Subjects Archives: Health

The Venezuelan president announced a strict quarantine for January.

Unequal distribution means the poorest countries are getting trampled in the stampede for COVID-19 vaccines.

Millions of day labourers in India lost their jobs overnight earlier this year when Narendra Modi’s central government hastily announced a national lockdown.

The number of recorded infections now tops 14 million and the total official death toll stands at more than 274,000. 

Before the COVID-19 pandemic engulfed the world, the big pharmaceutical companies did little investment in vaccines for global diseases and viruses.

These hopes may not last long. The announcement has sent governments scrambling to lay claim to vaccine doses, apparently realizing a bleak prediction: wealthy countries and individuals will monopolize early doses of any effective vaccine.

Over the past week, 14,697 new cases of Coronavirus infection were reported inside of state and federal prisons—the highest level since the pandemic began.

It wasn’t that long ago that the country celebrated frontline workers by banging pots in the evening to thank them for the risks they took doing their jobs during the pandemic.

A second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic is sweeping across the world with countries reporting record daily case numbers and the World Health Organization (WHO) warning that the death toll could be much higher than during the first wave earlier this year.

The death rate from these new infections may be lower than in the first wave last March-April, but hospitalizations are reaching new peaks in the U.S. and parts of Europe.

After a Spring in which Sweden had one of the worst Covid death rates in Europe, some latched on to their low summer case numbers to argue for a herd immunity approach. But as cases again rise dramatically, Madeleine Johansson challenges the Swedish herd immunity myth.

A mass movement in Poland has succeeded in delaying the implementation of a court decision that would ban nearly every abortion.

The past year has brought into sharp relief the significant differences between China and the rest of the world.

A seam of cruelty runs through U.S. policy, which by its sanctions regime prevents Venezuela from open trade of its oil to import key medical equipment to help break the chain of the virus and heal those infected by it.

With phrases like “protect the vulnerable” & “underlying conditions” currently all around us, disability activist Ruth Flood looks at the horrendous treatment of disabled people under capitalism.

The authorities reported that they have repaired more than 19.000 houses while supporting waste recycling projects that aim at securing an 18.000 job position.

Sweden has a relatively low level of urbanisation, is away from continental Europe and has a population prepared to apply social distancing with some discipline, the cumulative COVID death rate in Sweden is not far short of Italy and Spain, and is way higher than its Nordic neighbours, Denmark, Finland and Norway, which did impose early and much stricter lockdowns.

As cases continue to rise, Eoghan Ó Ceannabháin argues that the only way to avoid a winter crisis and future rolling lockdowns is an All-Ireland Zero Covid strategy which protects workers and puts public health first.

French health and social care workers stage mass protests for better staffing, pay and conditions as a second wave of COVID-19 engulfs the country, writes Susan Ram

He’s turned it into a political propaganda unit to the point that it is unable to deal even with a major outbreak within our own borders. The U.S. is beginning to exhibit the features of a failed nation state.