Multi-billion-pound UK track and trace system failed to reduce COVID-19 spread

Rory Woods

A report by the parliamentary Public Accounts Committee (PAC) on the National Health Service Test and Trace Service (NHST&T) reveals the criminal plundering of taxpayers’ by the Conservative government to enrich private pandemic profiteers.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government hailed the shambolic Test and Trace system as “world beating” after setting it up last May. Johnson justified the tens of billions handed over from the public purse to the Test and Trace system as it enabled the pandemic to be comprehended in a “very granular way”.

PAC chair, Labour MP Meg Hillier, said that “despite the unimaginable resources thrown at this project, NHST&T cannot point to a measurable difference to the progress of the pandemic,” adding, “British taxpayers cannot be treated by government like an ATM machine.”

The critical remarks of Hillier are self-serving. Everything that Johnson has been able to get away with since the beginning of the pandemic is thanks to the de facto government of national unity with the Labour Party, first under former leader Jeremy Corbyn and then under Sir Keir Starmer. As a result of their collusion, the death toll from COVID-19 now stands at more than 150,000.

If anything was “world beating” it was the corruption and theft of public money involved, the corollary of the callous indifference in ruling circles to the lives of the elderly, infirm and vulnerable.

Last week, Johnson told Tory MPs in private, “The reason we have the vaccine success is because of capitalism, because of greed my friends… It was giant corporations that wanted to give good returns to shareholders”.

Through the operation of the NHST&T, the greed of capitalist parasites, many among his own party and their friends, was never clearer.

The amount doled out to the private sector under the NHST&T is massive, equating to around a quarter of the entire NHS annual budget. At least £37 billion was allocated to NHST&T, which is principally run by 22 private companies, including Serco, Deloitte, Boots, DHL and Amazon. In all, £17 billion worth of contracts to purchase Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) were awarded to private companies, including those run by Tory party cronies.

Everything was done to make sure the private sector could make a killing. The High Court recently ruled that the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) acted unlawfully by not publishing the Contract Award Notices within the legal time frame.

The government has recommended to the NHS pay review body that health-workers receive only a 1 percent rise, yet a fraction of the funding allocated for the test and trace private sector profiteers—£6.8 billion—would be enough to give one million health workers in England a 20 percent pay rise.

Even ardent defenders of the capitalist class within the PAC expressed alarm at the scale of government largesse to the corporations. Sir Nicholas Macpherson, permanent secretary at the Treasury until 2016, tweeted that the NHST&T system “wins the prize for the most wasteful and inept public spending programme of all time.”

Reliable test, race and quarantining systems are vital in preventing COVID-19 transmission. But the UK government rejected putting such systems in place, as they embraced a criminal herd immunity policy in March of last year. The government’s Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir Patrick Valence, openly stated that the government’s strategy was not to “suppress” the virus entirely and “it’s also not desirable because you want some immunity in the population...”

It was only after a growing opposition from the working class at the prospect of up to half a million deaths that the government was forced to impose a national lockdown last spring. The Tories primary concern was then how to reopen schools and the economy to restart the flow of profits.

But before it could send millions back to workplaces, it had to roll out a test and trace system. In May 2020, Conservative Party peer, Baroness Dido Harding, was appointed to run the test and trace system and given a massive wad of money, knowing that this would soon line the pockets of the corporate elite, including Tory Party cronies.

Baroness Harding of Winscombe (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

The PAC report notes that by the end of October 2020, “NHST&T had signed 407 contracts worth £7 billion with 217 public and private organisations, of which 121 (or 70% of the contract value) were assigned as direct awards without competition under emergency measures.”

The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) told PAC that “in November and December, it had awarded a further 207 contracts worth £1.3 billion, of which around 30 were direct awards under emergency regulations.” By the end of the year, DHSC had signed “over 600 contracts for NHST&T-related services''.

Five months after launching NHST&T, there were 2,300 highly paid consultants and contractors working on it. Up to the beginning of November 2020 alone, they belonged to 73 different suppliers in NHST&T “with a total consultancy cost of approximately £375 million”.

The PAC noted, “When we took evidence in mid-January the Department estimated that from Deloitte alone there were still around 900 contractors on the books. In early February, NHST&T said it was still employing around 2,500 consultants, at an estimated average daily rate of around £1,100, with the highest daily rate paid of £6,624. It is concerning that the DHSC is still paying such amounts—which it considers to be ‘very competitive rates’—to so many consultants.”

This huge teams of consultants failed to grasp the impending disaster of the second wave of COVID-19. The PAC states, “In September 2020, NHST&T significantly underestimated the increase in demand for testing, when schools and universities returned. Laboratories processing community swab tests were unable to keep up with demand, leading to large backlogs, limits on the number of tests available, longer turnaround times and some people having to travel hundreds of miles to get a test.”

It was reported last October that Serco and Sitel, involved in non-complex contact tracing, had managed to reach only 60 percent of contacts despite winning lucrative contracts. Serco alone was expected to rake £165 million profit out of these contracts.

Regardless of the evidence that the Lateral Flow Device (LFD) test was not effective in detecting positive cases of COVID-19, DHSC announced last December that it would roll out mass testing in early 2021. The guinea pigs were to be school children and college and university students, to keep them in classes and their parents in work. Tens of thousands of LFD kits were eventually distributed among NHS workers—after many contracted the virus in the second wave—having no effect whatsoever on its spread.

“To support the roll-out of mass testing, as well as the continued increase in testing capacity, the government allocated a further £7 billion to NHST&T in November in addition to the £3 billion already made available for mass testing for 2020–21”, PAC wrote.

Professional bodies including the British Medical Association had already raised concerns over mass LFD testing as they result in a significant amount of false negatives compared to laboratory PCR tests. Only about three quarters of COVID-19 positive patients will get positive results from LFD tests according to published evidence. When LFD tests are self-administered accuracy falls to 40 percent.

Given growing public anger at the handing over of vast sums to the private sector while deaths reached the highest level of any European country, the PAC felt obliged to offer a few criticisms. “There is still no clear evidence to judge NHST&T’s overall effectiveness,” it wrote. “It is unclear whether its specific contribution to reducing infection levels, as opposed to the other measures introduced to tackle the pandemic has justified its costs.”

This is no more than a slap on the wrist for the government. The summary notes politely, “We appreciate that NHST&T had to be set up and staffed at incredible speed, but in particular it now needs to wean itself off its persistent reliance on consultants and temporary staff.”

CDC director admits sense of “impending doom” over COVID-19 pandemic

Benjamin Mateus

During a virtual White House briefing on coronavirus Monday, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), made a public declaration that she is fearful of the consequences of the new upturn in COVID-19 cases.

“Now is one of those times when I have to share the truth, and I have to hope and trust you will listen. I’m going to pause here. I’m going to lose the script, and I’m going to reflect on the recurring feeling I have of impending doom. We have so much to look forward to, so much promise and potential of where we are, and so much reason for hope. But right now, I’m scared.”

Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention testifies during a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing on the federal coronavirus response on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, March 18, 2021. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, Pool)

Walensky’s language is remarkable. She is effectively admitting that previous statements, like those two weeks ago when the CDC changed its guideline for social distancing in schools from six feet to three feet, were instances when she did NOT “share the truth.”

She said she was going to “lose the script”—in other words, discard the talking points drawn up by the spin doctors for the Biden White House, who have been preaching that the United States is nearing completion of the fight against coronavirus, and that by May, or June, or at the latest July 4, things will be “back to normal.”

One has to ask: What is so terrible in the facts and figures being collected by the CDC that it would bring the agency’s director to tears at a public press briefing at the White House? What does she know that the Biden administration is not telling the American people?

As one reader tweeted to Bloomberg News in response to Walensky’s warning of impending doom, “Then why the hell did they change the recommendations for classroom spacing? We are now getting pressured to return to school at three feet spacing while watching cases rise in NYC.” This commenter, obviously a New York City school teacher, speaks for millions.

Since Joe Biden was sworn into office, every action taken by the CDC has been in the service of an effort to downplay mitigation efforts and present the vaccination campaign as the exit strategy from the pandemic. They have played fast and loose with flawed science to lull the public into a false sense of reassurance, and all the while, the number of variants throughout the country was rising at an alarming rate.

Epidemiologists and infectious disease experts have repeatedly warned of another surge of infections, comparing them to a category five hurricane heading to the shore. They implored state and federal leaders not to lift restrictions and mitigation measures nor reopen schools. At every turn, the Biden administration doubled down on his vaccine initiative and praised leaders of teachers’ unions in their assistance with opposing intransigent rank-and-file teachers who understood the dangers posed by full-scale reopening of schools.

It is worth recalling Dr. Michael Osterholm’s warnings at the end of January. During an interview on “Meet the Press,” he noted, “The surge that is likely to occur with this new variant from England is going to happen in the next six to 14 weeks. If we see that happen, we are going to see something that we have not seen yet in this country. Imagine that you and I are sitting on a beach with blue skies, and it’s 70 degrees. But I see a category five hurricane or higher 450 miles offshore. Telling people to evacuate on that nice blue-sky day is going to be hard. But I can also tell you that hurricane is coming.”

Dr. Walensky’s outburst comes nine weeks after Dr. Osterholm’s warning (a warning which led to his effective exclusion from the national media).

Over the last two weeks, the seven-day moving average of coronavirus cases has ticked up again, rising 15 percent to an average of over 63,000 cases per day. The growing epicenter of the pandemic is expanding to encompass the northeast of the country. New Jersey, New York, Michigan, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and New Hampshire are seeing rapid growth in new cases.

But it is not just the northeast. Florida also sees a rise in new cases as their infection curves begin to turn up again. And most worrisome, half of Florida’s new cases subjected to genetic analysis are of the new, more infectious and lethal variants.

Many government officials have also been concerned that the seven-day average across the country regarding daily deaths and COVID-19 hospitalizations have plateaued again at higher levels than previous lows, and are starting to turn up. With the rise in cases, these grim numbers begin to follow in a few short weeks. For the Northeast region, public health officials attribute the increase to the spread of the B.1.526 (New York strain) and B.1.1.7 (UK strain) variants.

At present, the CDC has reported they have detected 10,579 cases of the B.1.1.7 variant across the entire country. Florida currently has had 2,274 cases detected, while Michigan has seen 1,237 cases, a sharp rise from just one week ago. There has also been a considerable rise in the B.1.351 (South African) variant and the P.1 (Brazilian) variant. The P.1 variant, which is far more transmissible and known to cause reinfections in 25 to 63 percent of previously infected people, is increasing in Florida and Massachusetts.

There have been close to 31 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the United States, with 562,000 deaths attributed to the coronavirus. When Joe Biden was elected on November 3, there had been under 10 million cases of COVID-19, and the death toll stood at 240,000.

On January 20, 2021, when he was sworn into office, the number of cases had risen to just over 25 million. The death toll on inauguration day stood at 423,000. In the span of just over two months, another 130,000 people have succumbed to the infection.

Yet, with lifesaving treatments in hand, instead of minimizing contacts until the entire population can be vaccinated, which would mean locking down schools and workplaces, the country has been thrown open as never before during the COVID-19 pandemic, beyond even Trump’s worst efforts.

The success of the vaccines only underscores the criminal loss of life going forward. A CNN interview program Sunday night confirmed that the 550,000 lives already lost to coronavirus were a crime against the American people, for which Trump first and now Biden are responsible.

Going forward, every life lost to coronavirus is a life taken unnecessarily, with the means to curb and contain the disease and ultimately eradicate it already in hand. Perhaps that is why Dr. Walensky seems to be experiencing the symptoms of a nervous breakdown. She begins to recognize that her previous actions—and the actions she will be called on to take going forward—implicate her in this slaughter.

Notably, President Biden did not denounce Dr. Walensky when he appeared before television cameras three hours later. He adopted a pose of sympathy and even support, portraying her remarks merely as an urgent call on states and individuals not to abandon the regimen of masks, hand washing and social distancing.

In urging states, cities and individuals to “stay the course,” Biden made no reference to his own administration’s campaign to throw open all public schools to in-person classes by April 29, his 100th day in office, a pledge that will be far more devastating to public health, turning the schools into new centers of infection, than any action by a governor or mayor.

Biden continued to suggest that the struggle against coronavirus was nearing completion. He did not give the slightest hint that a new upsurge of disease and death is about to ravage the American population and further stain his presidency, like Trump’s, in blood.

CNN’s pandemic “postmortem”: The anatomy of a “social murder”

Andre Damon

On Sunday night, CNN aired a two-hour special on the COVID-19 pandemic featuring interviews with the public health experts who nominally led the country’s response to the disease under the Trump administration.

The interviews are a devastating indictment of a government and political establishment that deliberately allowed hundreds of thousands of people to die in order to protect the interests of the financial oligarchy.

President Joe Biden speaks during an event on COVID-19 vaccinations and the response to the pandemic, in the South Court Auditorium on the White House campus, Monday, March 29, 2021, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

According to the two leading figures interviewed in the program—White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Deborah Birx and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci—almost the entire US public health response to the pandemic took place in defiance of science and the advice of public health experts.

In the defining moments of the pandemic, according to the officials’ own admissions, the Trump administration was either actively engaging in a massive cover-up or pursuing a deliberate policy of allowing the pandemic to spread unchecked throughout the population.

If, in the words of CNN host Dr. Sanjay Gupta, the program is a “postmortem” on the pandemic, the cause of death must be deemed, in the words of the BMJ medical journal, “social murder.”

The US government’s response to the pandemic was a disaster from the start, beginning with what Gupta called the “original sin” of failing to carry out any meaningful testing for the first two months of the pandemic.

The decision not to test the population throughout all of January and February has never been convincingly explained. The World Health Organization (WHO) formally alerted the world to the outbreak of what would later be called COVID-19 on January 1, 2020. But for the next two months, the United States would carry out no testing for the disease, even though a test from the WHO became available in early January.

In their interviews, the health officials faulted each other for failing to use the widely available WHO test, passing the blame like a hot potato until FDA commissioner Steven Hahn finally claimed the WHO was itself responsible because it did not force the United States to use its tests.

This account is absurd. A far more believable explanation is offered by Birx: “People really believed in the White House, that testing was driving cases, rather than testing is a way for us to stop cases.”

In other words, since the White House claimed testing was the cause of cases, it discouraged testing. Conveniently, the fact that there was no testing meant that everyone, including Fauci and Birx themselves, could justify claiming that the danger was low, while discouraging the public from taking vital social distancing measures that could have halted the spread of the pandemic.

By mid-March, with the pandemic totally overwhelming Italy and rapidly spreading in New York, it became impossible to keep up this charade. Once the US finally began testing people who showed symptoms of COVID-19, it became undeniable that there was widespread community transmission all over the country.

Workers began walking off of shop floors, and the markets went into freefall. The US government responded by passing the CARES Act, a massive, multi-trillion-dollar bailout to major corporations, accompanied by trillions more in cash from the Federal Reserve. Sensing the need to buy time, the Trump White House temporarily encouraged remote work and the closure of schools.

Birx and Fauci claim the Trump administration seriously listened to their advice on only two occasions: when it initiated the development of vaccines in January and when it advised the public to “work or engage in schooling from home whenever possible” for 45 days beginning in March.

Within a matter of days, however, Trump began to advocate for the abandonment of these basic measures under the slogan, coined by the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman, that “the cure can’t be worse than the disease.” This campaign led the White House to release a set of guidelines entitled “Opening Up America Again.”

While these guidelines nominally set out a set of criteria for states to reopen non-essential businesses, they in fact sent a political signal that all measures to contain the disease were to be abandoned. Governors in every state proceeded to reopen in violation of the Trump administrations’ own guidelines, including states with both Democratic and Republican governors where cases continued to surge.

The states, Birx said, went on to “completely ignore the opening criteria.” She added, “I didn't see coming that no one would follow really the gating criteria... so when Memorial Day came, it was—it was shocking.”

But the states’ actions did not come to a surprise to the World Socialist Web Site. Just days after the release of the guidelines, the WSWS wrote:

The Trump administration’s cynical announcement of a set of fraudulent “guidelines” that will serve to legitimize a rapid reopening of businesses and a forced return to work, in unsafe conditions, brings to an end any public pretense of a systematic and coordinated effort within the United States to prioritize health and to protect human life in combating the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic.

One year later, not a word of this analysis needs to be changed. With the announcement of the reopening criteria, Birx and Fauci were largely sidelined, going weeks without speaking to Trump, replaced with the right-wing ideologue and herd immunity proponent Scott Atlas.

As “testing tsar” Brett P. Giroir, who was also interviewed, put it, “Dr. Atlas’s position is that we should just sort of let it go in the healthy population to create herd immunity.” Atlas and his co-thinkers believed that any measures to contain the disease were “compromising the American economy, the American lifestyle. In their mind, all of those things outweighed the fatalities.”

The most highly cited passage from the CNN program came with the admission by Birx that nearly half a million deaths in the United States were preventable. As Birx put it, “The first time, we have an excuse, there were about 100,000 deaths that came from that original search, all of the rest of them, in my mind, could have been mitigated or decreased substantially.”

In other words, by closing non-essential businesses and schools, the spread of the disease could have been contained enough so as to be dramatically reduced through testing, quarantine, and contact tracing. But these measures conflicted with the social interests of America’s financial oligarchy. They were not carried out, leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands.

While CNN calls its program a “postmortem,” the crime is still ongoing. Even as Fauci and Birx condemn the Trump administration’s premature reopening of schools and businesses, the Biden administration is carrying out the same policies, with the same results.

On Monday, just one day after Birx made clear that most of the deaths in the United States were preventable, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky warned of “impending doom” if the United States does not change its course. Yet, only two weeks earlier, the CDC, bowing to the pressure of the Biden administration, modified its guidelines on social distancing to facilitate the reopening of schools.

One year after the events depicted in the CNN program, one thousand people are dying daily in the United States. And with deadly new variants of the disease emerging around the globe, COVID-19 is more dangerous than ever.

The catastrophic consequences of the pandemic are the product of the fact that the response of governments, led by the United States but repeated throughout the world, were dictated not by social need and public health, but by private profit. A solution to the pandemic, therefore, was and remains not primarily a medical issue. It is a matter of social and political struggle, waged by the international working class, against the capitalist system.

At last minute, US government renews inadequate eviction moratorium for three months

Jacob Crosse

Less than two days before it was set to expire on March 31, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced that it will be extending the federal eviction moratorium, first implemented in September of last year, through June 30.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has presented a historic threat to the nation’s public health,” CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said in her statement announcing the extension. “Keeping people in their homes and out of crowded or congregate settings—like homeless shelters—by preventing evictions is a key step in helping to stop the spread of COVID-19.”

Tenants' rights advocates demonstrate in front of the Edward W. Brooke Courthouse in Boston. President Joe Biden’s administration is cutting things close on a nationwide eviction moratorium, which is set to expire in less than a week. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer, File)

The moratorium is all that is standing in the way between evictions and homelessness for an estimated 8.8 million households that are behind on rent according to a recent report from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). The CFPB also estimates that some 2.1 million families are behind at least three months on mortgage payments, the most since the Great Recession of 2008–2009.

Overall, the CFPB estimates homeowners owe nearly $90 billion in missed payments, while delinquent rent payments are estimated to be up to $57 billion as of this month. However, the moratorium does nothing for the mounting payments millions currently owe.

And while the misnamed American Rescue Plan enacted earlier this month and the December 2020 relief packages did allocate some $50 billion in rental assistance, barely any of those funds have been distributed as the infrastructure to distribute the money only recently materialized.

Meanwhile, the latest Census Bureau survey found that more than 5 million Americans say they are at risk of eviction or foreclosure. Nearly 15 percent of adults in Mississippi reported that they are not current on rent or mortgage payments and have “slight or no confidence” that they will be able to pay next month’s rent or mortgage on time.

While Mississippi leads the nation, 13.8 percent of adults in Alabama likewise reported to the Census Bureau that they have no confidence in their ability to pay next month’s rent or mortgage. This was followed by 10.6 percent of adults in New York and Ohio and 10.5 percent of adults in South Dakota.

Despite pleas from housing and tenants rights organizations, the Biden administration refused to update the language in the moratorium to prevent landlords from exploiting known loopholes in order to force tenants out.

Tenants can still be evicted for alleged breaches of the lease besides non-payment or if a landlord began eviction proceedings against a tenant before September 4, 2020. The moratorium only applies to single renters making $99,000 or less and couples earning less than $198,000. Those who wish to be eligible for the moratorium must sign a declaration saying they cannot pay rent because of COVID-related hardships and will become homeless if evicted.

However, as thousands of workers and families have found out in the last eight months, landlords have still been able to process evictions despite the supposed “protection” offered by the moratorium.

“There are so many loopholes in the moratoriums that the landlords and judges exploit,” Josh Poe, co-founder of the Root Cause Research Center, told the Louisville Courier-Journal.

The Courier-Journal found that between August and December 2020, when the state of Kentucky was covered by a state-wide and then the CDC moratorium, judges in the Jefferson District ruled against renters in 1,298 eviction cases.

“I think anyone who looks at this data should feel a sense of outrage about what’s happened. The fact is that the moratorium isn’t working,” said Poe. “There’s simply too many loopholes.”

In California, a review of public records conducted by KQED and CalMatters found that 527 evictions were processed in 9 counties between March 19 and December 31. In New Jersey, court records show that more than 50,000 eviction notices have been filed since the pandemic began in March 2020.

During a Florida Senate committee hearing in early January, Secretary Chad Poppell of the Florida Department of Children and Families acknowledged that “about 40,000” evictions had been filed between March 1 and December 31, 2020. Poppell underestimated the figure by over 7,000 according to the Office of the State Courts Administrator, which found 47,484 eviction filings during that time.

The Eviction Lab at Princeton University, which has been one of the only academic sources that has tracked evictions throughout the pandemic, showed over 278,000 evictions processed during the pandemic. The figure is a severe underestimation as the Eviction Lab has only been actively tracking in 5 states, not including Florida, the third most populous state in the country.

Even with the moratorium, landlords are still permitted to begin eviction proceedings, meaning as soon as it does expire, in as little as three months, potentially millions could be made homeless in a matter of weeks.

In an email to Politico, Diane Yentel, CEO and president of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, said that the extension was “essential” but did not go far enough in protecting tenants.

“It’s disappointing that the administration didn’t act on the clear evidence and need to also strengthen the order to address the flaws that undermine its public health purpose,” said Yentel.

“While the Biden administration is well aware of the shortcomings in the moratorium order that allow some evictions to proceed during the pandemic, the CDC director did not correct them,” she added. “She simply extended President Trump’s original order, leaving the loopholes and flaws in place, an unfortunate and shortsighted decision that will result in some continued harmful evictions during the pandemic.”

“The CDC did the bare minimum,” said Shamus Roller, the executive director of the National Housing Law Project, in comments to NPR on the moratorium extension. “And that will mean many more renters will lose their homes before the pandemic is over.”

Unlike in the majority of states last year, Democratic and Republican state governors alike have refused to enact their own statewide eviction moratoriums to complement the federal moratorium. This has allowed landlords to exploit the loopholes and proceed with evictions as the coronavirus and its new deadlier B.1.1.7 and P.1 variants spread unchecked throughout the country. The latest case numbers are exceeding the “summer surge” last year, with the seven-day average in the US showing upwards of 63,000 daily new cases and 1,000 deaths a day.

The increase in daily new cases, up 16 percent nationwide compared to a week ago per Johns Hopkins University, prompted an urgent warning of “impending doom” from Walensky during a Monday press briefing.

“I’m going to pause here, I’m going to lose the script, and I’m going to reflect on the recurring feeling I have of impending doom,” Walensky said. “We have so much to look forward to, so much promise and potential of where we are and so much reason for hope, but right now I’m scared.”

Walensky’s professed fear is nothing to that of the hundreds of thousands of teachers who have been forced back into classrooms after Walensky and the CDC “evolved” their social distancing guidelines down from six feet to three feet, in order to fit as many children as possible back into classrooms and force parents back into workplaces to generate surplus value for the ruling class.

This “evolved” guidance did not make it into the latest eviction moratorium order. Instead, it correctly states that, “The virus that causes COVID-19 spreads very easily and sustainably between people who are in close contact with one another (within about 6 feet) mainly through respiratory droplets produced when an infected person, coughs, sneezes, or talks.”

The pandemic is a “trigger event” in world history: it has exposed capitalist society as it truly exists. Before the pandemic, millions of workers and their families faced eviction, homelessness and death due to skyrocketing rents, a dearth of affordable housing and stagnant wages.

Now, over a year later, as millions remain unemployed, with 10 million fewer jobs available compared to February 2020, coupled with rising housing costs, the preventable housing crisis shows no signs of abating. Meanwhile, a tiny layer of “pandemic profiteers” have enriched themselves fabulously over the bodies of over 560,000 Americans and over 2.8 million globally.

The elimination of homelessness and inequality is possible only through the abolition of private property and implementation of an international, scientifically coordinated socialist program.

Crisis-wracked Australian PM unveils cabinet reshuffle

Mike Head

Confronted by deepening political turmoil, with his government being destabilised by wave after wave of sexual assault or misconduct allegations, Prime Minister Scott Morrison yesterday desperately reshuffled his cabinet in a bid for survival.

After days of mounting media speculation predicting the changes, Morrison announced that, as flagged, Christian Porter would be dumped as attorney-general and industrial relations minister, along with Linda Reynolds as defence minister, although both would remain in cabinet.

Australia Prime Minister Scott Morrison (AP/Kiyoshi Ota)

Significantly, Peter Dutton, who was Morrison’s right-wing rival for the leadership when they ousted Malcolm Turnbull as prime minister in 2018, will become defence minister, a post he has long coveted. An equally right-wing and anti-working class figure, Michaelia Cash, will be promoted into the twin roles of attorney-general and industrial relations minister.

In a bid to shore up his own factional position, Morrison elevated one of his closest supporters, Stuart Robert, to a new super-portfolio of employment, workforce, skills, small and family business despite a series of previous scandals that saw him forced to resign from the ministry in 2016. As an indication of the domestic agenda, Robert is notorious for defending the government’s “robo-debt” scheme that unlawfully stripped more than $1 billion from welfare recipients.

Morrison could not afford to sack anyone from cabinet for fear that they would quit parliament and leave his Liberal-National Coalition government without a parliamentary majority. The government already lost its working majority on the floor of the House of Representatives last month when far-right Trump supporter Craig Kelly resigned from the Liberal Party.

As a measure of the crisis engulfing the government, yesterday’s announcement came just four months after another cabinet reshuffle, in which Morrison had emphasised “stability and consistency.” Morrison yesterday again claimed that his changes would ensure “stability and continuity” but with a “shake up” and a fresh “gender equality lens.”

A “new cabinet taskforce” would focus on “women’s equality and safety,” headed by Foreign Minister Marise Payne, whom Morrison labelled “effectively the prime minister for women.”

Almost exclusively, the media has presented the government’s unravelling as a product of Morrison’s mishandling of the sexual assault allegations made against members of the government. Porter has been accused of raping a young female friend three decades ago and Reynolds has been accused of indifference toward a staff member who was allegedly raped by a colleague inside parliament house in 2019.

As has happened many times historically, such allegations are being used, whatever the intentions of those immediately involved, for underlying political purposes. Information long held within the Liberal Party and other ruling circles has been leaked or seized upon, including by figures such as Turnbull and Peta Credlin, who was chief of staff to Turnbull’s ousted predecessor Tony Abbott.

In the style of a MeToo witch hunt, unproven and untested allegations have been given headline treatment, overturning the presumption of innocence. Under the guise of a belatedly discovered concern for women who suffer sexual harassment or assault, reactionary political agendas are being pursued by elements within the ruling capitalist class and affluent sections of the upper middle class.

While certainly promoting the prospects of privileged women within the parliamentary and corporate elite, the campaign has served as a political distraction and as a thrust for a more right-wing and militarist course on both the domestic and foreign policy fronts.

Largely buried from public discussion is the impact of the government’s termination this week of the JobKeeper wage subsidy scheme and the JobSeeker dole payment “coronavirus supplement.” Millions more workers and small business people face impoverishment, and this will fuel explosive social and political discontent.

Also hidden from view are the implications of the Biden administration’s rapid ratcheting up of the US conflict with China, which places the Australian population on the frontline of a potentially devastating economic and military war.

It is hardly a coincidence that the cabinet reshuffle centres on the two key portfolios of industrial relations and defence. These are crucial for intensifying the offensive against the jobs and conditions of the working class and stepping up the preparations for a US-led military confrontation with China.

The two demoted ministers, Porter and Reynolds, were both on the frontline of the government’s failure to deliver the escalating demands of the corporate and strategic establishment.

Porter had presided over the almost complete collapse of the government’s industrial relations bill, which ended up this month falling far short of the full restructuring of working conditions demanded by big business, despite months of backroom talks last year to strike a mutually beneficial deal with the trade union leaders. Porter had proclaimed Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) secretary Sally McManus his BFF (Best Friend Forever) after the union agreed to a wholesale ripping up of workers’ wages and conditions when the COVID-19 pandemic erupted, but the government proved incapable of carrying through the total assault required by the corporate boardrooms.

An editorial in the Australian Financial Review on March 22 castigated Morrison for having previously suggested that a “Hawke-Keating-sized reform agenda” was needed but then failing to seize on the pandemic crisis to “achieve any significant incentive-sharpening micro-economic reform.”

More than that, the editorial said there had been “a profound political failure by the Coalition side of politics to craft the narrative and build a constituency for workplace reform,” since it regained office in 2013. The Coalition had made no effort to paint what Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating had called “the big picture” of the supposed benefits for workers of “globally competitive enterprises.”

These references to the Hawke-Keating agenda and its “big picture” recall how their Labor governments of 1983 to 1996 worked closely with the unions to impose a sweeping assault on workers’ jobs, conditions and basic rights that earlier Coalition governments had been unable to implement.

Reynolds had been under fire from within the military establishment for delays and gaps in the acquisition of new weapons and for failing to sufficiently bury the exposure of the war crimes committed by Australian forces in Afghanistan.

In a column on March 25, the Australian’s foreign editor Greg Sheridan, who is closely connected with the US military and intelligence apparatus, insisted that the recent warning issued by a US admiral of a military conflict over Taiwan within six years would necessarily involve Australia in a war for which it was not prepared.

“We have what will be the world’s 12 most powerful conventional submarines on order,” Sheridan wrote scathingly. “They are a good investment. But they don’t start arriving until 2034. Our new frigates are also delayed…

“Our lack of size and lack of stockpile mean we have no war-fighting ability… We should move very fast in the next few years on fast jets, missiles and unmanned submarines… We need many, many, many more missiles.”

Sheridan called for up to $40 billion to be spent on such weaponry over the next few years, on top of the more than $200 billion that the Coalition government has allocated over the next decade. “That’s what the government should concentrate on,” he pointedly concluded.

Morrison has shown he is fully committed to backing Washington’s aggression against China, but there may well be concerns in the Biden administration about his close personal and political ties to Trump, as well as his capacity to mobilise the country for war.

This week, the opposition Labor Party will hold a two-day online platform conference, making its pitch, backed by the trade unions, to satisfy the ruling elite’s requirements for both austerity and war preparations.

While seeking to differentiate itself from the Coalition by making an even greater focus on gender issues, Labor’s draft platform pledges a fiscal policy that “keeps spending to a responsible level,” support for “a diverse and dynamic business sector” and greater “workplace collaboration” between business and unions. It also vows to strengthen “the US Alliance” because of “its vital importance to Australia’s national security requirements and the United States’ long-term role in underpinning broader stability in our region.”

Bucking US threats, China and Iran sign 25-year treaty

Alex Lantier

This weekend, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi traveled to Tehran and signed a 25-year treaty with his Iranian counterpart, Javad Zarif. The terms of the treaty were not disclosed. However, US news outlets noted that an earlier draft of the treaty, obtained by US officials and shown to the New York Times, entailed $400 billion in Chinese investment in Iran in exchange for exports of Iranian oil, as well as a strategic alliance.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, right, and his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi, pose for photos after the ceremony of signing documents, in Tehran, Iran, Saturday, March 27, 2021. Iran and China on Saturday signed a 25-year strategic cooperation agreement addressing economic issues amid crippling U.S. sanctions on Iran, state TV reported. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)

Beijing is defying economic sanctions imposed by former US President Donald Trump after he unilaterally scrapped the 2015 Iranian nuclear treaty in 2018, and that incoming US President Joe Biden has yet to remove. In February, Biden suddenly bombed an Iranian-backed militia in Syria, killing at least 17 people.

Beijing’s decision to sign the treaty with Tehran followed a disastrous US-China summit earlier this month in Alaska. During remarks to the press before summit proceedings even began, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken publicly lectured Wang that China must accept a “rules-based international order” set by Washington, or face “a far more violent and unstable world.” Afterwards, US Pacific Fleet commander Admiral John Aquilino threatened that a US war with China over Taiwan “is much closer to us than most think.”

By signing a treaty with Tehran, Beijing is signaling that it has concluded that it must make its own preparations against a Biden administration that will be aggressive and relentlessly hostile. It is no doubt confirmed in this view by continuing, groundless war propaganda from US politicians, debunked by scientists, alleging that COVID-19 was manufactured in a Chinese lab.

At the Anchorage conference, Wang replied to Blinken by contrasting China’s commitment to international law with US imperialism’s foreign policy in the Middle East. “We do not believe in invading through the use of force, or to topple other regimes through various means, or to massacre the people of other countries because all of those would only cause turmoil and instability in this world. And at the end of the day, all of those would not serve the United States well.”

Before traveling to Tehran, Wang hosted his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, for talks in the Chinese city of Guilin, shortly after Biden provocatively denounced Russian President Vladimir Putin as a “killer” who does not have a “human soul.”

At the signing of the treaty this weekend, Iranian and Chinese officials both made pointed criticisms of Washington’s threats. Zarif called China a “friend of difficult days,” adding that “we thank and praise the stance of China during the oppressive sanctions.”

Wang replied, “Relations between our two countries have now reached a strategic level, and China is seeking to promote inclusive relations with the Islamic Republic of Iran. … The signing of the road-map for strategic cooperation between the two countries shows Beijing’s will to promote ties to the highest possible level.”

According to China’s state-run Global Times, Wang told Iranian officials “China is willing to oppose hegemony and bullying, safeguard international justice and fairness as well as uphold international norms together with people of Iran and other countries.”

The treaty, first discussed between Iranian Supreme Guide Ali Khamenei and Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2016, deepens economic ties with the Middle East that Beijing has sought to develop with its Belt and Road Initiative infrastructure program. Citing Iranian Ambassador to China Mohammad Keshavarz-Zadeh, the Tehran Times reported that the treaty “specifies the capacities for cooperation between Iran and China, especially in areas of technology, industries, transportation and energy.” Chinese firms have built mass transit systems, railways and other key infrastructure in Iran.

While Washington has not yet publicly reacted to the Iran–China treaty, US officials have previously denounced it as a fundamental challenge to Washington’s interests, combining “war on terror” propaganda with attempts to revive Cold War anti-communism.

Amid speculation last December that the treaty would be signed, Director of the US State Department Policy Planning Staff Peter Berkowitz denounced it to Al Arabiya. He claimed it would be “very bad news for the free world” if the treaty were adopted: “Iran sows terrorism, death and destruction throughout the region. To be empowered by the People’s Republic of China would only intensify the threat.”

The three decades since the US-led Gulf War against Iraq and the Stalinist regime’s dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 have exposed such rhetoric. The elimination of the Soviet Union as the main military counterweight to the NATO imperialist powers did not lead to peace, nor was Iran the main source of “death and destruction.” For three decades, Washington and its European imperialist allies have laid waste to countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria, killing millions based on lies such as the claim that Iraq was hiding “weapons of mass destruction.”

Berkowitz’s denunciations of Iran and China are bound up with growing concern in Washington that it could lose its globally hegemonic position due to the debacles of its wars, its fading industrial and economic weight, and now its disastrous handling of the pandemic.

Since the NATO powers launched a war for regime change in Syria in 2011, supporting first Islamist and then Kurdish nationalist militias, Iran, Russia and increasingly China have intervened to bolster Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. With the China–Iran treaty, it is now clear that these NATO wars carry in them the seeds of a global conflict, as in the 20th century, for control of world markets and strategic advantage.

The rising industrial weight of Asia and specifically China as a workshop for transnational corporations has intensified these geopolitical conflicts. China’s trade with the Middle East rose to $294.4 billion in 2019, having surpassed US trade with the Middle East in 2010. Beijing is Tehran’s leading trade partner and plans to further develop infrastructure linking China through Pakistan, Iran, and Turkey to its key export markets in Europe under its Belt and Road Initiative.

The fate of the China–Iran treaty is highly uncertain. Certainly, it faces powerful domestic opposition within Iran, where broad sections of the ruling class have unsuccessfully sought to develop ties with Europe in the face of US sanctions. Former President Mahmoud Amhadinejad pledged that “The Iranian nation will not recognize a new, secret 25-year agreement between Iran and China,” when the treaty was first announced in June.

Chinese media were at pains to deny US allegations that the treaty was aimed at Washington. The Global Times complained that the China–Iran treaty was “interpreted by some Western media from a geopolitical competition perspective…to portray the normally deepening bilateral cooperation between China and Iran as a challenge against the US.”

Beijing and Tehran are not looking for war with Washington, but US imperialism has made clear that it reserves the right to bomb or invade anyone it sees as a challenge to its hegemony. The Chinese and Iranian regimes—oscillating between seeking a deal with and defying the imperialist powers—ultimately have no progressive solution to this growing danger of war, rooted in the bankruptcy of the world capitalist system. In the final analysis, avoiding a war requires the international mobilization of the working class.

The China–Iran treaty underscores how the global redistribution of economic and industrial weight has undermined the existing international alliances and geopolitical alignments. The contradiction that the great Marxists of the 20th century identified as driving to world war—between world economy and the outmoded nation-state system—emerges again with enormous force. The critical question that emerges is to mobilize the working class on an international, socialist program against war.

The Real Danger of the Pentagon’s New Indo-Pacific Plan

Simone Chun

The Pentagon recently asked Congress for an astronomical $27 billion budget increase to support a massive military buildup in Asia  as part of its new Indo-Pacific plan, which calls for a substantially more aggressive military stance against China.

With the US already ranking first in military spending worldwide and holding more than 290 military bases in the Asia-Pacific region alone, this aggressive buildup is being proposed at the most financially precarious moment in US history. According to the Congressional Budget Office report released this month, federal debt is projected to reach 102% of GDP by the end of 2021 before surpassing its historical high of 107% in 2031 and going on to nearly double to 202% by 2051. According to Doug Bandow, “Uncle Sam is headed toward insolvency.”

How can the Biden administration sell such an expensive foreign policy proposal to the American public in these economically depressed times? By publicly stoking moral outrage and militarism in the US–as well as throughout the Asia-Pacific region–in the name of launching a crusade ostensibly in defense of human rights. This strategy was on full display when Secretary of State Blinken echoed bipartisan political rhetoric about the “Chinese threat” during his visit to Asia last week. In a stream of condescending self-righteousness, he unleashed a deluge of recrimination against China and North Korea while pontificating on American exceptionalism.

Instead of taking a fresh direction on behalf of the new administration and sending a message that America’s top diplomat is intent on finding common ground in Asia, Blinken made clear that the Biden administration will hew close to the fundamentals that have guided the prevailing policy of containment reflected most recently in Bush’s Axis of Evil, Obama’s Pivot to Asia, and Trump’s confrontationalism.

Blinken’s performance seemed tailored to the US domestic audience; a rallying call to win support for the upcoming battle: selling the Pentagon’s costly Asian military buildup plan–and the unprecedented profits it represents for the US military industrial complex–to Congress and American public. Unsurprisingly, US corporate media amplified Blinken’s message, exulting: “Blinken blasts aggressive China, North Korea’s systematic and widespread rights abuses.” At the same time, Blinken and his team have been hard at work in reinforcing  an anti-China stance among their lynchpin Far Eastern military outposts–South Korea and Japan– by ensuring that the respective governments of these garrison states continue to unswervingly toe the US line with regard to Beijing.

But even if the administration succeeds in selling its new crusade to Congress and American public, the unprecedented buildup being proposed would have its most devastating consequences at home, rather than in far-flung military theaters. Firstly, its demand for enormous spending on expensive weapon systems would exacerbate America’s financial insolvency. The administration’s proposal includes nearly $5 billion in the next year alone for new missile defense systems and nuclear-capable naval craft as part of an aggressive forward-deployed military strategy that profits weapons manufacturers like Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics.

Secondly, it will engender a human rights crisis at home, much in the same vein as the Red Scare during the Cold War and the War on Terror did. Public support for the Indo-Pacific plan will depend on amplifying to the extent possible the threat from the East using time-tried methods of demonizing “threatening Others”, such as China, North Korea. As militarism, racism and xenophobia go hand in hand, this will inflame anti-Asian sentiment and scapegoating–a trend that is already well under way due to bipartisan political rhetoric about origins of Covid-19 and the rise of China. Anti-Asian sentiment has already risen to unprecedented levels in 2020, with crimes against Asians increasing by more than 150% in the past year.

If the Biden administration truly cares about a moral order in Asia, it should take global leadership to address the formative role that US militarism has played in the current state of Asian affairs. The foremost opportunity to embark on an alternative to the path of war lies in the Korean Peninsula, where the US continues to exert overwhelming economic and military pressure in the wake of a brutal war that claimed some 5 million lives, over half of whom were non-combatant Korean civilians. The staggering civilian cost of the Korean war far exceeded the non-combatant death rate of both WWII and the Vietnam War, and amounted to more than 10% of the entire Korean civilian population. US refusal to sign a formal peace agreement with the North means that the 70-year old conflict has never officially ended, leaving scores of Koreans–including some 100,000 Korean-Americans–separated from their loved ones in the North.

The Biden administration can begin down this alternative moral path by supporting bipartisan Congressional bills such as the Enhancing North Korean Humanitarian Assistance Act and the Divided Families Reunification Act, both of which would go a long way toward generating goodwill with North Korea without giving up any strategic advantage whatsoever on the part of Washington. Such symbolic but significantly humanitarian acts of goodwill would garner support from allies while earning the trust of “foes”, and would mitigate the risks of military confrontation, financial insolvency, and human rights crises at home and abroad.

The working class in Germany pays the cost of the pandemic

Elisabeth Zimmermann

The coronavirus crisis does not affect everyone equally. As a trigger event, it has exacerbated the crisis of capitalism and the social inequality that accompanies it. The ruling class is pursuing a ruthless profits-before-life policy. While at the top of society, the corporations and banks enrich themselves and profit from the governments’ billion-dollar bailouts, workers and their families pay for it with wage losses, job cuts, short-time working and their health and lives.

Last Wednesday, March 24, the death toll from COVID-19 in Germany exceeded the threshold of 75,000 for the first time. At the same time, the Federal Statistical Office announced that in 2020, because of the pandemic, wages fell in nominal terms for the first time since surveys began in 2007.

Gross monthly earnings, including special payments, fell by 0.7 percent in 2020 compared to the previous year. Consumer prices rose by just under 0.5 percent. Thus, employees were left with 1.1 percent less pay in real terms, as calculated by the Federal Statistical Office. Since this is the national average, the losses for those affected vary widely.

Berlin metalworkers demonstrate against real wage cuts in front of the City Hall in early March 2021

The paid weekly working hours of full-time employees fell significantly, by an average of 2.9 percent last year compared to 2019. The strongest decline was in the hospitality sector, 19.4 percent, followed by the arts, entertainment, and recreation sector with a 9 percent decline. Working hours in energy supply and the finance and insurance industries declined by only 0.4 percent each.

The lower income groups were hit particularly hard by the wage cuts. Unskilled and semi-skilled workers suffered the biggest wage losses with an average of 1.6 and 2.5 percent, respectively. The earnings of workers with managerial functions increased by an average of 0.2 percent.

The downward swings in wages in 2020 are much more severe than during the global financial and economic crisis in 2009 when nominal earnings were still up marginally by 0.2 percent and real wages fell by 0.1 percent.

Last year’s negative wage growth also has an impact on pensioners. Since pension rates are based on wages over the previous year, there will be no pension increase in the West this year and only a very slight increase in the East of Germany. This is due to the fact that, more than 30 years after reunification in 1990, pensions in the former East Germany have still not been adjusted to the level in the West. In terms of wages, this gap is even wider.

Many employers are using the pandemic as an excuse to cut jobs and wages. However, the general wages’ reduction is not only due to mass short-time working and job losses. The wage restraint of the trade unions has also contributed significantly to this. The IG Metall union, for example, simply suspended collective bargaining at the beginning of 2020 and is still negotiating wage cuts and mass job losses in the current round of collective bargaining.

The danger of contracting COVID-19, becoming seriously ill and dying from it, also hits workers and the poor particularly hard worldwide. In Germany, there have always been local and regional reports on this, but no comprehensive data collection or systematic findings. In the major media, such questions of social inequality and class issues have so far been largely ignored.

The connection between a person’s social situation—the work, income, housing and living situation—and the risk of contracting COVID-19 has now been addressed in several reports and recent surveys.

These include a Panorama programme on March 3 on broadcaster ARD. According to research by broadcasters NDR and WDR and the Süddeutscher Zeitung paper, 14 out of 16 federal states have no information about which people are particularly frequently infected with the coronavirus. But, as the accompanying report states:

Those who live in the Berlin district of Neukölln face almost twice the risk of being infected with coronavirus than those in neighbouring Treptow-Köpenick. What is the reason for this? That is not known. What is striking: In Neukölln, 7,000 people live on one square kilometre, in Treptow 1,600. In Neukölln, the unemployment rate is 16 percent, in Treptow 8 percent. The differences in household income are similar: In Neukölln it is €1,825 per month, in Treptow-Köpenick €2,200. In Neukölln, 47 percent of the inhabitants have an immigration background, in Treptow only 17 percent.

On March 22, the online edition of the Süddeutsche Zeitung reported a study in Cologne confirming that COVID-19 mainly affects people in poorer neighbourhoods:

The coronavirus belt stretches across Cologne. On the map by the Fraunhofer Institute, a blue band stretches from Chorweiler, the high-rise housing estate in the northwest, to the south-east of the megacity. It is above all the old industrial and working-class districts on the right bank of the Rhine signaled by deep blue on the scientists’ graphic: Here, where more unemployed people, more housing benefit recipients and more people with an immigration background live in Mülheim, Kalk or Porz, the citizens most frequently contract COVID-19. The virus plagues the weak, and it spares the rich on the other side of the river in the prosperous west of the cathedral city.

Those who are described as “socially vulnerable” or “disadvantaged” in the media are workers with and without an immigrant background. They often work in low-paid jobs that are considered essential, such as care, cleaning, postal services, logistics, grocery stores and public transport, to name just a few occupational areas. They cannot work from home and have fewer opportunities to protect themselves from infection. Also, they often have worse and cramped living conditions due to high rents and low incomes.

The Robert Koch Institute (RKI) published a fact sheet on its study “Social differences in COVID-19 mortality during the second wave of infection in Germany” on March 16. The core statements are:

· During the second wave of infection in autumn and winter 2020/2021, COVID-19 mortality in Germany rose sharply, reaching a peak in December and January.

· According to the reports of the public health authorities, more than 42,000 people diagnosed with COVID-19 died in December and January. Of these, about 90 percent were aged 70 and older.

· The increase in COVID-19 deaths was greatest in socially disadvantaged regions of Germany—among both men and women.

· In December and January, COVID-19 mortality was about 50 to 70 percent higher in highly socially disadvantaged regions than in regions with low social disadvantage.

The RKI study is based on the reporting data on COVID-19 deaths submitted by the health authorities to the RKI. For the analysis of social differences, the reporting data at the level of the 401 districts and independent cities were linked with the “German Index of Socioeconomic Deprivation” (GISD). This index on the extent of socioeconomic deprivation considers several regional education, employment and income indicators.

The results of this study by the RKI are an indictment of the policies of the federal and state governments. At no time since the beginning of the pandemic have they even considered a proper lockdown, including all nonessential businesses, to bring the coronavirus under control. The overriding principle has always been to put economic interests above the needs of the population—profits before lives!

It is above all workers and the poor, pensioners and the sick who must pay for these policies with their health and lives. Even now, when the number of infections is soaring again, and the new strains of the virus are increasing the danger even more, the government is not prepared to protect the population through a proper lockdown. It refuses to close factories, schools and day-care centres, to compensate affected workers by paying full wages, and to provide consistent support to poorer households.