Declaring COVID-19 “endemic,” Biden administration oversees policy of forced mass infection

Evan Blake

The United States is currently mired in its ninth wave of mass infection since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, with the population now completely abandoned by the powers that be. A policy of forced infection has emerged, in which all public health measures have been scrapped, and the most basic protection of mask-wearing is being criminalized in a growing number of counties and states.

Wastewater data show that over 1.2 million Americans are being infected with COVID-19 every day. Hospitalizations are climbing, in particular, among children and the elderly, while official deaths are approaching 1,000 per week. Excess deaths, a more accurate measure of the real death toll attributable to COVID-19, stand at over 500 per day, with the cumulative death toll in the US nearing 1.5 million. Long COVID, an array of symptoms which are often debilitating, now affects over 20 million Americans and over 400 million people globally.

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According to wastewater modeler Dr. Mike Hoerger, there have been over 1.1 billion cumulative COVID-19 infections in the United States alone, with the average American infected three or four times. With multiple studies showing that each reinfection compounds one’s risk of Long COVID and other adverse health events such as strokes or heart attacks, the current trajectory of the “forever COVID” policy is towards ever-broadening mass debilitation and death on a world scale.

Under these conditions, on August 23 top officials from America’s leading public health agencies held an extraordinary press conference, which very explicitly outlined the Biden administration’s criminal “forever COVID” policy.

Leading the event was Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Dr. Mandy Cohen, who bluntly declared that COVID-19 “is endemic, it is here with us.” This is the first time a top public health official has proclaimed COVID-19 to be “endemic,” after Drs. Anthony Fauci, Rochelle Walensky and Ashish Jha repeatedly and falsely said that the virus was “in the process” of becoming endemic since the emergence of the Omicron variant in late 2021.

An endemic disease is one which is largely contained, predictable and not disruptive to the basic functioning of society. None of this applies to COVID-19, which is spreading like wildfire almost year-round, causing widespread damage to the health of the population, as well as mass absenteeism and economic disruption to the tune of over $1 trillion annually.

After claiming that COVID-19 is “endemic,” Cohen hastened to add, “We need to protect ourselves. And we have the tools to do it, we just need to use them.”

Dr. Mandy Cohen, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention since July 10, 2023 [AP Photo/Bryan Anderson]

The reality is that the public health “tools” necessary to mitigate the dangers of COVID-19, let alone stop the pandemic, have been systematically stigmatized, denied and even criminalized by the entire political establishment. The capitalist state, beholden to the profit interests of Wall Street and corporate America, has dismantled all pandemic surveillance and left the population to fend for themselves. Those who remain vigilant and seek to avoid infection are increasingly isolated and unable to protect themselves amid a sea of viral transmission.

Over the course of the press conference, it became abundantly clear that the only “tool” advocated by the Biden administration are new vaccines designed for the KP.2 variant, which are currently being rolled out. The officials present covered up the fact that these vaccines are too little, too late, given that the KP.3.1.1 variant is now dominant, with KP.2 accounting for just 3.2 percent of cases nationally, and that the current wave appears to be just peaking.

Furthermore, in the course of the press conference it became clear that the latest vaccines will not be guaranteed to everyone, with Cohen stating that uninsured Americans (over 26 million people) will have to try to navigate their local or county public health bureaucracy or pay upwards of $120 for the shot. No speaker seriously addressed the fact that vaccine uptake is abysmally low, the product of bipartisan anti-vaccine disinformation and propaganda portraying the pandemic as over.

Not once in the course of the press conference was the word “mask” even mentioned, despite the fact that numerous studies have proven that well-fitting N95 respirators can block the transmission of COVID-19 and all other airborne pathogens.

In fact, just two days after the CDC press conference, police arrested an 18 year old in Nassau County, New York, for wearing a ski mask, after a county-wide mask ban was put in place earlier this month. Those arrested for wearing masks can face a fine of up to $1,000, up to a year in jail or both. A similar mask ban is now in effect in North Carolina, while cities including Los Angeles have floated the idea of such bans.

Another “tool” increasingly unavailable or impossible for average Americans to access is Paxlovid, one of the only effective treatments for COVID-19. In her remarks, Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) official Dawn O’Connell noted that starting in 2025 Pfizer will entirely control the distribution of Paxlovid. The pharmaceutical giant will undoubtedly charge the full price for the drug, which costs upwards of $1,500.

When asked by a reporter about the latest science on the risks of reinfection with COVID-19, Cohen downplayed the dangers and reiterated the vaccine-only strategy of the Biden administration, saying nothing about the need to wear masks to prevent transmission. The reality is that multiple studies have shown that each reinfection heightens one’s risk of developing Long COVID, which is only slightly mitigated by vaccination.

The response of the Biden administration to the latest wave of mass infection reaffirms that capitalism is descending into barbarism, with centuries of advances in science and public health trampled upon and discarded. Mass infection with a preventable illness is no longer to be prevented, but rather encouraged.

While the Democrats and Republicans bear primary responsibility for this policy of death, they are joined by the pseudo-left presidential campaigns of the Green Party’s Jill Stein and independent candidate Cornel West. Both have tailored their rhetoric to the far-right anti-vaccine constituency cultivated by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who himself has endorsed the “herd immunity” pioneer Donald Trump.

Israel’s West Bank offensive continues

Thomas Scripps

Israel’s intensified ethnic cleansing in the West Bank continued Thursday, taking the death toll since the military operation began to at least 18.

A bulldozer from the Israeli forces moves on a street during a military operation in the West Bank refugee camp of Al-Faraa, Wednesday, Aug. 28, 2024. [AP Photo/Nasser Nasser]

Five were killed in a mosque in the Tulkarem refugee camp, apparently amid a firefight. The camp was placed under siege by the Israeli military, with soldiers including special forces carrying out house raids, snipers taking up positions on rooftops and aircraft flying low overhead. The Thabet Thabet Governmental Hospital and al-Israa Specialised Hospital were blockaded, and the Palestinian Red Crescent prevented from entering the camp to douse fires and help the injured.

There were overnight raids in Far’a, al-Khader, Arroub, Nur Sham, Nablus and Nabi Saleh, with multiple Palestinians reported injured by shooting, beatings or fire. Electricity and Internet services were cut in a large swathe of Jenin city, where snipers shot “anyone who is moving” according to Mohammed al-Atrash of Al Jazeera Arabic, reporting from the scene. The Jenin Governmental Hospital was besieged, with ambulances blocked.

The huge deployment of lethal military force has been coupled with calls for mass evictions, with Foreign Minister Israel Katz leading the pack. He repeated his threats today, saying removals were necessary for the “dismantling of terror infrastructures” which must be accomplished “by all necessary means”.

Multiple organisations have condemned the offensive. The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, Al-Haq, and Al Mezan Center for Human Rights issued a joint statement warning of “even more escalated violence in the West Bank, with the employment of tactics that mirror those used in Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, particularly attacks on hospitals and healthcare facilities, and the use of excessive and indiscriminate force.”

A statement issued on behalf of United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said he was “deeply concerned by the latest developments in the occupied West Bank, including Israel's launch today of large-scale military operations in Jenin, Tulkarm and Tubas governorates, involving the use of airstrikes, which resulted in casualties and damage to civilian infrastructure. He strongly condemns the loss of lives, including of children.”

Amnesty International’s Erika Guevara explained that the “military assault on cities and towns across the occupied West Bank follows an escalation in unlawful killings by Israeli forces in recent months,” a “horrifying spike in lethal force by Israeli forces and violent state-backed settler attacks”.

She continued, “It is likely that these operations will result in an increase in forced displacement, destruction of critical infrastructure and measures of collective punishment, which have been key pillars of Israel’s system of apartheid against Palestinians and of its unlawful occupation of the Occupied Palestinian Territory.”

Over 600 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank by the Israeli military since October 7, over a fifth of them by airstrikes. Among the dead are more than 140 children. Just in the days August 20-26, before the latest assault began, 13 Palestinians were killed, eight in airstrikes, including four children.

Close to 10,000 have been arrested, held in prisons and detentions centres where abuses of human rights including torture and sexual violence are endemic.

Meanwhile, 12.7 square kilometres of land seizures have been officially approved by the Israeli government—the largest area in three decades. This process is spearheaded by far-right Israeli settlers who have carried out 1,270 attacks against Palestinians documented by the UN in the last 10 months, leading to 11 deaths and driving many communities out of their homes.

On Thursday, several dozen settlers staged a provocation in the al-Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem again, under the protection of Israeli security forces and while they restricted the entry of Palestinian worshippers—under conditions of an effective lockdown of Palestinian quarters of the Old City.

Former director of Human Rights Watch Kenneth Roth told Al Jazeera, “Frankly, the dream of the far-right ministers in Netanyahu’s government is to ‘solve the problem’ of the West Bank. ‘Solve the problem’ of the apartheid regime that Israel is maintaining there, by just getting rid of the Palestinians… a massive war crime.”

This is true, but the project is shared by the whole Netanyahu regime currently implementing it. The gleefully vicious comments of the likes of Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich serve as a convenient scapegoat for sections of the ruling class keen to be seen condemning Israeli actions from time to time but totally committed to supporting its government.

The apartheid, Jewish supremacist character of the state was highlighted by the treatment even of one of the recently returned hostages—in whose name Israel is waging its war. Kaid Farhan al-Kadi, the latest hostage to be brought back alive, is returning to a demolition notice.

Al-Kadi is one of Israel’s 300,000 heavily discriminated against Bedouin Arabs. Seventy percent of the residents are being evicted from his home village Khirbet Karkur—among the one-third of Bedouin Arab settlements the Israeli government intends to destroy. A local authority spokesperson cynically commented that Al-Kadi and his family would be exempt “in light of the situation”.

Over 1,300 Bedouin homes have been demolished in the first half of 2024, a 50 percent increase over the same period in 2022, according to the Negev Coexistence Forum for Civil Equality.

While the war on the West Bank unfolds, scores of people continue to be killed in Gaza every day, amid a worsening humanitarian disaster. Israeli strikes killed and wounded Palestinians, including women and children, across the Strip, in Khan Younis, Rafah, Gaza City, the Nuseirat refugee camp and Deir el-Balah.

Hina Khoudary, reporting for Al Jazeera, described how “eight Palestinians were killed when Israeli forces targeted al-Amal Hotel. It was obvious that displaced Palestinians were sheltering there, and they burned alive because no one was there to rescue them.” The ability of the Gaza Civil Defence to respond to these incidents has been massively cut back by Israel’s attacks on ambulances and fire trucks and on shops supplying spare parts.

Conditions for the almost entirely displaced population are so dire that Gaza has recorded its first polio case in 25 years, a 10-month-old baby now partially paralyzed by the infection, sparking fears of an epidemic. Hepatitis A is already spreading rapidly, with 40,000 cases reported earlier this month. For three months, the Israeli government has blocked Doctors Without Borders’ efforts to import 4,000 hygiene kits containing soap, toothbrushes, shampoo, and laundry powder.

Vials of polio vaccine have now been sent to Gaza but cannot be distributed due to the chaos of Israel’s repeated displacement and bombardment of the population. The issue has built up steam in the corporate media, where capitalist politicians are trying to gain a reputation for humanitarianism by insisting children must have the opportunity to be vaccinated before being buried under rubble.

Netanyahu has dismissed talk of any pause in the genocide, suggesting only the “designation of specific places” for vaccinations, a designation whose only practical impact is to require the Israeli military to claim their bombing is “accidental”.

IV fluid shortages intensify crisis in Australian healthcare system

John Mackay & Maria Smith

Serious shortages of essential intravenous (IV) fluids in Australia and subsequent rationing in hospitals have caused significant concern among medical professionals and deepening pressures on the already underfunded and understaffed healthcare system.

Nurse preparing to administer IV fluid to hospital patient [Photo: anzcog.edu.au]

On Tuesday, federal Health Minister Mark Butler announced that the Labor government had “secured” the supply of an additional 22 million IV fluid bags over the next six months. Butler claimed this would be “more than enough” to meet demand.

However, Butler gave no indication of when the additional fluids would actually be delivered. In a clear indication that the shortage is by no means over, he said, “there is generally advice going through the system that IV fluids should be used judiciously at this stage.”

Australia and New Zealand College of Anaesthetists (ANZCA) President David Story told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) doctors were “very pleased” to hear that more fluids had been sourced. But he warned, “The details are yet to be released. … I don’t think [the additional fluids] will be available tomorrow.”

Late last month Australian Medical Association (AMA) President Professor Steve Robson told the media that the shortages could see the healthcare system come to a “grinding halt,” with disruptions to surgery very likely.

“This lack of supply is unprecedented. The number of patients potentially affected would be unbelievable,” he said. “It would affect anaesthesia, surgery, chemotherapy, emergency departments, managing people with acute infectious illness in hospital ... (and) paediatric intensive care.” Robson’s comments were echoed by other peak professional health bodies. including the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons, which called for “a nationally co-ordinated strategy” for the future procurement of vital medicine, to be “informed by healthcare professionals.”

The IV fluids in short supply are 0.9 percent saline, a similar salt concentration to what occurs naturally in the body, and Hartman’s solution, which combines a range of salts, including potassium and calcium. These are vital to many aspects of medical practice in hospital settings with some hospitals often requiring hundreds of bags per day.

The products are crucial to maintaining blood volume for the body’s normal function and to combat dehydration, which can lead to kidney damage and other complications. They are also necessary for administering anaesthetics and other drugs, including during surgical procedures, and for delivering nutrients to patients who cannot eat or drink.

The shortages have resulted in rationing in hospitals across the country. In late July, one New South Wales health district directed doctors to use “conservation strategies” to manage the shortage, including restricting some solutions for use in resuscitation, intensive care and surgery, minimising fasting in surgical patients to reduce the need for fluid replacement and using oral fluids wherever possible.

This month, the Age newspaper cited a Royal Melbourne Hospital internal memo ordering a reduction of IV fluid usage by 20 percent. “We ask that all staff use IV fluids judiciously and where clinically appropriate,” it said.

ANZCA has also advised hospitals to reduce consumption of IV fluids during operations where there may be limited or minimal benefit. “There needs to be much greater transparency of what’s happening at individual states, but to a certain degree, individual hospitals, and there needs to be honest discussions about where places may need to cease elective surgery if required,” a college spokesperson said.

In a joint statement with the Australian Society of Anaesthetists on Wednesday, ANZCA wrote: “No widespread cancellations of elective procedures have been required, as was feared earlier on. Nevertheless, anaesthetists are being asked to consider the need for preoperative IV fluids on a patient-by-patient basis, and to be judicious in their use.”

The Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) regulates medicines and medical devices for safety, quality and effectiveness in Australia. While the TGA claimed in mid-July that the shortages were the result of “global shortages,” it provided no detailed information to back this claim. In fact, there are no global shortages, but some international transport disruptions with the only manufacturer in Australia, US-based Baxter, attempted to make up the shortfall.

Butler claimed this week that Baxter was “running their lines at more than 105 percent” and would expand its local manufacturing plant in the coming weeks.

It remains unclear when authorities were first alerted to the shortage and precisely what is behind it. According to the ABC, the Tasmanian Department of Health voiced its concerns about shortages with the TGA more than 18 months ago.

While the TGA monitors health products from the standpoint of safety, the body is not charged with monitoring supply. Purchasing of medicines is left to the individual states with no federal government oversight. Butler initially claimed that the government was “managing [the shortage] pretty well.” This line was repeated by Finance Minister Katy Gallagher, who recently told parliament that the government was providing “nationally consistent clinical guidance.” She then denounced the Liberal-National opposition for what she claimed was “a fear and scare campaign” in the community.

Confronted with rising media coverage about the impact of IV fluid shortages on hospitals across the country, Butler called an emergency meeting of state and territory health ministers on August 16, established a “Response Group” and sought to reassure the media that the lack of IV fluids was easing.

Despite Butler’s announcement this week of the newly secured IV supplies, the Response Group “is continuing to meet on a weekly basis, or more frequently if required.” This is a clear sign that there remains a high level of concern over the constrained supply.

What the IV fluid shortages reveal is that there is no effective monitoring system for identifying stock supplies of life-saving treatments that are essential for proper management of public health. Supply has been left to “market forces”—i.e., the demands of the profit system and the corporations’ efforts to manage supply to maximise their earnings.

The IV fluid crisis is a manifestation of the breakdown of Australia’s public healthcare system impacted by years of privatisation, government cost-cutting, understaffing and other problems worsened by COVID-19.

The profit-driven abolition of all scientific and public health safety strategies to deal with COVID-19, led by Labor federal and state governments, with support from the healthcare unions, has caused more than 25,000 deaths, millions of infections, and kept the healthcare system in a continuous state of crisis for more than four years.

The dangerous lack of IV fluids is not an aberration but another example of the incompatibility of capitalism with the basic needs of the population, including healthcare.

Chinese bond market surge points to economic and financial problems

Nick Beams

The ongoing slowdown in the Chinese economy, the outcome of the ending of its previous growth model based on property and construction, is throwing up a set of problems in the financial system centred on the bond market.

An elderly woman passes by workers dismantling scaffolding at a shopping mall in Beijing, January 17, 2024 [AP Photo/Ng Han Guan]

The slowing of the economy suggests that government and financial authorities would like to see a lowering of interest rates to provide some economic stimulus. But instead, the People’s Bank of China (PBoC) is moving in the opposite direction, at least as far as the bond market is concerned. (The price of bonds and their yield move in the opposite direction.)

But rather than welcoming the lowering of interest rates this produces, the central bank has been moving in the opposite direction for the past several months including selling bonds in order to lower their price and push up their yields.

Earlier this month, it even went so far as to “name and shame” a group of four rural banks for buying government bonds which the Financial Times (FT) characterised as a “most unusual sin” and likened it to “punishing a child for tidying up their bedroom.”

However, this seemingly irrational behaviour does have an objective foundation. The PBoC is fearful that if banks load up on bonds, then they will suffer major losses if interest rates start to rise, and the value of their holdings falls.

This could then lead to the same kind of crisis which hit the US Silicon Valley Bank in March 2023 when, as a result of interest rate rises by the US Federal Reserve, the value of its bond holdings fell, leading to a run on the bank and forcing it under.

The crisis, which threatened to spread, was only halted through intervention by government authorities—the Treasury, the Fed and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation—in which they gave an implicit guarantee that uninsured depositors throughout the banking system would not lose their money. (Uninsured deposits are those greater than $US250,000.)

At the same time there is an objective reason for the rush into bonds. As the FT noted in a recent article, prices in China are falling and that increases the return to be made by holding bonds after this is taken into account.

It pointed out that while the consumer price index (CPI) has been slightly positive, the deflator for the measurement of GDP has been negative for five consecutive quarters, and given that investment is a huge share of China’s economy, the deflator is likely a more accurate measure of overall prices than the CPI.

The article said that with a gloomy economic outlook—no end in sight for the housing market downturn, domestic companies hit by weak consumption and the problems resulting from the government crackdown on high-tech companies such as Alibaba and Tencent—“it seems wholly rational for Chinese investors to flock into bonds and gold.”

The extent of this movement was outlined in a Wall Street Journal article this week. It said that according to their half-year reports, “investment gains from government bonds now make up a large chunk of profits for some smaller city-level commercial banks.”

As an example, it cited the case of the Jiangsu Kunshan Rural Commercial Bank. Its holdings of government-bond investments jumped from $2.9 billion at the end of 2022 to $5.3 billion at the end of last year.

For the average Chinese investor bonds were attractive because the property market is in a “downward spiral,” the stock market is “on track for a fourth straight yearly decline” and capital controls mean it is difficult to invest much overseas.

The government has tried to take some measures to boost the property market, but they have had little effect and are generally regarded as being insufficient, either to increase housing demand or bolster the financial position of developers.

Goldman Sachs has estimated that the stock of unsold new housing could be up to 30 times the level of average monthly sales.

There have been repeated calls from many sources for the government to undertake stimulus measures to boost the economy. But no major stimulus program is going to be undertaken because authorities fear this this will only lead to greater debt and cause problems for the financial system.

Central government debt is relatively low, coming in around 24 percent of GDP. But the debts of local government authorities, which are responsible for much of government spending, amount to at least 93 percent of GDP, and are rising.

The central government policy is the development of “high quality productive forces” and the expansion of high-tech exports to the world market.

This export drive, however, does little or nothing to boost the domestic economy. It is also running into problems because of the US imposed of tariffs against cheaper Chinese goods—electric vehicles being one of the major items. Overall while the volume of exports may be rising, the revenue is not because of the general slowdown in the world economy.

The interconnected economic and financial problems have social and political implications. The Xi Jinping regime, which represents the oligarchy that had developed with the restoration of capitalism, rests on a base of better-off sections of the middle class with which it has a kind of social contract—the repressive character of the regime is tolerated insofar as it can deliver a growing economy, with prospects for their social advancement and their children.

But with the growth of economic problems, that is coming apart and the fear of the ruling oligarchy is that through the cracks opposition from the 400 million strong working class may emerge.

These political considerations are also at work in the attempt to halt bond-buying because the fall in their yield implies a degree of economic weakness, sending out a dangerous message regarding political stability.

This week the China Dissent Monitor published by the US Freedom House organisation reported an 18 percent increase in cases of dissent for the second quarter of the year compared to 2023.

Such data, coming from a right-wing organisation, should be taken with a grain of salt. But they are in line with the trend of economic developments. According to the report, some 44 percent of dissent incidents related to labour and 21 percent involved aggrieved homeowners. This dissent has yet to threaten the regime, but it could well develop further.

As the head of the Dissent Monitor, Kevin Slaten, noted there was a certain acceptance of the authoritarian nature of the regime as a “trade-off for economic prosperity” but this could be undermined as slowing economic growth impacted more people.

Finance capital sucking the lifeblood out of impoverished countries

Nick Beams

The International Monetary Fund has published a series of blogs showing the crippling effects of debt repayments on a wide range of lower-income and developing counties which have significantly worsened over the past four years, not least because of the impact of the COVID crisis.

International Monetary Fund annual meeting in Washington, 2022. [AP Photo/Patrick Semansky]

In a post at the beginning of this month, it noted that low-income countries have been hit the hardest by the “economic scarring of the pandemic, conflicts around the world and the abrupt rise in global interest rates.”

But there is another side to the poverty, hunger and misery this is causing. Finance capital is reaping benefits as it sucks in money like a giant vacuum cleaner.

According to the IMF, “The median low-income country is spending over twice as much on debt service to foreign creditors as a share of revenue than it did 10 years ago—roughly 14 percent at the end of 2023 from 6 percent 10 years earlier.”

For some countries the proportion is much higher, ranging up to 25 percent. At the start of this year, the World Bank reported that the total debt service for low-income countries and certain middle-income nations was estimated to be $185 billion when combined with domestic debt repayments.

“This figure is higher, on average, than their combined public spending on health, education and infrastructure,” it said.

Last December, the World Bank issued a report showing the devastating impact on developing countries of interest rate hikes, lifted to their highest levels in four decades. In 2022 they spent a record $443.5 billion to service their debts. It found that about 60 percent of all low-income countries were at high-risk debt distress or close to it.

In the previous three years, there had been 18 sovereign debt defaults in developing countries, more than the number recorded over the previous two decades.

In a report last October, the international aid agency Oxfam reported that some 57 percent of the world’s poorest countries, home to 2.4 billion people, would have to cut public spending by a combined $229 billion over the next five years.

Low- and middle-income counties would be forced to pay $500 million dollars every day to meet debt and interest payments between the present and 2029, “with the poorest countries now spending four times more repaying debts to rich creditors than on health care.”

In their reports on the debt crisis, the IMF and World Bank point to the initiatives which supposedly are aimed at alleviating it and call for them to be stepped up. In its latest blog, the IMF said that now was the time to help countries faced with liquidity challenges.

Such calls have been made in the past, but the IMF never explains why the crisis in getting worse and why its various initiatives are so limited.

In fact, as Oxfam has pointed out, rather than providing a solution to the crisis, both the IMF and the World Bank work to exacerbate it.

In a comment on the report, issued on the eve of a meeting of the two organisations last year in Marrakech, Morocco, international interim executive director Amitabh Behar said: “The World Bank and the IMF are returning to Africa for the first time in decades with the same old failed message: cut your spending, sack public service workers, and pay your debts despite the huge human costs.”

Oxfam analysis found that 27 loan programs negotiated with low-income countries, supposedly to provide a floor for debt payments, were actually a smokescreen for more austerity. This was because “for every $1 the IMF encouraged governments to spend on public services, it has told them to cut six times more than that through austerity measures.

“The IMF is forcing poorer countries into a starvation diet of spending cuts, driving up inequality and suffering,” Behar said.

However, while condemning the global institutions—they are more a financial vampire than aid agencies—he revealed the bankrupt reformist Oxfam perspective by appealing to them to “show they can genuinely change to reverse the tide of widening inequality and between countries.”

This bromide is offered not because of any lack of knowledge—all the reports of Oxfam and other such organisations make that clear—but because of their class standpoint grounded on the defence, in the final analysis, of capitalist property relations.

Oxfam has also provided some significant data on the refugee crisis that is exploited by Donald Trump to build his fascist movement, claiming that refugees are “poisoning” the blood of America.

It noted that the top ten countries, from which asylum seekers to New York City originate, pay a staggering $82 billion a year in public debt and interest payments to foreign creditors. Many of these are US banks, hedge funds and other financial institutions of which Trump, together with the Democrats, is a political representative.

Any notion that the debt and hunger crisis cannot be resolved because “there is no money” is nothing short of a big lie.

In analysis published on the eve of the G7 meeting of the major powers in June, Oxfam said that just 3 percent of G7 military spending would help solve the deepening global food and debt crisis.

Eradicating global hunger would require $31.7 billion annually, plus an additional $4 billion a year. Such spending would amount to just 2.9 percent of the total military budgets of the G7 powers.

The head of Oxfam’s inequality policy, Max Lawson, said: “Governments are finding their pockets run deep to fund war today, but when it comes to stopping starvation they are suddenly broke.”

Appealing to the major powers to divert some of their war spending to social and humanitarian needs is as futile as appealing to the institutions of global capitalism, such as the IMF and the World Bank, to change course.

This is because these drives are rooted in the objective crisis of the capitalist system as it hurtles into a breakdown. This objective fact of political and economic life must be recognised and acted on.

The same financial powers that are sucking the blood of the peoples of poorer countries are driving the attacks on the working class in the advanced countries—the never-ending offensive against social conditions and the demand that the working class pay for military spending.

Macron refuses to name New Popular Front to French government

Alex Lantier

After President Emmanuel Macron finished a round of talks with leaders of France’s parliamentary parties on Monday, he refused to select a prime minister to try to assemble a majority in parliament. Instead, the Elysée présidential palace issued a communiqué stating that Macron would not name a prime minister from the New Popular Front (NFP) led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, which won a plurality in the July 7 elections.

Macron’s trampling on the election results has exposed the intractable crisis of French democracy and his own deep ties to neo-fascism. His refusal to allow the election winners to try to assemble a majority in parliament has left France without a government for nearly two months. To explain this position, however, the Elysée stated that the NFP is unacceptable to legislators from the far-right National Rally (RN) and Macron’s own Ensemble coalition, pledging that they would band together to bring down any government the NFP formed:

A government based only on the program and the parties proposed by the alliance with the most legislators, the New Popular Front, would be immediately censured by all the other groups represented in the National Assembly. Such a government would thus immediately have a majority of over 350 deputies against it, effectively blocking it from acting. Given the views of the political leaders that were consulted, the institutional stability of our country therefore compels us not to take this option.

Macron’s pledge to work with the RN to block an NFP government is setting into motion an explosive confrontation with the working class. Macron is despised among workers for ruling against the people, after pushing through pension cuts last year, sending riot police to assault mass protests and strikes against the cuts. Fully 91 percent of French people reject Macron’s cuts, and a similar proportion oppose his call to send French troops to Ukraine for war with Russia.

The constant diversion of social wealth by the capitalist class towards imperialist war and massive bank bailouts in the face of deep popular opposition, above all, in the working class, is leading to a breakdown of democratic forms of rule.

Outgoing Prime Minister Gabriel Attal’s caretaker government has reportedly begun preparing an austerity budget to freeze social spending. Since caretaker governments traditionally cannot take budgetary decisions, this only underscores the illegitimacy of the Macron regime. It will provoke bitter opposition in the working class against austerity, global imperialist war, and French and NATO backing for the Israeli regime’s genocide in Gaza.

A debate is raging in the French ruling class over what coalition government to assemble to try to suppress and politically strangle this opposition. In the run-up to the July 7 elections, Macron carried out extensive discussions with the far-right RN to prepare for the installation of a far-right government. However, the elections led not to a victory of the RN but of the NFP, as millions of workers, particularly in the major cities, voted for the NFP to block the neo-fascists.

The Elysée communiqué issued an appeal to Mélenchon’s allies in the NFP—primarily, the big business Socialist Party (PS) and its traditional allies, the Stalinist French Communist Party (PCF) and the Greens. It called upon them to split the NFP, abandon Mélenchon and join the parties of Macron’s coalition in a governmental alliance backed by the traditional right. Imploring the PS, PCF and Greens to “cooperate with other political forces,” the communiqué stated:

Discussions with the LIOT group and the EPR, MoDem, Horizons, Radicals and UDI sketched a path towards a coalition and possible collaboration between different political sensibilities. These groups have made clear they are open to supporting a government led by a personality that would not come from their own ranks.

But for now, the PS and its allies have rejected Macron’s appeal and denounced his refusal to let the entire NFP form a government. The PS attacked Macron’s “intolerable” policy as a “coup” and “the rejection of a left-wing government, because he rejects and has contempt for its program.” Green Party leader Marine Tondelier denounced Macron’s “dangerous democratic irresponsibility” as a “shame,” pledging to “keep fighting for the will of the French people: three-quarters of them want to break with the Macron regime.”

PCF National Secretary Fabien Roussel said he would only meet publicly with Macron “to build a broad government led by Lucie Castets,” the 37-year-old Finance Ministry bureaucrat Mélenchon has approved as the NFP’s proposed prime minister.

Mélenchon for his part repeated the threats made by his France Unbowed (LFI) party to present a motion in the National Assembly to impeach Macron. “The popular and political response must be rapid and firm,” he tweeted, pledging: “The motion for impeachment will be presented.”

Tuesday, the Union of University Students (UE) and the National High School Students Union (UNL) called for nationwide protests “against Emmanuel Macron’s autocracy.” Shortly afterwards, LFI issued a call to join the UE-UNL protests. For now, the PS has not issued a statement of support or a call for participation in the UE-UNL protests, however, which are called for September 7.

A powerful movement must be built among the youth and, above all, to mobilize the working class to bring down Macron’s police-state dictatorship. The military aggression abroad and class war at home waged by Macron in France and the governments of all his NATO allies must be stopped. A critical warning must however be addressed to the workers and youth: This cannot be done on a national perspective of building a capitalist government led by the NFP and, in particular, by the PS, a bourgeois party deeply hostile to socialism and the working class.

For all of the proclamations of unbridgeable differences between various political parties that are supposedly blocking the formation of a government, the differences of policy separating these different parties are in fact relatively minor. The NFP has endorsed in its program calls to send troops to Ukraine and to build up the military police and intelligence services at home. On the basic agenda of imperialist war at home and class war abroad, the PS and Mélenchon do not represent a fundamentally different policy than Macron.

Moreover, despite Mélenchon’s threats to impeach Macron, and Macron’s insistence that he will not accept a NFP government, the basic form of the government they are proposing is also similar.

The NFP has 193 of the 577 seats in the National Assembly. Under these conditions, Mélenchon’s threatened impeachment motion is set to fail, as have repeated censure motions LFI submitted against Macron earlier in his presidency. Moreover, whatever government the NFP might form, even if it included LFI and Mélenchon, would depend on reaching an agreement with Macron and the raft of small, right-wing parties allied to him—as Macron is currently proposing.

Indeed, by offering to back a PS-led government in which LFI would have no ministers, Mélenchon has signaled that he is open to a compromise on the issue most clearly separating Macron from the NFP: whether Mélenchon and his party would participate in the government.

As COVID-19 infection numbers top 1 million a day, the CDC promotes a campaign against public health

Benjamin Mateus & Patrick Martin

With the toll of new COVID-19 infections regularly topping 1 million a day and weekly deaths creeping toward the 1,000 mark, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has launched a campaign aimed not at protecting the public from this ongoing pandemic, now in its fifth year, but at washing its hands of responsibility.

CDC Director Dr. Mandy Cohen held a press conference August 23 to review the state of the COVID-19 pandemic and encourage the public to get their winter COVID-19, RSV and flu vaccines once they are made available. While bluntly acknowledging that “COVID is with us,” she tried unconvincingly to assure reporters and viewers that “we have the tools to protect ourselves.” She then added, as a way of shifting the blame, “We just need to use them!”

Dr. Mandy Cohen, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention since July 10, 2023 [AP Photo/Bryan Anderson]

Dr. Cohen was silent on who was responsible for the failure of most Americans to get booster shots or otherwise protect themselves from a disease, which can be fatal for many and cause lifelong debilitation for many more.

She could have named the Democratic administration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, which ended the COVID-19 emergency more than a year ago and treats the pandemic as a thing of the past. She could have named Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, the promoter of quack remedies like ivermectin and bleach, who recently welcomed into his campaign the anti-vaxxer and enemy of science and public health, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

And if she had been equipped with a mirror—and a conscience—she could have pointed to herself and other top CDC officials, who have collaborated in the anti-scientific rampage to shut down both mitigation efforts and even elementary data collection on cases of illness, hospitalization and death.

Most importantly (and therefore least likely) she could have acknowledged that within the framework of the capitalist system, the profits of giant banks and corporations are far more important than the lives of human beings. That is the meaning of the incessant claims that schools, factories, public transportation and facilities must be kept open, to save “the economy,” despite the inevitable spread of the infection as a result.

Dr. Cohen, like her predecessors and colleagues at the top of the public health establishment, puts political pressures above science and medicine. The nearly hour-long briefing was simply political theater, where a panel of experts attempted to place the public health agency in the best light despite acknowledging the monumental number of daily infections that have seen hospitalizations and fatalities climb.

Meanwhile, schools across multiple states have announced closures—affecting thousands—just as the new academic year has begun, in response to mass infections among faculty and students.

So far this year, more than 26,000 Americans have died from acute COVID-19 complications, and more than 800 per week are being killed by a preventable infection, a figure 20 percent higher than last year this time. At the current rate, it is expected that between 50,000 to 60,000 Americans will die from COVID-19 in 2024, a rate two to three times higher than fatalities from flu. However, these do not take into consideration excess deaths, and given the complete dismantling of the reporting systems, these figures are known undercounts.

Such figures could only appear low in comparison to the colossal death toll of the first three years of the pandemic, when 352,000 died in 2020, 464,000 in 2021 and 260,000 in 2022. In 2023, 76,000 COVID-19 deaths were recorded. All these numbers are underestimates, as excess mortality figures are considerably higher. The cumulative death toll from COVID-19 is likely well over 1.4 million in the United States and approaching 30 million worldwide.

Neither did the panel address any concerns over the fact that millions continue to suffer from Long COVID, which has taken a significant toll on the health of Americans and the world over. It bears mentioning that a recent study noted that 410 million people across the world have had Long COVID with a $1 trillion impact on global GDP. Yet, no treatment for this condition exists. Without health insurance and means, issues of brain fog, chronic fatigue and sleep disturbances become part of one’s physiognomy.  

Much about Dr. Cohen’s characterization of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is deeply flawed and should have been taken up by the press, who remained silent on the matter. First and foremost, her claim, in response to a direct question that COVID-19 “is endemic,” is completely misleading.

An infection is endemic when it is contained, not spreading uncontrolled and not causing significant impact on the society. COVID-19 is none of these. It remains a pandemic, with new waves of infections where millions are being infected daily by a virus whose mutation far outstrips the efforts of public health agencies and pharmaceutical companies to provide vaccines, medicines and mitigation practices. It continues to cause large-scale social disruption, economic loss and general hardship. 

The opposition of both capitalist parties to any significant effort to fight the pandemic was on display last week. The Democratic National Convention, like its Republican counterpart in July, was a massive superspreader event, with thousands of delegates and media personnel congregating in an enclosed arena, where there was continuous cheering, shouting and singing. There are already anecdotal reports of widespread sickness in state delegations returning from Chicago.

As for the Republicans, Trump staged his appearance with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Friday afternoon, beaming as Kennedy announced he was folding up his independent presidential campaign and endorsing the ex-president and would-be dictator. Kennedy said he was working with Trump on staffing agencies like the CDC, NIH, FDA and USDA from the standpoint of ending the “chronic disease crisis.” By this he means, of course, ending efforts to fight diseases and letting children, the elderly, and the entire American population suffer the consequences.

Fundamentally, all large epidemics and pandemics are serious social issues that require broad-scale infection control in place to disrupt and prevent disease. And with respect to COVID-19 and all future pandemics, these require an international collaborative perspective.

In 2024 so far, 179 million people were infected in the United States, a total that is eventually expected to surpass 2023, when more than 248 million Americans, or three-quarters of the population, caught COVID-19. SARS-CoV-2 wastewater levels throughout the pandemic suggest that there have been more than 1.1 billion infections in the United States, between three and four for every person in the country.

This begs the question how are those most vulnerable, such as the elderly, immunocompromised, and those with chronic disabling medical conditions, which represent a significant portion of the population, to protect themselves from perpetual mass infection?

For the CDC director to present public health efforts as a matter of individual, personal choice is a gross falsification of reality. The policy of mass infection has been forced on the population. 

As for having the tools to protect themselves, what is being offered are simply vaccines and more vaccines as a means to prevent COVID-19. As the WSWS recently noted, “Despite the limitations, the uptake of the vaccines is vital for the health of the population. The shots have a strong, proven safety record and do prevent severe disease and potentially reduce the risk of Long COVID, as studies have indicated. However, they do not prevent infections and the immunity they offer is short-lived given the constant mutation of the virus.”

The vaccines by Pfizer and Moderna carry a cost of $120 to $130 per shot. In some regions, these can be as high as $160 or even $200. However, the rescinding in March of $4.3 billion from the Department of Health and Human Services in COVID-19 supplemental funding means access to free vaccines for the 26 million uninsured and tens of millions more underinsured, essentially all from working class families, will only mean that the vaccination campaign will simply languish as it did last year when only 7 million Americans accepted the boosters within six weeks of their delivery to pharmacies. 

As for other tools in their toolbox, Cohen refers to anti-viral treatments like Paxlovid, which are regularly being denied to patients by their physicians or when they actually are given a prescription, face the daunting price tag of $1,300 to $2,400 per course because their insurance denies them coverage. Meanwhile, repurposed medications like Metformin, a drug that treats diabetes, which has shown anti-viral properties and shown in randomized trials to reduce COVID-19 viral loads and decrease risk of Long COVID, remain unmentioned. In particular, this raises the question of why there are so few tools in the toolbox, and why some are being removed, such as the ability to wear N95 masks in public.

The arrest of an 18-year-old New York man in Nassau County on Tuesday who was wearing a black ski mask utilizing the recently passed mask-ban legislation will only embolden police departments and threaten the public who face possible detentions and arrest simply on charges of police suspicion. 

At the Democratic National Convention, guidance was issued forbidding mask wearing by attendees unless “it was necessary due to a disability” and this at the discretion of security.