Subjects Archives: Health

Despite facing the world’s worst pandemic of the last century, rich countries in the World Trade Organization (WTO) have blocked efforts to enable more affordable access to the means to fight the pandemic.

In 2020, the U.S. government perpetually wavered in acknowledging COVID-19 as a real danger. We lived through screens, bombarded by commercial messages professing how corporations were here for us, how we were in this together, that we should be optimistic. This is strange, indeed, but to be more specific about a pandemic’s root causes would not sell products and would not reassure people to go back to normal.

In countries where public health restrictions were in place, they were half-baked or have been lifted too soon. Where they are imposing them now, it’s too late; the Delta variant of the coronavirus is surging around the world.

Climate change is already leading to rising sea levels, threatening island and coastal communities and devastating food security and access to fresh water. Long-term drought and changes in weather patterns are causing hunger and destroying farming land.

This small island of 11 million people has created five vaccine candidates and sent its medical workers through the Henry Reeve International Medical Brigade to heal people around the world.

World Health Organization Director-General notes, “The global failure to share vaccines equitably is fuelling a two-track pandemic that is now taking its toll on some of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people.”

The lab leak theory bears a striking resemblance to the WMD hoax of 2002, not only in the fact that one of its key players is literally the same journalist using potentially the same anonymous sources, but also in the bipartisan political and media support it enjoys.

CounterSpin interview with Vivek Shandas on climate impacts

The masses of Tokyo want to postpone or cancel the games, but the government says it’s the IOC’s decision, not the host country’s, sovereignty be damned.

The UN has raised the alarm about the growing number of people (including children) suffering from hunger around the world due to the coronavirus and the economic crisis, while Ukraine exports agricultural products, depriving its already poor population of access to relatively cheap domestic food.

Previously solid ground is quickly degrading. The melting of the permafrost is about to cause huge damage to buildings and infrastructure across the country, Russia’s natural resource minister warns.

Last week, Venezuela signed an agreement with Cuba for the purchase of 12 million doses of Abdala, just three days after the country announced and celebrated the success of its locally developed anti-COVID-19 vaccine

In 1869, at the age of fifteen, José Martí and his young friends published a magazine in Cuba called La Patria Libre (‘The Free Homeland’), which adopted a strong position against Spanish imperialism. The first and only issue of the magazine carried Martí’s poem, ‘Abdala’.

An invoice for advance payment of $45 million raised by the offshore partner of Bharat Biotech is certain to become the reason for the impending cancellation of the contract.

The G-7 meeting that has just concluded has promised to donate one billion doses of anti-Covid vaccine to the rest of the world, consisting primarily of the so-called “developing” countries.

As hunger and food insecurity increases globally, the Sandinista government in Nicaragua has been working for the last decade to strengthen local food production and ensure food sovereignty in the face of sanctions.

With its development of five COVID-19 vaccines and the promise of sharing know-how with developing countries, Cuba has remained faithful to Che Guevara’s values of international solidarity and people-oriented medicine.

COVID-19 and other zoonotic outbreaks such as Ebola are illustrative of the complex interactions between deforestation, biodiversity loss, ecosystem destruction, and human health and safety.

CUBA’S economy lost more than $9 billion (£6.5bn) amid the coronavirus pandemic last year, due to the impact of the six decade-long U.S. blockade, government officials said on Thursday.

Jair Bolsonaro, Donald Trump, Boris Johnson and such leaders across the world are malicious miscreants, convening necropolitical death cults. But the alternatives, also tied to capitalist sociopathy, are only a little bit better. Our “progressives” worship at the altar of the circuits of capital.