Australian cancer testing declines during coronavirus pandemic

Clare Bruderlin

Cancer testing in Australia has reduced significantly during the COVID-19 crisis, with testing and screening for some cancers declining by more than 50 percent in April, often because of shortages of personal protective equipment (PPE) for health workers and patients.

Aggregate data from major private pathology labs showed a 56 percent decrease in tissue testing in the week starting April 6, compared with the February average, according to an article published in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Tissue testing includes biopsies for breast cancer, prostate cancer, colon cancer, skin cancer and lung cancer—the five most common types of cancer.

Over the same period, cervical cancer screening fell by 71 percent and blood tests for prostate cancer were down by 58 percent. Toward the end of May, testing still remained lower than the February average. In the week starting May 25, tissue testing was down 17 percent, cervical cancer 28 percent and prostate cancer blood tests 14 percent.

Cancer is the leading cause of death in Australia. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) estimates that in 2020 there will be just under 150,000 new cases of cancer diagnosed and just under 50,000 deaths.

Early detection and diagnosis are critical. A delay in diagnosis can significantly affect the outcome of cancer, leading to worse outcomes and increased deaths.

Jane O’Brien, a specialist oncoplastic breast cancer surgeon, told the Sydney Morning Herald: “It’s accepted that a delay in diagnosis of three months or more may be associated with a poorer prognosis—that is, the cancer is bigger and it would be more likely to have spread to the lymph gland… That means you may need more aggressive treatments, both surgically and with additional treatments like chemotherapy and radiotherapy.”

Breast cancer surgeons have reported a 40 percent fall in breast cancer diagnosis over the pandemic months, according to the Clinical Oncology Society of Australia. Breast cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer in Australia.

In April, BreastScreen Australia temporarily suspended its screening services, which provides free mammograms to women over 40. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) reported that BreastScreen NSW said this decision was made in order to “avoid risks of COVID-19 exposure and to free up trained health practitioners so they can respond to the pandemic.” Also, it “did not want to use personal protective equipment when it was much needed elsewhere.”

Moreover, the lack of PPE in hospitals and the shortages of masks, gloves and sanitiser available to the general public have forced many people to put off attending appointments with their GP or following up on referrals, due to the risk of exposure to COVID-19.

Cancer Council CEO Sanchia Aranda told the ABC in May that as many as one in 10 people may have put off cancer screening during the pandemic. “If it is one in 10 people who delayed [tests] by up to six months, that’s about 7,000 cancers that would be diagnosed potentially later,” she said.

Writing on the impact the coronavirus pandemic on cancer diagnosis, the University of Melbourne’s Professor Maarten Ilzerman and Professor Jon Emery raised concerns that the delay in testing, diagnosis and surgery would cause “second and third wave effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.”

“The second wave is known as the impact on urgent care for non-COVID-19 diseases and usually is explained by delays in access to health services,” they wrote. “The third wave reflects the impact of COVID-19 on care interruptions in chronic diseases and patients with known cancer. The latter is likely to occur because of changes in management of (metastatic) cancers receiving less (hospital-based) chemotherapy.”

There is an estimated backlog of 400,000 elective surgeries in Australia, including some 25,000 cancer surgeries, as a result of the cancellation of most elective surgeries from March 25 up until mid-May, due to the lack of PPE, beds and equipment to cope with the pandemic.

This is a global trend. A recent World Economic Forum report stated that 38 percent of global cancer surgery has been postponed or cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic. Health systems around the world, which for decades have seen funding cuts, under staffing and extensive privatisation, have been rapidly overwhelmed by the influx of COVID-19 patients.

Even before the outbreak of the pandemic, wait times for elective surgeries in Australia were lengthening. According to AIHW data, just 50 percent of patients were admitted for elective surgery within 41 days in 2018-19. That was up from 50 percent of patients admitted within 35 days in 2014-15.

Wait times were lengthy for diagnostic testing for some cancers. In 2018, Bowel Cancer Australia reported that 90 percent of National Bowel Cancer Screening Program participants with a positive screening were waiting between 116 and 181 days for a colonoscopy. Medical guidelines recommend that patients be referred to colonoscopy within a maximum 120-day threshold. Bowel cancer is the second most common cancer in Australia and kills over 5,000 people each year.

In addition to long wait times, life saving cancer treatments and care can cost thousands of dollars, becoming more costly the more advanced the treatments and surgery that is required.

One Western Australia study, recently published in the Australian Medical Journal, found that over 90 percent of participants incurred out-of-pocket expenses for their cancer care, including for surgery, medical tests and medical appointments.

Costs ranged from $51 to $106,140 for those living in outer metropolitan areas and from $13 to $20,842 for those in rural areas, and were higher among those who had private health insurance. Around 21 percent of all participants reported spending more than 10 percent of their household income on cancer care.

Moreover, clinical services such as radiology and pathology are often controlled by the private sector, increasing out-of-pocket expenses. A 2016 Australian Bureau of Statistics study showed that around 300,000 patients forgo early diagnosis each year due to the cost of radiology services.

Successive Labor and Liberal-National Coalition governments, state and federal, have inflicted cuts to health care and privatised health services. The lie that there is “not enough money” to provide decent health services has been exposed by the coronavirus pandemic. The federal Coalition government, with support from the opposition Labor Party, has funnelled hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out major corporations, while health workers have been left for months with inadequate PPE and resources to cope with the pandemic.

In March, with the outbreak of the pandemic, Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced a measly $2.4 billion package for health services to cope with the expected influx of COVID-19 patients. At the same time the government’s “economic stimulus” packages have exceeded $200 billion, most of which went to major corporations and the banks.

Migrants challenge visa processing delays by New Zealand authorities

Tom Peters

As an election approaches in September, the New Zealand government, a coalition between the Labour Party, the right-wing nationalist NZ First and the Greens, is intensifying its anti-immigrant measures.

Like its counterparts throughout the world, the government is seeking to divert anger over mass job losses triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic into xenophobia against immigrants, who make up a substantial portion of the population. According to the 2018 census, more than one in four people in New Zealand were born overseas.

Thousands of temporary migrant workers who have lost their jobs in recent months are ineligible for welfare payments and are being given “short term” relief including food parcels and vouchers. Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters, leader of NZ First, has told jobless migrants to “go home,” declaring that the economy cannot support them. This is despite the government handing out billions of dollars in subsidies to businesses.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of people applying for residency through the Skilled Migrant Category (SMC) are facing interminable delays and many fear they may be forced to leave the country. Immigration New Zealand (INZ) has a backlog of over 15,000 SMC and Work to Residence applications, representing more than 32,000 people. Many have been waiting a year or longer for a decision.

Graph showing the growing backlog of applications for Skilled Migrant Category visas (Source: Migrants NZ)

The World Socialist Web Site spoke with members of the recently established Facebook group Migrants NZ about their experiences. Migrants NZ, which has more than 4,600 members, has drafted a petition calling on the government to urgently process the applications, “make the process transparent and treat all applicants equally.”

The petition states: “We were promised that our applications would be processed in a reasonable timeframe. However, without any clear reasons we are forced to wait for a decision well over a year which takes an immense mental and financial toll on us and our families.”

Speaking to the Indian Weekender on Sunday, Immigration Minister Iain Lees-Galloway did not give a definite timeframe for visa processing or explanation for the backlog. He said waiting times would likely “increase for the foreseeable future” due to increased numbers of applications.

Anna, who is from Germany, told the WSWS she applied in May 2019 with her partner and their son. Her partner moved to New Zealand from Ireland seven years ago to work on the rebuild of Christchurch, which was devastated by an earthquake in 2011.

“When we applied we had one year left on our work visas, which we thought was sufficient,” she said. INZ estimated the processing time would be nine months, but this target was changed to 17 months. A year and a half ago a small number of applications were given priority, including people earning over $51 an hour and selected professions such as teachers and healthcare workers, “and the rest they’ve just stopped processing.”

Anna said the delay was “probably politically motivated,” noting that before the 2017 election Labour and NZ First “were saying: we will reduce immigrant numbers, and that’s what they’re doing at the moment.”

She said it was “hard to understand” how Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern could claim to lead the “kindest and most transparent government ever. Because this is not transparent, this is not kind. I’ve been talking to a lot of people recently and it has a massive impact on their mental health.”

Anna said her partner had worked for the same company for six years “and it doesn’t count for anything. I find it very frustrating when you put so much towards a country and its economy and the rebuild, and you’re just not given anything in return.”

She said the Facebook group gave people “a platform to share their stories and realise that they’re not alone in all this. It seems like to Immigration and the government we’re just a number. We want to get heard. We want people to understand the situation we’re in.”

A migrant from Britain, who we will call Jessica, said she and her partner had spent about $4,000 on applications and related costs. They have been waiting 18 months for INZ’s decision, despite initially being told to expect an answer by October 2019.

She was angry that INZ had received millions of dollars in fees from migrants for applications that are not being processed. The agency was “getting away with this, I don’t know how. They’re not accountable to anyone.”

“I’ve been here about three years and my partner’s been here for four,” Jessica said. Her partner works for an internet service provider “in critical infrastructure in Christchurch that doctors and nurses need to do their jobs, but that counts for nothing.”

Jessica is pregnant and due to give birth in December. Her current work visa expires in January 2021. “I don’t particularly want to go home with a one-month-old baby halfway across the world without a job,” she said. “It’s just awful, living in limbo.”

Visa applicants were “being fobbed off by the government” and given “nonsensical” excuses, she said. When she recently complained to her local MP, Jessica was told the delays were because of increased applications due to New Zealand being perceived as relatively safe from COVID-19. “But we’ve been waiting over 18 months. It makes no sense.”

Jessica believed the government was deliberately stalling “so that come election time they can say: ‘look how few migrants we’ve let in this year, aren’t we fantastic?’ Just to appeal to those that don’t want any more immigrants. I see no other reason, to be quite honest.”

A worker from China, based in Auckland, who wished to remain anonymous, told the WSWS he applied for residency almost a year ago and was very anxious about the future. He said the government was “trying to make people’s lives miserable to please a small number of anti-immigrant people. This whole thing is so inhumane. People have mental health issues from waiting so long. Every day they worry about their job or their application, about everything.”

He believed NZ First was “hijacking the whole process.” The party previously campaigned to cap immigration at 10,000 people a year, down from over 50,000 in recent years. Labour, supported by the Greens, gave NZ First considerable power in the coalition, even though the notoriously xenophobic party is very unpopular; NZ First received only 7.2 percent of the votes in 2017 and is currently polling below 2 percent.

COVID-19 cases increase across Pacific Island states

John Braddock

The World Health Organisation (WHO) warned last week of an increase of COVID-19 cases across small Pacific Island states. New cases were confirmed in Papua New Guinea (PNG), and in the US territory of Guam, where a fresh spike took the total to 231, which includes five deaths. The number of confirmed cases in the region is 353, an increase of 39 over the previous week.

The WHO says although official infection rates are slowing in the Pacific, the crisis is far from over. While most Pacific nations have few, if any, ongoing cases, the pandemic is only starting to make its presence felt. Should the virus take hold in any of the vulnerable and impoverished island states, with their inadequate health and welfare infrastructure, the results will be dire.

The closure of international borders has shattered economies and the meagre incomes of working people. The Guardian has reported that 90 percent of businesses have lost money, and are struggling with the effects of recent natural disasters such as Cyclone Harold. A quarter of businesses are unlikely to survive the pandemic, according to the latest Pacific Trade Invest Business Monitor Report.

The annual Pacific Islands Forum summit, the region’s major diplomatic gathering due to be hosted by Vanuatu in August, has been cancelled.

The Trump administration’s abject failure to bring COVID-19 under control is adversely affecting US territories across the northwest Pacific. As businesses and social venues reopened on Guam, the island was hit with 35 new cases from a unit recently deployed at the US Andersen air force base. Anger at the military erupted at reports that a group of US airmen absconded from quarantine to visit restaurants and other establishments.

In PNG, restrictions may be re-introduced in the capital Port Moresby after tests revealed the country’s latest case, a 26-year-old woman. A member of the Defence Force with COVID-19 was also found to be infected during mass testing at the Murray Barracks following another case involving a visiting Australian soldier.

Last month Fiji and New Zealand joined 13 Pacific neighbours in declaring themselves virus-free. The Cook Islands relaxed its travel ban with NZ, allowing workers and residents to re-enter. However, the emergence of new cases among people returning to New Zealand, and failures at the country’s quarantine facilities, set back similar plans in Samoa. Last year 83 people died when a measles epidemic spread from Auckland to Samoa.

The potential exists for new outbreaks as thousands of Pacific Island seasonal workers are being sent back home from Australia and New Zealand. The NZ air force has started flights to repatriate 1,000 ni-Vanuatu workers while flights for an estimated 7,000 stranded Tongans will start this month. Hundreds of cruise ship workers stuck in isolation for months on board empty ships were finally flown back to Fiji and Vanuatu by operator Carnival Australia.

Fiji’s Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama last week declared he is looking to attract “VIPs” to help restore the collapsed tourist industry. Billionaires who “fly your own jet, rent your own island, and invest millions of dollars in Fiji,” he tweeted, “may have a new home to escape the pandemic in paradise.” The first planeload of 30 “high-net-worth individuals… from a very well-known company” is due to arrive this week.

The number of infections in the French territories remains unchanged, at 21 for New Caledonia and 60 for French Polynesia. However, the economic cost is highlighted by Air Tahiti axing more than half its 48 domestic destinations, leaving many outlying islands isolated. A spokesman said the economic impact is 10 times worse than that which followed the 2008 financial meltdown.

Evidence continues to emerge that Pacific governments, preparing for an upsurge of social opposition to austerity measures, are using the pandemic to attack fundamental democratic rights.

In Vanuatu, while the opposition was under two-day suspension for boycotting an earlier sitting, an amendment passed through parliament extending a state of emergency indefinitely. The government also abruptly lifted the retirement age from 55 to 60 years.

Lawyer Paul Harricknen told Radio NZ that in PNG the ombudsman should step in after the government gave itself extraordinary new powers under the Public Health Emergency Act, which restrict basic rights for an indefinite period with no parliamentary oversight. Harricknen said the declaration of a “national emergency” was rushed through parliament and should be challenged in the Supreme Court.

The PNG legislation preceded an announcement that thousands of workers will lose their jobs due to an impasse over the huge Porgera gold mine. Canadian company Barrick Gold blames the government’s refusal to extend its mining lease. Barrick and Chinese partner Zijin have shut down production while they challenge the decision in court, and declared 2,650 jobs will be axed by the end of July.

Concerns have been raised about the Tongan government’s plans to spend $US1.9 million setting up a new security bureau, the Tonga National Security of Information Office, apparently to curb the leaking of government information. It will work closely with state agencies in Australia and New Zealand, and monitor a range of business and political negotiations. A Freedom of Information Act, initially proposed eight years ago, has meanwhile languished.

The Pacific journalists’ association PINA has accused the Cook Islands parliament of gagging the media after several local MPs objected to what they say was incorrect reporting about parliamentary allowances. The Speaker of the House was asked to require a Cook Islands News journalist’s withdrawal from parliament.

Financial assistance from international institutions has been both scarce and slow. The Solomon Islands has secured a meagre $US20 million from the Asian Development Bank (ADB), split between a concessional loan and grant to help mitigate the economic impacts of the virus. Tonga has received a similarly modest $US12.2 million from the ADB, following a previous $US6m injection to fund its border lockdown and relief for the effects of the pandemic. Tonga’s parliament has just passed a $US260 million budget for the coming year, with a record deficit of over $US26.4m.

The region’s imperialist powers, Australia and New Zealand, remain solely concerned with securing their geo-strategic interests and ensuring their continued dominance in what they regard as their semi-colonial “backyard.”

According to documents released in June by the New Zealand government, the Pacific will need “significant investment” to recover from the COVID-19 fallout. The foreign affairs ministry says the region is facing an “array of uncertainties in a significantly altered international environment.”

Far from focusing on the needs of the Pacific nations, however, the paper emphasises a rise in “security risks,” referring to greater opportunities for people smugglers and transnational crime. The ministry’s stated priority, however, is to reinforce the Labour-led government’s “Pacific reset” strategy, which aims to extend its diplomatic and military engagement in the region, in line with Washington’s war drive against China.

Ireland’s Greens agree to join austerity coalition government

Dermot Quinn

Almost five months after Ireland’s February 8 general election, Leo Varadkar’s Fine Gael and Micheál Martin’s Fianna Fáil have been able to form a coalition government after the Green Party membership voted to come on board.

On June 26, after weeks of negotiations, the membership of all three parties voted in favour of forming a coalition on a joint programme. Three quarters of the Green Party registered their support for an alliance with the architects of over a decade of austerity.

Micheál Martin will replace Varadkar as Taoiseach (Prime Minister) until December 2022 when the role will rotate back to Varadkar for the second half of the five-year parliamentary term.

The readiness of Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil to sink differences rooted in the bloodletting of the Civil War following the setting up of the Irish Free State in 1921 is a measure of the desperate crisis facing the bourgeoisie. Amid an imminent recession in the aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic, they need the Greens to secure a parliamentary majority and to have any hope of enforcing the savage attacks on jobs, wages and essential services now on the agenda.

Eamon Ryan

In return for some environmental window dressing, the Green’s leader, Eamon Ryan, spoke of the “sense of responsibility on us now because we do have a job to do,” in “getting our country out of a really severe economic crisis.” What this means is not the protection of jobs and livelihoods that is routinely invoked, but imposing economic policies that will favour the corporations, banks and the super-rich.

From 2007 to 2011, as junior partners in a coalition government with Fianna Fáil, the Greens were complicit in introducing billions of euros of cuts to health, education, and other social services to bail out banks and protect the wealth of the super-rich.

Despite widespread opposition from working people, Fine Gael has been kept in power by Fianna Fáil under a “confidence and supply” agreement worked out three years ago by Varadkar and Martin. But the two-party system that has enabled Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil to control the Dáil (parliament) since the foundation of the Republic was rejected overwhelmingly in the February 8 election.

The combined votes of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael fell to an historic low, with Sinn Fein winning a majority of first preference votes, based mainly on promises to end austerity, provide affordable housing, fund the health service and social care, and to tackle unemployment.

In Northern Ireland, Sinn Fein has proved its ability to combine such vaguely left rhetoric with the responsible safeguarding of corporate interests, in collaboration with the Unionists. But this was not enough to secure their inclusion in government in the South, with both the main parties refusing any discussion. Sinn Fein not only competes for a nationalist vote, but its anti-austerity rhetoric sends out the wrong message to workers when the official mantra must be “sacrificed in the national interest.”

Sinn Fein’s exclusion will likely strengthen its standing among sections of workers and youth. Party leader Mary Lou McDonald said Sinn Fein would continue to “press for change.” Deputy leader in the Dáil Pearse Doherty promised renewed opposition and to “stand up for ordinary workers and families.”

But their successes are only an initial expression of a more fundamental shift to the left by the working class, which cannot be satisfied by Sinn Fein’s pro-capitalist programme.

Varadkar’s term in government was marked by growing social inequality and the worst housing crisis in the country’s history, as well as a severe deterioration in the health care system that left the country woefully unprepared for the COVID-19 onslaught.

Between 2008 and 2015 Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil introduced a massive €2.7 billion of health service cuts, with patients forced to wait on trolleys in overcrowded and understaffed hospitals.

At the beginning of March there were over 500 patients waiting on trolleys in Irish hospitals, a figure which only fell after thousands were kept away from hospital during the pandemic.

Now that the numbers of COVID-19 deaths have fallen, those waiting on trolleys has started to rise, doubling to 102 a day. Dr Fergal Hickey, spokesman for the Irish Association of Emergency Medicine (IAEM), warned that patents in corridors are at particular risk from a winter virus surge, adding that the Health Service Executive (HSE) was “passively allowing a return to the status quo while we are still living with COVID-19 in the community.”

The months of lockdown due to the coronavirus pandemic will largely end on July 20. Travel restrictions were lifted on June 29 and the domestic tourism industry will reopen as well as cafes, restaurants and pubs.

The pandemic has decimated every sector of the economy, and economists are predicting a recession worse than the financial crash of 2008. The Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) predict investment will plummet by a third by the end of the year and consumer spending will fall by 13 percent, with unemployment spiraling to 17 percent of the workforce.

There are already 214,700 people claiming unemployment benefit, while almost a million people depend on some sort of state benefit—a fifth of the Republic of Ireland s population and just under half its working population. One of the first measures to be introduced by the new government will be to cut the Pandemic Unemployment Payment of €350 brought in by Varadkar after the country went into lockdown on March 27. Government estimates show €2.23 billion extra set aside for jobless payments for the rest of the year, but there is no provision for the Pandemic Unemployment Payment.

Central Statistics Office (CSO) figures show that the top 5 percent now has 46.4 percent of national wealth, with 1 percent of the population owning 27.3 percent. This concentration of wealth at the top has been accompanied by growing rates of poverty. Over 760,000 (15.7 percent) now live below the poverty line, with those under 16 years of age accounting for 23.9 percent of those in poverty.

One of the first pledges made in the joint document drafted by Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil and the Green Party for the formation of a government is that there will be a continuation of Ireland’s tax haven status. The corporation tax rate of just 12.5 percent will continue, around half the global average corporation tax rate of 27 percent and the European average of 25.3 percent.

Extra taxes will fall on those with low incomes, with the document stating that the government “will focus any tax rises on those taxes which tax behaviours with negative externalities such as carbon tax, sugar tax, and plastics.” The local property tax, which affects 1.2 million households and was introduced in 2012 during the financial and banking crisis, will be extended to include new homes which have been exempt.

The document pledges that the government will seek to negotiate a new public sector pay deal with the trade unions. These deals have long been used to reduce wages and undermine working conditions, including imposing recruitment embargos.

The treatment of health workers during the current COVID-19 pandemic brings into sharp focus the policing role played by the unions on behalf of big business. Of the 25,414 confirmed cases of coronavirus in Ireland, a staggering one third of these have been front-line staff, including nurses, diagnostic and therapy staff, and ambulance staff. This is the highest infection rate among health workers in the world.

Australian government unveils military boost aimed against China

Mike Head

Amid the worsening global COVID-19 pandemic, Prime Minister Scott Morrison today announced an aggressive military expansion, marking a more explicit shift to supporting the escalating US confrontation with China.

Over the next decade, $575 billion will be spent on the military, including an expanded $270 billion military hardware buildup, featuring “new long-range strike capabilities.”

This will start with the immediate purchase of US missiles capable of striking Chinese vessels and facilities in southeast Asia, and which could be reconfigured to hit southern China itself.

The announcement was made in the language of preparing the population for war. Asked on Seven TV’s “Today” show this morning if the “staggering” new amount of $270 billion meant China is “that great a threat,” Morrison answered in the affirmative.

“The big competition between China and the United States means tensions are much higher,” he said. “I mean, we haven’t seen a time of instability coming out of COVID-19 like this since the 1930s and early 1940s… And all of our defence force and defence strategy is built on the alliance, also as a foundation, with the United States.”

The 1930s and 1940s refer of course to the Great Depression and World War II.

Later, addressing military cadets, Morrison said Australia must “prepare for a post-COVID world that is poorer, more dangerous and more disorderly.” He emphasised: “Relations between China and the United States are fractious as they compete for political, economic and technological supremacy.”

Morrison said war could erupt suddenly. The Indo-Pacific was the “epicentre” of rising strategic competition and “the risk of miscalculation—and even conflict—is heightening.”

An Australian soldier participating in the Talisman Saber war games last year (Credit: Department of Defence)

As well as intensifying the US-China conflict, the COVID-19 pandemic has triggered a worldwide economic breakdown, thrown the Australian economy into its deepest contraction since the 1930s with government debt spiralling toward $1 trillion.

Yet, while millions of working people are suffering mass unemployment and vast social distress, hundreds of billions of dollars more are to be poured into the armed forces. Morrison boasted of exceeding the government’s previous promise of increasing annual military spending to 2 percent of gross domestic product.

In 2016, the Liberal-National government pledged to spend $195 billion over a decade to buy new warships, submarines, missiles and other weapons systems. Now that has been increased to $270 billion.

Morrison said Australia would remain prepared to join “US-led coalitions” globally, as it did in Afghanistan and Iraq, as provided for in the 2016 defence white paper. But the military’s geographical focus would now be the region ranging from the northeast Indian Ocean, through “maritime and mainland southeast Asia” to the southwest Pacific.

While this shift is couched in defensive terms of holding away “adversaries,” the build-up consists of offensive weaponry acquired from the US designed to help cut off Chinese access to vital shipping lanes through southeast Asia and block Chinese attempts to strike back if attacked by the US.

As a starting point, the Trump administration has already approved the $800 million sale of 200 AGM-158C Long Range Anti-Ship Missiles to Australia. These will be configured to travel up to 370 kilometres but can fly as far as 1,000 kilometres. Deployed on war planes, these missiles could strike targets in the South China Sea or southern China.

An estimated $10 billion-$17 billion is to be spent on fighter aircraft, signalling the possible expansion of the US Joint Strike Fighter acquisition program, and $5 billion for an “expanded long-range air launched strike capability.”

Between $6.2 billion and $9.3 billion will be spent on developing “high-speed long-range strike, including hypersonic weapons,” as well as $400 million-$500 million in joint US-Australian maritime strike missiles, capable of low-level flight. Also being considered are “additional, longer-range weapon systems.”

Between $168 billion and $183 billion will be spent on upgrades to the Navy and Army and $5 billion-$7 billion on “undersea surveillance systems including hi-tech sensors.” Also planned is a $75 billion expansion to maritime forces to “provide greater capability for anti-submarine warfare, sealift, border security, maritime patrol, aerial warfare, area denial and undersea warfare.”

Another $70 billion is to be spent on “increased combat power” for army and land-based forces, drone vehicles and long-range rocket artillery.

Space and cyber warfare is being prepared as well. The plan features “sovereign”-owned military satellites with “ground-based signals intelligence facilities.” Some $7 billion will go toward improving the military’s capabilities in space, and $15 billion will boost “cyber and information warfare” weaponry, $1.3 billion of which will expand the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) and the Australian Cyber Security Centre.

While also presented as a defensive move to combat cyber attacks, the cyber warfare plan marks a further development of the offensive capacity of the country’s military and intelligence agencies and their US partners to attack targeted countries, such as China, by hacking into or destroying computer-operated facilities.

As far back as 2013, top US intelligence officials announced that Washington was setting up scores of military units to wage offensive cyber war—i.e., to write malicious computer code to disable or destroy computers and computer-controlled infrastructure.

Following suit, the 2016 Australian Defence White Paper announced a 10-year workforce expansion of 1,700 jobs in intelligence and cyber security. This included a 900-person joint cyber unit in the Australian Defence Force, announced in 2017.

The largest component in the latest cyber war package, first unveiled by Morrison yesterday, is $470 million allocated for expanding by 500 the personnel of the ASD. This is the country’s electronic eavesdropping agency, which collaborates closely with the US National Security Agency (NSA) and other members of the global “Five Eyes” spy network.

As the thousands of secret US documents published by NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden and by Julian Assange via WikiLeaks showed, the Five Eyes partners intercept the communications of millions of people around the globe, exchange data about each others’ citizens, and supply cyber warfare facilities and targeting information to their militaries.

As the ASD’s expansion demonstrates, the drive toward war is being accompanied by preparations to spy on and crack down on political dissent, including anti-war sentiment, and the deepening working class discontent produced by the ruling elite’s exploitation of the COVID-19 crisis to attack jobs and working conditions.

Morrison’s two announcements in two days of major warfare expansions are transparently timed to feed into an escalating anti-China witch hunt, intended to poison public opinion, divert from the social crisis and prepare for potentially catastrophic military conflict.

Only two weeks ago, Morrison claimed that Australia was under attack by a “state-based cyber actor,” an unsubstantiated allegation clearly directed against China. Last Friday, his government authorised police raids on the home and parliamentary office of a state Labor Party MP, Shaoquett Moselmane, who was sensationally branded by the corporate media as a pro-China “foreign agent” and “the enemy within.”

The government has the support of the opposition Labor Party, which is equally committed to the US military alliance and has backed every move over the past two decades to strengthen the powers of the military and intelligence apparatus. In fact, it was the Gillard Labor government that emphatically aligned behind the US “pivot” to militarily confront China in 2011, agreeing to the stationing of US marines in Darwin and greater US access to northern Australian military bases.

At a media conference today, opposition leader Anthony Albanese stated his agreement with Morrison’s announcement, saying it was in line with Labor’s call “for a long time, to prioritise our regional security.”

Coronavirus crisis triggers mass layoffs, wage cuts across Europe

Will Morrow

As the economic crisis triggered by the coronavirus pandemic continues, hundreds of thousands of layoffs are hitting virtually every industry and every country across Europe.

The European ruling class is using the downturn to implement a historic restructuring of class relations. Trade unions are working hand-in-glove with employers to enforce job cuts and slash wages and working conditions.

Among the most severely impacted sectors is the airline and associated manufacturing industries. Yesterday Franco-German airplane manufacturer Airbus announced that it will destroy 15,000 jobs, including 5,100 in Germany, 5,000 in France, 1,700 in Britain, 900 in Spain and the remainder in other sites around the world.

Speaking Monday to the German newspaper Die Welt, Airbus CEO Guillaume Faury stated that the company’s economic activity would be 40 percent below previous predictions for 2020 and 2021. Its activity is not expected to return to 2019 levels until between 2023 and 2025, amid a global collapse in travel.

The trade unions have already made clear that they will not oppose the job cuts. The French trade unions have called only for there to be no “compulsory” redundancies, meaning that they will work with management to ensure that a sufficient number of workers are coerced into leaving. Airbus itself has insisted that it will implement layoffs if not enough workers can be pressured to leave.

Airbus’ main rival Boeing already announced a 10 percent cut in its workforce, destroying 16,000 jobs. Rolls Royce, which makes jet engines, is cutting 9,000 jobs worldwide.

Among the major airlines, Lufthansa in Germany will cut at least 22,000 of its 138,000 jobs. Air France-KLM is destroying 6,000–10,000 positions out of a total of 80,000. British Airways is slashing 14,000 out of 42,000 positions, and Ryanair is cutting 3,000. Scandinavia Airlines announced 5,000 job cuts in April, hitting workers in Sweden, Denmark and Norway. British budget airline Easyjet announced in May that it would cut 30 percent of its workforce, or 4,500 jobs, including one in three of its pilots in the UK. Virgin Atlantic is cutting 3,000 jobs.

Last week, the aviation services company Swissport announced that it would cut 4,556 jobs in the UK and Ireland. It had already laid off 1,500 staff in Belgium on June 9. It employs more than 64,000 people internationally, and told Euronews that it would inevitably be forced to announce more redundancies, without specifying how many. The Danish shipping company DFDS will cut 650 positions in coming months, according to a report published yesterday in Shipping Today.

A June 17 report by Allianz financial advisory firm, titled “The risk of 9 million zombie jobs in Europe,” makes clear that these layoffs are only the beginning. It states that 9 million people across the “big five” European economies—Germany, Britain, France, Italy and Spain—are at increased risk of losing their jobs in the next year with an end to government schemes that have provided companies with a portion of wages for employees throughout the pandemic.

The report states that close to one third of the workforce of these five countries, or 45 million people, is currently dependent upon temporary government wage payment schemes that will come to an end. It predicts that even with these schemes in place, an additional 4.3 million people will lose their jobs next year.

In the auto sector, BMW will cut its global workforce by 6,000, according to a report published June 20 by Belga. The reductions have already been agreed to by the trade union works council. The works council at Daimler sent a letter to employees this month informing them that the 15,000 job cuts already announced by the company would be increased, which the union declared was necessary.

Renault announced 15,000 job cuts in May, equivalent to almost 10 percent of its global workforce of 180,000, including the likely closure of four plants in France. Nissan is planning to lay off another 20,000. In Britain, the oil giant BP announced on June 8 that it would cut 10,000 jobs, most of them by the end of 2020.

In France, decorations and furniture brand Alinéa has been in financial proceedings since May 12 after declaring it was unable to pay its creditors. Dozens of other companies have been placed into receivership, threatening thousands of layoffs, including Celio, La Halle, Spartoo André, Naf Naf and Camaïeu. TUI France, the tourist operator, has announced it will cut 583 jobs, two thirds of its workforce.

The destruction of tens of thousands of jobs is proceeding with the critical assistance of the trade unions. Their role is to smother opposition among workers to the destruction of their jobs, and ensure that the cost of the coronavirus pandemic is borne by the working class, not only in mass deaths but in an assault on their living standards.

At Lufthansa, the trade unions have been the most enthusiastic supporters of a German state bailout involving not only 22,000 job cuts, but cuts to workers’ wages and conditions.

Similar agreements are being enforced across France. This month, the French trade unions led by Workers Force signed an agreement at Derichebourg, which manufactures aeronautics parts for Airbus, agreeing to the cancellation of the so-called 13th month for employees—effectively an 8 percent wage cut—as well as other bonuses, in the name of preventing the closure of the plant, which employs 1,600 people.

In every country, having carried out massive state bailouts of the corporations, the ruling class is using the conditions provided by the pandemic to effect a historic restructuring in class relations.

While collaborating in this offensive, the trade unions aggressively promote nationalism and chauvinism, aiming to divide workers between countries and prevent them from waging a unified struggle.

On Thursday, the CGT rallied with Unsubmissive France (LFI) leader Jean-Luc Melenchon and Raphael Glucksmann—a European parliament deputy who stood with the Socialist Party in the 2019 European elections—outside the Luxfer factory in Gerzat. The factory, which closed in June 2019, previously manufactured bottles of oxygen for medical use. The Luxfer plant has been the focal point of a nationalist campaign stretching from the CGT to the extreme-right Marine Le Pen demanding that the Macron administration purchase the plant in order to prevent France from being dependent upon foreign supplies of oxygen.

Speaking at the rally, Glucksmann declared, “The closure of this site is to condemn Europe to depend on the Turks and the Americans. If you really want this return of offshored production and this industrial sovereignty, start by saving this plant!” Mélenchon added that “the workers of Luxfer are ready to resume their posts and produce oxygen bottles that not only France but the world needs.” LFI has focused its response to the pandemic on demands to restore French economic “independence” and sovereignty.

The purpose of this nationalist demagogy is to hide the real source of the ongoing assault on jobs and conditions—the global crisis of the capitalist system—and to prevent workers from uniting across national borders against it. The trillions handed over to the banks and major corporations are to be extracted through a stepped-up exploitation of the working class and the destruction of social programs.

The response of the working class must be to develop its own international counteroffensive. The struggle must be taken out of the hands of the corrupt nationalist trade unions, which are the tools of corporate management, and placed under the control of independent rank-and-file committees controlled by workers and extending across the continent.

The growing struggle of autoworkers in the US against the return-to-work drive led by the Trump administration shows that there is a powerful objective basis for the development of such an international struggle. It must be connected to a socialist program for the establishment of workers governments and the socialist reorganization of the economy.

Chile: COVID-19 outbreak in mining regions

Mauricio Saavedra

Chilean mineworkers are being forced to bear the brunt of the health, social and economic crisis affecting the country since the outbreak of COVID-19 last March. With 280,000 confirmed infections and 5,688 deaths in Chile, mineworkers in particular face a severe threat of contracting coronavirus as it tears through mining towns and cities since May, as the ultra-right government of billionaire President Sebastian Piñera has refused to close down non-essential industries.

Three mineworkers have died in the giant state-owned mining corporation Codelco, and some 2,528 are infected, according to the Ministry of Mining. Even the corporatist unions, which have bent over backwards to appease the mining consortiums, question the veracity of these figures. The Health Ministry revealed that in the exclusively mining region of Antofagasta there has been an exponential increase in infections in the last two months: from 39 cases at the beginning of April to 8,308 cases on June 27. The rate of infection has similarly soared in other mining regions during the same period: O’Higgins rose from 26 cases to 5,606, Valparaiso from 136 to 11,307 and Tarapacá from 10 cases to 5,893.

Chuquicamata open pit mine outside Calama. (Credit: Diego Delso)

For both native and international capital, which have over-extracted the country’s natural resources and super-exploited labour for over a century, mining constitutes an industry too big to close. With an annual production of some 5.8 million tons, Chile produces about a third of the global supply of copper. The industry as a whole is responsible for between 10 percent and 15 percent of Chile’s GDP. Codelco, the state-owned company, produces 11 percent of the world’s copper and its Chuquicamata mine alone churns out 385,000 tons of the metal, or about six percent.

Major mining consortiums, BHP Billiton, Anglo American, Tech, Glencore, Antofagasta Minerals, along with the state-owned giant, have reaped billions in profits from a workforce that under ordinary conditions numbers up to 240,000 workers, contractors and subcontractors. Another 900,000 workers are dependent on the auxiliary industries for employment.

With the outbreak of the coronavirus in China, the main destination of copper, the price of the metal fell sharply in the first quarter of 2020. Since March over 40 percent of the workforce has been furloughed and 11,700 were laid off as construction projects were shut down. The remaining staff have been forced onto onerous 14-days-on 14-days-off shifts ostensibly as a “social distancing” measure. A fraction is working from home. Yet with a much-diminished workforce, the mining consortiums have extracted more copper ore during this year’s first quarter than in the same period in 2019.

Chile’s discredited former health minister, Jaime Mañalich, before resigning on June 12, attempted to blame the spike in cases on residents’ “untidiness in the measures of social distancing, like clandestine parties, social meetings, that unfortunately have been maintained in this commune, in a very intense form”. But social media has belied these claims with videos of empty streets and of the population practising, to the best of their ability, social distancing measures in overcrowded neighbourhoods.

The reality is that the Health Ministry delayed placing Antofagasta under total quarantine until an explosion in the infection rate and then removed the quarantine to allow the mining industry to continue operating unimpeded. The new health minister then waited another three weeks before re-ordering quarantine measures, after another sharp rise in coronavirus infections.

The present quarantines in the communes of the regional zone of Antofagasta—Antofagasta, Calama, Tocopilla and Mejillones—only apply to the urban radius and excludes mining operations and companies outside the city centres.

One of the primary sources of the outbreak in Antofagasta is the internal transfer of mineworkers, who often come from Santiago or other areas. While air traffic has dropped by 90 percent nationally, the Antofagasta region has the highest number of flights after Santiago. The Calama terminal has now been temporarily closed, but companies like BHP are sending staff to Antofagasta airport where they are provided with chartered buses to their final destination.

Another contributing factor is the viral spread in working class neighbourhoods which lack a regular supply of water. Access to the privatised water system comes in truck cisterns and families are provided with a negligible amount, insufficient to have daily showers let alone regularly wash hands. Another 7,600 families live in overcrowded squatter settlements in the region, also without access to potable water, electricity or sewer systems.

In other words, the mining regions of Antofagasta, Tarapacá, Valparaiso and O’Higgins are recording massive outbreaks of COVID-19 that surpass national averages as a result of the callous indifference to the conditions of the working class and placing profits before lives.

One tracker used to determine the viral spread is the “positive rate” in reference to the share of tests returning a positive result where the lower the number, the wider the testing. The World Health Organisation has recommended a positive rate of between 3–12 percent as a general benchmark of adequate testing. According to the online tracker Our World in Data, Italy has a positive test rate of 0.5 percent, England 1.5 percent, and the US 5.8 percent. Mexico on the other hand, has a rate exceeding 50 percent and Brazil has records that end in April, suggesting that the government of fascistic president Jair Bolsonaro has stopped publishing figures.

Chile has an average positive test rate of 30.9 percent for June 21, indicating that COVID-19 is being severely underreported amid an explosion in cases. The regional breakdown reveals an even more frightening picture. In a study conducted by investigative journal CIPER, the researchers showed that mining regions are registering up to double the national average.

The O’Higgins regional zone recorded a 62.4 percent positive rate; the Valparaíso region recorded 36.5 percent; Tarapacá 32.8 percent. The Antofagasta Region, the heart of the mining industry representing more than half of Chile’s mining output of copper, potassium nitrate, gold, iodine, and lithium, recorded 46.1 percent positive rate.

But even under these catastrophic conditions, the entire Chilean government, with the assistance of the corporatist unions, have refused to shut down the mining cash cow. The working class in the mining industry is supporting the entire state, which in turn has since March provided a myriad of tax and financial incentives to the financial and corporate elite. Total wealth, including liquid, financial and real assets, of the 31 most powerful economic groups reached US$490 billion last year.

Earlier in March, the Copper Mineworkers’ Federation, the CTC made a mealy-mouthed call on the government to close non-essential services. More recently, they said they wanted to “request, as the largest mining organization in Chile, a tripartite dialogue table, which is capable of unifying criteria in terms of health protocols, control measures and prevention to prevent even more mining workers from becoming infected.”

But it was their cynical advice to mineworkers that should be inscribed on the corporatist organisation’s epitaph. The CTC said workers should use the Labor Code to “interrupt or abandon their work because the conditions to protect the life and health of the workers do not exist. To that end, workers who are dismissed in reprisal for having protected their right to life and health may apply to the Labour Inspectorate and the Labour Courts for the appropriate action.”

This throwing the workers to the wolves reveals in the starkest colours the corporatist character of the bankrupt union apparatus. Since the late 1970s and early 1980s, with the developments of globalised production, which not by accident coincided with Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s economic shock measures, the national reformist unions were transformed into instruments that police the workforce and implement the corporate agenda of internationally mobile capital.

These profound economic changes in the capitalist mode of production also transformed the economic nationalist political parties like the Chilean Socialist Party which was groomed in this period for reinsertion back into the capitalist state through the so-called Concertación de Partidos por la Democracia. If the Stalinist Chilean Communist Party was unable to enter into the centre-left coalition that held power for the first 20 years of civilian rule, it wasn’t for the lack of trying.

The executive and the parliament, in the midst of the pandemic, have introduced laws to facilitate the furloughing of labour without having to pay any entitlements under the “Employment Protection Law”. They have put into practise “Electronic Settlements” allowing massive layoffs without the right of workers to make any claims, and suspended Collective Negotiations for the duration of the State of Exception decreed on March 18, 2020 and extended for another 90 days in June.

The working class is paying for this crisis with its lives and livelihoods. It can only put a stop to this carnage by advancing an independent socialist internationalist political perspective. To this end the International Committee of the Fourth International, which publishes the World Socialist Web Site has pledged to assist the working class by providing it the essential tactical, strategic and programmatic direction. This requires above all the building of a section of the Fourth International in Chile. We appeal to workers, students, and all those who recognize the need for the socialist reorganization of the world to secure the future of humanity, to join us in this struggle.

Record 47.2 percent of working-age Americans without jobs

Shannon Jones

According to newly released Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) figures, 47.2 percent of working-age Americans were without work in May, the highest level recorded since the end of World War II.

The numbers are based on the BLS employment-population ratio, which takes the total labor force and divides it by the number of those actually working. It is a more accurate measure of joblessness than the monthly unemployment report, which only counts those actively seeking work.

At the end of May the employment-population ratio stood at 52.8 percent; it stood at 61.2 percent at the start of the year. The employment-population ratio reached a postwar high of nearly 65 percent in 2000.

Citing Torsten Slok, the chief economist at Deutsche Bank, CNBC said it would take the creation of an additional 30 million jobs to bring the employment-population ratio back to January levels.

The report comes ahead of the release of the official jobless statistics for June later this week. They are expected to reflect a marginal decline in the official unemployment rate from 13.3 percent in May to 12.4 percent in June. It is not known if the June figures will correct the previous undercount in the numbers of May and April, when millions of workers were incorrectly classified. This resulted in the official jobless percentages being about 3 percent lower in May and 5 percent lower in June.

A pregnant woman waits in line for groceries with hundreds during a food pantry, sponsored by Healthy Waltham for those in need due to the COVID-19 virus outbreak, at St. Mary's Church in Waltham, Mass. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)

The official unemployment rate remains at Great Depression levels in a number of states. Nevada, hard hit by the shutdown of the gaming industry, had an unemployment rate of 25.3 percent in May compared to 4.0 percent one year earlier. Hawaii stood at 22.6 percent in May compared to just 2.7 percent one year earlier while Michigan saw 21.2 percent compared to 4.2 percent in May 2019. In California and Massachusetts, unemployment stood at 16.3 percent in May.

Joblessness was the highest in the leisure and hospitality sector, 35.9 percent, with retail at 15.1 percent, construction 12.7 percent and manufacturing 11.6 percent. Among young people age 16–19, 29.9 percent were unemployed and 23.2 percent of workers age 20–24 had no work.

Despite the reckless early reopening of state economies during the course of June there were around 1.5 million new weekly claims for unemployment benefits. Many workers do not have a job to come back to. This is particularly the case for those employed at small businesses, such as restaurants, which could not survive the shutdown. A further wave of larger bankruptcies are also expected.

The full impact of this economic collapse will hit toward the end of July when the temporary weekly increase of $600 to unemployment benefits enacted in the CARES bill ends. The cutoff, scheduled for the week ending July 25, will slash income by about two-thirds for 20 million workers and will lead to a surge in hunger and evictions.

Personal income dropped 4.2 percent in May, despite the supplemental payments. The cutoff will be particularly devastating for low-wage workers, since regular unemployment benefits cover only perhaps half of weekly pay.

The moratorium on evictions from federally subsidized housing contained in the CARES Act is also set to expire at the end of July, meaning that millions of families could soon confront the possibility of being in the street. According to the latest US Census Bureau Household Pulse Survey, 30 percent of renters had little or no confidence that they could meet housing payments for the next month.

A patchwork of state and local temporary bans on evictions are expiring or are being challenged by landlord associations. A statewide eviction ban was set to expire in Florida on July 1, barring a last second extension by the governor. A statewide ban in Virginia expired June 29. In San Francisco, a citywide ban is being challenged in court. Earlier this month an eviction ban expired in New York City leading to warnings that 50–60,000 eviction cases could soon be filed in housing courts.

Andy Winkler of the Bipartisan Policy Center issued a warning reported in Politico of a “tsunami” of evictions following the expiration of the $600 unemployment supplement.

It is clear that corporations are using the crisis caused by the pandemic to carry out a major restructuring, including the permanent elimination of huge numbers of jobs. According to the International Monetary Fund, the world economy will contract by five percent in 2020 with US GDP down by eight percent. The GDP of Mexico and Europe is expected to decline 10 percent while China will show no growth. The second quarter in the US is expected to show the largest quarterly contraction since the end of WWII.

In an indication of what is to come, Airbus announced 15,000 job cuts worldwide by 2021 as it restructures its operations worldwide, an 11 percent reduction. Ten thousand job losses will be in Germany and France alone.

Graph showing the sharp fall in the employment-population ratio

In recent years, spokesmen for the ruling class have been bitterly complaining that record low unemployment had created “tight labor markets” and demands for rising wages. The destruction of tens of millions of jobs will now be used by corporations as a hammer to demand a new wave of wage and benefit cuts from workers. This has already been seen in the airlines and among public sector workers.

Amidst this devastation the US stock market closed June with one of the best quarterly rises in history. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 216 points Tuesday. For the second quarter the Dow Jones rose 16 percent, erasing most of the losses of the first quarter of 2020. Apple, Home Depot, Dow and Microsoft were among those making the strongest gains. The S&P 500 showed a 19.1 percent gain for the quarter while the Nasdaq is up 11 percent for the year.

The rise in the markets comes as COVID-19 cases surge in the United States, with record numbers of new infections, following the lifting of all attempts by federal and state governments to control the virus. The stock rise has not been fueled by an improving real economy but the unlimited infusion of cash by the US Federal Reserve. Like a heroin addict the markets rely on ever-greater injections of liquidity to maintain their inflated levels. Meanwhile, the attacks on workers’ jobs and living standards become ever more ferocious as the corporate oligarchy attempts to claw back the money from the hides of workers.

Workers should not accept that they shoulder the economic burden for the criminal and inept response of the capitalist authorities to the coronavirus pandemic. The massive resources going to the financial markets must be redirected to meeting pressing human needs. Workers made jobless by the spread of the virus and necessary health measures must have their incomes and livelihoods protected. This requires the independent political mobilization of the working class on the basis of a socialist and internationalist program.

Gilead Sciences cashes in on the pandemic

Bryan Dyne

Pharmaceutical giant Gilead Sciences announced Monday that it will charge $3,120 for a five-day course of its coronavirus therapeutic remdesivir for the vast majority of the US population, including those on Medicare and Medicaid. A single vial of remdesivir, containing a tenth of a gram of the drug, will cost $520, a hundred times more expensive than its weight in gold.

This is nothing less than the extortion of the American public amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The price is estimated to be 400 times higher than what the drug needs to be profitable. Gilead is expected to make $1.3 billion from private payers by the end of the year.

Gilead’s announcement sends a clear message: American pharmaceutical companies plan to make billions off the COVID-19 pandemic, which has infected more than 10.5 million people and killed at least 513,000 worldwide. Notably, Wall Street surged 800 points over the past two days on the news.

The revulsion felt toward Gilead in the aftermath of its press release was put most forcefully by AIDS Health Foundation president Michael Weinstein. “Gilead Sciences unmasked itself today as both a war profiteer and greedy bastards—a depressing feat and spectacularly tone-deaf response to a global pandemic that has so far killed over half-a-million people worldwide, including more than 120,000 deaths in the US.”

In an attempt to justify the company’s price-gouging, Gilead chairman and CEO Daniel O’Day released an open letter. Basing himself on data that was preliminary and not statistically significant, O’Day claimed that remdesivir “shortened time to recovery by an average of four days,” which, according to him saves hospitals “approximately $12,000 per patient.”

The company’s executives thus generously “decided to price remdesivir well below this value. To ensure broad and equitable access at a time of urgent global need, we have set a price… which equates to $2,340 per patient.” In O’Day’s opinion, this would allow “all patients [to] have access” to the therapeutic and balance the firm’s “longer-term responsibilities.”

The letter does not spell out what these “longer-term responsibilities” are, but they are not toward coronavirus patients. A report from the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review shows that the raw materials needed to make remdesivir cost only about $10 for a ten-day treatment, and has been priced at $600 by generic producers of the therapeutic in Bangladesh and India, a quarter of the “broad and equitable” cost boasted about by O’Day.

Moreover, while the cost of the therapeutic will be borne by their insurance for many millions in the United States, many millions more depend on the CARES Act funding for coronavirus treatments. They will have few options once that money pool runs dry, especially as even before the pandemic hit, nearly 40 percent of the population was unable to afford an emergency $400 expense, much less one which is six or eight times that amount.

In a rational world, Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Alex Azar would have demanded that Gilead end its blatant price gouging immediately. Instead, he hailed the drug as “life-saving” and pledged HHS to buy up to $1.56 billion worth of the drug.

Azar himself has many ties to the pharmaceutical industry. He was the president of the major drug enterprise Eli Lilly and Company before being tapped to be US President Donald Trump’s HHS secretary and was also a director of the lobbying group Biotechnology Innovation Organization. He has been denounced by whistleblower Rick Bright for seeking to downplay the pandemic when it first emerged in China in December and January.

It is also unclear whether remdesivir is actually effective in treating the novel coronavirus. Gilead had tested the efficacy of the remedy against the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) coronaviruses, which led the company to suspect it might work against the pandemic virus, SARS-CoV-2. Doctors in China began treating patients with it in January.

Since then, medical studies on remdesivir’s effectiveness in treating COVID-19 have shown that it does not significantly reduce the death rate for those with the disease. Research by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in March and April concluded that, “given high mortality despite the use of remdesivir, it is clear that treatment with an antiviral drug alone is not likely to be sufficient.” In that context, billions of dollars are being spent to acquire a drug that, by the science available, doesn’t work.

The research did not stop NIAID director Anthony Fauci from declaring, when the preliminary results were released: “The data shows that remdesivir has a clear-cut, significant positive effect in diminishing the time to recovery… We think it is opening the door to the fact that we now have the capability of treating [the coronavirus].”

Fauci’s support helped drive Gilead’s stocks to new heights. Since the beginning of the year, the company’s market capitalization has increased by $20.1 billion to $96.5 billion, largely by promoting remdesivir as an effective treatment for the pandemic. This mirrors the fortunes of drugmaker Moderna, which has grown by more than 200 percent to a net worth of nearly $25 billion after proclaiming work on its own vaccine.

Moderna board member Moncef Slaoui, tapped by Trump to head the government’s “warp speed” vaccine development drive, became $2.4 million richer as a result of the media frenzy surrounding the announcement that Moderna had made progress toward a vaccine.

Beyond pumping up the share prices of the pharmaceutical giants, the media has promoted remdesevir and Moderna’s vaccine as “miracle drugs” to promote the campaign to get workers back on the job in factories and workplaces that have been hotbeds of COVID-19.

Wall Street sees the pandemic as a potential profit bonanza. The big banks and major corporations have received at least $6 trillion since March in bailouts and are going to make billions more holding the American and world population hostage by overcharging for potentially lifesaving coronavirus treatments.

Gilead is only one example of the lawlessness of corporate enterprises in the United States. The recent past has seen the poisoning of Flint, two Boeing 737 Max crashes, the opioid epidemic and the California wildfires caused by PG&E. No executive has ever gone to jail for these crimes. As Barack Obama’s attorney general told Congress in 2013, these modern-day robber barons are “too big to jail.”

The disastrous response of American capitalism to the COVID-19 pandemic makes clear the need to put an end to capitalism and the subjugation of human health to private profit. This means mobilizing the entire working class to expropriate the pharmaceutical giants and every major industry and transform these monopolies into publicly-owned and democratically-controlled utilities. The dictatorship of corporate interests over the working class must be abolished and economic life must be placed in the hands of the workers themselves.