Sri Lankan government continues to ignore the rise of COVID-19 and other dangerous infections

Pani Wijesiriwardena

Overcrowded COVID-19 patients at Colombo North Hospital at Ragama in August 2021.

COVID-19 infections have been increasing in Sri Lanka since May this year. With the complete absence of mass testing or disease monitoring, the extent of the spread is impossible to determine. However, the prevalence of the virus is now being demonstrated in a number of tragic deaths.

The increase of infections in Sri Lanka appears to be part of a broader regional trend. Recent media reports show COVID-19 is at high levels in India with its health ministry indicating active cases had risen to 7,121 with 306 new cases on June 12.

On Thursday, the Daily Mirror, quoting Professor Dushantha Medagedara from the Faculty of Medicine at the University of the Northwest of Sri Lanka, reported that two more people had died from a new COVID-19 variant. That followed the death of an 18-month-old child in Galle, in the Southern Province, earlier this month after they tested positive for the virus.

While public concern is rising over the worsening situation, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna/National People’s Power (JVP/NPP) government is concealing the true extent of the spread of this and other highly infectious diseases and the dangers they pose.

On June 2, Health Ministry secretary Anil Jasinghe issued a statement declaring that “health authorities remain vigilant in monitoring disease trends” but that the population “need not panic unnecessarily.” He advised that “if individuals experience fever or respiratory symptoms, there is no need for hospital admission out of fear. However, if someone has difficulty breathing then medical attention should be sought.”

In a media briefing on June 3, Health Minister Nalinda Jayatissa said his ministry would take the next decision over the current spread of COVID-19 “based on the number of cases being reported.”

In fact, other than randomly testing patients who present for treatment at the island’s 20 main hospitals, there is no scientific and large-scale method to assess the current prevalence of COVID-19. The Health Ministry’s “COVID-19 Situation Report,” moreover, has not been updated since December 13, 2022.

Jayatissa’s claims that his ministry would respond “based on the number of cases being reported” is absurd and cynical. Without a proper assessment system, it simply means that the JVP/NPP government will not take any serious action to protect the population from the deadly disease.

The government’s real policy was revealed when a journalist asked the health minister whether the government would make mask-wearing mandatory. He replied: “We have increased PCR testing in hospitals. We cannot take decisions irresponsibly.”

The reason the JVP/NPP government, which is fully committed to the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) austerity program, is unwilling to make face masks mandatory is because it fears this would make the public more aware of COVID-19 and demand increased government spending on public health.

Along with rising COVID-19 cases, there has also been a sudden increase in other dangerous infections, such as dengue fever and chikungunya, across the island.

According to Professor Neelika Malavige, who is Immunology and Molecular Medicine Department head at Sri Jayewardenepura University, “Sri Lanka is currently experiencing a large chikungunya outbreak after 16 years and the current virus is of the Indian Ocean Lineage (IOL) with several unique mutations.”

Chikungunya is transmitted to humans via the bite of an infected mosquito. Though the disease is not fatal, some studies have indicated that 30 percent or more of patients experience persistent joint pains and prolonged fatigue for months or years after illness.

Those infected with COVID, dengue and chikungunya also confront a dangerous lack of human and physical resources in Sri Lanka’s publicly funded health system. The country’s hospital network is currently struggling with severe shortages of essential medicines, including antibiotics, insulin, painkillers and drugs for heart disease and high blood pressure.

A COVID quarantine centre without required social distancing at Bingiriya in November 2020

According to General Medical Officers’ Association secretary Chamil Wijesinghe, nearly 180 essential medicines in the medical supply sector had completely run out and 50 other basic items for hospitals had been depleted by the end of April.

An Emergency Treatment Unit (ETU) doctor at the Kandy National Hospital, the country’s second-largest hospital, told the World Socialist Web Site that the facility had no stocks of salbutamol nebulisation solution, which is critical for asthma treatments, for three weeks during April. “This is an essential drug for the ETU,” he said.

The collapse of laboratory facilities in state hospitals also means that patients are now forced to pay exorbitant fees to obtain medical tests from private laboratories. Doctors say that patients who cannot afford to pay do not take these tests, making it impossible to properly diagnose them.

Health workers also report service outages due to lack of proper maintenance of equipment. The Government Radiology Technologists Association recently stated that patient treatment has collapsed due to the inoperability of four “linear accelerator” radiation machines in the cancer units of major hospitals in Karapitiya, Maharagama, Batticaloa and Jaffna.

Public health services centered around the Medical Officer of Health offices have also suffered a similar fate. The lack of human and physical resources needed to properly run those institutions has resulted in the rapid spread of chikungunya.

Meanwhile, medical specialists have warned about the outbreak of dengue, also a mosquito-borne disease. According to the Health Ministry’s Epidemiology Unit there have been 25,300 dengue cases and 13 deaths so far this year.

These developments all point to a serious collapse of the country’s public health service.

While Sri Lanka’s public health system was often hailed as a model for South Asia, the COVID-19 pandemic revealed that it was in serious decline due to inadequate government spending, the result of IMF demands, and an expansion of the private sector.

Cost-cutting IMF demands are continuing under the JVP/NPP government, which came to power falsely promising to immediately upgrade the health system. But like previous big-business governments, it has allocated a paltry 1.83 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) to public health.

Instead of investing billions in healthcare to save lives from COVID, President Gotabhaya Rajapakse’s government did the opposite. Less than a year after the pandemic began it demanded all employees return to work, abandoning the limited measures it previously adopted.

Like every capitalist government, around the world, Rajapakse, and his successor Ranil Wickremesinghe, embraced the anti-scientific “let it rip” agenda, allowing COVID-19 to spread freely. As a result, by April 12, 2024, some 16,897 people in Sri Lanka had died from COVID and 672,754 were infected.

US-China economic conflict goes up a notch

Nick Beams

The discussions in London this week between the US and China, leading to a “framework deal” for further negotiations, have revealed that the battle lines in the economic war launched by the Trump administration have shifted.

While the war was launched over the trade imbalance between the world’s number one and number two economies, the focus is increasingly on the control of global supply chains.

US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping [AP Photo/Craig Ruttle, Alexandr Demyanchuk]

The negotiations in London was convened after a truce on the escalation of tariffs decided in talks in Geneva last month had all but broken down. Discussions centred on the lifting of export controls on the export of rare earth minerals by China to the US.

China tightened its restrictions in response to the imposition of restrictions by the US on jet engine components and bans on Chinese students attending American universities in the wake of the Geneva discussions.

China entered the negotiations in what has been widely acknowledged as the stronger position because its restrictions on rare earths, used in the production of magnets able to function in high temperatures, was threatening to cripple key sections of the auto industry. Car companies and auto parts companies had met with Trump and informed him they were facing shutdown if supplies did not come through.

Details of the agreement in London have yet to be released—according to some reports they are still being finalised—but the broad outline has been reported. Under the deal China will ease restrictions on rare earth exports in return for the US lifting some restrictions on the sale of jet engines and related parts as well as ethane needed for the manufacturer of plastic products.

China, however, did not secure an easing of the restrictions on the export of advanced semi-conductors despite this possibility being raised by leading Trump economic official Kevin Hassett in remarks before the London talks began.

While pressing this demand, China did not make it a deal breaker and seemed to be prepared to bide its time. It appears this is for two reasons.

First, while the high-tech bans have had an impact, Chinese firms have been able to develop workarounds. The most glaring example has been the development by DeepSeek in January of an artificial intelligence platform equal to those in America and at a much lower cost, despite being denied access to the top-level AI chips developed by the US firm, Nvidia.

Second, China imposed a six-month limit on its easing of export controls on rare earths and magnets, of which it has a near total control, indicating it is ready to use this weapon again if the need arises.

Trump, as is par for the course, claimed a victory declaring on social media that subject to final approval by himself and China’s president Xi Jinping that full magnets and any necessary rare earths would be supplied “up front” by China.

Trump’s claims have been questioned by his critics in the US, particularly in the pages of the Wall Street Journal (WSJ).

One article, headlined “China’s Lock on Rare Earths Dictated Path Toward Trade Truce,” said: “China’s chokehold on supplies of minerals essential to high-tech goods from electric vehicles to jet fighters has become a formidable advantage in trade negotiations with the US.”

An WSJ editorial poured cold water on Trump’s claim of a win.

“President Trump… hailed the result of the latest trade talks with China as a great victory, but the best we can say is that it’s a truce that tilts in China’s favour.”

Together with all sections of the political, military, intelligence and corporate media establishment, the Murdoch-owned WSJ regards the suppression of the economic development of China as an existential question for the maintenance of US global dominance. Its difference with Trump is over how he is seeking to go about this.

The issue of rare earths, it said, pointed to a “larger problem with Trump’s tariff strategy—that is, he doesn’t have one. His latest walk-back shows he can’t bully China as he tried to do in his first term. China has leverage of its own.”

It called for a “smarter strategy” in which the US worked with allies against China instead of the “scatter-gun” approach in which Trump has used tariffs against “friends and foes alike.”

But the assessment that Trump’s measures are some kind of mistake is a misreading of the situation the US confronts.

The countries targeted with the highest reciprocal tariffs, especially those in south-east Asia, have close economic ties with China. While they are dependent on the US for their export market, they are equally dependent on China and form part of a global supply chain and consequently have attempted to balance between them.

However, with the erosion of its manufacturing base and the development of financial parasitism on Wall Street as a central component of profit accumulation, the US has no viable economic alternative to offer them, and so hectoring them will not bring about the desired shift.

Hence the use of diktats in the form of tariff hikes. At the centre of the negotiations with dozens of countries that have had reciprocal tariffs imposed on them is the US demand that they get off the fence and line up with it economically, politically and, if necessary, militarily against China or they will be hit hard by exclusions from the US market.

Meanwhile Trump officials claim there is some peaceful resolution to the conflict as they intensify the military preparations.

Returning from the London talks to give testimony to the US Senate, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said: “If China will course correct by upholding its end of the initial trade agreement we outlined in Geneva last month, then a big, beautiful rebalancing of the world’s two largest economies is possible.”

Bessent is either deluding himself or trying to fool others. The US demand for “rebalancing” goes far beyond the reduction of the Chinese trade surplus. It is nothing less than the subordination of China’s economic expansion to its demands.

But in many ways the horse has already bolted. As the WSJ noted China already has the “upper hand” in many essential sectors of the modern economy.

“The world’s second-largest economy accounts for around of a third of global manufacturing output, giving it a potential chokehold in auto parts, basic ingredients for drugs, key parts of the electronics supply chain and a host of other industry sectors.”

By contrast the US, it continued, dominated few sectors “but its clout in advanced technology gives it an outsize advantage.”

But even that is being whittled away. This means that the conflict has gone well beyond the issue of trade deficits and surpluses. As the WSJ put it, a new “era of weaponised supply chains has arrived” and the shift “highlights how the rivalry between the US and China is increasingly about who controls the levers of global economic power.”

The inexorable logic of this process is that with the US attempts to use economic power to subordinate China having largely failed, it will increasingly resort to military means. The lesson to be drawn from the outcome of the London talks and the so-called framework deal is that war has come a major step closer.

Number and wealth of UK billionaires soars as poverty deepens

Margot Miller

“The present state of civilization is as odious as it is unjust… The contrast of affluence and wretchedness continually meeting and offending the eye, is like dead and living bodies chained together.” Tom Paine (1737-1809)

Research by the Equality Trust points to the social gulf between the UK super-rich and the majority who are getting poorer.

Its report, Billionaire Britain 2025, published in May explains, “The costs for our unequal society continue to be borne by those who can’t afford them—and the costs are still growing. Throughout this time, however, the UK’s richest have thrived. Billionaires in particular have seen their wealth soar.”

Part of the Equality Trust report showing the surge in number of billionaires in the UK (screenshot from Equality Trust website) [Photo: equalitytrust.org.uk/evidence-base/billionaire-britain-2025/]

The richest 50 families in the UK own more than 34 million people, comprising the poorest half of the population. The ultra-rich are becoming richer, increasing their wealth by a multiple of a 1,000 since 1990. Today, the two richest UK billionaires hold “more wealth between them than all the billionaires in the 1990 list combined.”

Launched in 2009, the Equality Trust received funding from the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust before becoming a charity itself in 2015. The Equality Trust notes, “UK income inequality is among the highest in the developed world.”

In 1990, there were 15 billionaires in the UK. This number soared to 165 by 2024. In real terms adjusted for inflation, the aggregate wealth of billionaires in the UK in 1990 was £65.8 billion, rising to a stratospheric £619.5 billion by 2025.

This is a global phenomenon. According to Forbes World’s Billionaire List 2024, aggregate wealth of the world’s 3,028 billionaires reached a record high of $16.1 trillion.

The 2008 global financial crash, ushering in savage austerity for the working class globally, had no impact on the rising number of billionaires and their wealth. In 2010, the number of billionaires in Britain rose from 74 to 117 five years later— their wealth almost doubling from £250.2 billion to £442.5 billion in the same period.

Following the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, the wealth of the growing number of UK billionaires reached new heights. In 2020, 147 billionaires possessed £614.1 billion. By 2023, 171 billionaires held £704.1 billion.

Warning that the growth in extreme inequality means “trust in the political system is collapsing”, the report states that “the UK’s economy has become incredibly specialised at finding ways to extract wealth from a process… adding little or no value, and charging a fee.

“This has made a small number of people very, very rich by contributing almost nothing and taking increasing rents from those that do contribute.”

The Equality Trust graphically illustrates the parasitism and financialization of the UK economy since 1990, whereby wealth accumulation is increasingly divorced from the production of real value. This is a defining feature of the world economy controlled by a billionaire oligarchy.

In 1990, two of the UK billionaires’ wealth was held in property, rising to 15 in 2005 and reaching 42 in 2025. Today, the wealth in part or full of more than one in four billionaires in Britain is based on property, inheritance, or the financial markets.

Wealth accruing from finance comprised 30 percent of total billionaire wealth in 2024 or £197.6 billion—a fourfold increase since 1990. The number of billionaires in this sector rose from one in 1990 to 39 today.

There was a surge in wealth appropriation in this sector both after the financial crash of 2008—the report suggests this is indicative of a resumption of risky ventures—and in 2021 after the COVID-19 outbreak.

“There was a particular increase during the beginning of the cost-of-living crisis and the global inflation surge in 2021-22”, it states.

The myth that all boats rise when the richest and the corporations profit is dashed by the billionaires prospering vampire-like in industries like media, oil and gas, which are shedding jobs. The report states that the “growth of the ultra-rich has little to do with success for the wider economy.”

According to the British Retail Consortium, there were over a quarter of a million job losses in retail in 2024. The Equality Trust data shows that, in the same year, the total wealth of the billionaires exploiting this sector reached £100 billion.

The burgeoning wealth of the few based on property sits atop a desperate housing crisis. Due to rising property prices and lack of social housing, families are prey to private landlords, who charge exorbitant rents. Last year, one in 200 UK households had to resort to temporary accommodation. On any night, more than 300,000 people are classed as homeless in Britain.

While most of the population are crushed by the impact of rising inflation and the cost-living-crisis—due to surging energy costs since the pandemic and the Nato-led war in Ukraine—the rich increased their wealth, “from the increased bills, rents, and mortgage payments shouldered by the rest of us.”

The Equality Trust reveals the “rise in the value of inherited wealth” which now occupies “twice the share of the national economy it did in the 1980s, making up nearly 9% of UK GDP.” In contrast, inheritance tax, which provided 3 percent of national taxation in the 1950s, today provides a mere 0.3 percent.

Successive Conservative and Labour governments have allow the sated few to swell their incomes, slashing top rates of income tax since the 1950s—from 91 percent to 45 percent today—privatising essential services like transport and communications, while gutting funding for health, welfare and education.

Amazon UK was exempt from paying tax from 2020, while gaining tax credits of £8.9 million due to a scheme that rewarded investment under Rishi Sunak’s Conservative government, reported the Guardian. It only paid tax in 2023—£18.7 million after £27 billion revenue from sales. Amazon employees on the other hand labour under arduous conditions to earn £12.41 in the warehouses, barely above the minimum wage of £12.21 an hour.

“The growth in billionaires drawing wealth from oil and gas and gambling is also indicative of an extractive [non-value producing] economy,” the Equality Trust notes. As these areas contracted, so the number of billionaires increased, from two in 1990 to 11.

While the gambling billionaires have vastly increased their wealth, the Equality Trust points to fallout in terms of mental health problems associated with gambling addiction.

In the creative and media industries, the number of billionaires rose from zero to 20 today amid layoffs throughout the sector.

The Equality Trust report coincided with the Sunday Times Rich List 2025, which documents the 1,000 wealthiest individuals or families in the UK. In first position this year, for the fourth-year running was the Hinduja family, with £35.3 billion. 

A piece by the High Pay Centre (HPC), think tank on the Sunday Times Rich List addressed media focus on the Equality Trust’s statistics illustrating a dip in the number of billionaires this year and their total wealth—from 165 to 156, and a decrease in aggregate wealth by 3 percent.

This, the HPC concluded, was a blip or “slight decline” rather than a reversal in the tendency towards growing inequality due to, “Fluctuations in global financial markets”. It pointed out, “Since 2008, rich list wealth has increased about 4 x faster than median UK household wealth.”

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) report “UK poverty 2025” reveals the terrible impact of the pauperisation of millions. Figures for 2022/23 showed more than one in five people in the UK were living in poverty—21 percent of the population or 14.3 million people. “It is 20 years since we last saw a prolonged period of falling poverty,” wrote the JRF.

Six million or four in 10 of those in poverty in 2022-2023 lived on an income far below the poverty line— “the average person in poverty had an income 28 percent below the poverty line, compared to 23 percent between 1994/95 and 1996/97.” The very poorest families were surviving on an average income 57 percent below the poverty line.

Since Labour came to office a year ago, “unacceptably high rates of poverty… persist”, according to the JRF. This must worsen drastically as the government implements a war economy and doubles military spending in line with Nato’s confrontation of Russia and China.

Zionism is as Corrupt as Christian Nationalism

Graylan Scott Hagler

Image by Shalev Cohen.

As the political and religious left continues to attack Christian nationalism, as a progressive Christian, I find myself increasingly uneasy. It is not that I believe Christian nationalism exists, or that it is dangerous to a pluralistic society with religious diversity and perspective, but the ire and critique is not applied across the board to other forms of ethnoreligious nationalism. There is a glaring absence on the political left and in the peace and justice movement to condemn Zionism with equal weight as is applied to Christian nationalism. Among nationalistic expressions of religion, expressions of narrow particularism, and obsessive focus on the justification of one religious/ethnic group over others Zionism escapes the condemnation for some reason that Christian nationalism is confronted with.

Christian nationalism asserts that a particular country is founded on “Christian” principles. Its founders or framers were divinely inspired, and therefore the impetus is to draw those countries back into line with the original framework intended by the founders of that nation. Christian nationalism is a worldwide phenomenon, with proponents in Europe, and particularly evident in the United States. The political/religious framework offered in the United States is that the founders of the country, and all of its original documents were divinely inspired through white men who authored them. You cannot escape the fact that the founders of the United States were white men who were landowners, and therefore an undercurrent exists where Christian nationalism is built upon white privilege and supremacy. This is true whether it is in the United States or Europe. The belief is that the malaise that exist in national boundaries is due to the straying or abandonment of those Christian principles, and the antidote for the national demise is to return to religious inception initiating all the blessings that will flow as a result of doing so. Hence, we have witnessed the push to place the Ten Commandments in schools, the turning back of the clock on Roe v. Wade, the continued push to publicly fund religious schools, attacks upon the LGBTQIA communities, and the demonizing of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. It is presented as if all the problems and the failings of a nation is a result of eschewing “Christian” principles, affirming religious and ethnic pluralism, and because we have removed all the trappings, strictures, and images of so-called Christianity from public life. As a progressive Christian I unapologetically stand in opposition to Christian nationalism and all its forms of expression.

Zionism is akin to Christian nationalism. A difference in Zionism is that it existed originally as political/religious thought among a diverse population spread across national borders in Europe that identified religiously and culturally as an ethnoreligious group. Originally the argument of Jews pursuing a homeland in Palestine was met with skepticism as a political/religious philosophy and existed on the margins. However, the various European pogroms against Jews began to coalesce larger swarths of Jews to strategically reconsider Zionism.

Zionism emerged in the 19th century as an ethnocultural ideology. It sought to establish a national home for the Jewish people that they controlled and therefore were free from the ethnic cleansing that arose periodically in Europe. World War II and the atrocities carried out against Jews other groups in Europe became a major factor for the intellectual and emotional acceptability of the Zionist framework that would result in the colonialization of Palestine. As the acceptability of Zionism arose as a solution for Jewish security among larger segments of the Jewish population its political and religious tenets became more wedded to Judaism. This conflation of Zionism with Judaism has become problematic in terms of having any sober political discussions on the realities and consequences of Israel and the implications of Zionism without being accused of being antisemitic.

Zionism claimed that Palestine is the historical land of the Jews and therefore the Jewish right to the land outweighed anything that was Arab. The concept of “transfer”, or what we today would call “ethnic cleansing” is inherent to Zionism, believing that the security of Jews had to be based upon their majority, and to lessen any potential of uprisings in response to Jewish occupation. The idea of removing non-Jewish populations and affording non-Jews less rights than Jews evidently gained widespread support across a array of Zionist groups. The religious roots of Zionism focused upon the land of Palestine being promised by God to the Jewish people into perpetuity with the conquest and subjugation of non-Jewish people resulting. There are enough biblical narratives that justifies the subjugation, conquest, and killing of non-Jewish people. The political roots of Zionism are based upon what is presented as practical strategies of protection, security, and historical rights to the land. The religious justifications of Zionism are questionable given that Jews largely have appropriated and identified with the biblical narratives as stories of identity and belonging, just as Black people largely reinterpreted the biblical stories as our own identification with God and divine purpose. The political justification of Zionism is flawed in that it affirms the European colonialization and conquest of non-white lands, and the subjugation of non-white peoples. Zionism, though ethnic in character, is a nationalistic European expression of the stealing and conquest of the land of others and the extension of white supremacy in form and practice.

I am offering a brief summation of Christian and Jewish nationalism. I am also raising the ideological and political deficiencies of the left where it condemns Christian nationalism but fail in offering the same kinds of condemnation and critique of Jewish nationalism. One has to ask the question, why? Each form of religious nationalism is an apostasy to the spiritual and political concepts of Christianity and Judaism. Each nationalism avoids the declarations of justice, right treatment of neighbor, and welcoming the stranger as if it is foreign to the scriptural text. Instead, they turn to scriptures that seem to affirm their narrow and myopic points of view, conquest, and divine justification for subjugation and genocide. Each form of nationalism deserves and needs to be condemned. Peace and justice organizations on the left, liberal religious groups, and political secular groups need to apply their criticism of religious and political nationalism across the board and in a principled way. I am offering that all forms of nationalism are inherently evil because it strips non-conforming groups of their dignity, security, and freedom of expression. Zionism emerged because of nation-state nationalism, but the irony is that they formed another expression of nationalism to combat nationalism. This simply illustrates how one evil leads to another. Christian nationalism has been the backbone of all kinds of evils from enslavement to the Christianization and genocide of indigenous peoples. It must be condemned in all of its forms from the past to the present, and into any future expression. Zionism must also be subjected to the same types of criticism and analysis, and if we fail to apply the same standard of criticism across the board, in reference to Christianity, Judaism, and even Islam then we have certainly failed in being any moral voice at all.