Tag Archives | COVID-19

Sarah Jones, in The Coronavirus Class War in New York Magazine, does a neat, tidy job of kneecapping the notion that the anti-lockdown protests are manned by workers who want to get back to their jobs so they can start making money again.

Venezuelan former Vice President Elias Jaua calls for the government to rebuild the state and retake the reins of the economy.

On March 20, just after the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a global pandemic on March 11, the U.S. National Security Council (NSC) sent a cable to U.S. State Department instructing officials how they should speak about China and the novel coronavirus, according to the Daily Beast, which obtained the cable.

Infections with SARS-CoV-2 are now widespread, and as of 11 March 2020, 121,564 cases have been confirmed in more than 110 countries, with 4,373 deaths.

Here in the U.S., agribusiness lines up with pharmaceutical and military contractors in terms of being a political force to be reckoned with and, in effect, help run the country. Their needs are protected so that these pathogens have the best lawyers on the planet.

IN A PANDEMIC, “ESSENTIAL” LABORERS ARE WORKING, BUT THE LABOR MARKET ISN’T.

OK, I’m done with all these trite catchphrases about all of us being in this mess together.

The problems facing Native American communities during this pandemic were decades in the making.

Mass deforestation, industrialised animal agriculture and reductions in biodiversity are among a number of factors which increase the likelihood of the emergence and spread of dangerous pathogens such as the coronavirus disease 2019, explains scientist Dr Rob Wallace in an exclusive interview with Sputnik.

In the age of COVID-19, poor and working-class people are susceptible not just to illness, but also to discrimination and disdain.

‘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.