Tag Archives | coronavirus

‘Another, probably more severe pandemic has been predicted. Scientists know how to prepare, but someone must act. If we choose not to learn the lessons that are right before our eyes, the consequences will be dire.”

The president and his secretary of state made a startling claim last week: that there is enough evidence to suggest with a high degree of confidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology is the source of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.

Sarah Jaffe, with co-journalist Michelle Chan, interviews U.S. workers of all stripes for their podcast “Belabored” for Dissent Magazine. The following interviews are excerpts from their series on COVID-19 stories, republished with permission.

Scientists are struggling to understand how Covid-19 affects people differently. Socialist Worker shows that the construct of race has more basis in exploitation than biology.

President Trump has revealed a plan to mobilize the US military to deliver mass vaccinations across the country, coupled with Operation Warp Speed, a “Manhattan project-style” race to produce a COVID-19 vaccine.

The public, according to incessant government polling and monitoring of the public mood through focus groups and mass data has confirmed that the nation is quickly being ‘traumatised‘ by the UK’s experience of the pandemic.

I certainly didn’t expect to spend the start of 2020 wading through nearly 700 pages about the 1892 Hamburg cholera epidemic, but I’m glad I did. Death in Hamburg, British historian Richard J. Evans’ social history of the epidemic, is a page-turner, his passion for the topic nothing short of infectious.

The U.S. veto trashes the UN’s efforts to convince armed factions in more than a dozen countries to call for temporary truces as the world battles the pandemic.

More than a million Canadians lost their jobs in March, and an additional 800,000 had their paid hours reduced by over 50 per cent (Evans 2020). The recently released StatsCan Labour Force Survey (LFS) for April is the first government report to capture a full month’s worth of employment data since the start of the crisis.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ eagerly awaited Friday morning Official Unemployment Rate report for April—what editors generally call the BLS’s “headline” rate of unemployment—was definitely headline-worthy.

Early evidence on the intensity and drivers of the COVID-induced crisis in the U.S. and Europe suggests that the official response may lengthen the recession and delay recovery

Death cult capitalism–now the dominant variety–accepts some losses among the royal caste as an acceptable trade-off for creating a world in which millions of lives are extinguished to lube the system and keep the good stuff rolling in, feeding the insatiable parasites at the top whose lust for short term profits has no end.

While there are great differences between the crises and political movements and possibilities of the 1930s and now, there are also important lessons that can be learned from the efforts of activists to build mass movements for social transformation during the Great Depression. My aim in this paper is to illuminate the challenges faced and choices made by these activists and draw out some of the relevant lessons for contemporary activists seeking to advance a Green New Deal.

In particular, the existence of a reserve army serves to discipline labor, keeping its wage demands in check, since employed workers are forced to compete with unemployed and underemployed workers for the available jobs.

Like nursing homes, the U.S. meatpacking industry has become one of the hotspots of the novel coronavirus pandemic.

Technology reflects social factors throughout its development and use. Genetically engineered crops allow mega-corporations to patent seeds, lure farmers into buying them with visions of high yields, and then destroy small farmers. Cuba’s drugs are shared throughout the world. Making a distinction between the biotechnology of agro-industry and Cuba requires understanding the difference between bioimperialism and biosolidarity.

For capital, profits come from disease, not peoples’ health. COVID-19 shows the consequence of disease capitalism in a globalized world, the rich—countries or individuals—will not be spared either.

While prices and recipes for asparagus, dates and restrictions for re-opening dominated the media and many conversations, a far more significant matter found little attention. Ever since 1955 an estimated twenty American nuclear bombs have been stored underground at the U.S. Air Force base in Büchel in Rhineland. A German politician recently proposed spending $3 billion on a replacement fleet but ran into a snag.

Blaming health risks due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the New York State Board of Elections announced last week that the state would simply cancel its Democratic presidential primary, leaving former Vice President Joe Biden to be proclaimed the victor without a vote. The response from the country’s two most prominent newspapers? Meh.

THE government’s latest injunction–Stay alert, Control the virus, Save lives–has come under instant criticism as providing ineffective advice.