Australia: Surge in human metapneumovirus due to elimination of COVID safeguards

Frank Gaglioti

New South Wales Health data for the end of September showed a surge in lower respiratory tract infection human  (HMPV), with 1,168 cases out of a population of more than 8 million. This was a steep increase from 648 cases a fortnight earlier. These figures will be a vast underestimation of the real situation as only patients who present to hospital are tested. Medical authorities consider the surge is due to the relaxation of measures aimed at halting the continuing SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.

“What we’re seeing is the resurgence of respiratory viruses. For the first two years of the pandemic we basically have very little circulation of respiratory viruses because of all those COVID social distancing measures. … We’ve now seen an uptick as we’ve seen in flu and RSV, and HMPV is yet another virus,” NSW Chief Health Officer Kerry Chant told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).

Even though Australia experienced a spike in COVID infections in May, the Albanese Labor government and the media acted as if the pandemic had ceased to exist. In the week ending May 26 there were 184 COVID deaths across the country with 41,399 COVID infections.

This program was mirrored internationally with the US President Biden ending the COVID-19 emergency. The surge of the HMPV virus and other respiratory tract infections is a consequence of this “forever COVID” policy.

Model structure and proteins encoded by Human Metapneumovirus (hMPV). (a) hMPV model structure indicating viral proteins encoded by (b) the viral genome. [Photo: Wikimedia]

HMPV symptoms are similar to those of influenza and Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV): cough, fever, nasal congestion, and shortness of breath. Very young children and older people are the most prone to succumb to the virus, which can develop to pneumonia, bronchitis and death in some children and in people who have underlying conditions. Surges in HMPV cases usually occur in late winter and spring in temperate regions of the world.

HMPV is caused by a ribonucleic acid (RNA) virus in the Pneumoviridae family and is closely related to a type of bird flu, Avian metapneumovirus (AMPV). Scientists think that the HMPV virus probably originated in an unknown bird species approximately 200 million years ago and then jumped across to humans.

The pneumoviridae family of viruses also includes measles, mumps and parainfluenza viruses that infect children. 

HMPV was only recently discovered in 2001 in the Netherlands by associate professor in the Department of Viroscience at the Erasmus Medical Center, Bernadette G. van den Hoogen and her team. Retrospective studies have shown that the virus was prevalent in humans at least 50 years earlier than its discovery.

Respiratory infections are the major cause of death for children under five, but scientists are yet to identify the many viruses or bacteria that cause the disease. Most children have been infected with HMPV by the age of five.

Bernadette G. van den Hoogen [Photo: Erasmus Medical Center]

Professor of Pediatrics at the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics at the University of Pittsburgh, John V. Williams, in a comment in The Conversation, stated that “However, meticulous research studies by many groups over decades had failed to identify a virus or bacteria in every person with an acute respiratory illness.”

Like most viral diseases HMPV has spanned the globe, causing numerous recent outbreaks internationally. 

“The U.S. saw a spike in HMPV detections during the first few months of 2023. This trend is similar to the higher-than-normal case rates of RSV and influenza in the fall of 2022 and winter of 2023, likely related to decreased population immunity after two years of wearing face masks and social distancing,” Williams commented.

According to US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s respiratory virus surveillance systems, HMPV cases drastically increased in March with 19.4 percent of patients presenting to hospital with respiratory diseases.

A CNN article related, “At its peak in mid-March, nearly 11 percent of tested specimens were positive for HMPV, a number that’s about 36 percent higher than the average, pre-pandemic seasonal peak of 7 percent test positivity.”

The article quotes a 59-year-old immunocompromised woman, Diane Davison, who became infected in April, highlighting the severity of the disease.

“I couldn’t get out more than a couple of words … I would go into violent, violent coughing to the point where I was literally almost throwing up,” Davison told CNN.

Williams points out that there are a “dearth of treatments” and that there are no vaccines or specific antiviral drugs to treat HMPV infections.

Lenneke Haas, an intensive care scientist at the Intensive Care Medicine at Utrecht in the Netherlands, and her team published an important review in Viruses in January 2013, “Metapneumovirus in Adults.” They wrote, “HMPV is distributed worldwide and has a seasonal distribution comparable to that of influenza viruses and RSV. … In young children, HMPV is the second most common cause of lower RTI (respiratory tract infection) after RSV…”

“HMPV infection is associated with hospitalization for acute RTI in adults. … The incidence of HMPV infection in hospitalized adults varied from year to year ranging from 4.3–13.2 percent. This is in accordance with the rates for RSV and influenza A. … Two‑thirds of these hospitalized patients had underlying disease. Twenty-three percent of these patients had a co-infection with another respiratory virus,” Haas et al. stated.

Like many other viruses that infect humans, such as SARS-CoV-2, HMPV is spread through aerosols, making it highly contagious. 

Haas related, “HMPV is thought to be transmitted by direct or close contact with contaminated secretions, which may involve saliva, droplets or large particle aerosols. HMPV RNA is found in excretions five days to two weeks after initiation of symptoms.”

A study of HMPV in children by post-doctoral researcher Xin Wang at the Centre for Global Health at the Usher Institute at Edinburgh Medical School, was published in The Lancet Global Health in January 2021. In “Global burden of acute lower respiratory infection associated with human metapneumovirus in children under five years in 2018: a systematic review and modelling study,” Wang et al. estimated the global prevalence of HMPV associated with acute lower RTIs in children younger than five years from a review of 119 published studies conducted between Jan. 1, 2001, and Dec 31, 2019, and 40 unpublished studies.

They found that in 2018, among children younger than five years globally, there were an estimated 14.2 million HMPV cases, 643,000 hospital admissions and 7,700 in-hospital deaths, and 16,100 overall (hospital and community) deaths. Around 58 percent of the hospital admissions were in infants under 12 months, and 64 percent of in-hospital deaths occurred in infants younger than six months, of which 79 percent occurred in low-income and lower-middle-income countries.

Wang et al. concluded that “Our mortality estimates demonstrate the importance of intervention strategies for infants across all settings, and warrant continued efforts to improve the outcome of human metapneumovirus-associated ALRI [acute lower respiratory infections] among young infants in low-income and lower-middle-income countries.”

The call for “intervention strategies” is made under conditions where the ruling elite internationally have ditched any measures to control the COVID-19 pandemic, adopting a “let it rip” approach. Nothing can be allowed to interfere with the interests of big business. Poor countries have been completely abandoned to the ravages of COVID and other infectious diseases.

The current surge in HMPV infections and other RTIs is due to the abandonment of all mitigation measures, allowing a plethora of infections to proliferate.

The fact that the youngest and most vulnerable members of society have been subjected to the ravages of infections such as HMPV stands as an indictment of the capitalist system and demonstrates that it has to be replaced by a society based on rational socialist principles where the needs of humanity are met.

New data show 51 percent increase in US teacher vacancies in the past year

Jane Wise

A recently updated report on the teacher shortage crisis in the United States, based on a study from the Annenberg Institute at Brown University, reveals that teacher vacancies spiked 51 percent from 2022-23.

According to the newly released data, there are currently 55,000 unfilled teaching positions this year, compared to 36,000 reported last year. Additionally, enrollment in teacher preparation programs (TPP), a significant indicator of future teacher shortages, continues to languish.

While teacher turnover rates have slowed from 14 percent during the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021-22, to a projected 12 percent this year, enrollment in teacher training programs remains stagnant.

A separate study conducted at Penn State found that there has been a 58 percent decline in enrollment in TPPs since 2008. Another report from the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) shows that TPP completion rates have dropped 29 percent since 2010. 

Factors such as the skyrocketing cost of higher education and stagnant and declining pay for teachers make a career in teaching a poor return on investment. Another factor behind the enrollment drop-off cited in the Penn State study is deteriorating working conditions for teachers. The study indicates that teachers’ perception of their working conditions has been on a downward trajectory since 2004, with a precipitous drop from 2018 to 2022.

The Annenberg Report also reveals that the number of teachers hired last year without being fully certified is 270,512. The teacher shortage has enabled a host of alternative teacher preparation programs to be adopted in states and districts desperate to fill vacancies. According to the NCTQ, enrollment in alternative preparation programs rose 20 percent between 2018 and 2021.

“Grow Your Own” (GYO) programs are one way states are trying to fill the vacancies in their schools. Nearly every state in the US has a GYO program except for North Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming, but only 15-percent of states directly fully fund their programs. GYO programs differ between states and local education agencies (LEA). 

Seventeen states offer a program that puts school employees and community members without a college education in classrooms while they earn their degrees. Not surprisingly, the majority of these states are in regions with the highest number of under-qualified teachers. For instance, Florida and South Carolina have adopted the apprentice type of GYO program. States in the South Atlantic region of the US have 68,884 under-qualified teachers.

The teacher shortage crisis is sure to deepen once the pandemic-related Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund (ESSER) spending deadline hits next year. According to Marguerite Roza, a research professor and director of the Edunomics Lab, $24 billion of the total $122.7 billion in ESSER III funds are financing districts’ annual labor. It is estimated that 250,000 education jobs will be cut once the money runs out.

However, ESSER funding was not only spent on hiring teachers but much needed support staff such as social workers, psychologists, and nurses. Leslie Fenwick, the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education’s dean in residence noted, “Children’s needs are not going to evaporate.” It is unlikely states will pick up the tab on these supports for students.

The nation’s most vulnerable students who undoubtedly benefit from the increased supports made possible by ESSER are also facing draconian cuts to Title 1 funding. The House Appropriations Committee is seeking to cut federal grants to schools with a high percentage of low-income families by 80 percent or $15 billion dollars.

The rationale for this proposal is that the vast amounts of American Rescue Plan (ARP) funds did not get spent, therefore schools do not need the money provided by Title I grants. This is a gross oversimplification of the issue. Because of the limited and short-term nature of the money, schools were not able to spend it on what was really needed, which was teachers and support staff.

If legislators are successful in cutting back Title I, tens of thousands of teachers will lose their jobs in the poorest and most under-served communities in the country.

Commonwealth Foundation Grants 2024

Application Deadline: 23rd October 2023

Eligible Countries: Commonwealth countries, UK

About the Award: The Foundation offers grants of up to £200,000 over four years in support of innovative project ideas and approaches that seek to strengthen the ability of civic voices to engage with governments and that have the potential to improve governance and development outcomes through their active participation.

The Foundation believes in the power of stories and storytelling for social change and will award grants for creative approaches that have the potential to influence public discourse.

All proposals must ensure that the cross cutting theme of gender is mainstreamed throughout the project.

Fields of Funding: The Foundation’s Strategic Plan 2021-2026 is strongly linked to the Commonwealth Charter and its values and aspirations, and it identifies three thematic areas of focus:

• Health
• Environment and climate change
• Freedom of expression

Applications for the 2022-2023 grants call open at 1pm GMT on Thursday 29 September and close at 1pm GMT on Tuesday 1 November. For details on eligibility and the application process please download the call documents below.

Type: Grants

Eligibility: To be eligible for a grant, the following criteria must be met:

1. The applicant and, when applicable, partner(s) are registered not for profit civil society organisations (CSOs).
2. The applicant and, when applicable, partner(s) must be based in a Commonwealth Foundation member country and the project should take place in an eligible Commonwealth Foundation member country. A list of countries eligible under this call is available at Annex 1.
3. The application is for funding for a maximum of £50,000 per annum
4. The applicant is applying for funding for a maximum of four years
5. The applicant does not have an existing grant from the Commonwealth Foundation at the time the application window is open.
6. The average of the applicant’s total income over the last two years is less than £3m
7. The project must address one or both Commonwealth Foundation’s outcomes
8. The applicant will provide the following documents as part of the application:
   • a completed logic model using the Commonwealth Foundation template
   • a copy of the organisation’s registration certificate1 (the official registration document provided by the relevant authorities in the country concerned)
   • a copy of the organisation’s most recent audited accounts (it must include both the accounts and the opinion of the external auditor who has certified them; it should not be older than December 2016)
   • a copy of the registration certificate for all partner organisations

Selection Criteria: The application for a grant is a two-stage process: preliminary application and full application. Only shortlisted organisations will be invited to submit a full application.

Preliminary applications will be assessed on the criteria below:

1. The application has a clear problem definition.
2. The application clearly demonstrates that it is demand driven and relevant.
3. The project must address one or both Commonwealth Foundation outcomes
4. The application clearly shows how the planned activities will deliver outputs that lead to the project outcomes.
5. The organisation(s) has the capacity to deliver the submitted proposal.
6. The project must mainstream gender in the project design and project plan

Full applications will be assessed on the criteria below, in addition to the criteria used at the preliminary application stage:

1. The application clearly illustrates a strategy to sustain the positive outcomes from the project beyond the duration of the funding received from the Commonwealth Foundation
2. There is a clear Monitoring and Evaluation strategy for the project
3. The project includes a strong gender analysis of the problem, mainstreams gender and identifies how the anticipated change specifically impacts women and girls.

The selection process is highly competitive and selected projects will have been designed to undertake work that has the potential to lead to one or more of the outcomes in the Foundation’s strategic logic model.

Number of Awards: Not specified

Value of Award: up to £200,000 over four years

How to Apply: To apply applicants will need to complete and submit an online application form using the online application system in the link below.

It is important to go through every helpful application detail before submitting.

Visit Programme Webpage for Details

Thousands of asylum seekers face destitution due to UK’s “Illegal Migration” legislation

Liz Smith

Britain’s Conservative government is intensifying its attacks on refugees and asylum seekers, spurred on by fascistic elements led by Home Secretary Suella Braverman.

After her speech to the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in Washington in September, Braverman told the Tories annual conference last week, that “The future could bring millions more migrants to these shores, uncontrolled and unmanageable, unless the government they elect next year acts decisively to stop that happening.” She complained that Britain had “become enmeshed in a dense net of international rules that were designed for another era.” She said of “the misnamed Human Rights Act… I am surprised they didn’t call it the Criminal Rights Act.”

A Border Force vessel brings a group of people thought to be migrants into the port city of Dover, England, from small boats, August 8, 2020 [AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth]

Braverman is enforcing a brutal agenda threatening asylum seekers with being made homeless and destitute if they refuse to get aboard unsafe barges or under tents as they await deportation. They are also denied the right to work and forced to survive on small payments for food.

The British Red Cross (BRC) issued a statement October 5 warning, “More than 50,000 (53,100) refugees could be made homeless by the end of the year if the Government doesn’t take urgent steps to support them as it clears the asylum backlog”.

This is due to the government pledge to process all “legacy” asylum applications made before June 28, 2022 by the end of the year. The BRC warn that that even if this target is not met, 26,000 could still be at risk of destitution and homelessness.

The time given to refugees to move from state-funded asylum support to finding accommodation, employment and benefits has been slashed from a 28 day “move-on” process to seven days. This began in August and since then the BRC Refugee Services report a “140% increase in destitution for people they support with refugee status, from 132 people in June and July, to 317 people in August and September.”

The Home Office now counts the 28 days from the time when asylum seekers receive their asylum decision letter, rather than when they receive their Biometric Residence Permit (BRP), which is needed to apply for Universal Credit.

Alex Fraser, BRC Director for Refugee Support, said, “People who have been forced to flee their homes have already experienced unimaginable trauma… It takes at least 35 days to start getting Universal Credit and local authorities need at least 56 days to help them find accommodation.”

The Independent reported that Charity Refugees at Home, which matches refugees with rooms, has seen referrals increase from 70 in September 2022 to 223 last month. One Sudanese refugee, Hamad, 20, now supported by the charity, had to live in a London Park after he was granted refugee status in Britain and was given seven days to leave his hotel accommodation.

Carly Whyborn, executive director of Refugees at Home, said, “Since the changes, we have had a five-fold increase in the number of referrals from refugees desperate for somewhere to live, and the situation is getting worse. We are urgently trying to reach out to new hosts, particularly in major cities, who may be able to offer a temporary place to stay.”

Homelessness charity network NACCOM said 2022-23 was the first time since it started collecting data a decade ago that more than half the adults given help were refugees.

Major cities London, Glasgow and cities in the North West of England have higher numbers of asylum seekers at risk in addition to housing shortages.

The Guardian reported Seána Roberts, the manager of the Merseyside Refugee Support Network in Liverpool, saying, “I’ve never seen anything like this in my 25 years in the sector. Normally we might have seen one or two people present themselves as street homeless in a year. Now we’ve got 50 people in the space of six weeks.” Roberts had handed out sleeping bags to a number of refugees in the past six weeks. “They chose not to take tents because they didn’t want to be visible or feel vulnerable in the park,” she added.

Steve Smith, the chief executive of the charity Care4Calais, warned of a refugee homelessness crisis this winter. “Hundreds if not thousands of refugees are facing homelessness or destitution. Refugees are telling us that they are being forced to buy tents and sleep rough in the streets.”

The impact of the passing of the Illegal Immigration Act in July will make conditions for asylum seekers unbearable. Its attacks are the subject of a report by the Refugee Council, “The Truth About Channel Crossings and the impact of the Illegal Migration Act.” The main elements of the Act, it notes, “include the creation of a duty for the home secretary to arrange for the removal of anyone who arrives irregularly into the UK including, but not limited to, those who arrive by small boat. Anyone who is covered by the duty to remove will have any asylum application or relevant human rights claim deemed automatically inadmissible.”

The Refugee Council analyses Home Office statistics and shows that “three in every four of the people who have crossed the channel so far this year would be recognised as refugees if the UK Government processed their asylum applications. This is higher than the Refugee’s Council previous analysis of those who made the journey in 2022, which found it was almost two-thirds.”

It notes that more than 54 percent who have made perilous crossings are from five countries—Afghanistan, Iran, Eritrea, Syria, and Sudan, all devastated by the imperialist powers.

Once the Illegal Migration Act comes into force:

“Each year, over 27,000 refugees who cross the channel will be denied status in the UK.

“As few as 3.5 percent of those people arriving by small boat, 1,297 people, will be removed from the UK to their own country.

“35,409 people who arrive in the UK by small boat could be left in limbo each year, having had their asylum claim deemed permanently inadmissible but not having been removed.

The Act states that asylum seekers deemed to have arrived in Britain illegally can be deported to a “safe third country”. The report notes, “Even with a safe third country agreement in place with Rwanda which allows for up to 10,000 people to be removed there annually at least 25,409 people will be left in a state of permanent limbo each year and could be as high as 35,409.”

Many future asylum seekers will receive no state support while also denied the right to live and work in the UK indefinitely. The report states, “It is highly likely these people will disappear into the margins of communities and be at risk of long-term destitution, exploitation and abuse.”

Last month more than 140 refugee and homelessness organisations sent a letter to Braverman and Housing Secretary Michael Gove pointing out that the government policies were causing “severe hardship for refugees, as well as placing unnecessary pressures on local authorities who are already facing challenges finding accommodation for other groups.” The organisations warn, “The significant number of refugees already made homeless by this change is also placing huge pressures on the voluntary sector, including refugee hosting and housing schemes and mainstream homelessness services …The demands are quickly becoming unsustainable. It is already inevitably leading to increased rough sleeping, undermining government targets to end it.”

The full force of the state is being brought down on a few thousand people fleeing poverty stricken and war-torn homelands, as a result of decades of imperialist war and geopolitical intrigues. This agenda is shared by the Labour Party, which takes every opportunity to try to outflank the Tories on anti-immigration rhetoric. Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper declared in an interview with the Telegraph, as Labour’s annual conference began, “Net migration is now at a record high. We expect it to come down, we think it should come down.”

Palestinian uprising exposes Turkish political establishment’s complicity with Israel

Barış Demir

The popular uprising in Gaza against the brutal Israeli occupation has quickly exposed the hypocrisy of the Turkish government of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the bourgeois opposition parties, who are all complicit in the oppression of the Palestinian people.

Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Sarajevo, Bosnia, on September. 6, 2022. [AP Photo/Armin Durgut]

After the uprising, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s government declared war on the Palestinian people, killing hundreds and deploying 100,000 troops to the border of Gaza, to prepare a major ground invasion.

The Turkish ruling elite has reacted to this declaration of war and to indiscriminate attacks of the Israeli state on civilians by calling for “restraint” and compliance with international law. This is diametrically opposed to the attitude of the broad masses in Turkey, who sympathize with the Palestinians.

In his first statement on Saturday, Erdoğan said: “In light of events in Israel this morning, Turkey calls on all parties to exercise restraint and refrain from impulsive steps that could escalate tensions.”

In his remarks on Sunday, Erdoğan claimed that “the region will attain tranquility, lasting peace and stability” based on UN resolutions and international law. However, Israel has never abided by these laws, and the imperialist powers that back Israel routinely ignore it. Nevertheless, Erdogan called for a “two-state solution.”

Far from condemning Israel, Erdoğan made clear that his government was disturbed by and hostile to the uprising. Erdoğan said, “While we have always stood in solidarity with our Palestinian brothers and sisters, we have also underscored that steps which could escalate the tension, cause further bloodshed and aggravate the problems in the region should be avoided.”

Erdoğan reiterated this position last night on X/Twitter, arguing somewhat more bluntly that the Palestinians should simply peacefully adapt themselves to the Israeli regime’s persecution and theft of their lands.

He wrote: “We call on the Israeli government to stop its bombardment of the Palestinian territories, especially Gaza, and on the Palestinians to stop their harassment of Israeli civilian settlements. This restrained step will also open the door to peace.” In the past, Erdoğan and his government vocally condemned Israeli attacks and expressed support for the Palestinians. But now, apart from Erdoğan’s calls for restraint and for talks overseen by Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, there is complete silence from the government.

“When it comes to killing, you know how to kill very well!” he shouted to then-Israeli President Shimon Peres at a panel of the World Economic Forum in Davos, in 2009, declaring that Israel was persecuting Palestine. After that, there was a crisis in diplomatic relations with Israel, and Erdoğan posed for a time as a “defender of the Palestinians.”

Just two years ago, in 2021, Erdoğan went so far as to call Israel a “terrorist state,” urging the “whole world, especially Islamic countries” to take “effective” action against Israeli attacks.

Despite all these tensions, Turkey, the first country in the Muslim world to recognise Israel in 1949, has always maintained trade and military ties with Tel Aviv as part of its comprehensive military-strategic alliance with US imperialism. More recently, the Turkish bourgeoisie re-normalized relations with the Netanyahu government, in line with its interests in exploiting oil and gas reserves in the eastern Mediterranean.

Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, the head of Turkey’s bourgeois opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), also declined to condemn Israel. Kılıçdaroğlu, who campaigned on a more pro-NATO stance than Erdoğan in last May’s presidential election, was forced to make a statement on Saturday when journalists asked him about the issue, stating: “Palestine is a country that has been seeking its rights for a long time. We are always with the Palestinian people. We never want war. Within the framework of democratic measures, international society must intervene and ensure peace and the rights of Palestine.”

There is another, even more important reason why the Erdoğan government and other bourgeois parties have been unable to give even token support to the Palestinian popular uprising. As the statement by the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) explained, “At a time of mounting social unrest and strike activity throughout the world, the ruling class everywhere is terrified of the example that any manifestation of popular opposition will set.”

Anger among Turkish workers, who have suffered a massive decline in living standards amid rising living costs, has reached a boiling point. In recent months, opposition in different layers of the working class to these conditions has manifested itself in a new wave of wildcat strikes and a growing, international strike movement.

In previous years, after Israeli massacres, the Turkish government declared national mourning for the Palestinians and promoted anti-Israeli mass protests. It aimed to manipulate and exploit the sentiments of the overwhelming majority of the Turkish population against the Zionist regime and imperialism.

In the current explosive circumstances, the Turkish ruling elites are aware of the dangers of statements of support for the oppressed masses, even if only in a token manner. The demonstrations in support of the Palestinians in the main cities of Turkey after the recent uprising were mainly carried out on the call of organizations close to the Islamist Felicity Party, which was part of the CHP-led bourgeois alliance against Erdoğan in the last elections.

The events have exposed the hypocritical approach of the Erdoğan government on Palestine, which is based on the close ties of the Turkish ruling class with Israel and imperialist powers. The official line of Ankara and of the reactionary Arab regimes in the Middle East, who have worked for decades to improve relations with Israel at the expense of Palestinian lives and rights, is now indistinguishable.

However, Tehran, itself a target of Israel and US imperialism, did not join the chorus and made a statement of support for the uprising. This led the Israeli regime and the imperialist powers to make open threats against Iran.

The Wall Street Journal, which called on the Biden administration to fully support Israel’s planned ground invasion into Gaza, claimed in another article that Hamas coordinated its military offensive with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Iran. Both US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Israeli army spokesperson Brigaider General Danny Hagari said there was no evidence to substantiate this claim, however.

Iran’s foreign minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, denied the allegation and warned: “The continuation of the Israeli regime’s attacks on Gaza under the current circumstances will complicate the situation and increase the possibility of the spread of war.” 

As the US-led NATO powers escalate the war against Russia in Ukraine and give full support to Israel, the risk of war inflaming the entire Middle East is extremely serious.

Study finds that SARS-CoV-2 can infect the arteries of the heart

Bill Shaw

A recently published study demonstrated that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, can infect the coronary arteries that supply blood to the heart. These arteries are the ones involved in a typical heart attack, where blockage of the arteries results in oxygen depletion and consequent death of a segment of heart muscle.

The fact that the coronavirus can directly damage these arteries and induce the formation of so-called “plaques” is a surprise. Most theories about how SARS-CoV-2 results in the increase in heart attacks and other coronary events seen thus far in the pandemic have had to do with either inflammation or hypercoagulability. In both cases, it was presumed that there was an increased predisposition to forming clots that block the arteries.

The result is not entirely without precedent. Previously, a handful of viruses were associated with the development of atherosclerosis (plaques in the arteries), including hepatitis viruses, herpes simplex viruses, human immunodeficiency virus, human papillomavirus, human cytomegalovirus, and influenza virus. And of those, only herpes simplex viruses, hepatitis C virus, and human cytomegalovirus had evidence of directly infecting the cells in the walls of the coronary arteries.

Despite the pre-existing precedent, the result is still shocking. SARS-CoV-2 is now the only respiratory virus known to directly infect blood vessels. Influenza viruses have not been shown to do so. Their known and hypothesized effects on inducing atherosclerosis are indirect. Furthermore, the study showed that SARS-CoV-2 infection was a direct cause of both formation and growth of plaques.

Representative images of of SARS-CoV-2 NP, CD68 and merge in human coronary. White arrow indicates CD68+ SARS-CoV-2 NP+ cell, and yellow arrow indicates CD68+ cell. Pt., patient. [Photo by Eberhardt, N., Noval, M.G., Kaur, R. et al. / CC BY 4.0]

The study examined the coronary arteries of eight patients who had died after testing positive for COVID-19. They found evidence of SARS-CoV-2 viral replication in the tissues making up the arteries in all eight patients. They localized the infection to the arterial wall, finding lower amounts of viral material in the fat tissue surrounding the arteries.

They further localized the virus to macrophages, a white blood cell that fights infections in virtually every tissue of the body. They found that muscle cells of the arterial walls were infected to a far lesser extent than macrophages. By elucidating the differential effects among cell types, the researchers also confirmed that the findings were not incidental.

The researchers then infected both normal macrophages as well as macrophages that had accumulated large quantities of fat or lipids inside their cell wall. These latter lipid-laden cells are called “foam cells” because of their appearance under a microscope. The researchers found that both kinds of macrophages had a high degree of viral replication, but foam cells had more rapid viral replication than normal macrophages. Furthermore, normal macrophages cleared the virus faster than foam cells. Notably, foam cells are the hallmark of all atherosclerosis, regardless of cause and stage of development.

The researchers then verified that SARS-CoV-2 infected previously uninfected tissue by introducing the virus to arterial specimens—called “explants”—taken from unrelated patients who had no history of COVID-19. They found that the virus also infected these cells and replicated in similar quantities, confirming the original findings.

The researchers then studied whether SARS-CoV-2 infection of the coronary arteries induced inflammation. They found that it did, and that the inflammation was characteristic of atherosclerosis both in the original patients and in the explants. This induced-inflammatory response also possibly explains the increase in heart attacks seen during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The researchers then went on to identify the key mechanism of viral binding and entry into macrophages and foam cells. They found that the virus infects these cells through the neuropilin 1 (NRP-1) receptor, and not the ACE-2 receptor that is a common viral entry point in other tissue types. Nevertheless, NRP-1 was a well-known viral entry point prior to this study. They confirmed this finding by adding a compound that inhibits NRP-1 binding, which resulted in significantly reduced viral replication in both foam cells and normal macrophages.

The study adds to the already large body of evidence that COVID-19 is nothing like “the flu.” It is far worse, with considerably greater morbidity and mortality. Patients who survive COVID-19 infection have a greater risk of cardiovascular events for at least one year after infection, regardless of whether they have any pre-existing conditions that increase risk. This new study provides at least one significant mechanism by which this risk is conferred and sustained over time.

The ruling class policy of letting a novel virus infect and reinfect billions of people, with total indifference to the high potential of serious sequelae such as coronary artery infections, is further exposed as a vast social crime.

Proposed Ukraine funding bill skyrockets to $100 billion

Andre Damon

Members of Congress in the United States are discussing a bill funding the Ukraine war to the tune of up to $100 billion at one go, the Wall Street Journal reported Monday.

With the failure of Ukraine’s counteroffensive, the achievement of the United States’ sweeping goals of “weakening” Russia through the war in Ukraine by reconquering Crimea and the Donbas will require a massive expansion of direct U.S. involvement in the war, up to and including the deployment of U.S. troops.

In August, the Biden administration requested $24 billion in additional spending on the war with Russia. But the price tag of the proposed bill has grown two, three, or even four times in proposals made by members of Congress.

“Now, supporters of Ukraine in the Senate are aiming to offer a much bigger and longer-term package—with a price tag between $50 billion and $100 billion,” the Journal reported.

The Journal wrote, “Many pro-Ukraine senators say that passing a large package sufficient to carry Ukraine through the next U.S. election would send a strong message abroad that the chaos in the House won’t affect America’s long-term commitment to Ukraine.”

The largest package was proposed by Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut. The Journal reported Blumenthal “said if it were up to him, the number would be closer to $100 billion.”

The newspaper quoted Republican Senator Lindsey Graham as supporting a single aid package in the order of $70 billion. “I want to be one and done,” Graham said. “I want to get them through the next fighting season, through next year, so the Russians would realize this gets worse for them, not better.”

To date, the United States has spent approximately $150 billion on the Ukraine war. As the Biden administration has erased all existing limits on U.S. involvement in the war, the cost of the conflict has soared.

Last week, all Democratic members of the House of Representatives supported a group of fascist Republican members of Congress, led by Trump acolyte Matt Gaetz, in removing Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the House of Representatives.

As the World Socialist Web Site explained last week, the central focus of the Democrats is securing funding for the Ukraine war. “The Democrats… are pledging to collaborate with the domestic agenda of the Republicans in exchange for guarantees that funding for Ukraine is untouchable,” the WSWS wrote.

The contours of this deal are now taking shape. Last week, Biden announced that he is resuming construction of a wall along the United States’ southern border, the cornerstone of former President Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant policy.

Blumenthal, the Connecticut Democrat, told the Washington Post, “Border security is a goal that I have and other Democrats share. So I think there is a potential sweet spot for compromise if border security is something that Republicans require.”

Graham stated his support for tying a crackdown on the border to the passage of funding for the Ukraine war. “To those who say we need to fix our border, you’re right,” Graham told CBS on Sunday. “To those who say we need to help Ukraine, you’re right. To those who say we need to do the border, not Ukraine, you’re wrong.”

He continued, “We got to fix asylum, we need border security agent increases, we need more detention beds,” Graham said. “I think there’s Democratic support for major border security reform, but we have to attach it to Ukraine for those who say we need to fix our border.”

The House of Representatives will reconvene Wednesday to hold elections for speaker. Whatever the outcome, it is clear that the escalation of the Ukraine war has shifted the framework of American politics far to the right.

To date, the United States has provided Ukraine with 38 long-range HIMARS missile launchers, thousands of armored vehicles and armored personnel carriers, 31 Abrams tanks, and more than 300 million rounds of small arms ammunition.

In the latest escalation, U.S. President Joe Biden told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that the United States would send the ATACMS long-range missile to Ukraine. Earlier this month, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken publicly endorsed Ukraine using NATO long-range missiles to strike inside Russia, declaring that it is “up to them to make decisions about what can be most effective when it comes to restoring their territorial integrity.”

Who is responsible for the violence in Israel and Gaza?

Tom Carter

Palestinians inspect the rubble Abu Helal family in Rafah refugee camp, Gaza Strip, Monday, Oct. 9, 2023. [AP Photo/Rahmez Mahmoud]

The governments and media of all the imperialist countries have been mobilized for a massive propaganda operation to poison public opinion about the ongoing popular uprising against the Israeli occupation in Gaza and to justify the retaliatory decimation of Palestinians being prepared by Israel’s far-right regime.

The tone was set by US President Joe Biden, who declared Saturday following a call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that his “support for Israel’s security is rock solid and unwavering,” condemning the “appalling assault against Israel by Hamas terrorists from Gaza.” This was followed by what amounted to a roll call of the entire cast of characters that constitute the American political establishment, who lined up over the weekend to make appearances and issue statements denouncing “terrorists” and the “attack on Israel,” while expressing their “horror” and “outrage” at reports of deaths among Israeli civilians.

Similar scenes played out in all the imperialist capitals, with Israel’s national flag being projected onto public monuments. Any equivocation or wavering from this line was swiftly labeled as “antisemitism” or tantamount to “supporting terrorism.”

There is no denying that, particularly in the opening hours of the breakout from Gaza, there have been significant casualties among Israeli civilians, many of whom doubtless bore no individual responsibility for the oppression of Palestinians. There is an element of tragedy in the fates of many such people, who simply found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. Fighters from Gaza, hardened by a lifetime of atrocities under Israeli occupation and accepting that they would not return to Gaza alive, exacted their revenge on the first Israelis they found, including those who had staged a dance party on the outskirts of what amounts to a concentration camp.

But the question must be posed: Who bears ultimate responsibility for their deaths? Blame for these tragedies must be assigned where it belongs: In the first instance to the criminal Israeli apartheid regime and its US backers, together with the whole reactionary Zionist project of establishing an exclusivist Jewish state by expelling Palestinians and confining them to a constantly shrinking set of open-air prisons and ghettos.

The unanimous denunciations of the “terrorism” and “violence” of the uprising by the imperialist powers are hypocritical in the extreme. No official expressions of “horror” and “outrage” on a remotely similar scale have ever been made on behalf of the far more numerous victims of violence and terror among the Palestinians.

While Biden’s speechwriters offered his “prayers” Saturday for “all of the families who have been hurt by this violence,” Biden is a war criminal himself and no stranger to violence. In 2003, he voted in the Senate for the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, which resulted in over a million deaths.

Contrary to the upside-down official picture of events, according to which the Palestinians are the aggressors and the state of Israel is the victim, the oppression of the Palestinian masses by imperialism is an entirely one-sided conflict, in which for three-quarters of a century the Israeli government—armed to the teeth by the imperialist powers—has brutally put down all resistance. In the three-week 2008–09 aerial bombardment of Gaza, for example, which killed hundreds of people, Palestinian casualties exceeded Israeli casualties by a ratio of 100 to 1.

Palestinians in the West Bank have been reduced to living in hundreds of separate ghettos surrounded by hundreds more Israeli military checkpoints, while Gaza itself has been transformed into one giant open-air prison: the Gaza Strip, only a handful of miles wide and 25 miles long. At the mercy of the Israeli government for every necessity, more than 2 million Palestinians are confined in this open-air prison in some of the most densely populated and desperate conditions on earth. In this context, the uprising in Gaza that broke out over the weekend is more akin to a prison break than an “attack” and only the latest chapter in a long saga.

As the imperialist capitals resound with hypocritical denunciations of “violence” and “terrorism,” a retaliatory onslaught to terrorize the population of Gaza is already unfolding.

Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has declared “a complete siege on Gaza,” using language that fully exposes the character of his regime and its underlying ideology. “There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel, everything will be closed,” Gallant said. “We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.”

Former US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley, a candidate for the Republican presidential primary nomination, declared that the uprising was “not just an attack on Israel” but “an attack on America,” directly demanding that Netanyahu “finish them.” Netanyahu, for his part, declared ominously yesterday, “What we will do to our enemies in the next few days will echo for generations.”

Behind all this ferocious imperialist hypocrisy is the fundamental class attitude of the oppressors to any resistance by the oppressed, whether it is in Gaza or anywhere else. “We, the oppressors, are free to use force whenever we decide that it serves our interests,” they say. “We can bomb you indiscriminately, we can blockade and starve you, we can rob you and imprison you and kneel on your necks. But force is our monopoly and our sole prerogative. You, the oppressed, are not under any circumstances permitted to use force in response.” It is this class attitude that animates the repeated use of the word “terrorist” to describe anyone who takes up arms against the occupation.

Underscoring the degree of hypocrisy involved, it is worth pointing out that in a New York Times article in August of last year, “Behind Enemy Lines, Ukrainians Tell Russians ‘You Are Never Safe,’” correspondent Andrew Kramer celebrated the work of Ukrainian terror squads carrying out assassinations with car bombs behind Russian lines: “They sneak down darkened alleys to set explosives. They identify Russian targets for Ukrainian artillery and long-range rockets provided by the United States. They blow up rail lines and assassinate officials they consider collaborators with the Russians.” Such methods are permissible to proxies of American imperialism, just not to those resisting its proxies.

In 1831, a slave uprising led by Nat Turner took place in Southampton County, Virginia. The escaped slaves used knives, hatchets and clubs to massacre dozens of white men, women and children. The rebellion was put down with even more extreme savagery, with roving militias and mobs murdering black people on sight regardless of whether they were involved in the rebellion. Turner’s body was flayed and his skin was turned into souvenir purses.

Any objective historian, with the benefit of hindsight, would place the blame for the terrific violence of such uprisings, not on the slaves, but on the slave system itself, with all its colossal inhumanity. To denounce the Turner uprising on the grounds that it was “violent” would be hypocritical and ahistorical and would amount to an indirect apology for slavery.

“A slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains, and a slave who through cunning or violence breaks the chains,” Leon Trotsky wrote in 1938, are not “equals before a court of morality!”

For his part, in his second inaugural address in the midst of the Civil War, Lincoln expressed the idea that the tremendous violence with which the country was afflicted was the inevitable historical reckoning for the institution of slavery, which required that “every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.”

By the same token, the repression now being carried out by the Israeli government against the population of Gaza is not fundamentally different from that used by Britain against the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya, by France in the Algerian War of Independence, against South Africans struggling against the apartheid regime, or for that matter by the US military against the popular resistance to its occupation of Iraq. As always the political elites among the oppressors denounce armed resistance as terrorism and then proceed to carry out merciless retribution a thousand times more destructive.

In one rare deviation from the propaganda deluge, Palestinian National Initiative leader Mustafa Barghouti was interviewed by Fareed Zakaria on CNN yesterday, in which he was permitted to make the point that armed resistance is the inevitable result of the refusal of the government of Israel to recognize any other form of opposition by Palestinians as legitimate: “If we struggle in a military form, we are terrorists. If we struggle in a non-violent way, we are described as violent. If we even resist with words, we are described as provocateurs.”

Indeed, in 2018–19, there were mass protests in Gaza under the banner of the Great March of Return, demanding the right to return to the homes from which Palestinians were driven during the 1948–49 and 1967 wars. The Israeli military responded to these protests by gunning down Palestinian protesters as they approached the walls and fences that enclose them within the Gaza Strip. At least 223 Palestinians were killed, over 9,200 were injured, and hardly any of those personalities now preaching morality to the Palestinians batted an eyelash.

There is, in fact, deep opposition in the working class within Israel itself to the criminal Netanyahu regime, which will be seen as the principal instigator of this new bloody eruption of violence. This opposition has already been expressed in mass protests and a general strike earlier this year in opposition to the regime’s efforts to grant itself unchallengeable and legally unreviewable powers.

But the violent form taken by the uprising in Gaza is not unrelated to the absence of a genuine and principled left-wing and socialist leadership within Israel itself. In the mass protests earlier this year, the self-proclaimed leaders remained defenders of the Zionist state and scrupulously avoided any turn towards the struggles of the Palestinian masses, who would have been natural allies.

The massive propaganda campaign now underway to browbeat the population into accepting the official line reflects a fear that hundreds of millions of people around the world will not be inclined to accept that line, including within the US and Israel itself. Spontaneous demonstrations in support of the Palestinian uprising have already taken place around the world.