wall Street Journal: “What I care [about] the most is peace across the strait because our lives and property are already threatened.”

After the election, President Tsai resigned as head of the DPP, a common and largely symbolic gesture to give the impression someone is “taking responsibility” for the party’s loss. Tsai remains president until the end of her second term in 2024.

The US media has attempted to downplay the significance of the vote, pointing out that the low polls for the KMT indicate that it was unlikely to oust the DPP in the 2024 presidential elections. The KMT established a US-backed dictatorship on Taiwan after being driven out of China in the 1949 Chinese revolution, but following the restoration of capitalism in China has sought closer economic ties with the mainland.

The Wall Street Journal attributed the results to poor weather, election burnout following recent referendums, and COVID restrictions. Its article quoted Wen-ti Sung, a political scientist in the Taiwan Studies Program at Australian National University, who claimed, “We cannot infer this to be a loss for DPP’s China policy platform.”

Certainly, other local issues played a significant role in the election. Taipei’s decision to allow COVID-19 to tear through the population had an impact. In the past week alone, there have been 102,576 new cases, placing Taiwan in the top ten in the world for cases per million people. It also currently has the second-highest deaths per million. Total overall cases stand at 8,313,366 with 14,334 deaths, most occurring since April.

National Taiwan University Professor Chan Chang-chuan, a public health expert, criticized Taipei’s handling of the pandemic in a Facebook post on Monday, writing, “A COVID case, no matter if it ends in recovery, hospitalization, or death, is a very unpleasant experience of illness that has the patient and the patient’s family living in continuous anxiety, fear, and inconvenience for over a month. It is therefore inevitable that the difficult COVID experience affects many people’s election behavior.”

Youth unemployment remains high, with 12.27 percent of 20 to 24-year-olds officially out of work. Wages have been stagnant for more than two decades, with a recent university graduate earning about $1,000 a month now compared to $975 in 2000. For those under 40, 65 percent are in debt.

At the same time, while consumer prices have risen a comparatively low 3.1 percent this year, they have spiked sharply for food and fuel, particularly over the spring and summer when food prices rose 7.4 percent in May. Food prices rose 5.17 percent in October.

The Taiwanese ruling class however has profited during the pandemic, with the economy growing 6.28 percent in 2021, its fastest rate since 2010. The economy grew 3.11 percent in 2020. These social conditions demonstrate the sharp class divide that exists in Taiwan.

Undoubtedly, the worsening social and economic conditions facing working people influenced the votes of many. However, voters in Taiwan have always been acutely conscious of the state of relations across the Taiwan Strait with China. The prospect of being plunged into a US proxy war against China—as has happened to the Ukrainian people—was weighing on their minds as they cast their ballot.

Spain: PSOE-Podemos prepares new repressive laws against strikes, protests

Santiago Guilen & Alejandro López

The Socialist Party (PSOE)-Podemos government is preparing to review the penal code to criminalise protests and strikes, as the worst economic and social crisis in generations propels the working class in Spain and across the world into struggle, intensified by the NATO’s war against Russia in the Ukraine.

The PSOE-Podemos government is claiming that it is reviewing the sedition law, used by it and the previous right-wing Popular Party (PP) government to persecute the Catalan nationalists after the failed secessionist referendum in 2017, as a step to “defuse” the situation in Catalonia.

In words of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez on LaSexta TV, “We have a criminal code which, when it comes to certain crimes, is not comparable with the main European democracies”. The offence would be renamed “aggravated public disorder” and would carry a maximum prison sentence of five years rather than the current 15.

The PP and neo-fascist Vox are mounting a campaign claiming that this measure is tantamount to treason. In a statement, the PP said that Sánchez was “using all the powers of state to pave the way for those who want to combat it”.

The campaign on both sides, however, obscures the real aim of the “review”: the criminalisation of protests and strikes. The new proposed wording of the crime of public disorder states: “Those who, acting in a group and threatening public peace, carry out acts of violence or intimidation will be punished with a prison sentence of between six months and three years if they act: a) against people or things or b) obstructing public roads causing a danger to the life or health of people; or c) invading facilities or buildings”.

This wording criminalises normal forms of protest—a picket that blocks the entrance to a factory, eviction protests, students occupying a university or college, and even changing the route of a demonstration not officially communicated to the authorities.

Sanctions may be extended to five years in prison if they occur in a mass demonstration, and workers, particularly civil servants, may face losing their jobs. The review initiative states the above acts “will be punished with a prison sentence of three to five years and special disqualification from employment or public office for the same time when they are committed by a crowd whose number, organization and purpose seriously affects public order.”

The change will have little effect on the persecution on Catalan nationalists, the alleged target of the reform. There are currently 3,000 defendants in 44 cases for participating in mobilisations in favor of the Catalan independence process or against its repression. None of them will benefit from this legal change.

Victor, one of these defendants, summed it up in an interview with El País: “I have been prosecuted for three years and the Generalitat [Catalan government controlled by the nationalists] throughout this process has been part of the prosecution. Today I am accused by the same ones whose rights I demonstrated for in 2019. They have left us stranded and I face seven years in prison?”

The nine Catalan political leaders, jailed for nine to 13 years convicted in 2019 in trumped-up charges and a show trial, have already been released after back-door negotiations between factions of the ruling class in Madrid, spearheaded by the PSOE-Podemos government, and in Barcelona, led by the Catalan nationalists, over the disbursement of billions of euros in European Union bailout funds.

The PSOE-Podemos government is arguing that its changes to the penal code will be interpreted in order to defend democratic rights. This is a lie. The Spanish judiciary has repeatedly given the most reactionary interpretation of the law to ram through attacks on democratic rights, while allowing police violence on protestors, strikers and migrants.

Riot police officer fires a rubber projectile towards protesters during a strike organized by metal workers in Cadiz, southern Spain, November 23, 2021. [AP Photo/Javier Fergo]

The judiciary follows in the footsteps of the growing attacks on democratic rights by the PSOE-Podemos government. Over the past three years, amid mounting opposition against austerity, its “let it rip” COVID-19 policy and rising inflation, it has jailed a rapper for criticising the police and the monarchy, the first musician imprisoned in Spain since the fall of the fascist regime led by Francisco Franco.

Earlier this year it deported Algerian whistleblower and activist Mohamed Benhalima, and worked with Polish authorities to detain Spanish journalist Pablo González—who continues to languish in prison after eight months in preventive detention in Poland on fraudulent accusations of spying for Russia. Against the working class, the PSOE-Podemos government has repeatedly used minimum service legislation to break strikes, most recently on health workers and airline crew, and deployed the police to crush strikes by truckers and metalworkers.

The attack on workers’ rights by the capitalist elite is a global phenomenon. In France, the “President of the rich” Emmanuel Macron requisitioned striking oil refinery workers to end a two-week strike. In Britain, the right-wing Conservative government is in the process of adopting legislation that will effectively illegalise strikes and protests. In the US, the Biden administration is conniving with the union bureaucracy and rail companies to block a strike by over 120,000 rail workers.

The abrogation of workers’ rights makes a mockery of the incessant claims by these very same governments to be engaged in a crusade for “democracy” and “human rights” against “Russian aggression” in Ukraine.

Podemos is claiming that, given the current correlation of forces, it can do little about the review. Jaume Asens, one of the chief spokespersons of Podemos in parliament, declared, “The correlation of forces is what it is, and we are a party that has the strength it has compared to the PSOE”. He added, “Obviously, the occupation of facilities was put by the PSOE, not us.”

This is another lie. In fact, the PSOE depends on Podemos votes to pass its legislation through the Spanish Congress. This effectively gives Podemos veto power over the PSOE’s legislative agenda. However, it has deliberately decided not to exercise this power, instead ramming through social austerity, military spending increases, bank bailouts, and attacks on basic democratic rights.

Podemos is a pro-imperialist party, fully engaged in waging war against the working class at home and NATO’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. If Podemos had the upper hand in the coalition, it would act no differently than its PSOE partners. In Chile, workers have repeatedly been met with police repression by Podemos-backed Gabriel Boric’s government. Workers and migrants under the Podemos-backed SYRIZA government (2015-2019) in Greece likewise faced brutal repression at the hands of Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras.

Also complicit in this reform are the Catalan nationalists, who over the years have been the chief victims of Madrid’s crackdown. Catalan regional premier Pere Aragonès defended the review saying it is “an indispensable step” towards “dejudicialising” efforts to find a solution to Catalan question.

It confirms the repeated warnings made by the WSWS that the attacks against Catalan nationalists would later be deployed against the entire Spanish working class so as to press forward with rearmament, participation in imperialist wars, and the brutal austerity agenda that all sections of the Spanish establishment have implemented since 2008. Workers, as we warned, could not rely on the Catalan nationalists to defend democratic rights.

The trade union leaders have not even discussed how the new legal changes will directly threaten its own members. Instead, they too have participated in the charade, defending it as a way of “defusing” the Catalan situation.

General Secretary of the Podemos-linked Workers’ Commissions (CCOO), Unai Sordo, said, “It seems appropriate to us that obsolete legal forms be adapted and, in this case, crimes that are clearly obsolete with respect to comparative European legislation.” The general secretary of the UGT, Pepe Álvarez, described the changes as “brave”, adding, “It is not an issue thought for Catalonia, but thought for Spain and coexistence”.

One year since Omicron was declared a variant of concern: A balance sheet

Bryan Dyne

One year ago last Thursday, a new, highly-infectious and immune-resistant variant of the coronavirus was first reported to the World Health Organization (WHO) by the Network for Genomics Surveillance in South Africa after being detected in Botswana and South Africa. Two days later, the WHO declared it a “variant of concern” with the name Omicron, recognizing that it had the possibility of quickly becoming dominant globally.

The mortal danger of Omicron, however, was quickly suppressed by the world’s capitalist governments and corporate media. The warnings of scientists that Omicron could cause a wave of infection hitherto unseen during the pandemic were buried under proclamations that the new variant was “mild.”

The tone was set by US President Joe Biden, who attempted to foist responsibility onto those who were unvaccinated by using a partial truth, that “the unvaccinated have a significantly higher risk of ending up in a hospital or even dying,” and twisting it into the false claim that vaccinated people were all “protected from severe illness and death.”

US President Joe Biden giving a speech downplaying the dangers of Omicron three days after it was declared a variant of concern by the WHO. [AP Photo/Evan Vucci]

Such statements were repeated by world leaders throughout last winter, in a concerted effort to downplay the dangers of Omicron. The new variant was seized upon to falsely promote vaccines as the panacea to end the pandemic, to renounce lock-downs, masks and other basic public health measures as unnecessary, and to normalize ongoing infection and mass death.

A year of mass infection, death and debilitation

Over the course of the past year, the “herd immunity” strategy pioneered by the far-right in 2020 was adopted by nearly every world government outside China. This was epitomized in the statement by Dr. Anthony Fauci in January 2022 that Omicron would provide a “live-virus vaccination,” a false and pseudo-scientific conception that encouraged mass viral transmission.

The results of this policy shift have been catastrophic. According to official figures, over the past twelve months 1.4 million people have lost their lives globally to Omicron. Estimates of the real global death toll via excess deaths places the tally at 5.2 million, a quarter of all excess deaths during the pandemic.

[Photo by Our World In Data / CC BY 4.0]

One year later, the Biden administration is doubling down on the lies that cost millions of lives, including more than 297,000 in the US alone. In a press briefing on November 22, Fauci stated that “there’s a 14 times lower risk of dying” if one is vaccinated and boosted compared to one who is unvaccinated.

In fact, vaccinated people still get sick and die by the hundreds every day. A recent study of CDC data by the Kaiser Family Foundation, which the White House and the corporate media have covered up, found that as of August more than half of those that have died in the US have been vaccinated. In other words, at least 23,000 of the 46,000 Americans that have died from the coronavirus pandemic in the past fifteen weeks have been vaccinated. While the vaccines still provide relative protection against hospitalization and death, the danger of breakthrough infections, of the virus being able to evade immunity and kill, is real and present.

Not only has Omicron killed millions, it has infected billions, leaving numerous long-term health problems whether the virus’ victims had symptoms from the initial infection or not. These include but are not limited to asthma, diabetes, brain damage, muscular and skeletal weakness, multiple organ damage, increased risk of heart failure, stroke, and joint impairment.

By allowing the coronavirus to circulate and mutate in billions of hosts, new variants have evolved at an increasing pace. The Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta variants all produced their own waves of infection and death. Omicron is a step further, with surges of subvariants—including BA.1, BA.2, BA.5, BQ.1, and BQ.1.1—that have multiplied in their hundreds.

With each new immune-resistant Omicron subvariant, the immense risk of reinfection with COVID-19 has been heightened. A major study published November 10 in Nature Medicine made clear that each COVID-19 reinfection causes cumulative damage to one’s body, increasing their risk of all-cause mortality and Long COVID. It exposed the horrific reality of the “forever COVID” policy of the Biden administration, in which wave after wave of the pandemic will encircle the world, leaving behind increasing amounts of death and debilitation in its wake.

Long COVID is increasingly common and has essentially become a pandemic in its own right. An August report from the Brookings Institution found that 16 million working-age Americans (18-65 years old) suffer from the ailment, including up to 4 million so disabled that they can no longer work, numbers that will only increase as long as the country’s population continues to get infected and reinfected.

Extrapolated to the world’s population, the report suggests that as many as 400 million people internationally could now be afflicted with Long COVID and may have it for years to come, with tens of millions disabled to the point that they can no longer work.

The deepening COVID cover-up

Over the past year, the Biden administration has utilized the lie that “Omicron is mild” to completely dismantle the ability to track the pandemic in the US in an effort to cover up the extent to which the virus is spreading. The charge was led by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which ended the requirement for hospitals to report their daily coronavirus death count to the federal department as Omicron was at its peak last January. What had been the centralized repository for recording those who died each day from the coronavirus was taken apart in one fell swoop.

Following the dictates of the Biden administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has spent the past year repeatedly changing its guidelines to encourage the lifting of every mitigation measure, above all mask mandates. Most recently, the agency switched from daily to weekly reporting of COVID-19 infections and deaths, in order to cover up the coming winter surge.

Two maps of US zip codes from the CDC in late February 2022, showing actual rates of community transmission (left) versus the "Community Levels" (right) [Photo: CDC]

States have followed the lead of the CDC and HHS, gradually ending daily reporting of cases and deaths. Currently only two states, New York and Arkansas, as well as Puerto Rico, still report cases and deaths on a daily basis. Thirty-eight states only publish data on a weekly basis, and Nebraska, North Dakota and Washington D.C. have stopped reporting coronavirus deaths altogether. Eight states—Alaska, Florida, Nevada, Wyoming, Kansas, Oklahoma, Iowa and Illinois—no longer report testing, the first line of defense in hunting down the disease.

At the same time, the most recent wastewater data, one of the few remaining reliable ways to track the pandemic, show that even as official case counts are trending downward, the real number of cases is again increasing, potentially setting the stage for a third winter of death.

The lessons that must be learned

The experiences of the past year, and throughout the entire pandemic, demonstrate conclusively that capitalism is incompatible with the social interests of the working class. The drive for profits ultimately places a secondary value on human life. Workers are forced to labor in deadly conditions, with their exploitation funneling ever greater sums of wealth to the billionaires.

A critical lesson of the past year is that COVID-19 can still be eliminated globally, even the highly-infectious Omicron variant. At the beginning of June, China’s largest city, Shanghai, reopened after a two-month lockdown that successfully beat back an outbreak of the BA.2 subvariant. The lockdown was implemented when there were 3,662 cases a day in the city, a figure which peaked in April at just under 30,000 a day and reduced to essentially zero six weeks later. Fewer than 600 people lost their lives during the entire surge.

The Shanghai lockdown was a stunning example of the policy of Zero-COVID, which entails a genuine mobilization of public health measures—universal masking, mass testing, contact tracing, the safe isolation and quarantine of infected and exposed people, and temporary lockdowns—in a scientifically planned manner to crush the coronavirus.

Graph showing the elimination of Omicron BA.2 outbreak in China [Photo: WSWS]

The fundamental weakness of this policy, however, has always been the nationalist basis upon which it has been deployed, including by the governments of China and previously New Zealand, Vietnam and other countries. Zero-COVID cannot be sustained indefinitely in a single country as the virus continues to circulate and mutate everywhere else.

At the same time, imperialist interests dominated by the US have long demanded that Zero COVID be dropped globally. Faced with a mounting economic crisis and the threat of an exodus by companies such as Apple, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) finally gave in on November 11, and the results have already been disastrous.

Cases in China have jumped past 38,000 a day in a matter of weeks and threaten to infect the whole of China’s 1.4 billion inhabitants. Such a scenario would be catastrophic, potentially killing millions amid a complete collapse of the country’s healthcare system. It would also provide 1.4 billion more hosts in which the virus to evolve and mutate further into more infectious and deadly variants.

China pushes lifting of Zero-COVID after anti-lockdown protests

Peter Symonds

In the aftermath of last weekend’s protests in several Chinese cities, the country’s National Health Commission (NHC) held a press conference Tuesday calling for speeding up the implementation of the 20 measures announced on November 11 which initiated the lifting of the country’s Zero-COVID policy that has suppressed numerous outbreaks over the past three years.

Residents wearing face masks line up to get their routine COVID-19 throat swabs at a coronavirus testing site in Beijing, Thursday, Sept. 22, 2022. (AP Photo/Andy Wong)

An article in the state-owned Global Times notes, “anti-epidemic management should be lifted in a timely manner to minimize the inconvenience caused by the epidemic to people, said Mi Feng, spokesperson for the National Health Commission (NHC).”

Cheng insisted that the “20 measures” are “supported by sufficient scientific basis and evidence” and aim to fully suppress COVID-19 outbreaks, but the official figures speak for themselves. Over the past week, China has repeatedly set new daily records of COVID-19 infections, with a slight dip to 38,421 official new cases reported Tuesday.

While still low by international standards, the moves to ease previously effective measures—mass testing and contact tracing, isolation and quarantine guidelines, lockdowns and strict border management—pose the very real danger of escalating mass infections and deaths in a country of 1.4 billion people.

In a tacit recognition of the risks, the NHC is pushing for the vaccination of the elderly population, who are particularly vulnerable due to lower vaccination rates. However, vaccination alone has failed to halt the horrendous wave of infections and deaths in other countries around the world.

Significantly, the Global Times made no mention of the relatively small, middle class protests that took place over the weekend following an apartment fire last Thursday in the city of Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang Province. The protests in as many as 18 cities numbered in the hundreds, possibly low thousands in some cases, and were in part fueled by demonstrably false claims that anti-COVID restrictions were responsible for the 10 tragic deaths in the fire.

While the protests had disparate elements, the dominant theme was the demand for “freedom” from COVID restrictions, which has been taken up in the US and Western media in a veritable avalanche of propaganda calling for an end to China’s Zero-COVID policy. The protests reflect an ongoing, reactionary campaign among largely middle-class layers on social media in China condemning Zero-COVID measures and pointing to their absence in the rest of the world, while ignoring the disastrous consequences and huge death tolls that have resulted.

The protests were clearly not spontaneous. For instance, one rally in Shanghai organised via Telegram on social media was clearly oriented to foreign media, with a pinned message encouraging its members to reach out to the New York Times, CNN and Associated Press, as well as the anti-communist Epoch Times and CIA-linked Radio Free Asia.

Far from being the voice of the Chinese people, videos of some of the protests show local residents denouncing the protesters and condemning their demands for an end to Zero-COVID restrictions.

Rather than mount a political defence of the Zero-COVID policy which has kept per capita rates of infections and deaths among the lowest in the world, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) government and state-owned media has said nothing publicly on the protests. Nor has there been a response to the deluge of propaganda in the international press.

Asked about the protests at a Foreign Ministry briefing yesterday, spokesperson Zhao Lijian blandly declared that Chinese citizens enjoyed rights and freedoms, but these had to be “exercised within the framework of the law.”

The stony official silence on the protests is another indication, along with Tuesday’s NHC briefing, that the Chinese government is step by step adopting the same criminal “let it rip” policy as the US and other countries. As it shifts away from Zero-COVID, the last thing that the regime wants is a public debate about a policy that has been widely and patiently supported by the vast majority of the population despite its limitations and the personal difficulties involved.

The calls for “freedom” from affluent, self-centred middle-class layers are in marked contrast to the attitude of the working class. Last week’s protests by thousands of workers at Foxconn’s huge factory in Zhengzhou were driven not only by the company’s broken promises on pay and bonuses, as well as terrible working and living conditions, but its failure to adequately protect its employees against COVID-19 infections.

An article in yesterday’s Asia Times entitled, “Protests hasten Chinese exit from zero-Covid policy” cited unnamed Chinese sources stating that decisions to relax the Zero-COVID policy were taken prior to the CCP’s 20th Congress but “with omicron cases surging and protests threatening to get out of hand, the matter has become more urgent.”

The article noted, “According to the sources, further relaxation is now scheduled to start in the course of January when Beijing will formally announce the end of the pandemic and classify COVID as an endemic infectious disease. That’s earlier than previously planned.”

Major Chinese cities, including Beijing, Guangzhou, Chongqing and Zhengzhou, are already advancing what NHC officials call “new optimised measures” that signify the ending of city-wide lockdowns that have effectively contained outbreaks in the past in favour of limited, localised lockdowns.

The lifting of Zero-COVID in China is not the result of the failure of this policy, as repeatedly declared by pundits in the Western media, but rather the limitations of the national framework within which it has been implemented.

The repeated waves of infections in China are the direct result of the virus being allowed to run rampant through populations in the rest of the world—infecting billions and killing millions, while providing the breeding ground for new, more infectious and immune-resistant variants.

The Chinese government is succumbing to the same enormous pressures to let the virus rip through the Chinese populations as has led other countries such as New Zealand and Vietnam to abandon policies that had effectively stopped viral transmission. The CCP, which has presided over decades of capitalist restoration, represents powerful corporate interests which insist that profits must take priority over the health and lives of working people.

It is significant that Zhengzhou, home of the Foxconn factory, as known as iPhone City, has been one of the first to further ease anti-COVID restrictions. As of today, the city will remove so-called mobility controls, i.e. lockdowns, and replace them with “normal COVD-combating measures”—in other words, the new limited “20 measures.” Apple, which has been desperate to overcome severe labour shortages at the Foxconn plant in order to boost the production of the latest iPhone model in time for the holiday shopping season, will undoubtedly be grateful.