Biden’s third COVID infection and the ongoing dangers of the pandemic

Benjamin Mateus

In the public statement announcing his withdrawal from the 2024 US presidential elections, Joe Biden claimed, “Together, we overcame a once in a century pandemic.” Out of a series of delusional claims about his presidency, this was the most glaringly absurd, as Biden issued the letter while still in isolation with his third COVID-19 infection.

Undoubtedly, Biden’s bout with COVID played a role in his decision to withdraw from the elections. While official pronouncements on his infection have stated that he is on the way to recovery, COVID-19 remains a dangerous pathogen for anyone, especially those above 65 years old.

President Joe Biden coughs during an event with Rep. Steven Horsford, D-Nev., in Las Vegas, Tuesday, July 16, 2024. Biden tested positive for COVID-19. [AP Photo/Susan Walsh]

Now at 81, Biden’s body and mind were clearly impacted by his first infection and subsequent rebound in July-August 2022. While one cannot say with certainty that his mental decline is directly attributable to his prior COVID infections, it is entirely possible that he could be showing symptoms of “brain fog,” fatigue and other neurological symptoms commonly associated with Long COVID.

The fact that Biden, the most protected person on the planet, was allowed to contract COVID-19 last week underscores the growing recklessness and self-delusion of the American ruling class. Having fallen for their own lies that “the pandemic is over,” the last remaining testing measures were lifted in the White House in March.

Great pains are being taken to care for Biden round the clock, including checks on his vital signs led by a team of highly trained healthcare practitioners and access to costly anti-viral medications. Additionally, Biden is isolating, not according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) anti-public health policies, but based on actual scientifically grounded recommendations. 

The double standards for the American and international working class are glaringly obvious. Anti-viral medications and vaccines have become cost prohibitive or entirely inaccessible for the vast majority of the world’s population. For workers in the US, attempting to obtain a prescription for the anti-viral Paxlovid usually means waiting days for a call back from your physician.

Meanwhile, regardless of the infectious nature of the constantly evolving virus, those with asymptomatic infections or mild symptoms are forced to return to work, risking the well-being of colleagues. Without proper rest and treatment, which the medical community emphatically endorses, workers raise their risk of developing Long COVID, which can have tremendous consequences on their ability to earn wages and provide for their families. 

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Biden is one of millions of Americans who have been infected in recent weeks amid the deepening annual summer surge. According to the latest wastewater data released Friday, the US now has the highest concentrations of the coronavirus in wastewater for this date of any year in the pandemic, with current estimates placing daily infection rates somewhere between 780,000 to 850,000 per day. The surge is deepest in the West and South, but spreading to every region of the country.

The 9th wave of mass infection in the US is being driven by the KP.3 and KP.2 subvariants and their daughters, which account for more than 75 percent of all recently sequenced viral genomes. In particular, the emergence of KP.3.1.1—with high ACE2 binding affinity and considerable immune evasive characteristics—and its ability to outcompete its recent descendants, underscores the tremendous capacity for this virus to continue to evolve and infect humanity. 

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Test positivity rates are now at a highly elevated 12.6 percent across the US, while in the Southwest this has reached 16.4 percent. Both hospitalizations and emergency room visits for COVID have been climbing once more, despite the concerted efforts to cover-up these data. Official weekly fatality rates are up 31 percent over two weeks at nearly 400 deaths per week, while more than 25,000 people have already died of COVID in the first six months of 2024.

These limited statistics, which are no longer being addressed in the media, underscore the complete lie being promulgated by Biden and the entire state that the pandemic is over.

Now in the fifth year of the pandemic, as the world faces yet another massive wave of infections, a report released by the World Health Organization (WHO) last month demonstrated that uptake of the anti-COVID vaccines across the globe has by all accounts come to a virtual halt.

Given the known benefits of vaccines, which have been proven to reduce severity of disease and one’s risk of Long COVID, these developments are deeply disturbing from a public health perspective.

In the first quarter of 2024, across 73 WHO Member States, only 9.8 million doses of the vaccines were given, representing 0.12 percent of the general population. Only 4.9 million older adults from 60 Member States (0.42 percent)—people who are at higher risk for severe disease, hospitalization, and death—received the COVID-19 vaccines. Most egregious of all, only 0.17 percent of healthcare workers across 40 Member States reported being inoculated against COVID in the first quarter of 2024.

Graph showing drastic decline in anti-COVID vaccine uptake globally [Photo: World Health Organization]

The downward trends in immunization became firmly established after May 5, 2023, when Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the Director-General of the WHO, declared the end of COVID-19 as a global health emergency. At the time, the WSWS wrote, “This decision has no scientific basis, but rather serves to provide ex post facto justification for all capitalist governments’ scrapping of anti-COVID public health measures since the emergence of the Omicron variant in November 2021.”

Dr. Nilufar Ahmed, a psychologist in social sciences at the University of Bristol, attributed the decline in vaccinations to the lack of any media coverage of the virus and opaque public health directives that have created a false sense that the pandemic is in the rearview mirror. Ahmed added, “It’s very low in public communications. We see very few people masking, and the response if you see someone wearing a mask is that you assume they must have COVID – not that they’re wearing it as a preventative measure.”

Indeed, even as the ink was drying, Ghebreyesus admitted then that COVID was claiming a life every three minutes, “and that’s just the deaths we know about.” In his comments to the press just over one year ago, he stated that COVID was here to stay, even though “it is still killing, and it is still changing. The risk remains of new variants emerging that cause new surges in cases and deaths.”

The ending of the vaccination campaigns are not just a byproduct of an anti-public health campaign and blackout in the media that have promoted the false notion that the pandemic is over. They are also due to the profit imperatives of the pharmaceutical monopolies, whose executives calculate that the profits their shareholders can expect no longer make their manufacturing and distribution lucrative.

The criminality of the capitalist denigration and denial of vaccines was underscored by the latest study published by Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly and colleagues, which showed that the incidence of Long COVID in the era of Omicron can be lowered to 3.5 percent if people are vaccinated. Without vaccination, the risk of Long COVID rises to 7.76 percent if someone is infected with an Omicron subvariant of the virus. Given the stalled rates of vaccination and the high rates of transmission now being experienced, these will have untold consequences for the world’s population. 

Based on modeling estimates from wastewater data, two-thirds of all Americans will be infected this year. If one projects these rates to the rest of the world and employs the incidence of Long COVID from infections as illustrated by Al-Aly, this would mean well over 200 million more people may face some level of debilitation this year alone, irrespective of the severity of their acute infection. In 2020, the global estimate of Long COVID cases was at least 65 million. 

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a trigger event in world history, proving that capitalism has no progressive solution for the broader issues raised by climate change and unplanned globalization, both of which raise the threat of pandemic pathogens. In their use of imperialist war to prosecute their economic interests, the financial oligarchy eviscerate all the gains made by more than a century of developments in public health infrastructure.

Not only have infectious diseases skyrocketed internationally this year, but there has also been a historic backslide in providing routine immunizations to children, according to Dr. Katherine O’Brien, director of the Department of Immunization, Vaccines and Biological at WHO. World targets for diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis vaccinations have fallen two percentage points from 2022 to 2023 and stand at 84 percent, far short of the agenda goal of 90 percent set for 2030.

Rising death toll as Bangladeshi government unleashes military-police crackdown on protesting students

Sakuna Jayawardena

On Friday, Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina imposed a nationwide curfew and deployed troops with “shoot on sight” orders to suppress the widespread student protests that have erupted over job quotas and rising social inequality.

Bangladeshi military forces on armored vehicles patrol on the streets of Dhaka, Bangladesh, Saturday, July 20, 2024 [AP Photo/Rajib Dhar]

An estimated 139 people have been killed and several thousand injured over the past week in violent attacks by police and thugs from the ruling Awami League. The majority of those killed are students. While police claim that they have only fired rubber bullets, hospitals report that many of the bodies have gunshot wounds to their heads.

Fearing more unrest, the government declared that yesterday and today were public holidays and that the curfew would continue. Heavily armed military troops and police have been patrolling the streets, with helicopters circling overhead in Dhaka, the national capital.

The student protests, which began on July 1, are demanding the scrapping of Bangladesh’s retrogressive and divisive government jobs quota system. The quota system is used to benefit political supporters of Hasina’s Awami League.

Under this system, 30 percent of government jobs are allocated to the relatives of “freedom fighters” involved in the struggle to establish Bangladesh in 1971, 10 percent to women and those from underdeveloped parts of the country, 5 percent for ethnic minorities and 1 percent to physically challenged people. The remaining 44 percent is for those chosen under the current merit system.

Hoping to quell the mass anti-government unrest, Bangladesh’s Supreme Court ruled yesterday that the quota for relatives of “freedom fighters” should be reduced to 5 percent from the existing 30 percent and each of the other categories should be reduced to 1 percent. The student protesters, who are being supported by wide sections of the population, however, are demanding abolition of the quota system.

The Students Against Discrimination movement have called for a nationwide shutdown today. One student leader told the AFP yesterday: “We won’t call off our protests until the government issues an order reflecting our demands.” Al Jazeera has reported that the students are also demanding the immediate release of all those detained during the crackdown and the resignation of the officials who ordered the repression.

Nahid Islam, a student protest coordinator, declared in a Facebook post, “The government would have to take full responsibility if law enforcement agencies were still not removed from the streets, if the dormitories, campuses, and educational institutions were not opened, and if the firing continued.”

Students clash with police during a protest over the quota system in public service, in Dhaka, Bangladesh, July 19, 2024 [AP Photo/Rajib Dhar]

The Students Against Discrimination movement emerged on July 1 with demonstrations by students from universities in Dhaka and Chittagong. They were in response to a June 5 High Court call for the restoration of the job quota system. The system was scrapped in 2018, after a wave of student protests.

The latest protests quickly spread throughout the country after the Hasina government refused to hold any discussions with the students and declared that the matter had been settled by the court. In a television broadcast Hasina said that the students were “wasting their time,” and that there was “no justification for the anti-quota movement.”

Attempting to dissipate the protests, the Supreme Court suspended the High Court judgement on July 10, declaring that it would review the verdict and announce its ruling on August 7. This date, however, was brought forward to July 21, following a request from the government.

The student demonstrations, which had been largely peaceful, took a bloody turn last week when the Awami League’s student organisation, the Bangladesh Chhatra League (BCL), violently attacked protesters on July 15. When students refused to be intimidated by BCL members, the police began attacking Students Against Discrimination members with sticks and firing rubber bullets.

Angered by the police killings, ordinary people began joining the protests. According to media reports, hundreds of thousands of people have battled with police and government goons in Dhaka. Others have joined the demonstrations and clashed with police in other cities.

As Dr Samina Luthfa, assistant professor of sociology in the University of Dhaka told the BBC: “It’s not students anymore, it seems that people from all walks of life have joined the protest movement.” She added: “The anger against the government and the ruling party have been accumulating for a long time.”

The Hasina government has responded by ordering the closure of all state and private universities, schools and other education institutions. On Thursday, it shut down the internet and blocked mobile phone connections and short messaging systems. All Bangladeshi media web sites, including the Daily Star and Dhaka Tribune, were also blocked and on Friday it mobilised the military against the demonstrations.

The Hasina regime blames the opposition Bangladesh National Party (BNP) for the anti-government unrest, but this is a lie. The Students Against Discrimination has specifically distanced itself from affiliation with any political party.

The government ordered police to raid BNP’s headquarters and claimed that it had found explosives. Police also arrested Ruhul Kabir Rizvi Ahmed, the joint secretary of the BNP. While the BNP opportunistically backed the protests on Thursday, this right-wing party has no sympathy for students, workers and the poor, and when in power unleashed brutal anti-democratic attacks on the masses.

While Hasina was declared the winner of the January national election and is now in her fourth consecutive term, only 41.8 percent of voters participated in the election. The student protests and the wide support they are winning demonstrate the deep hostility to her regime.

Hasina’s government, which first came to power in 2009, has taken an increasingly autocratic direction, curbing democratic rights, suppressing her political opponents and freedom of expression. Last November, her government deployed police against garment workers protesting for a living wage. Four workers were killed in the clash.  

Hasina boasts that the country has a 5.8 percent economic growth rate, and achieved a $US2,528 per-capita income in 2023, but in 2018 its growth rate was 7.9 percent and its foreign reserves have dropped to $26.5 billion, half the amount in 2018. Inflation is currently running at 9.7 percent. Last year, her government was forced to obtain a $4.7 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund to cover declines of foreign reserve and a widening balance of payment gap.

Poverty and unemployment are rapidly rising, with around 18 million young people, including university graduates, currently without work. According to the latest Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics figures, approximately 40 percent of youth in Bangladesh do not have jobs and are not receiving education or job training. An estimated 400,000 university graduates are competing for the 3,000 civil service jobs that become available each year. In 2022, 18.7 percent of the population lived below the national poverty line, according to the Asian Development Bank.

The government job quota system, which was established in 1972 by Prime Minister Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, has been modified several times by consecutive administrations to build up pro-government groups against the working class.

As the World Socialist Web Site explained in 2018, during previous demonstrations opposing this system: “The quota reservation is divisive, retrogressive and used to divert mass opposition from challenging the existing social order and the capitalist system, the source of unemployment and mass poverty.”

While the Bangladeshi media has presented the Supreme Court ruling as a “partial victory,” the reactionary system remains, allowing the ruling elites to manipulate it in future. The Bangladeshi bourgeoisie, like its counterparts in Pakistan and India, are incapable of resolving any of the basic social or democratic issues facing the working class and the oppressed masses.

The brutal crackdown against students is a warning to the working class and youth and another indicator that the Hasina regime is turning towards dictatorial forms of rule in order to suppress the rising opposition to its social attacks.

Chinese leadership meeting points to social tensions amid economic problems

Nick Beams

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership is becoming increasingly concerned that significant economic problems, reflected in much lower growth rates compared to previous years, will lead to increased social tensions and political opposition.

Chinese President Xi Jinping at a session of the National People's Congress in Beijing, Tuesday, March 7, 2023. [AP Photo/Ng Han Guan]

This is evidenced by the issues raised in the communiqué from the Third Plenum of the central committee, comprising some 199 members and 165 alternates along with a number of policy experts, held in Beijing this week.

The meeting was convened to chart a course for future economic development and to confront significant problems. The official growth target is around 5 percent—the lowest in around three decades—and the problems were underscored by the fall in the growth rate for the second quarter to 4.7 percent, down from the 5.3 percent recorded in the first.

Amid the vague calls in the initial statement—more specific plans may be released in coming weeks—there was a reference to the problems caused by the ending of the previous growth model based on real estate and infrastructure development which had been responsible for up to 30 percent of GDP.

The collapse of this orientation, due to mounting debt and the threat to financial stability this poses, has led Chinese President Xi Jinping, who is also CCP general secretary, to implement the development of “high quality productive” forces based on new technologies.

That orientation will continue. There was no reference at all to the need to expand consumption, as advocated by numerous Western economists as well as some in China, in order to raise the economic growth rate. But the plenum statement did acknowledge the problems arising from the end of the old growth model.

It said the leadership would “implement various measures for preventing and defusing risks in real estate, local government debt, small and medium financial institutions and other key areas.”

The problems are not small. It has been estimated that the total debt of local government funding vehicles (LGFVs) is anywhere between $7 trillion and $10 trillion. The LGFVs raised debt to finance infrastructure projects by selling land for housing development. But with the downturn in the real estate sector, evidenced by the collapse of major firms such as Evergrande along with many others, this form of financing is increasingly unviable.

It was significant that the same paragraph that pointed to the debt problems raised the need for tighter social and political controls by the state.

“We will strengthen the network for preventing and controlling public security risks so as to safeguard social stability. We will improve public opinion guidance and effectively deal with risks in the ideological domain.”

The significance of these statements is that they express the great fear of the CCP leadership that as growth slows and economic and social tensions rise, the regime, having long ago abandoned any real commitment to social equality, loses any remaining political legitimacy and faces an oppositional movement from below.

The long delay in convening the meeting—it is 17 months since the previous plenum in February 2023, one of the longest intervals since the days of Mao—also points to possible conflicts within the central leadership.

Besides the fear of opposition in the working class, it also fears the emergence of cracks within the leadership of Xi’s Bonapartist regime, lest this provides an opening through which broader opposition could start to flow.

This concern was expressed in a lengthy paragraph which “stressed that the Party’s leadership is the fundamental guarantee for further reform.”

“We must acquire a deep understanding of the decisive significance of establishing Comrade Xi Jinping’s core position on the Party Central Committee and in the Party as a whole and establishing the guiding role of Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese characteristics for a New Era…”

The regime of Xi Jinping is in no way socialist. In early 2018, Xi and the Chinese leadership scrapped the 30-year practice that presidents serve for two terms and established him as the leader for life in an endeavour to defend the interests of the capitalist ruling class.

His Bonapartist regime has sought to balance between the competing interests of the Chinese oligarchs—China’s levels of social inequality are among the highest in the world—the pressure exerted by the imperialist powers, led by the US, while seeking to defend the interests of the capitalist class as a whole against the working class, now numbering more than 400 million.

Socially it has rested on a growing but narrow stratum of the Chinese upper middle class which was able to advance itself in conditions of consistently high levels of economic growth. But this base is under threat.

In the past six years the pressures on the regime have intensified. Growth has fallen below the 8 percent level, which the CCP regime once declared was necessary to maintain social stability, never to return.

The hopes of the regime that it would be able to peacefully integrate itself into the global economy have been shattered. Starting under the Trump administration and deepened under Biden, US imperialism has launched an economic war against China aimed at crushing its economic development through ever-expanding sanctions and export bans on vital high-tech components.

This has now been coupled with tariffs against Chinese exports, particularly in the area of high-tech green technology such as electric vehicles.

The economic offensive has been increasingly joined by the European powers while the preparations for military conflict develop apace.

Without going into any detail, the introduction to the plenum statement noted that the regime faced a “grave and complex international environment and the arduous tasks of advancing reform and development and ensuring stability at home.”

The response in the Western media to the plenum is that it has done little or nothing to solve the mounting problems of the Chinese economy.

This conclusion was summed up in comments by China expert Eswar Prasad of Cornell University to the Financial Times.

“The plenum has re-articulated the government’s economic objectives and acknowledged some keys risks but inspires little confidence that the government has a strategy for effectively managing the economy’s cyclical and structural problems,” he said.

Microsoft Windows outage causes global infrastructure shutdown

Kevin Reed

Computer systems were shut down at major corporations, small businesses, government offices and organizations around the world on Friday when two commonly used information technology infrastructure components failed simultaneously.

Screens show a blue error message at a departure floor of LaGuardia Airport in New York on Friday, July 19, 2024, after a faulty CrowdStrike update caused a major internet outage for computers running Microsoft Windows. [AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura]

Airports, banks, ground transportation, healthcare service providers, hotels, media and TV stations, retail businesses and more were brought to a halt by a digital catastrophe that began on Thursday night when Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform experienced a widespread outage.

The cloud services failure was followed on Friday morning by a flawed update to a security software provided by CrowdStrike, impacting computers running the Microsoft Windows operating system. A software update that was pushed out to CrowdStrike’s Falcon monitoring software sent Windows computers into a perpetual reboot cycle.

Microsoft spokesperson Frank X. Shaw confirmed that “a CrowdStrike update was responsible for bringing down a number of Windows systems globally.” Shaw said the company was supporting and assisting customers to recover from the disaster.

The global shutdown is being referred to as the largest IT outage in history. Examples of the impact are:

• The FAA reported that the airlines United, American, Delta, Spirit and Allegiant had been grounded. Thousands of flights were cancelled well into the evening on Friday. The outage also cascaded instantly around the world. At Sydney Airport in Australia, travelers encountered delays and cancellations, as did those in Hong Kong, India, Dubai, Berlin and Amsterdam. More than 70 flights were canceled by 7:00 a.m. at Los Angeles International Airport. The Los Angeles Times reported that passengers were stuck in hours-long waits to get through security or to try to rebook their flights. At Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, many flight information screens, including those at boarding gates, were stuck on the blue Windows “recovery” screen as of Friday afternoon.
• Tens of thousands of desktop computers at 150 hospitals in 24 states at CommonSpirit Health were displaying a blue screen on Friday morning bringing the healthcare system to a halt. Daniel Barchi, CIO at CommonSpirit, told CNBC, “We were all stunned by the fact that if a computer gets this blue screen lockup, there’s no way to push a software patch to fix it. You literally have to go up to it, log in as an administrator, a technology person, and then delete a line of code and make that enabled to come back online.”
• Tesla shut down production lines at its manufacturing facilities in California and Nevada on Friday. Tesla’s IT teams told employees that there was a “Windows host outage,” and systems including “servers, laptops and manufacturing devices” were affected. The IT teams informed Tesla employees that they may see a “blue screen” on their various devices. Some reports said managers were telling workers to prepare for cancellation of shifts or to go home early.
• Mobile ordering at Starbucks was halted during the crisis. Starbucks spokesperson Jaci Anderson said in a statement emailed to NBC News that there was a temporary outage of the company’s “mobile order ahead and pay features.” However, on a Starbucks subreddit, where customers and employees post information and comment, store closures were reported because local managers did not want to deal with the outages.
• US border crossings were put into gridlock on Friday morning by the outage. People seeking to enter the US through Canada and Mexico found long delays at the crossings.
• The San Ysidro Port of Entry was bogged down Friday morning with pedestrians waiting three hours to cross, according to the San Diego Union-Tribune. People approved for the US Customs and Border Protection “Trusted Traveler” program for low-risk passengers waited up to 90 minutes. The San Diego Metropolitan Transit System posted on Twitter/X that some of its employees who live in Tijuana, Mexico, were unable to get to work Friday. Meanwhile, at the US-Canada border, Windsor police reported long delays at the crossings at the Ambassador Bridge and the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel.
• The Texas Department of Public Safety closed all of its driver’s license offices at most of the state’s 254 counties across the state, and New York’s Department of Motor Vehicles was unable to process transactions either online or at its offices on Friday morning. In Texas, the department said in a statement that “there is no current estimate” as to when the offices will reopen. In New York, the DMV said that by Friday afternoon, some systems had been restored and that it could begin performing online transactions. News reports said at least three of its DMV offices closed for the day because of the outage, according to the agency’s website.

The serious and potentially deadly impact of the tech failure was revealed especially in the healthcare industry. Associated Press (AP) reported that the outage caused the cancellation of emergency heart surgery in Paducah, Kentucky. The AP report said, “Alison Baulos, the executive director of the Center for the Economics of Human Development at the University of Chicago, said her 73-year-old father’s emergency open heart surgery was cancelled Friday morning due to the global tech outage, leaving her family scared and worried.”

Baulos told AP, “It’s an emergency surgery so if anything happens, it would be as a result of not having the surgery this morning. It does really make you just realize how much we rely on technology and how scary it is.” The report continued, “Her father was waiting at Baptist Hospital in Paducah, Kentucky, to find out what will happen next, she said. Her father was expecting surgery after he received a call from his doctor on Wednesday saying he had eight blockages and an aneurysm. But the family was told the operation had to be postponed due to the outage.”

The full extent and impact of the outage around the world will not be known for days or weeks. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella issued a statement on Twitter/X that said, “Yesterday, CrowdStrike released an update that began impacting IT systems globally. We are aware of this issue and are working closely with CrowdStrike and across the industry to provide customers technical guidance and support to safely bring their systems back online.”

CrowdStrike has 29,000 customers with approximately $4 billion in annual sales and a current stock market value of $74 billion which is down 20 percent from a recent all-time high reached last month. It is a cloud-based cybersecurity platform with software used by industries around the world to protect against hackers and outside breaches.

The CrowdStrike Falcon antivirus software operates deep within network “endpoints,” such as desktops, servers and routers, to detect malware and other cyber threats. Due to the proliferation of hacking, ransomware and other evolving technology attacks, CrowdStrike enables its software to be configured for regular automatic updates of new antivirus responses.

It is ironic that a technology company devoted to protecting computers from being infected with viruses and malware has itself shut down a significant number of computer systems on a world scale.

A statement from CrowdStrike said the company was actively working with customers to fix the problem and that it was not a cyberattack. The statement continued, “The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed. We are referring customers to the support portal for the latest updates and will continue to provide complete and continuous public updates on our blog.”

Two recent studies on Long COVID underscore the dangers posed by the “forever COVID” policy

Benjamin Mateus

Two recent studies on Long COVID—a chronic disabling condition that afflicts many after infection or reinfection with SARS-CoV-2—provide important context to the anti-scientific abandonment of public health internationally. These reports lend further empiric evidence to the well-established fact that no one is safe from COVID-19 and that appropriate measures must be instituted immediately to protect people from future infections.

The first of these two studies was led by Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly and published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) Wednesday under the title, “Post-acute Sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection in the pre-Delta, Delta, and Omicron eras.” The purpose of the study was to address the real incidence of the condition given the broad estimates that have been mentioned in the media. The authors sought to understand how the different strains of SARS-CoV-2 that have emerged throughout the pandemic afflict people, both the unvaccinated and vaccinated.

Dr. Al-Aly [Photo: Dr. Al-Aly]

Al-Aly is director of the Clinical Epidemiology Center and chief of research development at the Veterans Affairs St. Louis Health Care System and has been leading clinical studies on COVID-19 throughout the pandemic that have provided critical insights into Long COVID, also known as Post-acute Sequalae of COVID-19 (PASC). In particular, they have demonstrated that considerable health detriments persist even three years after a COVID-19 infection, underscoring the chronic nature of the debility.

Utilizing the Veterans Affairs’ vast medical database, they found that the cumulative incidence of PASC at one year after SARS-CoV-2 infection was 10.42 percent for unvaccinated persons in the pre-Delta era. This remained essentially unchanged during Delta, with Long COVID afflicting 9.5 percent of those infected. It declined very slightly to 7.76 percent of those infected with the Omicron strain, which first emerged and spread globally in November 2021.

Among vaccinated persons, the risk of Long COVID was dramatically lessened by comparison. Only 5.34 percent of these individuals during the Delta era developed PASC after infection, a nearly two-fold lowered risk. For the Omicron era, the risk of Long COVID among vaccinated individuals had declined to 3.5 percent. Al-Aly noted, “[Although] the decline is welcome news, the remaining risk is still substantial. Multiplied by the number of people who continue to get infected and re-infected, these rates would add considerably to an already high toll of people already impacted with Long Covid.”

In response to the question of how vaccines protect against Long COVID, Dr. Al-Aly explained to the World Socialist Web Site, “There is no mechanistic data to explain the data. [But] there are a couple of hypotheses. Vaccines reduce risk of severe disease which correlates with risk of long covid—but long covid can happen after even mild disease. So, this hypothesis may or may not be valid. Another hypothesis is vaccines may reduce viral load and enhance ability of the immune system to achieve viral clearance earlier—which may probabilistically lead to less chance of viral persistence and potentially less long covid. As you know, we need empiric data to evaluate these.”

Indeed, when one reviews the critical analysis made by data scientists who have modeled COVID wastewater concentrations and calculated estimates of daily infections, since the Omicron era, on average well over 500,000 people are being infected every day or over 180 million cases per year. Assuming every person has been vaccinated, a rate of 3.5 Long COVID cases per 100 persons infected means that over 5 million people can expect to develop Long COVID each year on top of the massive burden that already exists.

The authors of the NEJM study corroborated these back-of-the-envelop estimates when they wrote, “[Even] after this substantial decrease, the cumulative incidence of PASC at one year among vaccinated persons during the omicron era was not negligible. The large number of infected persons during the omicron era, the large numbers of ongoing new infections and reinfections, and the poor uptake of vaccination may translate into a high number of persons with PASC.”

On the issue of the current state of vaccination in the US, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that as of May 11, 2024, only 22.5 percent of adults have received an updated COVID vaccine since September 14, 2023. However, for children six months of age through 17, that figure is a deplorable 14.4 percent. Including the complete abandonment of all mitigation measures, the ongoing surge of infections is being driven by the waning immunity in the population.

This raises to the fore the next important study, “Post-acute cardiovascular outcomes of COVID-19 in children and adolescents: an EHR [electronic health records] cohort study from the RECOVER project.” Conducted by the RECOVER (Researching COVID to Enhance Recovery) consortium and posted as a pre-print on medrxiv on May 15, 2024, the study exposes the lie that children are immune to the debilitation caused by COVID, specifically as it relates to their cardiovascular system.

Figure 1: Relative risk of incident post-acute COVID-19 cardiovascular outcomes in children [Photo by RECOVER consortium study. Bingyu Zhang et al. / CC BY 4.0]

Analyzing the data for over one million children and adolescents, nearly 300,000 with COVID and over 900,000 without COVID, those with documented infection exhibited increased risks for a host of post-acute cardiovascular outcomes that include high blood pressure, heart rate problems, heart inflammation, heart failure and heart enlargement, shock from heart failure, blood clots, chest pains, and palpitations. The elevation of these risks ranges from 26 percent to three-fold.

The results are worth reviewing. The authors note,

[The] absolute rate of any post-acute cardiovascular outcome in this study was 2.32 percent in COVID-19 positive and 1.38 percent in negative groups. Patients with congenital heart defects (CHD) post-SARS-CoV-2 infection showed increased risks of any cardiovascular outcome [63 percent increase], including increased risks of 11 of 18 post-acute sequalae … Those without CHDs also experienced heightened cardiovascular risks after SARS-CoV-2 infection [63 percent increase], covering 14 of 18 cardiovascular conditions…

Furthermore, the authors added,

Risks were consistently observed regardless of age, gender, race/ethnicity, obesity status, severity of acute COVID-19, or virus variant. Even children and adolescents without a history of any cardiovascular outcomes before SARS-CoV-2 infection showed increased risks, suggesting a broad potential impact on those previously considered at low risk of cardiovascular disease.

Subgroup analysis of relative risk of incident post-acute COVID-19 composite cardiovascular outcomes. [Photo by RECOVER consortium study. Bingyu Zhang et al. / CC BY 4.0]

To suggest that COVID-19 is no more harmful than the flu is utter quackery. It remains a serious airborne pathogen that demands global attention.

Summer COVID wave develops in Germany

Tamino Dreisam

A wave of COVID infections has been emerging in Germany for weeks this summer, debunking claims that the pandemic is supposedly over. Despite the warm season, the number of infections is constantly increasing and is now at the same level as at the beginning of the wave last autumn.

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)

As a result, more people were ill at the beginning of July than ever before at this time of year. According to figures from the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), 5.1 million people in Germany are currently suffering from acute respiratory diseases. This means that the number of new respiratory infections is around 150 percent higher than before the pandemic.

According to Christian Karagiannidis, Head of the Intensive Care Register of the German Interdisciplinary Association for Intensive Care and Emergency Medicine, the evidence is “clear”: “A coronavirus summer wave is currently building up.”

This can be seen, for example, in wastewater monitoring. The infection radar of the Federal Health Ministry indicates a constantly rising viral load in all reported sewage treatment plants in recent weeks. While it was still at 42,000 gene copies at the beginning of May, it is now almost three times as high and stands at 119,000 gene copies. At the same time, the Health Ministry is also recording an increase in visits to the doctor due to COVID-19 infections.

Thomas Rhein, head of the North Rhine Pharmacists’ Association, told the Rheinische Post newspaper: “Respiratory infections are well above the usual level in the summer months. Pharmacies are also feeling the effects. ... In general, the population’s defence mechanisms no longer seem to be as efficient since coronavirus. In addition to rhinovirus, RSV and influenza viruses, the coronavirus is a fourth new major challenge for the immune defence.” Coronavirus tests are in high demand in pharmacies.

Matthias Blum, managing director of Krankenhausgesellschaft NRW, explained that hospitals were also feeling the effects of the wave. “We are currently experiencing a surprising increase in coronavirus infections for the summer season.” The increase was “moderate,” but “this development” was “naturally also reflected in inpatient cases in hospitals.”

In recent weeks, the hospitalisation incidence level due to COVID-19 cases rose from 0.4 per 100,000 in May to 1.4 in July. This corresponds to around 1,170 hospitalisations per week. The number of hospitalisations is therefore more than three times higher than at the same time last year.

These developments refute the claims of politicians and the media that the coronavirus has gone from a pandemic to an endemic state. No serious scientist would ever describe the spread of a virus as endemic when over 10,000 people per week are hospitalised every year during the peak phase in winter and the virus does not disappear even during the “low phases,” with many hundreds still having to be admitted to hospital every week.

The consequences of the virus go far beyond immediate hospitalisations and deaths. In contrast to acute respiratory diseases such as influenza or RSV, one in 10 COVID-19 infections leads to long-term effects that can have devastating consequences and severely restrict the ability to work, move or see.

At the same time, new and more infectious mutations emerge every year due to the unhindered spread of the virus. The current summer wave is being driven by the Omicron sub-variants KP.2 and KP.3, which account for 13 percent and 52 percent of infections, respectively. Both variants are extremely contagious.

Furthermore, because of the dismantling of all health protection measures by all government parties, it is only a matter of time before a more deadly variant develops or another pandemic breaks out. The risk of a devastating H5N1 bird flu pandemic is currently growing as well.

Regarding H5N1, Christian Drosten, chief virologist at Berlin’s Charité hospital, called the situation “confusing and worrying,” in the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper. Although it was possible to get H5N1 under control, he said, he could “also imagine that we will soon be caught up in the next pandemic with H5N1.”

Global Wealth Report 2023: An orgy of enrichment for the super-rich

Andy Niklaus & Carola Kleinert

Multimillionaires around the world have benefited from the inflation year 2023, while the German super-rich alone increased their wealth by 10 percent to more than €2.1 trillion. This money could be used to finance thousands of new hospitals, schools, universities, housing estates, etc., modernise Germany’s entire rail and road network and end world hunger.

Champagne on ice [Photo by Harald Bischoff / CC BY 3.0]

The global wealth produced by the international working class is concentrated in the hands of 73,000 super-rich people, the so-called “ultra high net worth individuals,” as financial market analysts call them.

These “individuals” stand in contrast to hundreds of millions of workers who barely know how to meet the ever-increasing costs of basic necessities such as food, energy and rent each week or month.

In a press release from Zurich, the analysts behind the Global Wealth Report 2023 by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) celebrate: “After a weak year in 2022, global net wealth rose significantly again last year.”

The NATO war against Russia in Ukraine, which is devouring immense monetary, economic and human reserves, and the slaughter of the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip, have not affected the profit margins of the super-rich in the slightest. Quite the opposite!

The net wealth of the ruling classes in all nation-states rose by more than 4 percent to over €400 trillion in 2023, as the Global Wealth Report reveals. Worldwide financial assets (cash, account balances, bonds, shares and investment funds as well as pensions) rose by 7 percent to €231 trillion. The largest increases were in North America (€8.7 trillion), Western Europe (€1.8 trillion) and Asia-Pacific excluding Japan (€2.5 trillion). Global tangible assets (real estate, precious metals and other physical assets) rose by 2 percent to €220 trillion.

The BCG report is intended to show the capitalist financial aristocrats and oligarchs, “in times of geopolitical uncertainty, such as recently during the conflict in Ukraine ... clear trends in trans-border asset flows, the so-called cross-border assets.” Michael Kahlich, BCG partner in Zurich and co-author of the study, praised last year as “another significantly better year on the international financial markets. Investors in North America and Western Europe in particular benefited from this.”

As the leading financial power, North American financial capital once again increased its wealth the most in both absolute and percentage terms. At €100 trillion, it is still clearly at the top of the global ranking of financial assets.

Last year, North America’s financial capital increased by just under 9 percent or €8.4 trillion. Compared to its German rival on the global market, the report states that the “increase in financial assets in the USA last year was equivalent to more than half of the total net assets in Germany.”

The US is home to the most super-rich individuals (26,000), with Elon Musk ($251 billion), who is notorious among workers worldwide, at the top of the list, followed by Jeff Bezos ($218 billion) and Mark Zuckerberg ($189 billion). With 8,300 super-rich people, China ranks second in the global comparison. Some 3,300 super-rich people now live in Germany (an increase of 300 compared to 2022), which puts Germany in third place in the global ranking—with a much smaller population.

In-depth research by the Netzwerk Steuergerechtigkeit (Tax Justice Network) has identified over 237 billionaires by name, although there are no official wealth statistics in Germany and assets can therefore only be estimated.

In first place, the Netzwerk Steuergerechtigkeit lists the Boehringer and von Baumbach family (Boehringer Ingelheim company), whose assets are believed to be between €50 billion and €100 billion. In second place is the Quandt and Klatten family (BMW) with an estimated €40.5 billion, followed by the Schwarz family (Schwarz Group, Lidl) with €39.5 billion, the Merck family with €32 billion, the Kühne family (Kühne & Nagel) with €28.5 billion, the Albrecht and Heister family (Aldi Süd) with €26.5 billion, the Porsche family (VW/Porsche) with €23.8 billion, the Albrecht family (Aldi Nord) with €18.5 billion, the Henkel family with €15.2 billion and the Otto family with €13.7 billion, to name just the first 10 super-rich “families” on the network’s list.

These enormous fortunes contrast with the rapid impoverishment of working people. The poverty rate in Germany is now more than 20 percent. Single parents, those with large families, people with low educational qualifications and a large proportion of senior citizens are particularly affected by poverty. Child poverty is also at a record high: one in five children in Germany is affected by child poverty, which means that almost 3 million children and young people under the age of 18 are living in poverty.

While in the early 1990s, according to broadcaster ZDF, “the average wealth of the richest 10 percent [of the population] was 50 times higher than that of the poorer half,” “it is now 100 times higher.”

Over 20 years ago, the anti-working-class policies of the Social Democratic-Green Schröder/Fischer coalition (1998-2005) laid the foundations for the widespread impoverishment of the working class and the financial elite’s orgy of enrichment with its “Hartz” welfare and labour “reforms” (today’s “Citizens Allowance”) and its creation of a nationwide low-wage sector. Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the US had implemented similar measures in the mid-1980s. In Germany, the spread of low-wage labour contributed to the rise of the German economy to become Europe’s leading economic power.

Significantly, the Schröder government did not reintroduce the wealth tax abolished in 1997 by the Christian Democratic (CDU/CSU) government under Helmut Kohl. Instead, the top tax rate was reduced from 53 to 42 percent. In fact, the richest financial oligarchs still pay just 1 percent tax today, as Jochen Breyer found out in his research for ZDF, “In the world of the super-rich.”

Meanwhile, the bottom half of the population only owns 1.3 percent of total wealth. The top 10 percent, on the other hand, own two-thirds of total wealth. Among these 10 percent, the top hundredth of the rich elite concentrate 35.3 percent of total wealth in their hands, and among them the super-rich (0.1 percent of the population) hold nearly a quarter (23 percent) of Germany’s total wealth.

According to the BCG report, the distribution of wealth in Germany is “disproportionately unequal.” And in its latest article on the subject, Der Spiegel warns that this extreme concentration of wealth in the hands of the few will “reinforce the above-average level of inequality.”

Maintaining this “above-average inequality” is not possible by democratic means. Since the beginning of the 2020s, strikes and class struggles against low wages, speed-up, poor working conditions and the risk of infection in the coronavirus pandemic have been increasing worldwide.