Subjects Archives: Health

The Trump administration suspended funding to WHO in April—the UN’s primary infectious disease–fighting body—accusing it of “severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus,” and of taking China’s allegedly deceptive claims about its handling of COVID-19 at “face value.” But corporate media had already been boosting these same talking points.

In an act of pure hypocrisy and obsessive cruelty, GOP Senators Marco Rubio, Rick Scott and Ted Cruz joined together to penalize developing nations who seek to take advantage of Cuba’s hands-on humanitarian work.

While the Black Lives Matter protests sweeping the United States were triggered by recent police murders of unarmed African Americans, they are also helping to encourage popular recognition that racism has a long history with punishing consequences for black people that extend beyond policing.

A few weeks ago, I was talking to Noam Chomsky about the state of the world. At one point, Noam smiled and said that he is not aware of any German doctors in Italy, even though both countries are in the European Union; instead, Cuban and Chinese doctors went to Italy to help the Italians fight the global pandemic.

Between 1963 and 1972, there were more than 750 Black-led urban revolts in the United States in 525 cities. How did sociologists react?

Despite conspiracy theories, there is no evidence whatsoever that the virus was manufactured in or escaped from a laboratory, in China or anywhere else. Such accusations ignore how easy viral transmission can be when other factors come into play.

“Mayor Downplays Rough Police Treatment of NYC Protesters” (AP, 6/5/20)

In the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), Article 25 offers an expanded vision of what it could mean to be a human being. Human beings, it notes, have ‘the right to a standard of living adequate for [their] health and well-being’. This includes ‘food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services’; human beings also have the ‘right to security’, which means they have the right to compensation for any lack of livelihood due to circumstances beyond their control.

For decades, Cuba has sent tens of thousands of its medical professionals abroad to work in countries where natural disasters or poverty have left people without healthcare. In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the catastrophic U.S. response to it, the absurdity of a propaganda war against Cuban medical missions has become more obvious than ever. But you can’t rely on corporate media to explain why.

CoronaShock is a term that refers to how a virus struck the world with such gripping force; it refers to how the social order in the bourgeois state crumbled, while the social order in the socialist parts of the world appeared more resilient.

Mike Davis’ The Monster Enters updates his earlier book on capitalism and pandemic disease to reflect on the current failure of the neoliberal state, finds Elaine Graham-Leigh

Families vary, in terms of their composition, structure, and functioning, but all play a key role in society and require special attention from government.

The ruling establishment’s intrigue against the WHO might seem at odds with Taiwan’s failed bid to join the World Health Assembly (WHA) this past May, but there was no contradiction between Taiwan being seen fighting a David and Goliath-like battle with both the WHO and China, thereby flaring up geopolitical tensions from without. Both served the interests of the ruling class of Taiwan.

Will colleges and universities reopen in the fall? That’s the question on the minds of many these day—administrators, faculty, staff, students, and their families, not to mention the communities in which they live.

We are at war! The heads of states throughout the globe are posing as chieftains in this quixotic war against an enemy who no one understands.

Donald Trump launched a new vaccine war in May, but not against the virus. It was against the world.

Barnaby Raine writes to mark the launch of a new class on Marx and his writing, as part of The Brooklyn Institute summer season

he current pandemic is giving humanity a crash course in apocalypse management. Whether COVID-19 is actually apocalyptic or not is debatable, but the pandemic has many of the characteristics that we associate with something of that scale.

Americans rate their own government’s response, along with that of the UK and Italy, higher than that of China despite those countries having much higher death and infection rates.

The Trump regime is ratcheting up its protectionist rhetoric vis-à-vis China. If this leads to new sanctions, it would worsen the COVID-induced trade crisis rather than help the U.S.