Tag Archives | COVID-19

THE total number of COVID-19 cases detected across India crossed over 2,34,000 on April 17, the very day Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed an election rally in Asansol, West Bengal, where he congratulated the attendees for coming in large numbers and gushed that he had not seen such crowds at a rally before.

U.S. President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion rescue package is one of the most ambitious measures to revive the U.S. and, with it, the world economy.

As rich nations stockpile COVID-19 vaccines, China is providing a lifeline to Global South nations spurned by Western pharmaceuticals and excluded by the West’s neocolonial vaccine nationalism. So why is China being smeared for its efforts?

This pandemic has affirmed that public healthcare needs cannot be adequately met under a profit-based system.

The infamous Tuskegee syphilis study on Black men is but the best known of the plethora of medical experiments on Black and Brown people in and out of prisons, and other vulnerable populations.

COVID-19 – A socialist response

Both the pandemic and the response to it represent the irrationality and destructiveness of capitalism. The crisis of care was already evident before the outbreak of Covid, but was greatly exacerbated by it.

Over the past few weeks, the subject of anti-Asian racism has received an unusual degree of Western media attention, ever since a video showing the January 28 killing of Vicha Ratanapakdee, an 84-year-old Thai immigrant in San Francisco, was widely shared on social media.

Senior care puts care workers into racialized, gendered, and age hierarchies, making it difficult for them to achieve social and economic mobility. 

One year ago, as both the Trump administration in the U.S. and the Johnson government in the UK responded fitfully to the growing pandemic, the international media were looking for whipping boys: other countries whose response to the virus was even worse.

The lead up to the second round elections in Ecuador have been marked by misinformation campaigns, a sharp increase in COVID-19 cases and fears of manipulation and fraud.

Nearly three million people have reportedly been killed by the novel coronavirus (SAR-CoV-2) and upwards of 128 million people have been infected by the virus, many with long-lasting health repercussions.

After over a year of suffering, death, and profound transformations of everyday life, International Women’s Day 2021 is an opportunity to take stock of the COVID-19 crisis so far and craft visions for a future centred on the value of social reproduction.

President Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez notes the impressive work of the third group of medical professionals from the Henry Reeve Contingent returning from Mexico, after joining the COVID-19 battle there.

As industrial agriculture encroaches into the last wild places of the Earth, it’s unleashing dangerous pathogens. Time to heal the metabolic rift between ecology and economy, suggests Rob Wallace.

One year after the COVID-19 pandemic began, U.S. billionaires have made out like gangbusters at the expense of workers.

Germany, once viewed as an exaggerated model of exactitude and discipline, is currently in a muddle.

Brazil has suffered the world’s second-worst number of COVID-19 death rates, with Bolsonaro’s COVID-19 policy being described as “homicidally negligent”.

In the West, Cuba has set an example of efficiency and shown that another way is possible in the fight against the pandemic. The numbers speak for themselves; we only need to compare Cuba with other countries or even big cities with similar populations to get a very clear picture of the difference in results.

Developing country governments are being wrongly advised to use their modest fiscal resources to pay down accumulated debt instead of strengthening pandemic relief and recovery. Thus, debt phobia risks deepening and extending COVID-19 recessions by prioritizing buybacks.