US requires travelers from China test negative for COVID amid surging infections and deaths

Evan Blake

On Wednesday, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced that, beginning on January 5, all travelers flying from China to the US will be required to show a negative COVID-19 test result from within two days of their flight departure. Similar measures have also been implemented by Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Taiwan and India.

Over the past month, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has rapidly lifted the Zero-COVID policy which had kept the country’s per capita death rate by far the lowest among major countries. In a matter of weeks, hundreds of millions of Chinese people have been infected with COVID-19, hospitals have been overrun with patients and are implementing triage care, and morgues have had to suspend burial services.

A medical worker collects sample swab sample from residents in a lockdown area in the Jingan district of western Shanghai, China, Monday, April 4, 2022. [AP Photo/Chen Si]

In effect, the CCP is condensing into the span of a few months the years-long and ongoing process of mass infections and deaths that have taken place in nearly every other country. They have adopted the “herd immunity” strategy pioneered in the US, Brazil, India and other countries which are now hypocritically imposing a test requirement on travelers from China, which will do nothing to stop the deepening global catastrophe.

In a brief thread commenting on the one-sided character of the CDC’s measure, American epidemiologist Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding noted, “Ironically—US has surges nationwide, and same for Europe too. So why focus the airport inbound testing for just China?” He added, “I’m not against [airport testing] per se—but thinking that only China flight arrivals need to be tested while arrivals from other countries don’t—doesn’t make any sense given the worldwide spread of COVID.”

Boston University School of Public Health Professor Dr. Jon Levy similarly commented, “So we are requiring a negative COVID test to fly from China to the US, because China now lacks mitigation policies or adequate surveillance, but not for any other country or domestically? Not arguing for the latter, but this is illogical, hypocritical, and stigmatizing.”

A CDC press release on the new measure states that their goal is “to slow the spread of COVID-19 in the United States during the surge in COVID-19 cases in [China].” It denounces China’s “reduced testing and case reporting” and “lack of adequate and transparent epidemiological and viral genomic sequence data,” which “are critical to monitor the case surge effectively and decrease the chance for entry of a novel variant of concern.”

What hypocrisy and cynicism!

Over the past year, the Biden administration has overseen the dismantling of virtually all COVID-19 testing, data tracking and reporting. Regarding testing and genomic sequencing, the US is arguably the worst in the world relative to economic output and technological capacity.

At present, the US is in the midst of likely the third-largest wave of infections since the beginning of the pandemic, according to wastewater data. This reality is completely at odds with official infection figures, due to the closure of free PCR testing facilities across the US this year and the switch to unreported at-home antigen testing.

The CDC is doing nothing to stop the deepening surge in the US, which has been driven in large part by holiday travel from Thanksgiving to the present. In the past month, tens of millions of Americans have flown back-and-forth across the country and internationally without testing, masking, or any anti-COVID mitigation measures whatsoever.

Regarding genomic sequencing, throughout the pandemic the US has sequenced relatively low levels of positive PCR tests, and done so very slowly.

In Wednesday’s press release, the CDC also announced that airports in Seattle and Los Angeles will join their Traveler-based Genomic Surveillance program (TGS), bringing the total number of airports involved to a dismal seven and the “number of weekly flights covered to approximately 500 from at least 30 countries.” In other words, an infinitesimal fraction of international travelers to the US are tested for COVID-19 and positive results sequenced.

Furthermore, just two months ago the CDC was caught deliberately covering up the spread of new variants.

For nearly a month, from September 24 to October 14, 2022, the CDC violated their own rules and withheld data showing that the Omicron BQ.1 and BQ.1.1 subvariants were becoming dominant across the US. This was among the most significant cover-ups by the CDC since the start of the pandemic, but was only seriously reported on by the World Socialist Web Site. It took place just weeks after US President Joe Biden falsely claimed that “the pandemic is over.”

In recent weeks, the Omicron XBB subvariant, which caused a surge of infections and reinfections in Singapore and other countries this fall, has become dominant in the Northeast region and will likely become dominant across the US in the coming weeks. Numerous scientists have raised the alarm about this subvariant, while the CDC, the White House and the bourgeois media have done nothing to warn the public about this danger.

The measures against China are entirely political and in no way meant to ensure the public health of the American, Chinese or world populations. Underscoring this fact, travelers are allowed to use results from a self-administered rapid antigen test, which are known to be more likely to return false negative results. Anyone that tests negative two days before departure is liable to catch COVID-19 and become infectious in the subsequent period. As is the case for every other country, there will be no mandatory testing or quarantining upon arrival for travelers who very well could be infectious.

Furthermore, these measures are not being imposed on any other country, despite the fact that COVID-19 is now spreading unchecked throughout the world.

The CDC press release cynically concludes, “The approach laid out, when layered with existing CDC recommendations such as masking during travel, self-monitoring for symptoms, and testing for three days after arrival from international travel, will help make travel safer, healthier, and more responsible by reducing spread on planes, in airports, and at destinations.”

But throughout the past year, the CDC and other public health agencies globally have scrapped previous COVID-19 testing requirements, as well as mask mandates, for national and international travel.

The new CDC policy follows a meeting last week between US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, in which Blinken decried China for a lack of “transparency” regarding COVID-19. American imperialism is increasingly utilizing the COVID crisis which it has fomented in China to escalate the threat of war.

For over two years, US imperialism and its media mouthpieces have continuously demanded that China scrap Zero-COVID. After Apple, Nike and other major corporations threatened to move production from China elsewhere, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) relented and lifted all public health measures, including mass testing, contact tracing, lockdowns, the safe isolation and quarantining of infected and exposed people, travel restrictions, and more.

The scrapping of Zero-COVID in China is reactionary and must be counterpoised with a comprehensive public health program fought for by the Chinese and international working class. But the measures implemented by the US and other countries against China will do nothing to stop the spread of the pandemic and will only be used to escalate military aggression against the country. China will be vilified for any new variants detected, and all the lies told about the “Wuhan lab leak” will be repackaged and disseminated once again.

New VW CEO restructures company with support of the trade unions, costing thousands of jobs

Dietmar Gaisenkersting

In the almost four months since Porsche CEO Oliver Blume also took over as CEO of Volkswagen, he has implemented two strategic changes.

First, he has reorganized software development in the 10-brand VW group with its 670,000 employees worldwide. This will have far-reaching consequences for workers in research and development, especially at Audi. Secondly, he has secured the full support of the trade union-dominated works councils, above all that of Daniela Cavallo, chairwoman of the General Works Council, who also chairs the works council at the main VW plant in Wolfsburg.

Reorganization of software development

A week before Christmas, Blume presented plans for a comprehensive strategic restructuring of the company. Accordingly, from 2023 onwards the VW brand will be responsible for production and procurement in the overall group, Audi will then be responsible for sales and quality management, and Porsche will head the important development and design departments. This is a huge demotion for Audi, which until now has been responsible for development as the technology leader. It will result in massive job cuts in the development departments in Ingolstadt.

Audi’s ambitious goal of putting the first highly automated car (under the name “Artemis”) on the road before the end of this decade has been completely abandoned by Blume. VW’s withdrawal from US-based start-up Argo AI is also related. VW bought into this firm along with Ford in 2019 to develop fully automated driving. Now, Argo AI is being wound up, and almost 300 developers who worked in Munich do not know what awaits them in the coming year.

The temporary withdrawal from the development of highly and fully automated driving is a consequence of the concentration of all resources on the company’s own software development efforts. Software is considered the largest value-adding component in the cars of the future. VW set up its own subsidiary, Cariad (for Car, I am digital), for this purpose two years ago. But so far it has not been able to develop an in-house operating system. Blume’s predecessor, Hebert Diess, had to leave not least because of this. VW workers complained that under his leadership, software had taken a back seat to the development of new models. Now it is to be the other way around, with software being developed first and then vehicle models defining it.

Ex-Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess (left) and his successor Oliver Blume. [Photo by Alexandr Migl / Matti Blume via wikimedia / CC BY-NC-SA 4.0]

Accordingly, the Trinity electric model, which was supposed to roll off the production line with this software as early as 2026 in a new factory sprouting from the ground near the Wolfsburg main plant, has also been postponed for the time being. It is to be released—if at all—at the end of the decade at the earliest, when the company’s own software can be used. Only a few people in Wolfsburg still believe the new factory will be built, and a decision is to be made early next year.

As long as the new proprietary software is not available, VW will have to make do with further development of existing software. To do this, VW will also have to cooperate more with established software companies such as Microsoft and Google.

Cariad announced at Christmas that it would hire up to 1,700 software and hardware developers and engineers, 300 of them in Seattle alone, in the US. Nevertheless, the approximately 5,000 Cariad employees worldwide, many of whom work in Ingolstadt—at the headquarters of the previous development manager, Audi—are wondering whether their VW subsidiary will still exist in one or two years.

Close cooperation with union works council representatives

Diess also had to go because he frequently announced attacks without involving the IG Metall union works council representatives. For example, the works council had taken exception to the fact that scenarios commissioned by Diess about the loss of 30,000 jobs had been made public and had alarmed the workforce.

Blume is currently being praised by the union works council representatives because he involves them closely in his planning. Blume had made a good start at the top of the corporation and enjoyed the “fullest support” of the works council with his team, says Cavallo, adding that they worked together “on a basis of trust and as equals.”

Blume needs the union works council members, especially at the Wolfsburg headquarters. The plant has been underutilized for some time. Parts shortages, especially in semiconductors, have caused production to pause frequently throughout the year. Night shifts were permanently cancelled in the spring, followed by repeated short-time working. Throughout January, VW will have production workers on short-time working, which began in the week before Christmas. These were the consequences of the “current worldwide coronavirus pandemic and the effects of the war in Ukraine.”

This year, fewer than 400,000 cars will be produced in Wolfsburg--the world’s largest car factory. This is the worst result in VW history and there is no significant improvement in sight. According to Volkswagen CFO Arno Antlitz, inflation and the worsening economic situation will hurt demand for new cars.

Cavallo is therefore insisting on producing new models in Wolfsburg. The €2 billion that the new Trinity plant was supposed to cost could flow into the main plant. The corporation has since announced plans to invest around €460 million there by 2025. The plant was already being prepared for production of the ID.3, which has so far been built in Zwickau, he said. The small car would be the first electric model for Wolfsburg. At a works meeting, VW brand boss Thomas Schäfer announced another larger electric model, an SUV.

Works council head Cavallo has expressed her pleasure, saying Wolfsburg remained the powerhouse of the brand and the group. She anticipated two electric car models and the Trinity: “In this way, we are creating job security.”

Works councils at other VW subsidiaries see it differently, however. There are already signs of bickering among the company’s works councils at different plants, especially between VW Wolfsburg and Audi in Ingolstadt and Neckarsulm, since it is not just development engineers who are at risk there. Hildegard Wortmann, who is responsible for sales on Audi’s management board, recently recalled what she had predicted in 2020, when she said, “There’s a 50 percent chance that Audi will still be around in 10 years.” She would repeat this thesis today, she said two months ago in a podcast by business weekly Wirtschafts-Woche.

Incoming orders for VW’s Western Europe division were down 15 percent, she said. If Audi did not change, “we’re simply out of the game,” she said.

Last week, Audi announced plans to cut annual factory costs in half by 2033. The company’s main plant in Ingolstadt, which employs 40,000, is serving as a blueprint, according to Gerd Walker, board member responsible for production.

At the last works meeting, long-time Audi works council chairman Peter Mosch supported the restructuring. He said there were clear agreements between the board and the general works council. In an interview with the Augsburger Allgemeine newspaper on December 16, he, too, raved about the new VW boss. “Mr. Blume also calls me on his own accord.” Blume makes sure that “we as employee representatives are in on the action.”

IG Metall works council member Mosch is calling for full capacity utilization at the Audi plants until at least 2030, and only then could there be talk of “one or the other project being manufactured at another location in the VW Group.” According to Mosch, “Our motto is therefore: Audi First!”

He recalled that he had agreed to eliminate 9,000 jobs in return for which he expected “around 2,000 to be created in new areas such as electrification and digitization.” Mosch announced, “But we as the Audi Works Council want to get a bigger piece of the new pie.”

Just as Mosch is now calling for “Audi First,” others will follow suit. By playing off the workforces of the individual brands and locations against each other, the union works council representatives are implementing the attacks that Audi manager Wortmann described as a “fundamental need for change.” Job cuts, wage reductions, increases in work pressure, all this is being prepared.

Enrichment of the shareholders

While the union works council representatives are calculating how to implement these attacks with Blume, the shareholders are securing their profits. The Porsche IPO in September raised around €20 billion for VW. A quarter of Porsche preferential shares have been sold on the stock market; the financial holding company of the Porsche and Piëch families has acquired another 25 percent.

At a special general meeting on December 16, shareholders decided that half of this nearly €20 billion would be distributed to themselves as a special dividend. Since VW’s largest owner by far is the financial holding company of the Porsche and Piëch families, the two will thus receive €3 billion. As the second largest shareholder, the state of Lower Saxony will receive more than €1 billion, and the third largest owner, the Sheikdom of Qatar, will also receive more than €1 billion in special dividends.

2022: A year of deepening economic and financial crisis

Nick Beams

The year 2022 has seen a sea change in the global economy and financial system, setting in motion tendencies that will continue and deepen in 2023.

The most significant shift in the economic and financial landscape has been the development of global inflation to the highest level in four decades and the response of central banks, led by the US Federal Reserve.

A person stands near an electronic stock board showing Japan's Nikkei 225 index at a securities firm Monday, Dec. 19, 2022, in Tokyo. [AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko]

In the name of “fighting inflation,” they have undertaken the sharpest rise in interest rates since those of Fed chief Paul Volcker in the early 1980s, part of a war against the working class spearheaded by the Reagan administration in the US and the Thatcher government in the UK.

This shift has not been initiated to bring down inflation—central bankers understand their policies will do nothing to reduce prices—but is aimed at suppressing the wages struggles of the working class by imposing an economic contraction, or even a recession.

There are many forecasts of recession next year, both in the major economies and globally, as the impact of interest rates rises takes hold.

The Centre for Economics and Business Research in London said it was “likely” that the world economy would face recession next year. It expected that central banks would continue with their tightening regime “despite the economic costs” and there was a “poorer growth outlook for a number of years to come.”

These findings are more pessimistic than the International Monetary Fund predictions in October that more than a third of the world economy would contract in 2023.

The development of recession, coupled with the higher interest rate regime, will have a significant effect on financial markets.

As Financial Times columnist John Plender noted in a recent comment entitled “Central bank horror story”: “A move into recession in 2023 could expose financial fragilities arising from the long period of ultra-low interest rates in which investors searched for yield regardless of risk.”

The low interest rate regime, intensified in March 2020 to prevent a meltdown of the financial system at the start of the pandemic, led to a new round of speculation which sent share markets to record highs.

With the shift in the policy of central banks this financial house of cards is becoming increasingly unstable.

The turn by the Fed and other central banks does not indicate any shift in their class orientation by the guardians of finance capital. Rather, it is based on the assessment that the most destabilising factor of all is the global upsurge of the working class in support of wage demands to counter rising inflation which must be suppressed at all costs.

The year has ended with a small downturn in goods inflation and a slight easing of the rate of interest rate hikes—the Fed reduced the increase in its base rate to 0.5 percentage points from the previous four consecutive rises of 0.75 percentage points at its last meeting. However, the major central banks have made it clear the rises must continue and have increasingly pointed to the “tightness” of labour markets as the reason for doing so.

The Fed has said it has “more work to do,” the European Central Bank has spoken of “more ground to cover” and the Bank of England, confronting struggles by millions of workers in support of pay demands, has insisted it must take “forceful” action.

Even before the interest rate rises have had their full impact, the effect on financial markets has already been felt. This was most notable in the September-October crisis in the UK financial system which followed the budget of the short-lived government of Liz Truss.

Her government’s decision to give massive tax handouts to the corporations and wealthy by increasing debt sparked a market meltdown which threatened the financing of the entire pensions system, estimated to amount to £1.5 trillion.

The turmoil in markets was not an expression of opposition to more wealth being showered on the super-rich but because the measures were not funded by major spending cuts and the increase in debt was not viable in the new financial conditions produced by interest rate rises.

The financial gyrations on Wall Street, while not yet as violent as those which erupted in the UK, are no less significant. The major index, the S&P 500, has fallen by almost 20 percent over the year, even as traders continue to speculate on the assumption that the Fed will have to begin cutting rates some time in 2023.

Notwithstanding these expectations, at least in some quarters, the direction is clear. One of the chief beneficiaries of ultra-cheap monetary policy, the Tesla car company of Elon Musk, has suffered a spectacular fall.

At the start of the year, the market value of the company was $1.2 trillion. In trading just before the Christmas break, its market capitalisation was below $400 billion, after its stock price fell $85 billion in a week, or 18 percent.

The rapid changes in financial conditions have led to calls for the Fed to pull back on the interest rate hikes lest they hit the entire financial system.

Writing in the FT, Bill Gross, once the world’s foremost bond market trader, called for a halt noting the “dangerous levels of debt” reported by the Bank for International Settlements earlier this month, but which are not reported on or tracked.

“Off-balance sheet dollar debt,” the BIS warned, “may remain out of sight and out of mind, but only until the next time dollar funding liquidity is squeezed.”

According to Gross, the BIS calculated that this “hidden ‘shadow bank’ debt may be as high as $65 trillion more than two and half times the size of the entire Treasury market and most of it owed to the banks.”

He noted that the lowest global interest rates in history had led to “massive misallocations of capital,” much of it “hidden in private equity” that ultimately had to be repriced “sharply lower.”

The collapse of the crypto bubble, expressed in the $32 billion demise of the FTX exchange owned by Sam Bankman-Fried, now facing multiple criminal charges, is not some kind of exception.

The rise and rise of crypto was fueled by the provision of virtually free money which lifted all areas of the financial system, but has now come to an end.

The year is concluding with another significant shift—the decision by the Bank of Japan to ease its so-called yield curve control. The measure involved buying up virtually all new government debt, which kept interest rates at near zero.

While the BoJ has yet to officially abandon the policy, there is no doubt as to its implications. Higher Japanese rates will mean the return of money previously invested internationally.

In an article entitled “Why Japan’s bombshell risks another global credit crunch,” the financial columnist of the UK-based Telegraph, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, noted that with $3.6 trillion of net assets overseas Japan is the world’s top creditor.

“When the flows reverse and the Japanese repatriate their money—as they did in late 2007 and 2008—it can lead very quickly to a systemic credit crunch and a financial chain reaction.”

He cited the remarks of one financial analyst who pointed out that ultra-monetary policy had been holding down rates in the rest of the world but “the tectonic plates are shifting.”

It is impossible to predict the exact course of events, but the general trend of developments is clear.

The onset of global recession, the growing prospect of another major financial crisis and the unbridled determination of governments and central banks to make the working class pay for the deepening crisis of the profit system is going to drive forward the development of the class struggle in the coming year.

China’s lifting of Zero-COVID and the ongoing dangers of the pandemic

Evan Blake

As the year 2022 draws to a close, a dangerous new stage of the COVID-19 pandemic has opened with the universal lifting of all measures that slow the spread of the coronavirus. Throughout the world, governments have decided to allow COVID-19 to spread entirely unchecked, infecting or reinfecting billions of people. This policy allows the virus to mutate and produce new and potentially more dangerous variants.

The global epicenter of the pandemic is now China, where the ruling Communist Party (CCP) has dismantled its Zero-COVID policy, which had kept China’s per capita infection and death rates the lowest of any major country. Since November 11, the CCP has ended lockdowns, mass testing, contact tracing, quarantine and isolation protocols, and every other public health measure.

On Monday, China’s National Health Commission (NHC) reclassified COVID-19 from a Class A to a Class B infectious disease starting on January 8, prompting the scrapping of all quarantine requirements for inbound travelers. This followed Sunday’s NHC announcement that they will no longer report COVID-19 infections, after last week adjusting their definition of a COVID-19 death, in a transparent effort to suppress all data on the spread of the pandemic.

The reversal of Zero-COVID in China has produced a wave of mass infection. A leaked report by Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention Deputy Director Sun Yang estimated that 248 million people were infected with COVID-19 across China during the first 20 days of December. The majority of China’s 1.4 billion people are expected to be infected over the next two months amid the Lunar New Year travel season.

Hospitals in Beijing, Shanghai and other major cities are collapsing under a massive influx of patients, morgues are suspending burial services, and hundreds, if not thousands, of people are believed to be dying at home every day. Social media posts by people suffering from Long COVID describe prolonged symptoms, including extreme fatigue, deep coughs, shortness of breath, difficulties concentrating and more.

Breaking his month-long silence on the disastrous spread of COVID throughout China, President Xi Jinping employed Orwellian double-speak at a press conference Monday, stating, “We should launch the patriotic health campaign in a more targeted way. … fortify a community line of defense for epidemic prevention and control, and effectively protect people’s lives, safety and health.”

In justifying the abandonment of Zero-COVID, CCP officials and the Chinese state media have repackaged all the lies and propaganda developed over the past year throughout the rest of the world, particularly in the United States. Referring to the Omicron variant as “mild,” they falsely claim that the current surge of infections will be their “COVID exit wave.” In the words of Zhong Nanshan, a doctor and spokesperson for the CCP’s COVID policy, China will return to “pre-epidemic conditions” by mid-2023.

Three recent articles published in the New York Times and Financial Times have stated that China appears to be striving for “herd immunity” through rapid mass infection. But the reality is that “herd immunity” is a mirage manufactured by far-right politicians and corrupt scientists in 2020 which has no scientific basis. The Chinese population is being forced to join the rest of the world in a horrific cycle of ongoing mass COVID infections and reinfections, which will cause compounding damage to the physical and economic health of society, with global ramifications.

The future confronting Chinese society can be seen in the United States and throughout the Northern Hemisphere, where the third winter of mass infection is now underway.

Despite the suppression of data over the past year, throughout December official COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths have climbed steadily in the US. According to more accurate wastewater sampling, COVID-19 is currently spreading at the third-highest rate of the entire pandemic, surpassed only by previous surges of Omicron subvariants last winter and spring.

Hospitalizations and deaths are increasingly impacting the elderly, with hospitalization rates among those 70 years and older now at the highest point since last winter. The seven-day average of daily new deaths now stands at 426, meaning that each week the number of Americans dying from COVID-19 is now equivalent to the death toll from the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Over 90 percent of these deaths are people over the age of 65.

Last week, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) confirmed that life expectancy in the US decreased for the second year in a row in 2021, by roughly 0.6 years, bringing the figure to 76.4 years, the lowest level since 1996. The pandemic thus amounts to a social retrogression of roughly a quarter-century. This is part of a global trend, in which life expectancy declined worldwide in 2020 and 2021 for the first time since World War II. Notably, the first two years of the pandemic saw life expectancy increase in China and surpass the US in 2021, a process now set to reverse.

Another recent study on excess deaths found that COVID-19 was among the leading causes of death in 2020 and the leading cause of death in 2021 globally, killing a combined 14.83 million people by the end of 2021.

Alongside and connected to the spread of COVID-19, unprecedented numbers of children are being hospitalized by the flu and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), in what has been termed a “tripledemic.” Across the US, Canada, Germany and other countries in North America and Europe, pediatric hospitals are at or above capacity and children are dying from these preventable diseases.

A growing body of research indicates that COVID-19 can substantially damage a patient’s immune system, through the depletion of naive T-cells, rendering them susceptible to more serious disease from other viral or bacterial infections. Many scientists and physicians have warned that the mass infection and reinfection of children and all of society is a primary factor behind the present surge of hospitalizations due to other respiratory viruses.

Finally, the immense societal impact of Long COVID is increasingly coming into focus. According to the latest data from the CDC, roughly 17.7 million Americans are presently experiencing Long COVID, of whom 23.1 percent report that this affliction causes “significant activity limitations.” The most significant study on COVID-19 reinfections, published in October, found that each reinfection greatly compounds one’s risk of Long COVID, a risk only slightly reduced by vaccination.

The growing volume of scientific data which prove the ongoing and alarming dangers of COVID-19 can only be covered up and suppressed with a continuous stream of lies and propaganda. In the United States, the White House, the corporate media and all official institutions peddle unending happy talk, speak of the pandemic in the past tense and denigrate the most basic public health measures.

Last week, White House COVID Response Coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha absurdly stated, “There is no study in the world that shows that masks work that well.” Media talking heads routinely compare COVID-19 to the flu and promote holiday shopping and travel. In August, US President Joe Biden declared, “the pandemic is over.” This propaganda has had an impact, with a recent Ipsos poll finding that only 30 percent of Americans still wear masks at least some of the time, down from 90 percent in December 2020 and 69 percent just one year ago.

The deliberate disarming of the global population to the dangers of the pandemic and promotion of unending mass infection—from China to the US, and everywhere in between—places society in great danger in the face of future variants.

The laws of viral evolution are objective and detached from baseless claims of governments that COVID-19 will gradually become less dangerous. At any point, a new variant could evolve that combines increased immune-resistance, transmissibility and virulence, producing an even greater global wave of infections and deaths.

Up to 25,000 COVID-19 deaths in Australia this year

Oscar Grenfell

As the year draws to a close, COVID-19 continues to inflict a deadly toll with no end in sight. In Australia, 2022 has been by far the worst year of the pandemic, with fatalities an order of magnitude higher than in the first two years of the global crisis.

The country is a graphic demonstration of the fact that this carnage is the result, not primarily of the biological characteristics of a virus, but of political decisions made in the interests of private profit.

COVID-19 deaths in Australia up to December 23, 2022 [Photo: Data from covidlive.com.au/WSWS]

In 2020 and 2021, Australia’s death toll was comparatively low as a result of successful mitigation measures implemented by the country’s governments under popular pressure. The huge number of deaths over the past 12 months is the direct result of the dismantling of those restrictions and the adoption of a “let it rip” strategy aimed at “reopening the economy.”

This essential point was made by Professor Brendan Crabb, one of Australia’s leading infectious disease experts and the director of the Burnet Institute. He was interviewed on the popular podcast, Australia Today’s Morning Agenda with Natarsha Belling, last week. It was a rare breach in the wall of silence surrounding with the pandemic, which is either presented as a thing of the past or a minor inconvenience.

Crabb noted, however, that including excess deaths it is likely that the virus will have claimed 25,000 lives in 2022 by year’s end.

Even that figure may be an underestimate. Crabb was extrapolating from excess death figures released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics this month. They show that in the nine months to the end of September there were 19,986 more fatalities than the historical average.

If that rate holds for the last three months of the year, excess deaths for 2022 would reach 26,648. However, the public healthcare systems, decimated by decades of funding cuts and brought to a breaking point by the “let it rip” program, will be under even greater pressure during the holiday season. That means there is every prospect that the rate of excess deaths will increase.

As Crabb stated, these are “people who otherwise would not have died. In fact, excess deaths in Australia are normally negative, less than zero. That’s why life expectancy has increased every year for the last 70 years in Australia.”

Crabb pointedly noted that this historic reversal exposed the fraudulent propaganda used to justify the “reopening” of December 2021. “Can you imagine us sitting here a year ago saying ‘we’re going to open up and we’ll cope with 25,000 deaths?’ No one would’ve accepted that, it would have been outrageous,” he said.

Later, the professor remarked: “Nothing else kills 25,000 extra people in a year. COVID is doing that. Influenza killed 300 people this year. And yet influenza was compared to COVID in Australia.”

Of the likely 25,000 fatalities of 2022, 14,662 have thus far been officially recorded as directly caused by the virus. That compares with 909 in 2020 and 1,344 in 2021 or a total of 2,253 for the two years. In other words, even going by the official toll, the annual coronavirus death rate has jumped 11-fold this year as compared to last year.

Crabb explained, however, that the fatalities only provide one indication of the broader long-term health crisis that has been unleashed.

He cited recent analyses indicating that as many as half a million Australians, in a population of 25 million, are likely afflicted with Long-COVID. That term designates a host of potentially debilitating conditions that can impact upon virtually every organ of the body. Treasury figures earlier this year indicated that at least 30,000 people were no longer able to work, having been effectively disabled by the virus.

Speaking to this broader situation, Crabb stated: “COVID is driving this crisis, all of it. What happens with Covid infection is a serious infection that leaves you susceptible to other infections.

“And even more worryingly a signature of Long COVID is what we call immune dysfunction, reactivating Epstein-Barr virus or chickenpox in people because their immune systems aren’t working as they should. This means we have the likelihood of quite a lot of people in the community far more susceptible to infection than they otherwise would be. It’s all COVID, we have to get our head around that.”

The damage caused by the virus refutes the claims, used to justify the reopening, that repeat infections would generate immunity and thereby end the pandemic.

As Crabb noted, while there have been four major COVID waves this year, “we never had a low point. The difference between the lowest point of a wave and the top is only about 4 times. The lowest number of people in hospital in 2022 for Covid was 1,400 people, the maximum 5,500.”

He elaborated: “The July-August wave was Australia’s worst. This one’s looking pretty bad. You would have to be a very optimistic person to think the next one we have in January-February next year is somehow going to be fine.

“The likelihood is that if we keep our current approach of being casual about infection, we’ll keep having waves of this sort. Even more worrying is that the virus evolves in a step change way, like it did when omicron arose in the first place, where this completely different looking COVID arises. The driver of that happening is numbers. The more viral numbers out there, the more opportunity the virus has to evolve into something that can transmit better in the face of immunity that’s out there.”

Like many principled epidemiologists, Crabb framed his important remarks as an appeal to governments to see sense and to adopt essential public health measures necessary to stem transmission.

The experiences of the past year however, in Australia and internationally, have demonstrated the collapse of any mitigation strategy. The alternatives are between a homicidal “let it rip” policy, supported by the entire capitalist political establishment, and the fight for the elimination of the virus, which requires the mobilisation of the working class against the governments and the profit system itself.

That is underscored by the role of the current federal Australian Labor government. In the seven months since it was elected in May, Labor has presided over more deaths than in the entire preceding period of the pandemic.

Labor has gone further than its conservative Liberal-National predecessor in dismantling even the semblance of a coordinated public health response to the virus. It has overseen the ending of daily reporting of pandemic statistics, including infections and deaths.

This has gone hand in hand with measures virtually designed to further spread the virus. They included the abolition of any requirement to report a positive Rapid Antigen Test (RAT) to the health authorities. Even more significant was the ending of any mandatory isolation period for people who test positive. Together with the termination of limited pandemic leave payments, the clear purpose was to force infected workers to remain on the job.

Even further attacks come into effect on January 1. For most testing sites, it will become necessary to obtain a doctor’s referral to be given a Polymerase chain reaction test (PCR), even though they are more reliable than RATs. Many general practitioners are ending free bulk-billing consultations in response to a virtual freeze on government subsidies, meaning a lot of people will have to pay up to $70 for such a referral. But Labor’s guidelines indicate that they could be still denied a PCR, given that the tests will now largely be restricted to those deemed vulnerable to the virus.

With testing already at record lows, the obvious aim is to claim that the pandemic is over by no longer registering the vast majority of cases.

Even with the current breakdown of testing, however, more than a hundred thousand infections are being reported across the country every week and there were almost 700 official deaths in the three weeks to Christmas. The Labor government’s program, identical to that of its counterparts internationally, is guaranteeing that the pandemic will continue to exact a heavy toll in 2023.

Netanyahu forms far-right Israeli coalition government

Jean Shaoul

Former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is set to return to power after 18 months in opposition, after announcing a series of deals with the fascistic Religious Zionism Party and the ultra-orthodox religious parties, Shas and United Torah Judaism (UTJ).

Former Israeli Prime Minister and the head of Likud party, Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife Sara gesture after first exit poll results for the Israeli Parliamentary election at his party's headquarters in Jerusalem, Wednesday, Nov. 2, 2022. [AP Photo/Tsafrir Abayov]

Having pushed Israeli politics to the right during his 15 years of premiership, he will now head the most right-wing government in Israel’s 75-year history. It will empower the violent, racist and fascist forces seeking to incite political violence against the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and within Israel, cement Israel’s Jewish Supremacy policy enshrined in its 2018 Nation-State law and clamp down on Jewish workers opposing its policies.

It puts paid to the claim that Israel is “the only democracy” in the Middle East. The inclusion of Religious Zionism makes explicit what was always implicit: Israel’s government will be committed to Jewish Supremacy and apartheid rule, the annexation of large swaths of the occupied West Bank illegally occupied since the Arab Israeli war of 1967, the expansion of settlements illegal even under current Israeli law and Jewish prayer at al-Aqsa Mosque.

Netanyahu tweeted triumphantly, “I got it,” on Wednesday night, just minutes before the deadline for forming a new government following the fifth elections in less than four years on November 1. It is expected that the new government, which will have a majority of four, will be sworn in early in the new year.

The election, the fifth in four years, was precipitated by the collapse last June of the fragile coalition headed by Yair Lapid and Naftali Bennett of eight parties united only by opposition to the scandal-ridden Netanyahu. Their “government of change” that included Labour and Meretz—both ostensibly committed to a Palestinian statelet alongside Israel—paved the way for the rise of the far-right Religious Zionism. It presided over more killings of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories than at any time since 2005, escalated Israel’s covert wars against Iran and its allies, lifted all measures aimed at restricting the spread of the pandemic and did nothing to alleviate social inequality—one of the highest in the OECD group of advanced countries.

Netanyahu, currently in court on charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust in three separate cases, brokered an electoral alliance of the three far-right parties—Religious Zionism, Jewish Power and Noam—to bolster its vote in the November 1 election because of its willingness to introduce a law preventing a sitting prime minister from being indicted while in office. Religious Zionism won 10 percent of the vote and 14 seats, making it the third largest party in the Knesset, enabling Netanyahu to form a 64-seat coalition, the largest majority for any government since 2018.

With Religious Zionism in a position to call the shots, Bezalel Smotrich, leader of the Religious Zionism alliance, has secured the finance portfolio for himself and a newly created ministerial position within the defence ministry with powers over the civil administration of the West Bank for his party. This Jewish Supremacist, homophobe and proponent of annexation of Palestinian territories has control over building permits in the settlements, demolitions of Palestinian homes, land issues, access to water. It has oversight of two military units that run civilian and security issues in the West Bank’s Area C, including the movement of people and goods between Gaza, Israel and the West Bank.

Likud Party leader Benjamin Netanyahu (left,) far-right Israeli lawmaker Bezalel Smotrich and Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid (centre) and and leaders of all Israel's political parties pose for a group photo after the swearing-in ceremony for lawmakers at the Knesset, Israel's parliament, in Jerusalem, Tuesday, November 15, 2022. [AP Photo/Tsafrir Abayov]

This is nothing less than the de facto annexation of Area C, designated under the Oslo Accords as being under Israeli military control, where Israel’s West Bank settlements, home to more than 450,000 Israelis, are located. While Netanyahu had sought to annex parts of the West Bank during his earlier premiership, he was forced to drop the plan after “normalizing” relations with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco. These states had earlier signaled their unease over the new government that has—according to the New York Times—'quickly morphed into a more pragmatic approach: Business as usual, at least for now.”

Itamar Ben-Gvir, leader of the fascistic Jewish Power, has secured the post of national security. This convicted racist, supporter of the virulent anti-Arab Kahanist organization, once designated as a terrorist organization in both Israel and the US, who threatened to expel Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, will have oversight of the police within Israel and the force that controls access to and security at al-Aqsa Mosque. Ben-Gvir demanded and won an extension of his remit to include the Border Police, a paramilitary force that chiefly operates in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, a change that requires parliamentary approval. The security forces that have long allowed the settlers to attack the property and lives of Palestinians living in the West Bank with impunity—often under the protection if not active assistance of the military—will now actively encourage it in order to drive them from their homes and their land.

Netanyahu has appointed Avi Maoz, head of the Noam party and notorious for his racist, homophobic and misogynist views, is deputy minister in charge of “Jewish identity,” with control over parts of Israel’s national education system and authority to approve or expunge external content programmes from the list currently offered to Israeli schools.

Netanyahu has promised the interior and health portfolios to Aryeh Deri, leader of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, who served time in jail for corruption and left office as part of a plea deal for a new indictment of tax evasion. Since Israel’s attorney general has stated that his conviction for tax offences disqualifies him from serving in the cabinet, this will require the Knesset to fast-track legislation to overturning the ban on convicted legislators serving as ministers.

The new government’s agenda includes an overhaul of the judicial system, subjecting the decisions of the Supreme Court to an override by the Knesset that will also be given the power to appoint judges, ending any independence of the judiciary. It is following the path taken by far-right governments in Poland and Hungary. Also expected is legislation aimed at securing the dismissal of Netanyahu’s ongoing corruption trial.

His agreement with Religious Zionism includes steps to promote Orthodox and nationalist interpretations of Judaism, including narrowing the definition of who is a Jew—and thus eligible for automatic citizenship under Israel’s law of return. It also includes a pledge to introduce legislation revoking the ban under Israel’s Basic Law on a party that incites racism that was introduced to block the return of the outlawed Kach party, led by ultra-nationalist Meir Kahane who advocated for the mass expulsion of Palestinians, to the Knesset. In 2019, this law was used to prevent Jewish Power members Baruch Marzel—who has called for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians—and Bentzi Gopstein—who has called for the dismantling of the Dome of the Rock Mosque—from running for the Knesset.

Netanyahu has already agreed to legalise Jewish settler outposts in the West Bank and transferring jurisdiction over settlers from military administrators to civilian ministries. This would legally place settlers and Palestinians under entirely different systems and confirm charges that Israel is running an apartheid regime.

There are plans to enforce the “Judaisation” of the Galilee and Negev in the north and south of Israel respectively, that are home to significant numbers of Israel’s Palestinian citizens, via the offer of economic benefits and discounts to Israeli Jews who move there.

According to Arab 48, Ben-Gvir has won agreement from Netanyahu to sack and refuse to hire teachers who criticise the Israeli occupation or take part in anti-Israeli occupation protest, claiming “this is terrorism.” Smotrich has declared that human rights groups—both Palestinian and Israeli—pose an “existential threat” to Israel and called for their funds to be seized and their activities banned. Amichai Chikli, a Likud legislator, said “under the guise of human rights organisations and humanitarian activity hides a radical antisemitic and anti-Zionist ideology, whose purpose is to undermine the legitimacy of the State of Israel and spill the blood of its soldiers and citizens.”

At a recent clash between Israeli activists opposed to the settlements in Hebron in the West Bank, one soldier was filmed hurling an activist to the ground and then punching him in the head, while a second warned, “Ben-Gvir is going to put things in order here. You’re done making a mess… I decide what’s legal here.” While the first soldier was suspended and the second jailed for six days, Ben-Gvir is pushing an immunity bill for soldiers against trials and investigations for acts carried out during their service.

An estimated 250 million Chinese people were infected with COVID-19 through December 20

Aaron Edwards

The immense scale of the social crime unfolding across China as a result of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) abandoning its Zero-COVID policy is increasingly coming into focus. According to a leaked report presented by Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention Deputy Director Sun Yang at a closed-door health briefing last Wednesday, roughly 250 million people were infected with COVID-19 across China within just the first 20 days of December.

This massive number of infections amounts to 18 percent of China’s 1.4 billion people and starkly contrasts with official figures of the National Health Commission (NHC), which reported 62,592 symptomatic cases over the same 20-day period. Sun estimated that on a single day, Tuesday, December 20, roughly 37 million people were infected.

Sun’s private estimates coincide with public approximations made last week by two individual cities, Qingdao and Dongguan. The head of Qingdao’s health commission, Bo Tao, estimated that there were about 490,000-530,000 new infections in the city each day as of Friday, and he expected an increase of 10 percent to those numbers on Saturday and Sunday based on modeling data.

A patient is wheeled into the fever clinic at a hospital in Beijing, Monday, Dec. 19, 2022. (AP Photo/Andy Wong)

In Dongguan, the city commission’s computer modeling and experts estimated Friday that there are now roughly 250,000-300,000 infections per day throughout the city. This figure, as well as infection levels throughout the country, are expected to increase massively over the next month due to the Lunar New Year holiday season.

The abandonment of regular testing and even the reporting of cases by the NHC has resulted in vast undercounts of infections and deaths, prompting a hypocritical response from the imperialist powers and other countries which have overseen mass infection policies throughout the pandemic.

In a recent phone call between US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, Blinken stressed the need for “transparency” regarding COVID-19. The World Health Organization (WHO) and officials in India have also expressed concerns over Beijing’s lack of accurate case reporting.

One need only recall the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) blatant distortion of infection data to discourage masking last February, or the mass funeral pyres in India during the devastating outbreak of the Delta variant last year, to recognize the hypocrisy of these figures’ supposed concern for human life.

In essence, the CCP is repeating the same process pioneered by the United States, India and other countries of minimizing the effects of COVID-19, manipulating the criteria for cause of death, undercounting cases and pushing propaganda through the media.

The scenes in Chinese hospitals as described by doctors, nurses and patients testify to the number of cases surging through major cities, where most of China’s 267 million citizens over the age of 60 live. Elderly patients are flooding the hospitals, which are running out of portable beds, oxygen hookups and places to put sick patients. Many doctors are too sick to carry on working, and others are working while infected.

A neurologist at Beijing Friendship Hospital told the Financial Times in a recent interview, “All the doctors are laid up, we don’t have anywhere to send patients because other departments do not have enough doctors, the ER is clogged with patients—it is taking us much longer to move them onwards.” The neurologist interviewed was herself recovering from COVID-19 and visibly coughing through her face mask.

Ambulances are backed up and cannot get patients off of their stretchers. In the city of Hangzhou, volunteer drivers are being recruited to meet the demand for emergency ambulance services. State-run funeral services are suspending burials due to a high volume of corpses. Specially-built emergency facilities, such as Beijing Chaoyang Integrative Medicine, have rooms that have been converted into makeshift morgues.

Other signs indicate that people are dying at home in large numbers. The demand for oxygen machines for at-home use is soaring. There is a shortage of cough medicine and other drugs. In Yunnan, officials have limited the sale of ibuprofen to one box per buyer and the sale of antigen tests to six tests per week. Sales of oximeters, a device to measure pulse rates and oxygen saturation, have skyrocketed. Production of these devices, which are useful to determine heart and lung health, is being boosted to meet demand.

Just days after Sun’s estimates were leaked, on Sunday the NHS released a statement saying it would no longer report COVID-19 cases whatsoever. Provocatively, the agency has also narrowed the definition of a COVID-19 death solely to “respiratory failure,” excluding other related issues, underscoring that the official numbers of infections and deaths are now completely unreliable.

There have been at least three recent high profile deaths in Beijing presumed to be from COVID-19. In the case of 67-year-old Wu Guanying, a lead designer of the 2008 Beijing Olympics mascot, the media reported his death as the result of a “severe cold,” prompting opposition on social media. Footballer Wang Ruoji of the Shenyang Jinde team died at the age of 37 of “diabetes complications” believed to be caused by COVID-19 infection. Opera singer Chu Lanlan, 40, died shortly after contracting the virus.

The highly infectious nature of the current dominant variant in China, the Omicron BF.7 subvariant, has made it particularly dangerous to a population who have mostly never been exposed to the virus. The overall vaccination rate is above 90 percent, but only 57.9 percent of adults have had a booster shot, and the booster rate for those above 80 years old is only 42.3 percent.

Vaccination rates alone, however, are not to blame for this unraveling catastrophe. It is the scrapping of the Zero-COVID elimination strategy by the CCP, under continuous pressure from the imperialist powers, that is endangering and killing masses of Chinese citizens.

The direct pressure of major corporations such as Nike and Apple, which in November threatened to move their businesses elsewhere if supply chain and labor-related shortages continued, prompted the rapid lifting of Zero-COVID. China is expected to be the world’s cheap labor sweatshop, and the CCP is forcing the working class back into dangerous conditions that will lead to their sickness, disability and death.

With the Lunar New Year festivities approaching, the loosening of travel restrictions poses a major threat to the rural provinces, where hundreds of millions of workers are expected to travel in the coming weeks. Having fully embraced the “forever COVID” policy, the CCP is doing everything it can to open up the country to travel with no restrictions on borders or public gatherings.

On Saturday, the Ministry of Education ensured that 4.74 million students took national postgraduate admissions exams in-person. Even those who tested positive for COVID-19 were expected to take the exams in-person, in a separate room from those who tested negative.

These policies are giving COVID-19 a new lease on life. Unleashing this highly infectious disease on such a massive population so suddenly and without any real attempt to isolate people or implement basic mitigation measures greatly accelerates the evolutionary path towards new and potentially more dangerous variants.

A recent article in Nature warned, “China is likely to discover what other countries with limited previous exposure to the virus have found over the past year: that there won’t be a single ‘exit’ wave to mark the lifting of pandemic restrictions. Further waves of infection and death are likely to follow, either from new variants that arise in the population, or from variants imported as the country opens its borders to visitors.”

The scrapping of Zero-COVID measures, motivated by the class interests of China’s national bourgeoisie under pressures from global finance capital, is as shortsighted as it is criminal. There are plenty of examples around the world of what will happen to the population, but they are being purposefully ignored by the Chinese ruling class. An estimation from the health data firm Airfinity states that 1.3-2.1 million people could die in China from the current surge alone.

While the bourgeoisie of the imperialist powers and within China have lifted Zero-COVID in a pragmatic attempt to fully resume capitalist production and restore stability to global supply chains, in actuality, this reckless policy will further destabilize the entire world economy.

In the short term, the center of world production is now engulfed in a massive social crisis of sickness and death. In the long term, potentially tens of millions of Chinese workers will join the ranks of those disabled by Long COVID. In the US alone, an estimated 4 million people have been so disabled by Long COVID that they have dropped out of the workforce.