House Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic begins political inquisition of scientists

Benjamin Mateus

On Tuesday, the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, led by Republican Representative Brad Wenstrup, a podiatrist and former US Army reservist, interrogated two leading authors of the research note titled Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2, published in March 2020 and well known in the scientific community for being the first significant investigation into where the virus which causes COVID-19 came from.

The purpose of the hearings was intended to discredit Dr. Kristian Andersen, professor in the Department of Immunology and Microbiology at Scripps Research Institute, and Dr. Robert Garry, professor of Microbiology and Immunology at Tulane Medical School, by claiming they “vilified and suppressed the lab leak theory in pursuit of a preferred, coordinated narrative that was not based in truth or science.”

Wenstrup claimed that he had evidence “that the conclusions championed by the co-authors of Proximal Origin are not only inaccurate but were crafted to appease a stated political motive.” This involved a supposed cover-up of the real source of the virus, the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), in which the scientists engaged at the direction of two top health officials, Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Francis Collins.

The Republican-based scenario, initially advanced by fascist Trump counselor Steve Bannon, insists that Fauci and Collins had pushed to publish the paper showing a natural origin of SARS-CoV-2 to escape responsibility for creating the virus. They feared that otherwise they would be implicated in offering millions in grants to EcoHealth Alliance, a US-based global nonprofit scientific research organization, which worked with the Chinese lab to conduct studies on bat coronaviruses.

Dr. Kristian Andersen testifying before the House Oversight Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic on July 11, 2023. [Photo: C-SPAN.org]

Dr. Andersen addressed this right-wing conspiracy theory in his prepared testimony to the hearing. He declared, “The title of this hearing, ‘Investigating the Proximal Origin of a Cover-Up,’ is directly targeted at our March 2020 peer-reviewed study in Nature Medicine titled ‘The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2.’”

He continued:

It has been alleged that our paper was initiated and orchestrated by Dr. Anthony Fauci to disprove, dismiss, and cover up a lab origin of SARS-CoV-2 as directed at a February 1, 2020, conference call. ... It has also been suggested that a $8.9 million federal “WARN-ID” grant awarded in 2020 to myself and colleagues from five different countries was a quid-pro-quo we received for changing our conclusions about the likely origin of SARS-CoV-2. Let me categorically say that these allegations are absurd and false.

Throughout the hearing, the two scientists gave calm and measured testimony rebutting the conspiracy theory at every point and arguing that proponents of the “lab leak” had not offered a shred of factual evidence. The Republicans howled and preened before the television cameras, appealing to Donald Trump and his fascist supporters.

And the Democrats contented themselves with a few “for the record” statements of support for the scientists but otherwise did nothing to interrupt the display witch-hunting worthy of Senator Joe McCarthy at his worst. They are far more concerned with maintaining bipartisan support for the war in Ukraine than in fighting a conspiracy theory launched by fascists like former Trump counselor Steve Bannon.

During the hearing, Representative Ronny Jackson (Republican—Texas) told Andersen and Garry, “What a lot of people think is going on here is that Dr. Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins realized that they had been implicated in the creation of the virus, and they were doing everything they could, including getting both of you to come on board as tools or vehicles, to undermine that theory.”

These are, based on accumulated evidence acquired over the last three years that include their own intelligence reports on the subject, bald-faced lies that perpetuate the conspiracy first raised by Bannon and his cronies to shift the blame for Trump’s criminal response to the pandemic onto China.

Dr. Andersen is an internationally renowned researcher whose main work has focused on understanding the complex relationships between human hosts and infectious pathogens. He has conducted extensive work in the genetics of these interactions, as well as field work and computational biology to better elucidate these natural processes. More so, he has been the lead investigator in many international collaborations that not only included SARS-CoV-2, but also the Zika virus, Ebola virus, West Nile virus and Lassa virus.

In late January 2020, after a preliminary review of the SARS-CoV-2 genome, Dr. Andersen and colleagues Dr. Robert Garry and Dr. Edward Holmes (leading researcher on the evolution and emergence of infectious diseases) had contacted Dr. Fauci to discuss their concerns over the mutation seen at the furin site of the coronavirus’ spike protein, which they felt was a possible indicator of bioengineering.

Fauci and the scientists and other health experts discussed this possibility and asked Andersen to get a group of scientists together “to examine carefully the data to determine if his concerns were validated.” Specifically, Fauci had told Andersen then that “if you think it came from a lab, you should write this up as a peer-reviewed paper.”

In others, the email record shows the diametrically opposite of the right-wing conspiracy theory. The scientists were initially concerned about the possible creation of a bioweapon, which would have enormous implications both politically and in terms of health care, and they were tasked with investigating the issue.

Fauci and Collins were merely facilitators in organizing the international investigation without once indicating any particular conclusion should be arrived at or forced. This was an open collaborative process free from any form of coercion, deceit or ill intentions. A February conference call among leading scientists demonstrated this, as Andersen noted in his testimony:

There is clearly much to understand in this. This call was very helpful to hear some of our current understanding and the many gaps in our knowledge. I do not believe this is a question of a binary outcome, it is more a question of “What are the evolutionary origins of 2019-nCoV, important for future risk assessment and understanding of animal/human coronaviruses.”

We on this call are not the only ones with scientific expertise in this area, and this was an ad hoc group that came together to air some thoughts. It is clearly not the sole group to take this forward, that will need a broader range of input and a respected international body to ask an expert group to explore this, with a completely open mind. In order to stay ahead of the conspiracy theories and social media, I do think there is an urgency for a body to convene such a group and commission some work to “Understand the evolutionary origins of 2019-nCoV, important for this epidemic and for future risks assessment and understanding of animal/human coronaviruses.”

In other words, a completely open minded and neutral question bringing the best minds and under the umbrella of a respected international agency. I hope this is a reasonable approach, please send any thoughts or suggestions.

In a matter of a few days in February 2020, after studying the virus’s genome and the available literature on coronaviruses in bats and their spillover into human populations, and entertaining various lab leak accident scenarios, Andersen and his colleagues arrived at an “agnostic” consensus, stating in their Letter published in Nature Medicine: “Although the evidence shows that SARS-CoV-2 is not a purposefully manipulated virus, it is currently impossible to prove or disprove the other theories of its origin described here [various hypotheses of how the virus made its way from the animal reservoir to human beings]. However, since we observed all notable SARS-CoV-2 features, including the optimized RBD [Receptor Binding Domain] and polybasic cleavage site [Furin Cleavage Site], in related coronaviruses in nature, we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”

They added, “More scientific data could swing the balance of evidence to favor one hypothesis over another. Obtaining related viral sequences from animal sources would be the most definitive way of revealing viral origins.”

Since that publication, the weight of the evidence has only given further support to their “proximal” conclusions. Four publications in particular are relevant to the examination of these and have been linked here for the reader’s review:

• The origins of SARS-CoV-2: a critical review (September 16, 2021)
• The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan was the early epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic (July 26, 2022)
• SARS-CoV-2 furin cleavage site was not engineered (September 29, 2022)
• COVID-origins study links raccoon dogs to Wuhan market: what scientists think (March 22, 2023)

And these are only a few in a long list of publications in high visibility journals that include most recent evidence of SARS-CoV-2-like viruses have emerged as well as bat coronaviruses that harbor FCS and most recently work by Dr. Edward Holmes and his group that found a recombinant “SARS-1-like and SARS-2-like viruses [that has] a receptor binding domain that is as close as any to SARS-CoV-2.”

On the side of the lab leak conspiracy, not one piece of even circumstantial evidence has come to light in defense of their hysterical allegations. Not even the US intelligence services, with a vested interest in spreading anti-Chinese propaganda, have been able to reach any consensus or offer more than a “low confidence” assessment—little more than speculation.

As the World Socialist Web Site noted last month after the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) released its report on the potential links between the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and the origin of COVID-19, “Not only does the ODNI report offer not one shred of evidence in support of the fascistic right-wing Wuhan lab leak conspiracy, but it goes far to corroborate the earlier statements made by the WIV scientists and the WHO officials on the topic.”

Despite the oft inflammatory remarks made by various Republicans, including the outright fascist Marjorie Taylor Greene, not once did they offer any evidence to the allegations that Andersen and colleagues changed their views from a bioengineered to zoonotic origin hypothesis because of political coercion or bribery. Nor could they refute the science as it was presented during the testimony.

As Andersen quietly observed, unfazed by the attacks, “[it seems we are] pawns in a political game.” Despite these, he continued to patiently explain when he was given an opportunity to get a word in edgewise. “I think it’s important that we take a step back and focus on what’s possible versus what is probable. … We conclude that the virus very likely emerged as the result of a zoonosis, that is, a spillover from an animal host. This remains the only scientifically supported theory for how the virus emerged. If convincing new evidence were to be discovered, suggesting otherwise, we would, of course, revise our conclusions. This is science.”

Later he noted, “If there were any new evidence that were to be unearthed suggesting that this could potentially have been associated with a lab, of course, we will consider that.”

Dr. Andersen explained that the threats to himself and his colleagues had reached a fever pitch, so much so that he has found his name on various kill lists posted by right-wing Trump supporters and other fascists.

As Wenstrup brought the hearings to an end, he defended the two federal agencies that supported the lab-leak hypothesis—the FBI and the Department of Energy—for their positions, and he warned that he was going to investigate the other intelligence units for not reaching similar conclusions. This is McCarthyism in a nutshell.

One can assume that Eco Health Alliance and Dr. Fauci will be next on the subcommittee hit list. These proceedings only underscore the deeply reactionary and degenerated state of US politics and global capitalism, where science is deeply maligned and mistrusted if it does not adhere to the demands placed on it by political reaction.

Heavy rainfall kills over 100 people in India, following heatwaves that took the lives of almost 200

Yuan Darwin & Martina Inessa

People on bridge across River Beas swollen due to heavy rains in Kullu District, Himachal Pradesh, India, Monday, July 10, 2023. [AP Photo/Aqil Khan]

Torrential downpours over the past fortnight have led to the deaths of more than 100 people and unleashed havoc across northern India in what climate scientists describe as the country’s worst monsoon in decades. The deadly monsoon comes as several other countries grapple with similar extreme weather.

Himachal Pradesh, India’s most northern state, was the worst affected by the heavy rains. Authorities reported that over 1,300 roads were damaged, resulting in a total estimated damage bill in the state of 40 billion Indian rupees (approximately $US486 million). Other impacted states include Assam, Meghalaya, Sikkim, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh.

New Delhi, the national capital, recorded 153 mm of rain in 24 hours on July 10, the highest in a single day in July since 1982. The water levels of the Yamuna River in Delhi hit an all-time high, breaching the previous record level of 207 metres (over 680 feet) in 1978. Schools, houses and other buildings have been inundated and shut down.

Delhi, Punjab and Himachal have received 112 percent, 100 percent and 70 percent more rainfall than usual so far in this year’s monsoon, according to the India Meteorological Department (IMD).

The extreme rainfall follows blistering heat waves in Northern India that began in June and saw temperatures soar to 45 degrees Celsius (113 degrees Fahrenheit) in large parts of the country. More than 170 people died from the heat, most of them in the north.

Extreme temperature and rainfall events, droughts, rising sea levels and intense cyclones are recurring events across the sub-continent and clear signs of climate change with deadly consequences.

In India, 959 people were killed by floods in 2020 and 656 in 2021. In 2018, it was reported to the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of the national parliament, by the Central Water Commission that 107,480 people had died from extreme rainfall and floods across the country between 1953 and 2017.

Heatwaves have claimed more than 17,000 lives in the past 50 years in India, according to a paper authored by M. Rajeevan, former secretary of the Ministry of Earth Sciences, along with four other scientists. While India’s main summer months—from April to June—are always hot, temperatures over the past decade have become much more intense and dangerous.

The IMD reports a 24 percent increase in the number of heat waves in 2010–2019 compared with 2000–2009. The mortality rate from high temperatures increased by 62 percent between 2000 and 2019.

Even though these disasters are projected in the media as “natural” calamities, they are, in reality, mainly produced by the destructive drive for profits by big business and are, hence, man-made. Unplanned urbanisation and development along with haphazard burning of fossil fuels are key factors.

Last year, the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), a New Delhi-based public interest research and advocacy organisation that tracks extreme weather events, released its “State of India’s Environment Report 2022.”

It revealed that the country experienced extreme weather events on 314 out of the 365 days, meaning that at least one extreme weather event was reported in some part of India on each of these days. The report concluded that these events caused over 3,000 deaths in 2022, affected some 2 million hectares of crop area, killed more than 69,000 livestock and destroyed around 420,000 houses.

Extreme weather events claimed 233 lives and damaged 950,000 hectares of cropland in the country in the first four months of this year (2023), according to a recent study led by the CSE.

These recurring calamities impact most heavily on the poorest sections of society. They always produce crocodile tears from political leaders and the media and grossly inadequate compensation payments.

On July 10, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s office issued a cynical tweet declaring that local administrations are working to ensure the well-being of those affected by floods while the PM “took stock of the situation.”

Aggrieved farmers and flood victims have angrily spoken out about the devastation. One social media video showed an elderly woman in Haryana slapping Ishwar Singh, a parliamentarian from the Jannayak Janta Party which is part of the BJP ruling alliance. “Why have you come now?” she asked.

While climate change and global warming are drastically changing weather patterns, Modi and his Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government, like its Congress Party-led predecessor, has refused to take any real action to mitigate the devastating impact of these catastrophes or to provide adequate relief.

Instead, it spends billions of dollars upgrading the Indian armed forces in pursuit of the ruling elite’s geo-political ambitions while giving major tax incentives and other assistance to big business.

For decades India’s ruling elites have failed to act on warnings made by climate scientists. They have refused to build the necessary infrastructure to prepare for these disasters.

AI vs. AI: Flash Wars and Human Extinction

Michael T. Klare

Photo by Owen Beard

A world in which machines governed by artificial intelligence (AI) systematically replace human beings in most business, industrial, and professional functions is horrifying to imagine. After all, as prominent computer scientists have been warning us, AI-governed systems are prone to critical errors and inexplicable “hallucinations,” resulting in potentially catastrophic outcomes. But there’s an even more dangerous scenario imaginable from the proliferation of super-intelligent machines: the possibility that those nonhuman entities could end up fighting one another, obliterating all human life in the process.

The notion that super-intelligent computers might run amok and slaughter humans has, of course, long been a staple of popular culture. In the prophetic 1983 film “WarGames,” a supercomputer known as WOPR (for War Operation Plan Response and, not surprisingly, pronounced “whopper”) nearly provokes a catastrophic nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union before being disabled by a teenage hacker (played by Matthew Broderick). The “Terminator” movie franchise, beginning with the original 1984 film, similarly envisioned a self-aware supercomputer called “Skynet” that, like WOPR, was designed to control U.S. nuclear weapons but chooses instead to wipe out humanity, viewing us as a threat to its existence.

Though once confined to the realm of science fiction, the concept of supercomputers killing humans has now become a distinct possibility in the very real world of the near future. In addition to developing a wide variety of “autonomous,” or robotic combat devices, the major military powers are also rushing to create automated battlefield decision-making systems, or what might be called “robot generals.” In wars in the not-too-distant future, such AI-powered systems could be deployed to deliver combat orders to American soldiers, dictating where, when, and how they kill enemy troops or take fire from their opponents. In some scenarios, robot decision-makers could even end up exercising control over America’s atomic weapons, potentially allowing them to ignite a nuclear war resulting in humanity’s demise.

Now, take a breath for a moment. The installation of an AI-powered command-and-control (C2) system like this may seem a distant possibility. Nevertheless, the U.S. Department of Defense is working hard to develop the required hardware and software in a systematic, increasingly rapid fashion. In its budget submission for 2023, for example, the Air Force requested $231 million to develop the Advanced Battlefield Management System (ABMS), a complex network of sensors and AI-enabled computers designed to collect and interpret data on enemy operations and provide pilots and ground forces with a menu of optimal attack options. As the technology advances, the system will be capable of sending “fire” instructions directly to “shooters,” largely bypassing human control.

“A machine-to-machine data exchange tool that provides options for deterrence, or for on-ramp [a military show-of-force] or early engagement,” was how Will Roper, assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, technology, and logistics, described the ABMS system in a 2020 interview. Suggesting that “we do need to change the name” as the system evolves, Roper added, “I think Skynet is out, as much as I would love doing that as a sci-fi thing. I just don’t think we can go there.”

And while he can’t go there, that’s just where the rest of us may, indeed, be going.

Mind you, that’s only the start. In fact, the Air Force’s ABMS is intended to constitute the nucleus of a larger constellation of sensors and computers that will connect all U.S. combat forces, the Joint All-Domain Command-and-Control System (JADC2, pronounced “Jad-C-two”). “JADC2 intends to enable commanders to make better decisions by collecting data from numerous sensors, processing the data using artificial intelligence algorithms to identify targets, then recommending the optimal weapon… to engage the target,” the Congressional Research Service reported in 2022.

AI and the Nuclear Trigger

Initially, JADC2 will be designed to coordinate combat operations among “conventional” or non-nuclear American forces. Eventually, however, it is expected to link up with the Pentagon’s nuclear command-control-and-communications systems (NC3), potentially giving computers significant control over the use of the American nuclear arsenal. “JADC2 and NC3 are intertwined,” General John E. Hyten, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, indicated in a 2020 interview. As a result, he added in typical Pentagonese, “NC3 has to inform JADC2 and JADC2 has to inform NC3.”

It doesn’t require great imagination to picture a time in the not-too-distant future when a crisis of some sort — say a U.S.-China military clash in the South China Sea or near Taiwan — prompts ever more intense fighting between opposing air and naval forces. Imagine then the JADC2 ordering the intense bombardment of enemy bases and command systems in China itself, triggering reciprocal attacks on U.S. facilities and a lightning decision by JADC2 to retaliate with tactical nuclear weapons, igniting a long-feared nuclear holocaust.

The possibility that nightmare scenarios of this sort could result in the accidental or unintended onset of nuclear war has long troubled analysts in the arms control community. But the growing automation of military C2 systems has generated anxiety not just among them but among senior national security officials as well.

As early as 2019, when I questioned Lieutenant General Jack Shanahan, then director of the Pentagon’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, about such a risky possibility, he responded, “You will find no stronger proponent of integration of AI capabilities writ large into the Department of Defense, but there is one area where I pause, and it has to do with nuclear command and control.” This “is the ultimate human decision that needs to be made” and so “we have to be very careful.” Given the technology’s “immaturity,” he added, we need “a lot of time to test and evaluate [before applying AI to NC3].”

In the years since, despite such warnings, the Pentagon has been racing ahead with the development of automated C2 systems. In its budget submission for 2024, the Department of Defense requested $1.4 billion for the JADC2 in order “to transform warfighting capability by delivering information advantage at the speed of relevance across all domains and partners.” Uh-oh! And then, it requested another $1.8 billion for other kinds of military-related AI research.

Pentagon officials acknowledge that it will be some time before robot generals will be commanding vast numbers of U.S. troops (and autonomous weapons) in battle, but they have already launched several projects intended to test and perfect just such linkages. One example is the Army’s Project Convergence, involving a series of field exercises designed to validate ABMS and JADC2 component systems. In a test held in August 2020 at the Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona, for example, the Army used a variety of air- and ground-based sensors to track simulated enemy forces and then process that data using AI-enabled computers at Joint Base Lewis McChord in Washington state. Those computers, in turn, issued fire instructions to ground-based artillery at Yuma. “This entire sequence was supposedly accomplished within 20 seconds,” the Congressional Research Service later reported.

Less is known about the Navy’s AI equivalent, “Project Overmatch,” as many aspects of its programming have been kept secret. According to Admiral Michael Gilday, chief of naval operations, Overmatch is intended “to enable a Navy that swarms the sea, delivering synchronized lethal and nonlethal effects from near-and-far, every axis, and every domain.” Little else has been revealed about the project.

“Flash Wars” and Human Extinction

Despite all the secrecy surrounding these projects, you can think of ABMS, JADC2, Convergence, and Overmatch as building blocks for a future Skynet-like mega-network of super-computers designed to command all U.S. forces, including its nuclear ones, in armed combat. The more the Pentagon moves in that direction, the closer we’ll come to a time when AI possesses life-or-death power over all American soldiers along with opposing forces and any civilians caught in the crossfire.

Such a prospect should be ample cause for concern. To start with, consider the risk of errors and miscalculations by the algorithms at the heart of such systems. As top computer scientists have warned us, those algorithms are capable of remarkably inexplicable mistakes and, to use the AI term of the moment, “hallucinations” — that is, seemingly reasonable results that are entirely illusionary. Under the circumstances, it’s not hard to imagine such computers “hallucinating” an imminent enemy attack and launching a war that might otherwise have been avoided.

And that’s not the worst of the dangers to consider. After all, there’s the obvious likelihood that America’s adversaries will similarly equip their forces with robot generals. In other words, future wars are likely to be fought by one set of AI systems against another, both linked to nuclear weaponry, with entirely unpredictable — but potentially catastrophic — results.

Not much is known (from public sources at least) about Russian and Chinese efforts to automate their military command-and-control systems, but both countries are thought to be developing networks comparable to the Pentagon’s JADC2. As early as 2014, in fact, Russia inaugurated a National Defense Control Center (NDCC) in Moscow, a centralized command post for assessing global threats and initiating whatever military action is deemed necessary, whether of a non-nuclear or nuclear nature. Like JADC2, the NDCC is designed to collect information on enemy moves from multiple sources and provide senior officers with guidance on possible responses.

China is said to be pursuing an even more elaborate, if similar, enterprise under the rubric of “Multi-Domain Precision Warfare” (MDPW). According to the Pentagon’s 2022 report on Chinese military developments, its military, the People’s Liberation Army, is being trained and equipped to use AI-enabled sensors and computer networks to “rapidly identify key vulnerabilities in the U.S. operational system and then combine joint forces across domains to launch precision strikes against those vulnerabilities.”

Picture, then, a future war between the U.S. and Russia or China (or both) in which the JADC2 commands all U.S. forces, while Russia’s NDCC and China’s MDPW command those countries’ forces. Consider, as well, that all three systems are likely to experience errors and hallucinations. How safe will humans be when robot generals decide that it’s time to “win” the war by nuking their enemies?

If this strikes you as an outlandish scenario, think again, at least according to the leadership of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, a congressionally mandated enterprise that was chaired by Eric Schmidt, former head of Google, and Robert Work, former deputy secretary of defense. “While the Commission believes that properly designed, tested, and utilized AI-enabled and autonomous weapon systems will bring substantial military and even humanitarian benefit, the unchecked global use of such systems potentially risks unintended conflict escalation and crisis instability,” it affirmed in its Final Report. Such dangers could arise, it stated, “because of challenging and untested complexities of interaction between AI-enabled and autonomous weapon systems on the battlefield” — when, that is, AI fights AI.

Though this may seem an extreme scenario, it’s entirely possible that opposing AI systems could trigger a catastrophic “flash war” — the military equivalent of a “flash crash” on Wall Street, when huge transactions by super-sophisticated trading algorithms spark panic selling before human operators can restore order. In the infamous “Flash Crash” of May 6, 2010, computer-driven trading precipitated a 10% fall in the stock market’s value. According to Paul Scharre of the Center for a New American Security, who first studied the phenomenon, “the military equivalent of such crises” on Wall Street would arise when the automated command systems of opposing forces “become trapped in a cascade of escalating engagements.” In such a situation, he noted, “autonomous weapons could lead to accidental death and destruction at catastrophic scales in an instant.”

At present, there are virtually no measures in place to prevent a future catastrophe of this sort or even talks among the major powers to devise such measures. Yet, as the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence noted, such crisis-control measures are urgently needed to integrate “automated escalation tripwires” into such systems “that would prevent the automated escalation of conflict.” Otherwise, some catastrophic version of World War III seems all too possible. Given the dangerous immaturity of such technology and the reluctance of Beijing, Moscow, and Washington to impose any restraints on the weaponization of AI, the day when machines could choose to annihilate us might arrive far sooner than we imagine and the extinction of humanity could be the collateral damage of such a future war.

Asbestos in UK schools responsible for 10,000 deaths in four decades

Ioan Petrescu

As many as 10,000 UK school teachers, pupils and school staff have died of lung cancer caused by asbestos exposure in school buildings in the past 40 years, according to an investigation by the Sunday Times.

A UK school building in 2015 [Photo by PeterMHertsHeritage100 / Wikimedia / CC BY-SA 4.0]

Asbestos is a building material used as a fire retardant and heat insulator. It was widely employed during the postwar construction boom when many homes and schools were built in the UK. A 2019 Department for Education (DfE) survey of 20,000 schools in the UK estimated that about 81 percent of them contained asbestos.

Despite its useful properties, asbestos poses significant health risks for humans, especially after prolonged exposure—though there is no “safe” level of asbestos exposure. When inhaled, asbestos fibers damage the lungs and can lead to scarring and inflammation and, in many cases, malignant mesothelioma, an aggressive tumor for which there is no effective treatment.

While the time between exposure to asbestos and the emergence of actual illness can be quite long (up to 40 years), once diagnosed with mesothelioma, the average life expectancy is about 12 months. Over 4,000 people in the UK are killed by the disease each year.

The effects of asbestos have been known for a long time (the first documented death related to the substance was in 1906), but the material was only banned in the UK in 1999. Britain has the highest mesothelioma incidence in the world—more than twice that of France, Germany, or the United States.

The type of asbestos most commonly used in UK schools—generally known as “white” asbestos—does not emit fibers unless it is disturbed. However, as more and more schools are falling into disrepair, the risk that parts of buildings containing asbestos will be damaged, either by roof collapse or renovation work, is growing. There is no register recording which schools contain asbestos and where in the building.

Many teachers and children are daily exposed to asbestos when going to school, virtually guaranteeing that a significant number of them will contract mesothelioma later in life. This is doubly true for children, who are more vulnerable to lung cancer from asbestos than adults.

Since the risk of mesothelioma accumulates over time, a five-year-old child who is exposed to asbestos is estimated to be, according to a 2013 DfE report, five times more likely to develop mesothelioma during their lifetime than an adult who is first exposed at the age of 30. Despite this, schools in the UK are not obligated to inform parents if the school contains asbestos—and in many cases will not even be aware themselves that their buildings are potential death traps.

The Times recounted the case of PE Teacher Chris Willis, who was diagnosed with mesothelioma at 29 after being exposed to asbestos while attending the Kenton School in Newcastle as a child. “You don’t expect to go to school, get an education and come out with what I’ve got,” he said. He died last year, at the age of just 34.

In April 2022, a UK Work and Pensions Select Committee (WPSC) report recommended that the government establish a register of asbestos and start a program of gradually removing it from all buildings, starting with “high-risk” ones such as schools. The Health and Safety Executive of the government rejected both recommendations, which would have cost and estimated £11.4 billion, claiming that the risk of exposure is minimal if properly managed and that the “rush to remove asbestos” would pose more of a risk than letting it stay where it is.

This claim was contradicted a few months later when a report by the Asbestos Testing and Consultancy Association revealed that “Of the 710,433 items of asbestos found, 507,612 (71 percent) were recorded as having some level of damage.”

The government further stated that it is the responsibility of school staff to “manage” the risk, by “covering up” areas containing asbestos and ensuring that it is not disturbed. Tests have shown that this is not an effective strategy, however, as the asbestos is often not in good condition, or it is unsealed and hidden. They have also shown that it can be disturbed by normal school activity, with asbestos fibers released over the course of many years without anyone being aware of it.

The government’s own guidance on how to “manage” asbestos in schools relates an incident where, “In one school, a laboratory technician installed an IT cable through a ceiling void, putting holes through fire barriers and walls and contaminating most ceiling voids throughout the building. It was 9 months before the exposure was spotted by a surveyor.”

Electrical work done in another school led to the contamination with asbestos of “everything from computers, files and records to pupils’ coursework”.

Thousands of teachers and pupils are being condemned to an early grave by this cruel, penny-pinching indifference. It can be safely assumed that cases like the ones described above have happened many times and will continue to happen. It amounts to nothing less than social murder.

The Times report concludes by proposing a five-point plan for addressing this crisis and appealing to the government to implement it. Its suggestions are mostly a re-hash of the Work and Pensions Committee recommendations, including: “draw up a national strategy for the planned removal of all asbestos over the next 40 years”, creating a digital register for people to check if any building contains asbestos, and introducing air quality controls around buildings that monitor asbestos fibers.

While these are important, if inadequate, steps, it is pointless to expect a government that let 220,000 people die in the Covid-19 pandemic to spend anything on protecting the health and safety of workers and children, especially when that money could be used for the ongoing NATO war against Russia in Ukraine.

The teacher unions have made some pro-forma statements criticising the government but have not proposed any plan for teachers and school staff to fight for their health and lives.

NASUWT general secretary Dr Patrick Roach said, “This is needlessly and avoidably passing on a potentially deadly legacy to the staff and children working and learning in our schools today.” Yet the only proposal from the union is working with WPSC committee chairman Sir Stephen Timms to raise demands in parliament.

That the Times, a right-wing Murdoch newspaper, has made more of a fuss over this issue than the union bureaucracy is indicative of its contemptuous attitude towards its members. As far as the trade unions are concerned, as long as they can collect their dues from, nothing else matters, even if workers end up dying prematurely of a preventable cause.

Australian Labor government pushes social media censorship

Oscar Grenfell

The Australian Labor government is carrying out a crackdown on social media aimed at limiting the ability to discuss social and political issues free from state interference and censorship.

On Tuesday, July 4, 2023, a judge prohibited several federal agencies and officials of the Biden administration from working with social media companies about “protected speech.”

Late last month, Labor unveiled draft legislation that would greatly increase the regulation of content on social media. Under the bill, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), a federal regulatory body, will be granted sweeping powers to demand that social media corporations remove material deemed to be “misinformation or disinformation.”

Failure by the companies to delete material after instruction from the ACMA could result in massive fines of up to $2.75 million or 2 percent of global turnover, whichever is the larger.

The bill will thus create two interrelated streams of censorship. The social media corporations will have a direct financial interest in limiting controversial material that could come to the attention of the ACMA on their platforms. Meanwhile, the ACMA will be provided with significant powers and resources to trawl through social media postings and determine whether they can remain viewable or must be excised from the internet.

As with similar anti-democratic measures being carried out internationally, this is a clear attack on oppositional views, especially of a left-wing or socialist character.

Labor is pursuing its crackdown under conditions of mounting social and political opposition. There is growing anger among workers and youth over a rapidly deepening social crisis. The steepest increases to the cost-of-living in decades are being accompanied by real wage cuts, on top of decades of attacks on workers’ living and social conditions.

In a number of countries, these global processes have already produced major social upheavals, such as in France and Sri Lanka. Social media has played an important role in a number of these struggles, providing ordinary people with a means of communicating and organising, outside the control of the corporatised trade unions and other official institutions.

At the same time, the censorship is directed against anti-war sentiment. Australia, under Labor, is on the frontlines of advanced US preparations for war against China. It is also an active supporter of the US-NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, underscored by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s attendance at a war planning NATO summit in Lithuania this week.

This militarist program, promoted by the corporate media and all the parliamentary parties, will provoke increasing opposition as workers and youth become more aware of its disastrous implications. As in the 20th century, the program of war is incompatible with democratic rights and requires major attacks on civil liberties. This is borne out by the draft legislation itself.

“Misinformation” is defined in extraordinarily vague terms. According to the legislation, it is material that is “false, misleading or deceptive,” whose “content is provided on the digital service to one or more end-users in Australia” and is “reasonably likely to cause or contribute to serious harm.”

“Disinformation” is defined in almost identical terms, but includes the proviso that “the person disseminating, or causing the dissemination of, the content intends that the content deceive another person.” Thus it is a more serious offense than “misinformation” which also involves spreading information deemed to be false, but doing so unintentionally and without any aim of misleading others.

The sweeping character of the legislation is underscored by its definition of “harm.”

Among other things, the proposed laws declare “harm” to be any purportedly incorrect information that could cause a “disruption of public order or society in Australia,” that could do “harm to the integrity of Australian democratic processes or of Commonwealth, State, Territory or local government institutions,” and cause “economic or financial harm to Australians, the Australian economy or a sector of the Australian economy.”

These amount to what are essentially sedition offenses. The state, its institutions, the capitalist social order and specific corporate sectors are to be protected from information that threatens their interests with the blunt instrument of censorship.

It is entirely conceivable, for instance, that those who expose the lies and pretexts for Australia’s role in the US war drive against China, for instance, will be accused of causing “harm” to the military and “public order.”

In addition, the government and all government bodies are explicitly exempted from the “misinformation” and “disinformation’ regulations. So is so-called “professional news content,” i.e., that produced by the corporate media, the state-funded Australian Broadcasting Corporation and their international equivalents. These are the very entities pushing “disinformation” in the form of an endless stream of pro-war propaganda.

A “guidance note” accompanying the draft legislation includes an eclectic series of examples of potential “misinformation” and “disinformation.”

“Misinformation undermining the impartiality of an Australian electoral management body ahead of an election or a referendum,” one example states. The wording is vague. But the implication is clear. Criticism and exposure of government institutions can be declared illegitimate.

In a cynical attempt to dress up the legislation, it is being framed as an attempt to protect the population from such things as false medical information. One example in the “guidance note” refers to “misinformation that caused people to ingest or inject bleach products to treat a viral infection”—an obvious reference to the Trump inspired far-right.

Governments, however, played the central role in spreading deliberately false information about the COVID-19 pandemic. Driven by the demands of business, they resorted to misinformation and outright lies to justify their homicidal “let it rip” policy with dire public health consequences.

When the economy was being “reopened” in December 2021, the federal government’s Chief Medical Officer Paul Kelly declared that the rapid spread of the Omicron variant throughout the population would be a “Christmas present” to him. This was linked to disinformation claiming that Omicron was mild, and its transmission would result in heightened immunity. As a direct consequence of these falsifications, more than 20,000 Australians died of COVID last year, and many more became seriously ill.

Government spokespeople have denied or downplayed the airborne transmission of the virus, falsely claimed that children are not severely impacted and incorrectly asserted that COVID is unlikely to be spread in schools.

The lies about the pandemic to subordinate health and lives to profit interests parallel the pro-war propaganda that is being churned out by the governments and the media. The aggressive US-led confrontation with China, for instance, aimed at ensuring American global hegemony, is fraudulently presented as a defence of “stability” and the post-World War II “international rules-based order” in which Washington set the rules.

These falsifications recall one of the greatest pieces of disinformation this century. In 2003, governments in the US, Britain and Australia claimed that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. This lie was used to justify an illegal war for oil and geo-strategic dominance that claimed up to a million lives.

Censorship of social media, while sometimes presented as a crackdown on right-wing misinformation, is inevitably targeted at the left and socialists, and ultimately at the oppositional sentiments that are emerging among workers and young people amid an enormous social crisis, an unending pandemic and the growing danger of a world war.

In 2017, in close consultation with the US government, Google developed new algorithms aimed at suppressing access to alternative news sites and directing traffic to “authoritative sources,” i.e., those that toed the line of the American state.

As a consequence, search referrals from Google to the World Socialist Web Site declined by almost 70 percent. Similar falls were registered across a number of other anti-war and left-wing sites, including Julian Assange’s publication, WikiLeaks.

Now the Australian government is preparing to make deeper inroads into basic democratic rights and take the censorship of social media another step further.

The Impact of Plastic on Human Health

Robin Scher

In 2019, the European Commission’s Scientific Committee on Health, Environmental and Emerging Risks published a statement that identified 14 emerging health and environmental issues. Right near the top of that list was plastic waste. The committee emphasized the “urgent” need “for a better assessment of hazard and risk” associated with exposure to plastics of different shapes and forms.

The Facts About Plastic

During World War II, U.S. plastic production increased by 300 percent. Since then, plastic has become ever more ubiquitous, and by 2014, according to market research firm PlasticsEurope, had surpassed 300 million tons produced per year. There’s a good reason for that. The wondrous nature of plastic is that it’s lightweight, highly malleable, and resistant to biodegradation. It is widely understood that this last property is the root of what has emerged as one of the most intractable environmental problems as the plastic waste piles up around the globe. What is less understood are the exact reasons why.

Plastic is made up almost entirely of hydrocarbon chains, which are an incredibly stable type of molecular bond. In cases where hydrocarbon chains occur naturally, that stability is a necessary component of an organism’s function and generally forms part of a greater ecosystem. Plastics, however, are synthetic, which means they’re no good as a food source for microorganisms (with at least one rare exception) and, as we’ve so tragically come to learn, that is a major problem.

On one hand, there’s the obvious issue of what happens to all that accumulated plastic trash. We all know the answer to that one: It turns into giant islands of floating trash, it goes up into poor turtles’ nostrils, and is found in the stomachs of beached whales. According to a 2022 study published in the online journal Nature Communications, blue whales could be ingesting as much as 10 million pieces of microplastic every day. According to the World Wide Fund for Nature’s Living Earth 2018 report, 90 percent of the world’s seabirds have plastic in their stomachs, a figure that is expected to rise to 99 percent by 2050.

Marauding Microplastics

Over the course of several decades, as plastic is exposed to the elements, it begins to decompose into smaller particles. While this process, known as photooxidation, does not affect plastic on a molecular level, it does eventually break it down to its nanoparticles. If you’re finding that hard to imagine, picture a grocery bag that’s been zapped by a shrink ray: It’s the exact same piece of plastic, only now it’s microscopic.

On the surface, this result may appear to be a good thing. Out of sight, out of mind, right? If only it were that simple. Plastic may actually be at its most threatening once it has broken down to the point it’s invisible to the naked eye because at that point, those little particles can travel a lot faster and further, and into the bodies of animals, including us.

Research conducted by the State University of New York at Fredonia found a significant amount of microplastics in bottled water. To be precise, 10.4 microplastic particles per one liter of water were recorded in a sample of 259 bottles representing 11 major brands across nine countries, including Aquafina, Dasani, Evian, Nestlé Pure Life and San Pellegrino, reflecting twice the amount of plastic found in a previous study using tap water. Researchers suggested the plastic contamination could have partially come from the bottling process.

Avoiding bottled water and sticking to municipal water won’t necessarily solve the problem of ingesting microplastics from drinking water.

“Substantial amounts of microplastics” were recently found in tap water and rivers throughout South Africa, according to a recent study conducted by scientists from North-West University. Zoologist Henk Bouwman, a member of the research team, explained that the findings were conclusive, but the implications remain unclear. “There is no consensus yet on any health impacts as the science is still in its infancy,” he told Johannesburg’s Daily Maverick. “It might be benign, and it might not be. There are a whole lot of things we don’t understand at this stage.”

This topic was further explored by National Geographic in a 2018 article. For the piece, Chelsea Rochman, an ecologist at the University of Toronto, shared her research that found that fish suffered liver damage from ingesting polythene plastic (the kind plastic bags are made of), while oysters exposed to polystyrene tended to produce fewer eggs and less mobile sperm. But this does not necessarily mean humans will suffer the same effects.

Plastics and Human Health

Given the ubiquitousness of microplastics, it’s no surprise that they have infiltrated our bodies too. A breakthrough study published in 2022, using blood donated by members of the general public, found the tiny particles in 80 percent of the samples. A 2023 UK study found that microplastics can pass through blood vessels to vascular tissue, potentially contributing to damage inside the vein. Other studies have shown that they are present in our feces, our lungs, our stomachs and, most worryingly, in placentas.

It is not yet clear what effect this infiltration has on human health.

As the National Geographic article’s author Elizabeth Royte points out, it’s difficult to study the impact of microplastics on human health for a number of reasons. First, there’s the simple fact that “people can’t be asked to eat plastics for experiments.” Extrapolating the findings from fish experiments doesn’t work either, as “plastics and their additives act differently depending on physical and chemical contexts,” as well as the fact that “their characteristics may change as creatures along the food chain consume, metabolize or excrete them.” As a result, notes Royte, “we know virtually nothing about how food processing or cooking affects the toxicity of plastics in aquatic organisms or what level of contamination might hurt us.”

For Rochman, there is no doubt that “there are effects from plastics on animals at nearly all levels of biological organization.” Studies show that in fish, microplastic pollution (MP) causes structural damage and affects metabolic balance, behavior and fertility. In laboratory mice and rats it causes similar biochemical and structure damage.

OK, so we may not have clear evidence on the direct health impacts of microplastics where human beings are concerned, but what about more immediate side effects?

For one, there’s the fact that microplastics are foreign particles entering our bodies. Inflammation, for instance, is a response triggered by the immune system to this sort of invasion, writes Rachel Adams, a senior lecturer in biomedical science at Cardiff Metropolitan University, in The Conversation. Another cause for concern is that these microparticles act as carriers for other toxins entering the body. Toxic metals like mercury and organic pollutants like pesticides are just two examples of hazardous materials that could enter the body attached to plastic particles. They can slowly accumulate over time in our fatty tissue.

Quantifying Harm

“We do not currently have clear evidence that plastic microparticles in drinking water have a negative effect on health,” writes Adams. “But given the effects other particles can have, we urgently need to find out more about plastic microparticles in the body.”

John Meeker, professor of environmental health sciences and global public health at the University of Michigan, concurs. “We first need to figure out how best to measure exposure then document whether people are being exposed, and, if so, how much,” wrote Meeker over email. In order to do this, he continued, scientists need to determine what environmental factors influence exposure levels and “what aspects of microplastics could be most relevant to toxicity—is it size, shape, chemical makeup or additives used in the plastics, or even toxins picked up by the plastic from its surrounding environment?” Once these factors have been established, we can begin to consider how the body processes these plastics, and what effects the various levels of exposure can have on humans over a period of time.

“Once we have found ways to measure exposure in humans, we will then need to conduct cohort studies in various types of populations to look for associations between exposure and various health endpoints,” said Meeker, advising that “these should be done in concert with experimental laboratory studies on toxicity to establish estimates about health risk.” Some efforts have begun in this direction. For example, in 2022 California became the first state in the USA to adopt a state-wide microplastics strategy. Among other actions, the state requires monitoring of microplastics in drinking water and investigate whether it should set a limit on the particles in this water to protect public health.

For the gamblers out there, this lack of scientific certainty at present might seem like an invitation to continue rolling the plastic dice. The potential hazards of microplastic, however, are far from the only cause for concern.

Bothersome BPA and Problematic Phthalates

Modern living has made it so that there’s no escaping contact with plastic—and the various extra chemicals it contains. Take Bisphenol A (BPA), which gives plastic its shape and structure, and the phthalates that make plastic soft and flexible. We end up ingesting a fair amount of these chemicals when plastic comes into contact with our food or even our skin. In turn, this affects our hormone levels, which is why, for the most part, chemicals such as BPA are heavily regulated. There is a growing body of research showing that exposure to industrial chemicals commonly found in plastics may help contribute to metabolic disorders like obesity and diabetes.

Added to this is the concerning fact that an increasing number of these chemicals are being detected in humans. A recent study conducted by the University of Exeter found traces of BPA in over 80 percent of teenagers. Reporting on the study, The Guardian explained how BPA mimics estrogen, and in so doing disrupts the endocrine system, which is responsible for regulating metabolism, growth, sexual function and sleep. But as is the case with microplastics, it is difficult to draw conclusive causal links between BPA and these health impacts due to ethical concerns around testing on humans.

Despite this lack of certainty, there’s enough cause for concern that governments have responded to this plastic plight. Legislation has been passed in Australia, Canada, the European Union and the United States restricting or prohibiting the use of phthalates in certain consumer products. According to a paper published by the Indian Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, these moves respond to the “variety of adverse outcomes” caused by the chemical, “including increased adiposity and insulin resistance” as well as “decreased levels of sex hormones, and other consequences for the human reproductive system.”

While it’s important to understand the health impact of plastic, perhaps a more pressing question is what happens when we tell ourselves that plastic is safe—and continue to produce it in ever greater quantities. According to Statista, a market research firm, global plastic production has grown from 50 to 335 million metric tons over the past four decades. Chances are likely that the ultimate consequence of our plastic consumption will be something far greater, and perhaps direr, than our current scientific understanding is able to predict.