Subjects Archives: Health

We are a group of physicians, researchers, and advocates who have come together to express our grave concern for the safety and well-being of Ontarians who reside and work in long-term care (LTC) homes. We call upon the Ontario government to immediately end the violations of peoples’ human rights and control the spread of COVID-19 in LTC. Action is needed today.

Someday the world will be free of the coronavirus. Then, we will glance backward at these years of misery inflicted by virions with spike proteins that have struck down millions of people and held social life in its grip.

Rather than attack the government for its poor handling of the COVID crisis, corporate media have opted for a return to a favorite pastime of theirs: union bashing.

Dr. Eduardo Martínez, president of the BioCubaFarma state pharmaceutical enterprise group, reports that work is advancing to expand production capacity of Cuba’s candidate vaccine Soberana 02.

The 13th national congress of Vietnam’s ruling communist party, which began in Hanoi on Monday is an event of exceptional significance for the country’s internal politics and future trajectory of development, regional politics and the geopolitics of the Asia-Pacific.

While it is not clear how many people have lost their lives to COVID-19 in the United States (is it under 400,000 still? Over 500,000 yet?), it is clearer than ever that we are experiencing a continent-wide public health catastrophe. Perhaps this is unsurprising.

Leith Mullings, an anthropologist whose work on what she dubbed the Sojourner Syndrome created a baseline understanding of the “weathering” that the amplified stresses of race, class, and inequality have on African Americans, and in particular African American women, died of cancer on December 12.

Although most East Asian economies have successfully contained the pandemic without nationwide ‘stay in shelter lockdowns’, many governments have seen such measures as necessary. But lockdowns are blunt measures, with inevitable adverse consequences, especially for businesses and employment.

Several reports on China’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic came out late last year, based on what U.S. outlets like CNN, the New York Times and ProPublica claimed to be leaked Chinese documents. Although these reports implied that China was responsible for how bad the pandemic has been because of its downplaying of numbers and censoring of critical information, these narratives are themselves misleading in several ways.

In the sticky conversations around rationing life-saving treatments and vaccines during the Covid pandemic, corporate media have elevated some experts without disclosing their troubling views on disability, aging and the value of human life. Meanwhile, media outlets have largely sidelined the voices of disabled activists and others who could speak on behalf of those most affected by the pandemic.

A jokester once characterized Yale University as a hedge fund with a campus attached to it. One might say something similar of the country in which Yale is based.

Mark Lowcock of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs warned that recent labeling of Houthis as a terrorist organization by the U.S. would likely trigger a “famine on a scale we have not seen in 40 years.

In December 2019, China’s Wuhan city witnessed an abnormal rise of what was initially thought to be cases of pneumonia, as identified by the Wuhan Municipality Health Commission. However, upon further investigation by Chinese officials, a novel coronavirus was identified. By then the city’s health system was already dealing with dozens of cases of coronavirus.

The evidence clearly is that the Covid-crisis has upended the fiscal conservatism that has been the hallmark of the neoliberal era since the 1980s.

A vaccine alone will not be enough to end the pandemic as it must also be made available at an affordable price and allocated in a way that achieves equity. It follows that suspending intellectual property rights related to COVID-19 is the most appropriate solution to our current situation of global vaccine apartheid.

THE NHS is facing its biggest ever crisis, medical professionals and unions warned today, with hospitals at risk of being swamped by coronavirus admissions.

On 30 December, Argentina’s Senate voted to legalise abortion after many years of mass protests around the issue. In the wake of this important victory, Red Flag spoke to Cele Fierro, an activist with the anti-capitalist feminist group Juntas a la Izquierda and a member of the national leadership of the Movimiento de los Trabajadores (MST) in Argentina.

Vietnam’s death toll from COVID-19 has stood at 35 since last September, and none of those hospitalized due to this disease risks death, the Ministry of Health reported on Sunday.

January 7th is the deadliest day of the pandemic so far, 89 people died in the last 24-hour period. By every measure the situation is critical, and there can be no question remaining that stronger measures are needed to control the devastation the virus is wreaking.

While China contained COVID-19 and preserved its economy, the U.S. spins lies while hundreds of thousands of its people die for lack of even a semblance of a national health system.