Tag Archives | coronavirus

Over 2,000 people have written to the CBC to condemn its deletion of the word “Palestine” and its subsequent apology for uttering it. Still, the broadcaster insists the word falls outside its standards.

Over two decades ago, Professor Richard Levins, one of the founders of Science for the People, described this phenomenon as the “dual nature” of science.(1) On one hand, scientific investigations discover truths about material reality that are independent of ideology or politics.

The U.S. Commerce Department blacklisted a Russian research institute that helped create the world’s first COVID-19 vaccine.

Well-thought-out policies can reverse the results of incompetence; the onus is on the Centre to spend now

The number of continued claims for unemployment compensation, while below its peak, rose from the previous week and was more than 29 million American workers—a figure that includes workers receiving Pandemic Unemployment Assistance.

Social media, in March 2020, was awash with rumours. Swans and dolphins could be seen in totally deserted Venetian canals. A group of elephants marched into a village in Yunnan (China), drank corn wine, and went to sleep in a tea garden.

The danger doesn’t only come from the symptoms of a virus: it comes from our distorted relationship with the natural world.

In the spring, we shut down our lives and our economy in hopes of reducing the spread of COVID-19 enough to be able to manage it through widespread testing and contact tracing. In spite of that shutdown, today the virus is raging virtually uncontrolled. We didn’t stick with it until the job was done.

“Russia’s health workers and teachers will be the first ones to receive the vaccine in the country,” Russia’s Health Minister Mikhail Murashko said.

Patrick Cockburn examines the threads between the pandemic and the media’s coverage of age of endless war.

Nothing happens in Beirut and Lebanon that is transparent; plots of all kinds unravel against the ordinary hopes of the population.

The rising toll of diseased and deceased from the COVID-19 pandemic has hit Bolivia particularly hard, in a continent that is now in the lead in global contagion rates.

Jhuliana Rodrigues works as a nurse technician at the Hospital São Vicente in Jundiaí, Brazil. “It is very difficult,” she says of her job these days. Brazil has just passed 100,000 deaths from COVID-19, with 3 million Brazilians infected with the virus.

The American economy gained 1.8 million jobs last month, even as the coronavirus surged in many parts of the country and newly reintroduced restrictions caused some businesses to close for a second time.

The novel coronavirus continues its march through the world, with 18 million confirmed cases and at least 685,000 deaths. Of these, the United States of America, Brazil, and India are the worst-hit, harbouring about half of the world’s cases.

What can a virus tell us about climate breakdown, in its causation and in humanity’s response?

Six months ago, on January 30, the director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, announced a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC). Ten days before this, the Chinese government had said—to great alarm—that the coronavirus could be transmitted from human to human.

Two things seem certain at this point: (1) The Trump administration will continue to extend its heavy handed neofascist tactics in the next three months, seeking to expand its political base by these means, and (2) the White House and the Republican Party will try to engineer another set of stimulus payments/tax cuts in early September with Trump’s name all over it.

“Now this liberal virus, which pollutes contemporary social thought and eliminates the capacity to understand the world, let alone to transform it, has profoundly penetrated the whole of the ‘historical left’ formed in the aftermath of the Second World War” (Samir Amin, 2003, 41)

No one should have been surprised by COVID-19. Epidemiologists have been warning for decades about the increasing danger of novel virus pandemics that could cause major human suffering, disrupt the economy and exacerbate the growing inequalities that characterizes the modern world.