Tag Archives | coronavirus

According to the Cuban Public Health Ministry, as of October 12, 6,500,743 Cubans have been fully vaccinated against COVID-19 with its own vaccines. The figure represents 58.1% of the country’s entire population.

The world should now be more aware of likely COVID-19 devastation unless urgently checked. Last week, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced an US$8 billion plan to quickly vaccinate many more people to expedite ending the pandemic.

The United States marked a grim milestone Oct. 1 as the 700,000th death from COVID-19 was officially registered. Since January of 2020 the United States has also counted over 43 million cases, the most of any country on the planet for both deaths and infections.

Most rich countries have opposed most developing countries’ request to temporarily suspend World Trade Organization (WTO) intellectual property (IP) rules to more quickly contain the COVID-19 pandemic. Expectations were high as Biden had supported a patent waiver, albeit only for vaccines.

Shielding the Western elite from justified rage.

The webinar on ‘Vaccine Imperialism: Scientific Knowledge, Capacity and Production in Africa’ which took place on 5 August 5, 2021, was organized by the Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE) in partnership with the Third World Network-Africa (TWN-Africa).

COVID-19 is the major public health emergency witnessed by human history in recent times. Covid has put humanity to a new test and shaped our World from individual new norms to a new world order.

How early post-independence clarity on the link between food self-sufficiency and national sovereignty offers lessons for contemporary efforts.

Even if we were to accept all the accusations against the WIV regarding their alleged subpar safety standards, none of it has any relevance to the COVID-19 pandemic unless it can be shown the WIV possessed SARS-CoV-2 in its lab before the outbreak, and there is no evidence of that.

EVERYWHERE in the world people got vaccinated against the COVID-19 virus without having to pay a penny, but not in India. Everywhere in the world, historic landmarks that define a nation, that constitute the warp and woof of a nation’s consciousness, are held sacred and left untouched in their original shape, but not in India.

Vaccine costs have pushed many developing countries to the end of the COVID-19 vaccination queue, with most low-income ones not even lining up. Worse, less vaccinated poor nations cannot afford fiscal efforts to provide relief or stimulate recovery, let alone achieve Agenda 2030.

Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel announced Aug. 31–in a special meeting of scientists and health professionals–that by November, 92.6% of Cuba’s entire population will be fully vaccinated with the three-shot process.

While workers are continuing to struggle under Covid, corporate lobbyists are converging on Capitol Hill to block proposed pro-labor reforms.

The multilateral trading system anchored by the WTO is not confined to cross-border trade in physical goods.

The pandemic is pushing back the world’s poorest countries with the least means to finance economic recovery and contagion containment efforts. Without international solidarity, economic gaps will grow again as COVID-19 threatens humanity for years to come.

The Supreme Court callously ended the CDC’s eviction moratorium, but the pandemic has already shown the most effective way to fight back: direct actions.

One key factor in spreading suspicion that the coronavirus might have escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) is media’s early and ongoing politicization of the World Health Organization’s investigation into the pandemic’s origins. Much of this politicization weaponizes Orientalist tropes about China being especially, perhaps genetically, untrustworthy—the sort of people who would unleash COVID-19 on the world.

In recent years, the United States and its allies have unleashed a devastating blockade against Venezuela in hopes of triggering regime change.

Decades of public health cuts have quietly taken a huge human toll, now even more pronounced with the pandemic. Austerity programmes, by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, have forced countries to cut public spending, including health provisioning.

The perfect storm of COVID-19 and climate change, and the resulting economic damage, will most likely trigger much more social and political instability. Although substantially increased international cooperation can still avert this nightmarish scenario, the current state of global politics provides few grounds for optimism.