About the Award: ABH aims to identify, support and inspire the next generation of African entrepreneurs who are making a difference in their local communities, working to solve the most pressing problems, and building a more sustainable and inclusive economy for the future.
The initiative aims to be as inclusive as possible. Applications are open in English and French to entrepreneurs from all African countries, all sectors, and all ages who operate businesses formally registered and headquartered in an African country, and that have a 3 year-track record.
Every year, ten finalists will be selected to compete in the ABH finale pitch competition and participate in a TV Show that will be broadcast online and across the continent. The finalists will compete for a share of US $1.5 million in grant money.
Eligible Countries: African countries
To be Taken at:
Due to the outbreak of COVID-19, we may host the Semi-Finale online in Aug. We will closely monitor the situation globally to determine the safest solution.
The Finals will be held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia during the end of November/early December. This is subject to the situation regarding COVID-19.
Type: Entrepreneurship
Eligibility:
Applicant should be the Founder or a Co-Founder of the company.
Applicant has traceable/provable African nationality. In other words, you have/had African citizenship and/or a Parent or Grandparent has African citizenship.
Company is Africa-Based. The business is registered and headquartered in an African country, and primarily operates in Africa.
Company is post-Idea stage. Business is 3 years old or more and has at least 3 years of revenue history
Selection Criteria:
Vision, Mission & Values
The importance/magnitude of the problem/need you’re addressing
The feasibility and value-add of your solution
Market traction of your solution
Competitiveness of your product/solution
The feasibility of your revenue model and financial projections
Leadership & Team Potential
Social Impact – the tangibility and sustainability of the impact you’re creating
Number of Awards: 10
Value of Award:
1st Prize Winner
$300,000
2nd Prize Winner
$250,000
3rd Prize Winner
$150,000
Other Top 10 Finalists (7)
$100,000
Global Immersion Program (Hangzhou, San Francisco, South East Asia)
$100,000
ANPI will also cover all costs related to the Semi-Final.
Also,
Exposure: Through the “Africa’s Business Heroes (ABH)” show, we provide our Heroes the chance to tell Africa and the world their story. The show is distributed via major television networks, which provides our finalists with significant publicity and exposure.
Training: we offer our Heroes training at Alibaba’s headquarters via the prestigious eFounders fellowship training program. In addition, we are working with partners to develop bespoke training and accelerator services for our Top 10.
Mentorship: we offer our Heroes the opportunity to be mentored by renowned business leaders including our Finale and Semi-Finale judges.
Networking opportunities: ABH attracts inspiring entrepreneurs from across all 54 African countries. Our finalists have the opportunity to connect with, learn and partner with other like-minded entrepreneurs and our community of judges.
With Brazil’s COVID-19 catastrophe raging unchecked—reaching a rapidly rising average of 77,000 cases and 2,500 deaths a day, and a total of 12.5 million cases and 312,000 deaths—the government of fascistic President Jair Bolsonaro is rapidly erecting the framework of a police state.
In the last month alone, over 30 individuals have been subpoenaed under the country’s anti-subversion National Security Law, a draconian piece of legislation enacted under the last president of the 1964-1985 US-backed military dictatorship with the stated goal of giving the military control over future civilian governments.
On March 19, the conservative daily Estado de S. Paulo reported that the first two years of the Bolsonaro government had seen the expansion of the use of the law by a staggering 285 percent, with a total of 77 inquiries into alleged violations of the law, as opposed to 20 over the two previous years.
Jair Bolsonaro (Credit: Marcelo Camargo/Agência Brasil )
The recent crackdown began on March 4, with the targeting of 24-year-old João Reginaldo Jr. for a social media post related to an official presidential visit to his city, the agribusiness hub of Uberlândia, in the state of Minas Gerais. Reginaldo Jr. had asked on Twitter if anyone wanted to become a “national hero” during the president’s visit, suggesting some public display of opposition would attract widespread support.
Reflecting Bolsonaro’s own extreme sensitivity to the explosive social conditions in Brazil, where 22 million more people have been thrown into poverty, the tweet was taken as a threat to national security. The intelligence unit of the Minas Gerais state Military Police took Reginaldo Jr. into custody by 10 p.m. the same day, barely six hours after his tweet, which received 400 responses, some of them suggesting violent opposition to the government. Despite Reginaldo Jr.’s small following of just 150 people, his post had been shared 1,000 times. At the local Federal Police headquarters, Reginaldo Jr. was questioned about his connections to political parties or student unions, which he denied. He was sent to prison, being released only the next day.
By March 18, a group of Uberlândia attorneys following the case had already identified 25 individuals, overwhelmingly young people, who had been subpoenaed in relation to the case without any knowledge of possible crimes they were involved in, for simply responding to or re-tweeting Reginaldo Jr.’s original message.
Also on March 18, five Workers Party (PT) activists were detained in the capital Brasília by the local Military Police and brought to the Federal Police precinct accused of violating the National Security Law for associating Bolsonaro with Nazism and genocide. Their “crime” was unfurling for barely a minute a banner bearing a cartoon of Bolsonaro painting a swastika over a hospital’s red cross, with the caption “genocidal.”
Fascist demonstration outside Bolsonaro's house in Rio de Janeiro on March 22 (YouTube)
The cartoon had been produced by the cartoonist Aroeira in June, 2020 at the height of the first wave of the pandemic in Brazil, and was shared on social media by Ricardo Noblat, a columnist with the powerful Globo media group. On June 15, both were charged by Justice Minister André Mendonça with falsely accusing the president of associating with Nazism, which itself is a crime under the National Security Law.
The local Federal Police deputy in Brasília eventually dismissed the case against the PT activists after party deputies flocked to the precinct.
In another high profile case three days earlier, on March 15, a 33-year-old YouTube personality known as Felipe Neto, whose social media channels boast more than 41 million followers, was subpoenaed on the basis of similar charges by the Rio de Janeiro state police cyber crimes division. It issued a warrant against him for carrying out a “crime against the honor of the president of the Republic provided for in the National Security Law.” The reason for the charge was Neto’s repeated use of the term “genocidal” to refer to Bolsonaro and his sociopathic handling of the coronavirus pandemic in Brazil.
As was later revealed, the charge had been brought by none other than Bolsonaro’s son, Carlos, a city councillor in Rio. The investigation was suspended three days later, on March 18, by a judge who ruled that national security issues could not be handled by the Rio police and should be directed to the Federal Police.
While the case against the PT activists was dismissed by the intervention of the party, and the case of Felipe Neto is suspended due in large measure to his prominent social media presence in Brazil—defenses not shared by the 25 unknown youth charged in Uberlândia—the March “national security” scare poses the gravest dangers. It not only exposes the accelerating buildup of a police state under the weight of the vast crisis gripping bourgeois rule, but also reveals the fascistic moods being cultivated among low-ranking state police forces, the most solid constituency for the far right in Brazil.
In all three March cases, individuals were subpoenaed, charged or detained by state police forces. Given that investigations or enforcement under the National Security Law are part of the federal legal framework, these actions amount to rogue demonstrations of loyalty to the would-be Brazilian dictator Bolsonaro in the face of his growing political isolation. Brazil’s state-based Military Police kill over 6,000 Brazilians a year, and are virtually immune to prosecution under their own Military Justice system.
Bolsonaro has made one of his mottos the call for security forces “not to obey absurd orders,” referring to the enforcement of search and seizure warrants related to corruption probes against himself, his family or his political associates. And on March 8 he declared that “my army will not go to the streets to enforce governors’ decrees,” referring to mild restrictions on economic activity imposed by local authorities in Brazil in order to avoid an even more horrific COVID-19 death toll.
On March 8 Bolsonaro told supporters that the limited curfews in some cities amount to a “state of siege.” He threatened to “react” by imposing his own state of siege in order to ensure unrestricted economic activity and let the virus spread unchecked. “Is the Brazilian population prepared for a federal government action on that front?” he asked.
In direct response to Bolsonaro’s appeals, on March 22, the president’s birthday, dozens of fascists dressed in army fatigues and red berets, identifying themselves as members of the airborne infantry—Bolsonaro’s own branch of the Army in the 1970s and 1980s—marched in front of his private home in Rio de Janeiro. A video of the event included the threat of civil war in Bolsonaro’s defense. “If you want to impeach our president, remember he is not alone,” the video’s narrator warned. Addressing himself to “lefties,” he concluded, “you’d better gather the best you’ve got and try it.”
In response to a question from TV Globo, the Eastern Military Command stated that there was “no relation between the institution and the event cited,” adding that “the Brazilian Army does not condone any type of illicit conduct on the part of its members.” It made no attempt, however, to deny that those involved in the fascist march were indeed active-duty paratroopers.
Rogue police elements are also responding to earlier calls by Rio de Janeiro’s Military Club, the 133-year-old center of military coup-plotting in Brazil, for the National Security Law to be used against the left. This came in response to the Brazilian Supreme Court (STF) ordering the arrest of federal Deputy Daniel Silveira, a former Rio de Janeiro Military Police soldier and Bolsonaro loyalist, for demanding the shutdown of the court.
On Sunday, this political struggle between the various political representatives of the ruling class to show which is more loyal to the military apparatus took to another stage, in response to what authorities described as a psychotic episode on the part of a Military Police soldier in the state of Bahia, ruled by the Workers Party (PT). The soldier, Wesley Soares Góes, broke into a section of beach cordoned off as part of the state’s COVID-19 restrictions, and started shooting in the air, shouting that he would “not allow the violation of the dignity and honor of workers,” and “I am not going to arrest workers anymore; I didn’t join the police to arrest fathers of families.”
After several hours of negotiations, Góes started shooting at the BOPE special operations troops sent to seize him, and was brutally gunned down with 10 shots. While what precisely prompted Góes’ outburst is as yet unknown, the episode was immediately seized upon by the far right, which cast him as an anti-lockdown martyr. The episode was cited by no one less than the head of the House Constitutional Committee, the Bolsonaro loyalist Bia Kicis, who tweeted that it was the beginning of a mutiny by state Military Police forces against governors, concluding with Bolsonaro’s rallying cry: “enough with obeying absurd orders!”
The latest developments lay bare the political criminality of the complacency and dismissal of the military coup threats by the largest opposition force, the Workers Party, and its foremost leader, former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, politically rehabilitated by the recent annulment of corruption convictions barring him from elections. Lula used his rehabilitation speech at the headquarters of the ABC Metalworkers Union on March 10 to declare he “could not take seriously” the crackdown calls by the Military Club. Making a pro-military profession of faith, he declared, “those who need guns are our Armed Forces, our police, who go into the streets to fight crime with a rusty .38 revolver.” The speech was made against the backdrop of a police strike threat against Bolsonaro, welcomed by the PT with the charge that Bolsonaro had “betrayed” his constituency in the state repressive apparatus.
With staggering hypocrisy, the party has feigned indignation at the persistence of the dictatorial law whose application it oversaw when mass opposition to the party broke out in 2013. The PT is principally responsible for providing a draconian backup in case the hated law was struck down by the judiciary. It vastly expanded the framework for the prosecution of political opposition with the enacting of the anti-terrorism law of 2016, which its governors want to expand to include the torching of buses and blocking of streets, common tactics of demonstrators in response to often deadly police crackdowns.
The PT has one overriding concern: avoiding the eruption of mass opposition to Bolsonaro, which could sweep aside the PT itself, which is politically responsible for his rise and is complicit in his crimes. In the northeastern states where the PT holds power, it has pursued the same homicidal herd immunity policy. All the while, the self-styled opposition is leaving Bolsonaro free to hatch his conspiracies in plain sight.
India’s right-wing authoritarian Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government has suspended exports of COVID-19 vaccines for at least two months. This decision will severely impact vaccination programs in lower- and middle-income countries in Africa, Latin America and the rest of Asia, contributing to the further spread of the pandemic, including the new more contagious and lethal variants.
The BJP government has yet to issue an official statement announcing that it is suspending COVID-19 vaccine exports. However, Indian and international media have quoted “government sources” justifying the decision by pointing to increasing domestic requirements under conditions of a dramatic rise of infections within India in recent weeks.
An official source quoted by the Chennai-based daily the Hindu said last Wednesday night, “Given our current manufacturing capacity and requirements of national vaccination programmes, there may be a need to calibrate the supply schedules from time to time. All stakeholders would have to work together to adjust the schedules as required.”
A man comes out after receiving COVID- 19 vaccine at a government hospital, in New Delhi, India, Monday, March 22, 2021. India has reported its highest number of coronavirus cases since October, amid a worrying surge that has prompted multiple states to return to some form of restrictions on public gathering. (AP Photo/Manish Swarup)
In an attempt to downplay the implications of the government’s decision, he claimed that India—the world’s leading exporter of generic medicines—remains “committed” to providing vaccine supplies to the world. He said that “unlike many other countries,” the Indian government has not placed an official ban on vaccine exports, but the policy he and other officials went on to outline is a ban in all but name.
According to the officials, exports will now take place in a phased manner, “keeping in view the domestic requirements.” Moreover, while all pending orders will ultimately be delivered, new orders will not be accepted for several months.
However the Narendra Modi-led BJP government chooses to justify its decision and downplay its impact, the reality is its suspension of vaccine exports is bound up with the reactionary nationalist calculations of India’s ruling elite. It is the Indian version of the “vaccine nationalism” pursued by governments in the US and Europe, which have subordinated the production and distribution of vaccines to the drive for profit and the geopolitical interests of the various competing ruling elites.
The US has hoarded vaccines, insisting that they must be allocated to the American population before being supplied to other countries. The distribution of vaccines has become yet another tool at Washington’s disposal to bully and intimidate other countries into following US interests. For example, the US has made the supply of vaccines to neighboring Mexico conditional on the Mexican government’s willingness to use savage repression to block migrants trying to cross the Mexico-US border.
At the same time, the US, Canada and EU have vehemently opposed requests made by several lower-income countries for the lifting of patents so that the vaccines can be produced in developing countries. In this way, the Western imperialist powers have shown that they have more concern for the profits of their pharmaceutical giants than they do for the lives of millions of people across the world. This refusal to provide vaccines to the vast majority of the world’s population, even as the pandemic surges due to the spread of more infectious variants, has now been compounded by the Modi government’s move to block exports.
The Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, which runs the COVAX programme, a UN-backed effort to provide vaccines to poor countries, said that Indian vaccine supplies to lower income countries are being delayed “as the government of India battles a new wave of COVID-19 infections.” Although Gavi has received 28 million doses of Covishield from the Serum Institute of India (SII), it said that it was unclear whether additional supplies of 40 million doses in March and 50 million in April will be provided. The SII is manufacturing the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine under the name of Covishield under a license from its original British-Swedish manufacturer AstraZeneca.
An email sent by UNICEF to Reuters noted, “We understand that deliveries of COVID-19 vaccines to lower-income economies participating in the COVAX Facility will likely face delays following a setback in securing export licenses for further doses of COVID-19 vaccines produced by the Serum Institute of India (SII), expected to be shipped in March and April.”
The Modi government’s decision has also affected the vaccination program in the UK, since part of AstraZeneca’s licensing agreement required India to supply Britain with doses. Last week, the National Health Service (NHS) sent a written warning to hospitals about an impending shortage of the vaccine due to a “four-week delay” of about half of the orders it expected from the SII.
According to Adar Poonawalla, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the SII, five million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine were already delivered by his institution to the UK early this month. However, future supplies will be affected by the decision of the Modi government. He told Britain’s Daily Telegraph, “It is solely dependent on India, and it has nothing to do with the SII. It is to do with the Indian government allowing more doses to the UK.”
India has exported more than 60 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines since last January, according to the Indian Ministry of External Affairs. However, only a small fraction of them, just eight million, were grants from the Indian government. The bulk of the doses, some 34.17 million, were part of commercial orders, and another 17.86 million were procured by the international Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance.
An Indian government source quoted by the Hindu noted that the country has already exported the vaccine to 75 countries worldwide. “No other country has supplied the world with as many doses as India has so far,” he added.
Whatever the Modi government’s claims, its policies are not driven by humanitarian concerns about the impact of the pandemic on the lives of the population internationally and in India. On the contrary, through its supply of the vaccines to lower-income and middle-income countries, New Delhi seeks to boost its geostrategic influence against its rivals, above all China, which is also exporting its own COVID-19 vaccines.
During the recent leadership summit of the Quad, a US-led “security dialogue” including India, Japan and Australia, a proposal was discussed to produce COVID-19 vaccines in India with the financial support of the US and Japan. The plan called for these vaccines to then be sent to poor countries throughout the world with the assistance of Australia, in an attempt to counter what the Quad more than cynically described as China’s “vaccine diplomacy.”
The Modi government’s suspension of the export of COVID-19 vaccines is also a desperate response to the current resurgence of the pandemic throughout India, i.e., the ruinous outcome of its own disastrous policies.
The country recorded 68,020 new COVID-19 cases on Monday, the highest number of new daily infections since October. The total number of coronavirus cases has now surpassed 12 million, with the death toll over 161,800, even according to the highly underreported official figures.
This resurgence of COVID-19 is in all likelihood being driven by the emergence of new variants of the virus, which are more infectious and may cause vaccines to be less effective. Last week, authorities reported that they had identified a “double mutant” of the virus, i.e., one that combines two variants.
“This double mutant could be a major reason behind the upsurge in COVID cases, but we need to wait for test results to determine if it is the case,” M.C. Mishra, a former top official at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, told the German broadcaster Deutsche Welle.
From the very beginning, the government’s response to the pandemic has focused on placing corporate profits ahead of the lives of workers and the poor.
Having refused to take any substantial measures to contain the pandemic during several critical months at the beginning of 2020, the government suddenly made an about-face and imposed a national lockdown in late March.
However, due to the ill-prepared character of the lockdown—including the government’s failure to provide social support combined with mass testing, contact tracing and the allocation of substantial financial resources to upgrade the ramshackle public health care system—Modi’s lockdown failed to achieve its declared aims.
Starting from late April, the government worked to reopen the economy, systematically lifting coronavirus-related restrictions to allow industries to operate under dangerous conditions as the virus surged.
The Modi government’s decision to suspend the export of vaccines is bound up with its insistence that no more substantive lockdowns should be implemented, in-spite of the rapid spread of the virus. By promoting vaccination as the sole solution to the pandemic, the government is doubling down on its push to keep the economy open at all costs.
Even if one grants that the government desires to curb the pandemic in India, its reactionary nationalist decision to suspend vaccine exports is self-defeating. The pandemic is a global crisis that requires a global solution. COVID-19 does not respect national borders and will continue to pose a threat to every country as it spreads internationally.
The failure to vaccinate large numbers of people in the majority of the world’s countries only creates the conditions for the virus to spread more widely, giving it the chance to mutate and possibly become resistant to the very vaccines the Indian government is now relying on to ultimately bring the pandemic under control within its national borders.
Given the dramatic increase in the number of coronavirus infections in Germany, medical experts are calling for an immediate halt to the policy of opening up the economy and the imposition of effective measures to contain the pandemic. Otherwise, they say, there is a risk of an exponential increase in the number of cases and an overload of intensive care units within a very short time.
The president of the German Society for Internal Intensive Care and Emergency Medicine (DGIIN), Christian Karagiannidis, is demanding a hard lockdown and an immediate stop to all planned steps to further reopen businesses and education institutions.
“The decisions for model projects after Easter are completely inappropriate and must be immediately withdrawn by the federal and state governments,” the physician told the Rheinische Post. Karagiannidis, who is also the scientific director of the DIVI (Interdisciplinary Association for Intensive Care and Emergency Medicine), is demanding “a mixture of a hard lockdown, many vaccinations and tests.” This was the only way to “prevent intensive care units being overrun.”
Medical staff wait for people at a local vaccination centre as the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) continues in Ebersberg near Munich, Germany, Monday, March 22, 2021. (AP Photo/Matthias Schrader)
Referring to the doctors and nurses who have been fighting for patients’ lives under extreme conditions every day for over a year, Karagiannidis appealed to the government and political parties: “I ask politicians not to abandon hospital staff.” Containment measures would have to apply nationwide, he said. Germany is “only at the beginning of a massive increase in intensive care patients.”
Numerous other medical professionals and scientists are also warning of the effects of the unscrupulous reopening policy. DIVI President Gernot Marx stated, “We are now beginning the third wave in intensive care units and at a very high level. We had already warned about this at the end of February, and this is causing us great concern.”
With incidence levels of around 200 per 100,000, emergency medicine specialists have predicted around 5,000 COVID-19 patients in ICUs by early May. According to DIVI, as of Saturday there were 3,334 COVID-19 patients in intensive care, the highest number since the peak of the first wave last year. “We expect a rapid increase in patients over the next few weeks, as the wave of intensive care patients always follows the wave of infection by two to three weeks,” Marx said.
“We are facing tough weeks ahead,” the head of the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), Lothar Wieler, warned. There were “clear signals” that the third coronavirus wave “can be even worse than the first two waves.” We must be prepared for the number of those infected to rise sharply, for hospitals to be overloaded and for “many people to die.” Scientists agree on this. Previously, renowned virologists such as Melanie Brinkmann and Christian Drosten had also warned against further relaxations and the associated increase in the number of infections.
On Saturday morning, the RKI reported a seven-day incidence of 124.9, the highest value since mid-January. The day before, the RKI had reported an incidence of 119.1, compared to 76.1 a fortnight ago. If no drastic measures are taken, doctors expect daily infection figures of 50,000 and higher. There are already districts in Thuringia with an incidence rate of over 500, where the national average is 218.
According to the RKI, the opening of schools and day-care centres, which was pursued by the state governments of all colours, is now having a dramatic effect. In its current situation report from Thursday, the RKI assumes that the seven-day incidence among children up to 14 years of age has more than doubled nationwide in the past four weeks. In Berlin alone, where the Social Democratic Party-Left Party-Green Party Senate (state executive) has been particularly aggressive in reopening schools and day-care centres, 176 day-care centres are currently reporting coronavirus cases.
The B.1.1.7 variant, which now accounts for the majority of infections in Germany, “is undoubtedly more infectious and does not leave children out,” notes Burkhard Rodeck, Secretary-General of the German Society for Paediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. In schools and day-care centres, children and adolescents become infected with the highly contagious viral mutation and infect parents and grandparents in the family environment, with fatal consequences. In the meantime, severe illness because of COVID-19 no longer occurs almost exclusively in the elderly and those with previous illnesses, but frequently in younger and healthy people.
A high number of infections with the new variants increases both the risk of resistance to existing vaccines and renewed infection. SPD health politician Karl Lauterbach recently warned that, according to a Harvard University study, there are signs vaccine resistance is developing due to South African and Brazilian variants.
In the neighbouring country of the Czech Republic, where more than 10 percent of the population has already been infected and more than 25,000 people have died, the number of reinfections has risen massively. By the end of February, 1,400 cases were reported in which a person became infected again after having overcome an earlier infection. A month before, only 158 such cases were known. In Brazil, too, researchers put down the enormous infection figures partly because of reinfections with the P.1 variant.
Despite this dramatic development and the urgent warnings of scientists and medical experts, the ruling class is determined to continue its murderous policy placing profits before human lives.
The decision of German Chancellor Angela Merkel (Christian Democratic Union, CDU) on Wednesday to overturn the so-called “Easter Shutdown” just one day after it was announced makes this abundantly clear. At the same time, representatives of the federal and state governments have agreed to rigorously push ahead with reopenings under the guise of “model projects.”
In Saarland, for example, there are to be wide-ranging openings throughout the state after Easter without a time limit. From April 6 onwards, restrictions in restaurants as well as in sports and culture will be relaxed or lifted. Visits to theatres, cinemas, concerts and gyms will be possible again with a negative coronavirus test. Further reopenings are to take place two weeks later.
State Premier Tobias Hans (CDU) explained the decision to Bild: “One year after the coronavirus pandemic, we must now think of more than just closing and restricting.” Comments that the “emergency brake” would be pulled if the number of cases increased are nothing but hot air. So far, in all federal states, previously made decisions when to apply the “emergency brake,” such as an incidence rate of 100, have been thrown overboard with absurd justifications as soon as they were reached.
In Bavaria, state Premier Markus Söder (Christian Social Union, CSU) has announced that eight model regions will be opened.
In Thuringia, the government of state Premier Bodo Ramelow (Left Party) calls its criminal game with people’s health and lives a “small spring opening.” To this end, contact restrictions are to be massively relaxed at Easter in the federal state that currently has the largest coronavirus hotspots. State Health Minister Heike Werner (Left Party) justified this by saying that Easter was one of the most important festivals. From April 10, zoos and botanical gardens are to be reopened, and two days later the retail trade as well.
At the same time, there is no effort to vaccinate the population in sufficient numbers. Months after the vaccine was approved and delivered, only 4.5 percent of the population in Germany has been fully vaccinated. While billions were pumped into businesses immediately after the outbreak of the pandemic as part of the coronavirus emergency packages, hardly anything was done to build up the necessary production capacities and enable health care facilities to cope with the pandemic. Even now, according to data from the RKI and the federal and state health ministries, 33 percent of existing vaccination resources are not being used.
On Saturday, the Mexican Health Ministry published a report acknowledging that the COVID-19 death toll is at least 60 percent higher than the official count of 201,623 deaths. The country has confirmed 2.23 million cases, which are also vastly under-reported.
The ministry found that between December 20, 2019, and February 13, 2021, Mexico recorded a total of 417,002 excess deaths—i.e., above those “expected” based on the weekly averages from 2015 to 2019. Employing “word searches” of death certificates “where possible” that “mention words such as COVID-19, SARS-Cov-2, Coronavirus, among others” and an algorithmic extrapolation, the report estimates that 294,287 of these excess deaths are “associated to COVID-19.”
In this April 29, 2020 file photo, Aurora Azamar reacts after learning that her mother died, believed from complications related to the coronavirus, outside a public hospital in the Iztapalapa neighborhood of Mexico City. As Mexico approaches 200,000 in officially test-confirmed deaths from COVID-19, the real death toll is probably higher due to the country’s extremely low rate of testing. (AP Photo/Fernando Llano, File)
Since February 13, the government has confirmed 28,419 more deaths, raising the total to 322,706. This places Mexico as the country with the second highest death toll in the world after the United States.
While the figure is higher than the 312,206 confirmed COVID-19 deaths in Brazil, hospitals and morgues in the country have been overwhelmed for weeks and countless COVID-19 deaths, particularly in slums and remote areas, are also going unrecorded.
Mexican engineer Alejandro Cano found that if Mexico had maintained the same per capita excess mortality as Brazil—whose population is 60 percent greater—about 232,000 people would still be alive in Mexico.
Hundreds of thousands of lives have been sacrificed to defend the massive fortunes and profits of the financial and corporate oligarchies throughout the world. This has held equally true under both the administration of Brazil’s fascistic President Jair Bolsonaro and the purportedly “left” nationalist government of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) in Mexico.
The acknowledgement of a massive undercount stands as a confession by the ruling class to criminal premeditation in what the British Medical Journal aptly defined as social murder. While refusing to ramp up testing levels, the Mexican ruling elite has used phony official figures to justify premature reopenings.
Malaquías López, a member of the coronavirus task force at the Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), said to daily Reforma on Sunday: “We don’t know what the real undercount is because all reports are impossible to interpret. … We could even add to those cases the 182,301 records confirmed by the epidemiological monitoring system [but untested], whose inclusion in the excess toll is not indicated—we could be talking of a figure closer to 500,000 deaths. The number is brutal.”
Dr. Laurie Anne Ximénez-Fyvie, professor at UNAM, agreed that the new report still underestimates the real toll and warned on Twitter: “Now, we fear a third surge around the corner. If what is happening in Brazil and other parts of the world is an indicator for what awaits—and there is no reason to believe otherwise—we have difficult weeks and months ahead.”
Facing a potentially deadlier surge, Mexico has a negligible level of protection from the COVID-19 vaccines. It has administrated 6,724,789 doses, meaning that less than 3 percent of the population has been fully vaccinated.
By comparison, 143 million doses have been administered in the United States, where the Democratic President Joe Biden has continued the “America First” maxim of his fascistic predecessor Donald Trump. World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has described such hoarding of vaccines as a “moral outrage,” as health care workers and the elderly in poor countries are left to get sick, spread the virus and die.
Ghebreyesus explained that vaccine hoarding is “economically and epidemiologically self-defeating,” given the need to tackle the pandemic globally and prevent the surge of variants resistant to the vaccines.
A new variant, which is also present across the United States, Europe, and Africa, has already spread like wildfire in Mexico. The country reported that 87 percent of its cases studied in February corresponded to a B.1.1.222 variant of the virus first detected in the country in October.
After refusing to share its vaccines with Mexico, the Biden administration agreed to send 2.7 million doses of its stockpile of the AstraZeneca vaccine, which has yet to receive approval in the US. In exchange, the López Obrador administration agreed to increase its deployment of National Guard and Army troops on its border with Guatemala to block Central American refugees and migrants seeking to reach the United States.
The López Obrador administration has refused to make any serious effort to contain the pandemic. A brief order to shut down nonessential activities between April and May was only enforced by workers themselves, who carried out a wave of wildcat strikes that resulted in thousands of layoffs at the largely foreign-owned factories on the border with the United States.
After the Trump administration reopened US factories, AMLO agreed to declare all manufacturing “essential,” while allowing corporations and the trade unions to cover up outbreaks in the plants.
As a result, Mexican exports—which consist mostly of manufacturing products sent to the United States— were higher between September and December of 2020 than the previous year, and they are expected to jump 9 percent for all of 2021.
The unenforced lockdown was replaced by a semaphore system of alert levels, but the López Obrador administration was exposed for reporting false data to prevent or postpone shutdowns of production.
Even where restrictions were put in place, they were not accompanied by any program of economic aid. This compelled small business owners and informal workers to expose themselves and others to infections to avoid going hungry.
Public schools have remained closed, but 56 percent of students have had no access to online classes. The government has refused to invest in providing computers and Internet access to students.
The lack of assistance is being driven, on the one hand, by the interest of the ruling class in cutting back social spending in order to service the debt to financial vultures. On the other hand, the threat of having no income or assistance at all has been used to force workers to risk their lives at unsafe workplaces.
As a result, countless of the poorest families lost loved ones, as well as their sources of income. The Health Ministry has reported that the average age of COVID-19 victims is 55, roughly 20 years younger than in the US.
According to a recent London School of Economics study for Mexico City—which has been the epicenter of the pandemic in the country—the neighborhoods, or colonias, with the highest cases per capita were Álvaro Obregón and Milpa Alta, two of the poorest. The poorer colonias had five times higher prevalence of coronavirus.
At the same time, the government agency Coneval reports that in 2020, Mexico saw 9.8 million people fall below the poverty line, bringing the total of number of Mexicans officially defined as poor to 70.9 million people, or 56.7 percent of the population.
New Zealand’s public healthcare system is in a severe crisis. Despite the ever-present danger posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s government has refused to address the dire lack of staffing and capacity in the country’s hospitals.
The priority of the ruling Labour Party-Greens coalition has been to protect the wealthy from the consequences of the economic crisis at the expense of essential services, including healthcare. The Reserve Bank is printing tens of billions of dollars to buy bonds from the commercial banks, and the government has spent billions more to subsidise and bail out big businesses.
Ambulance vehicles of St John New Zealand at their Pitt Street, Auckland base (Wikimedia Commons)
New Zealand has so far not experienced mass deaths from the pandemic. However, repeated small outbreaks have highlighted failures at under-resourced quarantine facilities for people returning from overseas. The government’s response to an outbreak in February in South Auckland was highly negligent. It lifted an initial lockdown after just three days, allowing the virus to spread, before imposing another week-long lockdown.
Vaccinations for COVID-19 have barely begun. As of March 24, just 500 people had received both doses of the Pfizer vaccine, and 41,500 were partially vaccinated, out of five million people. The government says it will take all year to vaccinate everyone.
In a severe outbreak, hospitals would be overwhelmed. Already, they are under immense strain due to decades of austerity from National and Labour Party governments alike.
TVNZ reported on March 25 that in January and February several emergency departments (EDs) were full to capacity. Dr John Bonning, president of the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine, said the “crisis” would get worse as winter approaches. He predicted there will be “patients stuck in ambulances because there is no physical space in the emergency department.”
Stuff reported that one woman recently waited 10 hours to be seen in Christchurch Hospital’s ED “in excruciating pain” after injuring her knee. The number of patients going through the ED each week has soared to 2,264, compared to 1,977 for the same period last year.
A senior nurse in Christchurch told the World Socialist Web Site “a lot of staff turnover” is placing pressure on nurses. To deal with staffing shortages, management is continually shifting workers between different hospital wards, “which is really quite damaging to our numbers and the cohesion of the staff. We are missing the experienced person who knows our ward, and we get somebody who doesn’t know the ward, which actually increases our workload.”
Dunedin Hospital last week announced a “code black,” meaning every bed in the building was occupied. On March 24, RNZ reported that “there were 18 patients in the Emergency Department waiting for a bed, but only three beds were available on the wards.”
At Middlemore Hospital in South Auckland, an ED worker told Stuff that on one day “there were 55 people waiting for beds. There were patients who had been waiting for two days… It’s at such a dangerous level the patients aren’t getting the care they need through a lack of government funding.” The Counties Manukau District Health Board, which includes Middlemore, revealed this month that it has 150 unfilled vacancies for nurses.
NZ Medical Association chair Dr Kate Baddock told RNZ the lack of general practice doctors in the community was forcing patients to wait up to four weeks to see a doctor. Many had no choice but to resort to EDs.
Meanwhile, thousands of foreign healthcare workers are being kept out by the government’s border restrictions, which are among the harshest in the world. Stuff reported on March 17 that since the border closed a year ago, Immigration New Zealand had approved only 65 percent of entry applications from healthcare workers—4,501 out of 6,880 applicants. More than 40 percent of New Zealand’s doctors and 27 percent of nurses are overseas-trained.
A worker at Taranaki Base Hospital questioned the government’s claim that overall staffing is increasing. He told the WSWS many trained nurses had left the profession or “migrated to other countries like Australia, UK, Arab nations, due to the poor wages here.” He said hospitals had digital screens “showing the current patient versus nurses ratio. It is indicated with colour codes… Most of the time it shows orange or red which means a severe shortage.”
On March 26, Health Minister Andrew Little admitted to TVNZ that the country’s District Health Boards (DHBs) have a combined deficit of around $1 billion, but denied that this was a result of underfunding. Little blamed hospitals for “significant overspending,” and called for better “management,” i.e. more cuts.
The Ardern government’s austerity agenda is backed by the trade union bureaucracy. In 2018, the New Zealand Nurses Organisation (NZNO) imposed a sellout agreement, while echoing the government’s lies that there was no money to properly fund hospitals. The union had to overcome widespread opposition from 30,000 nurses and healthcare assistants, who held an historic nationwide strike against the deal. The agreement limited wage increases to 3 percent, and ignored members’ demands for safe staffing levels.
The NZNO is currently negotiating a new deal. An “indicative offer” from DHB representatives in late February was so abysmally low—a flat pay increase of $1,200 for staff earning less than $100,000—that the union did not put it to a membership vote. The proposal was really a pay cut, given the large increases in housing and other living costs.
The Taranaki hospital worker told the WSWS the offer was “insulting” but he did not expect the next one to be much better, given NZNO’s record of collaborating with the government. He also denounced the “huge remuneration” paid to the union’s top officials.
The offer is similar to the 1 percent offered to National Health Service workers in Britain, which has sparked mass anger and a petition demanding a 15 percent pay increase.
The crisis facing healthcare workers and patients underscores the urgent need for new organisations—rank-and-file committees independent of the union and controlled by hospital workers themselves—to organise a fightback against austerity by linking up with other workers in New Zealand and internationally. The unions are not workers’ organisations: they are controlled by a privileged upper-middle class layer, which defends the interests of capitalism.
Above all, the pandemic demonstrates that workers must fight for the socialist reorganisation of society. The tens of billions of dollars funneled to the rich must be expropriated and redirected to essential services, including a well-funded healthcare system, freely accessible to all, with a vast increase in staffing and high salaries for all healthcare workers.
Despite the repeated calls by international agencies for the fair and equitable distribution of these lifesaving treatments, the COVID-19 vaccines, vaccine nationalism is threatening a complete breakdown in the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In this regard, AstraZeneca has become the focal point of what is undoubtedly an already deeply rooted vaccine war spurred by the conflicting interests of the major imperialist powers, as well as their lesser rivals and client states.
Earlier this year, there was an open brawl among the European powers over AstraZeneca’s inability to meet delivery schedules to both Britain and the European Union. Last week European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said that the EU would use emergency powers to ensure it received promised vaccines. Britain is partly reliant on supplies from Europe and thus may not be able to deliver a second dose to those who have received it.
A vial of AstraZeneca vaccine is pictured in a pharmacy in Boulogne Billancourt, outside Paris, Monday, March 15, 2021. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)
The supply issue in Europe was exacerbated by apparently unwarranted claims of health problems among those receiving the AstraZeneca vaccine. Then the company ran afoul of US regulators when it published interim results of a US trial that showed 79 percent efficacy against symptomatic COVID-19 infections. While the Data and Safety Monitoring Board (DSMB) said the vaccine maker had provided “outdated information,” refiled results showed 76 percent efficacy, essentially no different, and a higher efficacy among the elderly.
Dr. Anthony Fauci described the company’s action as “an unforced error,” adding that “this is very likely a very good vaccine, and this kind of thing does … nothing but really cast some doubt about the vaccines and maybe contribute to the hesitancy.” Stephan Evans, professor of pharmaco-epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, told the Guardian, “I think some of the difficulties were that the trials were being set up by [AstraZeneca] to answer public health questions, whereas clearly Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna’s trials in the US were set up to get FDA approval.”
The in-fighting, hostility, and derisory comments made by European government leaders directed against AstraZeneca, which contributed to popular concerns raised over its efficacy and safety, demonstrate the reactionary role of rival capitalist nation-states in the face of the pandemic There is no globally coordinated response to the pandemic, to the point that such tensions undermine distribution and utilization of what health officials regard as an efficacious and effective vaccine.
What the scientists say about AstraZeneca
A statement of support published on February 26 by the World Health Organization regarding AstraZeneca’s vaccine explains, “Efficacy shown in clinical trials in participants who received the full series of vaccine (2 doses) irrespective of the interval between the doses was 63.1%, based on a median follow-up of 80 days, but tended to be higher when this interval was longer. The data reviewed at this time support the conclusion that the known and potential benefits of ChAdOx1-S/nCoV-19 [recombinant] vaccine outweigh the known and potential risks.”
The assessment was based on a study published in The Lancet on February 19, 2021, on the “immunogenicity and efficacy” of the AstraZeneca vaccine—a pooled analysis of four randomized trials. Though it is unusual to pool these studies, it provides the context for an assessment of the vaccine. The vaccine’s primary dosing regimen is considered to consist of two standard doses given at an interval of 4 to 12 weeks, with the spacing of 12 weeks seeming to be optimal.
According to the study, “The primary outcome was virologically confirmed symptomatic COVID-19 disease, defined as a nucleic acid amplification test (NAAT)-positive swab combined with at least one qualifying symptom (fever equal to or greater than 37.8 degrees Celsius, cough, shortness of breath, loss of smell or taste). The primary analysis was of cases occurring more than 14 days after the second dose.”
When comparing vaccines, it is critical to take note of the primary outcome that is being measured. This makes the reported results in a particular study challenging to compare with other trials. When the mainstream media implies one vaccine is superior to another, simply by comparing their reported efficacy numbers, this is misleading. A genuinely scientific objective measure of superiority would require a head-to-head trial between vaccine candidates to confirm such assertions. Efficacy endpoints mainly indicate the vaccine is a viable candidate for broader use.
For instance, in the case of the Moderna vaccine trial, which cited an efficacy of 94 percent, Moderna made the diagnosis of COVID-19 in a participant if they had at least two symptoms with a fever considered equal to or greater than 38 degrees Celsius. The Moderna trial also allowed one symptom with confirmatory nasal swabs or saliva samples for viral confirmation. Participants were encouraged to self-report symptoms, a process that could bias these trials.
AstraZeneca’s overall efficacy was found to be 63.1 percent in the initial trial. Further evaluation, however, found that the vaccine’s efficacy after a single standard dose improved over time. By day 90, the efficacy had risen to 76 percent without evidence of waning of protection. A two-dose regimen with a 12-week interval raised the efficacy to 81.3 percent, suggesting that the 12-week gap is optimal. This has become the new accepted dosing regimen.
More importantly, both in the Moderna and AstraZeneca trials, no severe COVID-19 cases or hospitalizations were reported 14 days after those participants had completed their vaccine regimen. This means both prevented serious disease from developing in the participants, the most critical aspect of these treatments. These findings were recently confirmed in the trial conducted in the Americas where efficacy was found to be 76 percent and no severe disease or hospitalizations occurred. These studies also indicated that the efficacy was higher for older participants.
Efficacy and effectiveness
There are two critical and distinct concepts in vaccine terminology: efficacy and effectiveness. According to the Gavi vaccine alliance, “Efficacy is the degree to which a vaccine prevents disease, and possibly also the transmission, under ideal and controlled circumstances. … Effectiveness meanwhile refers to how well it performs in the real world.”
Vaccines may differ in efficacy by a considerable degree in a controlled trial, while being roughly equal in effectiveness once deployed in daily life. This appears to be the case with the AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, any of which should be taken as soon as available. The same considerations seem to apply, by the way, to the Russian and Chinese vaccines.
The author of a recent Scottish trial looked at the effectiveness of a single dose of the Pfizer or AstraZeneca vaccines in preventing hospital admissions. As they noted, “There is an urgent need to study the ‘real-world’ effects of these vaccines.” They conducted a prospective study using their Early Pandemic Evaluation and Enhanced Surveillance of COVID-19 database linking vaccinations to hospitalization among 5.4 million people, or 99 percent of the population. Their primary endpoint was hospital admission within 28 days of a positive PCR test for COVID-19.
Between December 8, 2020, and February 15, 2021, more than 1.1 million people (35 percent) had received at least one jab of a vaccine. Rapid uptake (production of antibodies to COVID-19) was seen among those 80 years or older. This group also had higher uptake from the AstraZeneca vaccine. Those under 65 had higher uptake from the Pfizer vaccine.
Vaccine effectiveness with just a single dose increased over time, peaking at day 28 to 34 post-vaccination for both vaccines. While the Pfizer vaccine was associated with an 85 percent reduction in hospital admissions for COVID-19, there was a 94 percent reduction in admissions for those who received the AstraZeneca vaccine. Statistically, both vaccines were equally effective. The EMA has reviewed the data and has noted that both vaccines offer similar protection. Still, prospective phase four trials remain a critical factor in appraising these vaccines on a global scale.
Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, chief scientist at WHO, commenting on recent modeling studies on the AstraZeneca vaccine, said, “There was data from the clinical trials which suggested that the longer the interval, at least up to 12 weeks, the better the immune response and the better the efficacy of the vaccine. So, there is also modeling done to show if you have a limited number of vaccine doses, and you want to protect the population, particularly the high-risk groups, the older groups, and so on, countries like the UK have taken the approach of vaccinating more people with available vaccines and giving the second dose at a time around 12 weeks. The SAGE group that advises the WHO recommended a gap of eight to 12 weeks between the first and second dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine. And this was based on an analysis of the data, both from the immunogenicity data and efficacy data. And we are getting more data from the actual rollout of the vaccines in countries which have opted to use this delayed approach showing that the first dose is providing significant protection against hospitalization and disease. So, it seems like a good strategy to protect more people more quickly. But a second dose must be given.”
Vaccines and variants
An additional and perhaps critically important issue is how well the six major vaccines perform against variants of COVID-19 that have emerged because of the herd immunity policy adopted by the major imperialist powers, which has allowed the vaccine ample time and space to mutate into different versions, threatening to adapt in ways that would undermine the effectiveness of the vaccines.
There is some hopeful evidence emerging that people with prior infections or vaccinations may develop a robust cellular immunity to the new variants. A recent study released in preprint form from La Jolla, California, on March 1, found that T-cell responses from patients vaccinated with the mRNA vaccines or previously infected with the wild-type variants continued to have a robust response against the CAL.20C, B.1.1.7, P.1, and B.1.351 variants.
The authors wrote, “The data provide some positive news in light of justified concern over the impact of SARS-CoV-2 variants of concerns on efforts to control and eliminate the present pandemic. While it is not anticipated that circulatory memory T cells would be effective in preventing SARS-CoV-2 infections, it is plausible that they can reduce COVID-19 severity.”
However, current developments with the continuing surge in Brazil with the P.1 variant should be a dire warning of the catastrophic dangers of the half-hearted measures and rhetorical responses by many governments to the pandemic.
Brazil is in the throes of a catastrophic surge that has brought the entire country’s health system into a state of collapse, and daily death tolls are exceeding 3,000. Recent evidence has emerged that suggests that the P.1 variant’s transmissibility is far higher than the B.1.1.7 at 2 to 2.5 times higher than the wild type. It is now also known to cause reinfection in 25 to 63 percent of people with prior infections with the coronavirus. The spillover into countries like Chile and Uruguay pose tremendous global health risks.
Studies show that the variants like those from South Africa and Brazil can evade the protective immunity elicited by previous infections. It has also raised concerns that the current vaccines may not be as effective. Data on the effectiveness of the current vaccines against these variants are lacking, and sorely needed.
These more transmissible variants have evolved under positive selection pressures that coincided with the winter surges. It appears that the Receptor Binding Domain of the spike protein is designed to allow for evolutionary convergence of different SARS-CoV-2 viruses mutating along similar adaptive lines, conferring a survival advantage over previous lineages. With these new strains of the SARS-CoV-2 becoming dominant across several regions across the globe, lifting restrictions while the vaccination campaigns are underway is a recipe for disaster.
Vaccines and the poor countries
A major concern, both from the standpoint of epidemiology and of social justice, is the inability of billions of people in the poor countries to gain access to or even to afford purchase of the life-saving vaccines that have been developed so rapidly in the United States, Europe, Russia and China. The conflict over the AstraZeneca vaccine has disrupted efforts to distribute the vaccines throughout Latin America, Africa and Asia.
Speaking of the international COVAX facility, created to provide no-cost coronavirus vaccines to the poorest countries, Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus of the World Health Organization said March 26, “COVAX is ready to deliver, but we can’t deliver vaccines we don’t have. As you know, bilateral deals, export bans, vaccine nationalism, and vaccine diplomacy have caused distortions in the market, with gross inequities in supply and demand. Increased demand for vaccines has led to delays in securing tens of millions of doses that COVAX was counting on.”
Aggravating matters most recently, Indian officials announced they had suspended exports of the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine, potentially for several weeks, to redirect them to their own population, as coronavirus cases were rising explosively. The Serum Institute was providing the lion’s share of the vaccine to the COVAX facility and the rest of the world. This will only further exacerbate the limited supplies that exist and lead to more entrenched trade restrictions and bottlenecking of critical materials. To place the AstraZeneca vaccine in this critical context it should be noted that it has been given conditional marketing or emergency-use authorization in more than 70 countries, according to the Guardian, which are eagerly waiting their turn.
Whether the country is industrialized or underdeveloped, vaccines alone are not sufficient to fight the pandemic. The central question is the prevention and rolling back of the infection, both to save lives and to prevent COVID-19 from mutating any further and developing new and more terrible features.
Dr. Katherine O’Brien, Director of Immunizations, Vaccines, and Biologics at the World Health Organization, noted at a March 26 press conference, “As everybody knows, the evidence on the vaccines is really clear about the prevention of disease, certainly the prevention of severe disease and death for these vaccines. But the part of the evidence that is still rolling in is the degree to which they also protect against getting infected. Clearly, to get disease you have to get infected, but just because you get infected doesn’t mean you get disease. But it does mean you can transmit to somebody else … as vaccines are rolling out, there are many people in the community who are not vaccinated and not protected against disease.”
She added, “Continuation of the measures to avoid transmission even if you are not symptomatic is so incredibly important as we are rolling out vaccines and that increase in immunity in the population is continuing. We also have the variants of concern (VOC) and we don’t have information that is firm and clear about the degree to which each of these vaccines against each VOC may have some reduction or change in the ability they have to protect against infection or disease … this is the time when we should do everything possible to keep transmission low because it is that low transmission that will also impede and avoid the emergence of other variants.”
Conclusion
The ruling class sees vaccines as a mechanism to check the explosive social situation that exists. The working class should accept all the vaccines because they are life-saving. But they should understand that it isn’t being done because the ruling class cares an iota for them.
Precisely in this regard, such myopic strategies are exacerbating the population’s reluctance to accept these vaccines, while creating dangerous conditions such as school reopening and relaxing mitigation efforts, which are selecting for newer, more virulent mutations of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Even though just one year has passed, the coronavirus still has significant energy to wreak havoc on communities worldwide.
At the World Health Organization’s virtual COVID-19 press conference on March 1, 2021, Director-General Ghebreyesus said, “It is regrettable that some countries continue to prioritize younger and healthier adults in their own populations ahead of health workers and older people elsewhere. Countries are not in a race with each other. This is a common race against the virus. We are not asking countries to put their own people at risk. We are asking all countries to be part of a global effort to suppress the virus everywhere. … We urge all governments and individuals to remember that vaccines alone will not keep you safe.”
The contrast between the director-general’s comments and the current strategy of vaccine nationalism is stark. An international plan for vaccine deployment should prioritize frontline health workers and the elderly and most vulnerable in all countries.
Evidence is emerging that the vaccines appear to limit onward transmission and prove effective in preventing severe disease and hospitalization. The first and most crucial phase in an international response to the COVID-19 pandemic is minimizing death and suffering to the greatest extent possible.
The implication behind this is simple; the intellectual property held by these giant pharmaceutical companies must be made publicly available to all nations. In turn, every country that can manufacture the vaccine or produce the necessary ingredients for their production, including supplemental materials such as syringes, vials, etc., must work in concert to mass-produce and deliver these life-saving treatments where they are required.
Simultaneously, all regions must initiate a mass vaccination program while working closely with their public health officials and health systems to ensure these measures are carried out safely and efficiently. This means that the virus must be suppressed to the greatest extent possible while a rational, systematic approach to vaccine delivery and administration is established. Such an initiative can only come from the working class and its seizure of power on the basis of an international socialist program.
