3621. Learning from the "COVID War"

By Sam Friedman, Bill of Health, July 5, 2023 

Sam Friedman

Amid an emergent international consensus that the COVID pandemic is “over,” writings about the pandemic and its meanings have burst forth like the flowers of June.

This article will focus on one such book, Lessons from the COVID War: An Investigative Report. Produced by an eminently established collection of people, The COVID Crisis Group. The book is intelligently critical of what was done during the pandemic, but at all points it remains within the confines of what is “politically respectable.” This respectability, I argue, means that their recommendations are too narrow to protect Americans, much less the populations of the Global South, from pandemics ahead (barring unexpectedly marvelous advances in vaccine breadth and rapidity of deployment).

Their COVID War

The “COVID Crisis Group” is an establishment group of businesspeople and government officials plus some subject matter experts. Many, like their director, Philip Zelikow, have held high government positions and been lawyers, CEOs, or higher-managers for business. Some have also served as public health officials and/or professors. Only one of the over thirty members of the Crisis Group, Kristin Urquiza, is a community representative due to her role in Marked By Covid. When the Crisis Group organized, it saw itself as the future nucleus for a government commission on the pandemic, much like the 9/11 Commission (that Zelikow had directed). Thus, it formed very much thinking of itself in an establishment role.

Here, I will list a few of their major ideas and assumptions.

1. The pandemic response in the United States, and its attendant hospitalization and death rates, represents a failure of public health. This failure was primarily rooted in not knowing how to get things done. That is, their critique is on process and competence, not on the underlying assumptions of what was done nor on whether the response was organized for the interest of the wealthy, powerful, and white in ways that hurt workers, the poor, members of oppressed racial/ethnic groups, the disabled and the elderly.
2. Since the failure came from not knowing how to get things done, they see a major part of the solution as being the re-creation of the “can-do culture” for which the U.S. used to be famous.
3. They emphasize a “need” for public-private ventures to get things done competently. As they see it, business has the “know-how,” as do certain parts of the military.
4. They recognize the near-certainty of future pandemic outbreaks. They thus point to the need for early detection and tracking systems, and put forward a number of intelligent suggestions for how this might be done more effectively.
5. They state as a main goal in responding to pandemics is getting people back to schools and work as soon as possible. That said, they do take seriously the need for layers of protection at schools and workplaces.
6. They also present good ideas on the “how” side of public health. These include funding increases for public health departments and greater data sharing enabled by digitization of health and public health data.

Their omissions and errors and what else needs to be done

Perhaps their most consequential omission is a serious discussion of why potential pandemics are coming at a rapid rate during this century and how to slow this down. They do mention the issue of slowing the transmission of dangerous viruses and bacteria from other animals to humans, but dismiss this as impractical. Instead of trying to do this, they argue, the United States and other countries should set up effective systems of early detection of new potential pandemics and ways to improve reaction times to such detection. They thus accept the inevitability of zoonotic pandemics, which comes intellectually from their either seeing capitalism as a given or as seeing it as an unavoidable eternal fact.

This is a critical omission. Capitalism fuels potential zoonoses — as cities in the global south expand into forests and savannahs, as hunters seek to flood food markets with “exotic” meats, and as industrial meat producers raise and slaughter animals at massive scale. Once humans get infected with a potential pandemic pathogen, the rapidity of travel across and among continents — much of which is for the business purposes of production, distribution, and, thus, profits — makes it highly possible for disease to spread globally before it is even detected.

In other words, pandemics arise through the day-to-day operations of capitalism. For COVID, this involved financial investment by globally-prominent firms in agriculture and food markets in China that probably were the sites of early viral transmission to humans. Relatedly, within the United States, some evidence suggests that capitalist industrial agriculture may have been a driver of the pandemic in the U.S. Midwest.

A second major weakness is their superficial discussion on the misinformation and “anti-science” messages that greatly reduced the effectiveness of many public health interventions around vaccination, masking, and business closures. They discuss some of the commonly mentioned aspects of this, such as the flip-flops of President Trump in his messages about the pandemic, the growth of social media-based misinformation and its spread by “Russian and Chinese cyber mischief-making” (p. 209), and the like.

What they did not discuss is the reasons why capitalism at its current stage breeds attacks on science (such as those volleyed by political leaders against the science of climate change) and a degree of irrationalism among some groups of workers and others in the population, both of which carried over into the politics of COVID. Most importantly, perhaps, they did not discuss the sustained, systematic attacks on science by many large corporations. The tobacco industry attacked the science around smoke and cancer, agribusiness has attacked the critics of both genetically modified organisms and the critics of industrialized meat production, the fossil fuel industry and many firms dependent on it attack the science of climate change. The techniques they used in these attacks, such as sowing doubt and confusion about what science really says and myths about the muzzling and persecution of “dissenting” scientists, were then used to attack the science behind vaccines, masks, school closings, and many other public health responses to the pandemic and to promote many ineffective but supposedly “evidence-based” medications.

The COVID Crisis Group’s superficial discussion of pandemic misinformation does not address the deep-seated roots of this messaging. This is not surprising for such an establishment group, since these root causes are the use of attacks on science to defend the interests of major blocs of capital, the racism that sustains capitalist rule, and the irrationalism that is endemic to capitalism.

Relatedly, although they do report (p. 164-165) that COVID was particularly devastating for American Indians, Blacks, and Hispanics, they do not adequately analyze why this same pattern was true for the HIV/AIDS pandemic, nor why poor health and medical apartheid have been racialized throughout the history of the United States. In discussing the mistrust and disconnection from health systems that greatly weakened a variety of public health efforts during the first two years of the pandemic, they mention that his mistrust “goes deep among communities that have long felt marginalized” (p. 204). They then mention the Tuskegee Syphilis Study that left Black participants with syphilis to suffer the ravages of the disease long after effective treatments were available, but fail to mention similar atrocities such as the involuntary sterilizations that many racially oppressed women had forced on them by the American medical system and the racist eugenic “science” used to justify these actions. Not unexpectedly, with their emphasis on “how to” react to pandemics rather than on what needs to be changed, they do not offer suggestions about ending the socially structured racism that both underlies the extra burdens of pandemics on racialized peoples and contributes substantially to white “anti-science” opposition to public health actions.

They say almost nothing about Long COVID — two short paragraphs and a short footnote. They do recognize that Long COVID is poorly understood and that some people with Long COVID have organized for care and research. One might think that these uncertainties about the extent of Long COVID, its duration, and thus the threat it poses to the population and the workforce would make it worth discussing in depth. After all, if too many people become disabled by it this would show that the COVID Crisis Group was badly mistaken in claiming that getting people back to school and work is a main priority of policy and in supporting the policy of getting back to normalcy in 2023.

In supporting the return to normalcy, they do not discuss one of its large-scale and extremely harmful effects — that of excluding millions of people in the United States (and elsewhere) from social life. Examples include people with asthma or other respiratory infections, or those with impaired immune systems (such as those undergoing chemotherapy for cancer, or those with HIV except when it is totally under control), and elderly people. Thus, the policy of “opening up” and of “normalcy” amounts in practice to excluding tens of millions of people from many jobs and stores. This is not a surprise — by and large, businesses and governments around the country have given lip service to including people with disabilities in society, but actions on this have trailed far behind words

As a final critique, and as a first step in presenting ideas for political actions in future outbreaks of COVID or in the next pandemic (or even a bad epidemic in one country), the COVID Crisis Group discusses the failures and successes of what happened in the United States response to COVID in a thoroughly top-down matter. 

They focus on what government agencies and politicians did, on what researchers did, and on what pharmaceutical companies did. In doing this, they failed to discuss the remarkable and sometimes successful actions of ordinary people and workers. They fail to see how members of local communities mobilized mutual aid projects to held neighbors unable (or afraid) to get groceries or needed medications. They fail to discuss and analyze the actions of nurses and other health care workers to organize care, to support each other when sick, and to force hospital managements to procure PPE like masks. They fail to discuss the strikes by various groups of front line workers that arose in dangerous conditions. Further, in their emphasis on the need to re-open schools, they fail to discuss the heroic actions of some teachers’ unions in refusing to return until changes in ventilation and case detection procedures were established that would keep kids, their relatives, and school workers as safe as reasonably possible. They fail even to discuss Marked by COVID and its efforts, in spite of the fact that the COVID Crisis Group includes the founder of Marked by COVID as a member, much less discuss groups like People’s CDC, which have been involved in community education and politics opposed to some of what the COVID Crisis Group proposes.

In short, they base their analysis on thoroughly elitist grounds. They treat the public as the objects acted upon by public health institutions and as a potential obstacle to implementing public health. In the next section, I take the exact opposite view. I see the actions of community mutual aid and worker groups as the solution to ending the system that evokes pandemics and, until then, as fundamental to mitigating the pandemics that arise through the everyday search for profit and power by capitalist institutions.

Solutions

In preparation for the next pandemic, and perhaps during it, we need to empower workers at workplaces to defend themselves. I do not see this primarily as a call to change laws, although passing laws to increase workers’ rights to avoid unsafe working conditions and to organize unions, and even to speak freely with each other at work, would clearly be helpful, and I do support their passage. Laws, however, are likely to be abrogated by employers and the state during emergencies like pandemics. What is needed now, and in the future, is for workers to organize their power and their collective willingness and ability to strike effectively regardless of what the law says and even regardless of what union leaders say. During the COVID pandemic, hospital workers did this, as did some teachers and other workers. Much more is needed.

Similarly, people in the most-effected communities developed many skills at how to cope with sickness and how to organize mutual aid for each other. When confronted with police violence and killings in 2020, people demonstrated around the U.S. and, indeed, the world as part of the Black Lives Matter movement. What is needed now, and in the future, is for neighborhoods and larger communities of poor people, racially or otherwise oppressed people, and working people to develop organizations of mutual solidarity and aid, and a willingness and ability to take direct action to defend themselves and to meet their needs regardless of what employers or governments say.

COVID ravaged prison populations, nursing homes and the homeless with particular ferocity. To prepare for future pandemics, these groups too will have to organize, together with various abolitionist groups. They alone will have limited power, but together with the worker and community groups discussed, more can be done.

Although all of the above will be essential in meeting the threats of a renewed COVID outbreak and of future pandemics, they alone will not be enough. We also will need many of the more intelligent proposals that the COVID Crisis Group put forward, such as improved forms of detecting new pathogens as soon as they arise and rapidly responding to reduce their spread and to develop medicines and vaccines quickly through improved and sustained scientific and public health capabilities.

Preventing pandemic destruction is not just a question of “how to,” as the COVID Crisis Group thinks. It is a question of organizing power from below so people can get rid of capitalism and its pandemic-creating needs and set up a society where people can take care of their needs and of each other without evoking pandemics or climate change. Given the damage that capitalism has already done to the metabolic interchanges between humans and the rest of nature, some of the specific proposals of the COVID Crisis Group will be useful. The economic, political and human structures and ways of thought that we will need to set up, however, will in no way resemble the public-private or military “can-do structures” that are their ideal.

I would like to acknowledge the intellectual input of fellow members of the People’s CDC, and especially Fran Green, Karyn Pomerantz, Howard Waitzkin, and Rob Wallace.

Samuel R. Friedman is a research professor at a leading New York university and previously the Director of the Institute for Infectious Disease Research at National Development and Research Institutes in New York. He can be reached at sam4wp@netscape.net

3620. Hugo Blanco Galdós, Peruvian Socialist Fighter, Died at 88

By La Jornada, June 26, 2023 

Mexico City. The union and peasant leader and former Peruvian guerrilla, Ángel Hugo Blanco Galdos, died yesterday in Sweden at the age of 88. He was an integral part of the Latin American left since the 1950s and spent 40 years of his life in and out of prison and in exile.

Born in Cuzco on November 15, 1934, Blanco Galdos was a leader of the indigenous peasant struggle that culminated in the agrarian reform of 1968, and participated in the Constituent Assembly of 1978.

His father was a peasant defense attorney, so he learned Quechua from a young age. He adopted the concept of "ecosocialism" with which he proclaimed the right of indigenous people to defend their lands from environmental damage caused by business.

In his childhood he was changed when he found out that a landowner marked his initials on the buttock of an indigenous man with a hot iron, a practice known as carimba, Blanco Galdos recounted during an interview with the Fourth International in 2015.

He began studying agronomy in La Plata, Argentina, in 1954, "because I liked the countryside," and he admitted that "the 1910 Revolution in Mexico influenced Cuzco."

He dropped out of school when he became interested in worker and union causes that led him, during his life, to travel to Argentina, Bolivia, Mexico and the United States.

In his youth he sought to soak up the thought of the left, among Trotskyist groups. "At that time the approach was that the proletariat was the vanguard, and since there were no proletarians in Cuzco, I came to Lima to enter factories." He indicated that it took time to find a large factory, with a union formed, he told La Cuarta.

“I finally found a factory where there was a union (…) and I went to work there. That's when (Richard) Nixon, who was vice president of the United States, arrived in Peru, and among various small groups on the left (...) we prepared a counter-demonstration that turned out to be much larger than we imagined. And then came the repression. I had to leave the factory and I went to Cuzco,” he added.

Between 1961 and 1963 he led a Quechua uprising in that area, where he is considered to have been the bridge between indigenous workers and white intellectuals. He organized some 2,000 peasants in the Departmental Federation of Peasants of Cuzco, who occupied landowners' properties, and formed a self-government, in which Blanco was "secretary of Agrarian Reform."

In August 1962, Blanco with a group of companions founded the guerrilla Remigio Huamán Brigade. “The support of the peasantry was almost absolute, exciting. He fed us, clothed us, guided us, protected us, ”he explained. On May 15, 1963, the army captured him and three years later sentenced him to 25 years in prison on the island of El Frontón. During that time he wrote his book Tierra o Muerte, las luchas campesinas en Perú .

In 1970, the government of Juan Velasco Alvarado granted him an amnesty, but expelled him to Mexico. He then traveled to Argentina, where in 1971 he was deported to Chile; During Augusto Pinochet's coup on September 11, 1973, he took refuge in the Swedish embassy. By then, intellectuals from all over the world knew of his struggle and participated in a solidarity campaign on his behalf, supported by Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Bertrand Russel.

In 1976 he came to Sweden as a political refugee. The United States Committee for Justice for Political Prisoners in Latin America obtained a visa for him, which allowed him to tour American cities, where in 1977 he spoke before thousands of sympathizers of the worker, peasant, and indigenous movements.

In 1980 he was a deputy and presidential candidate in Peru, for the Left Revolutionary Alliance, and later a senator of the Mariateguista Unified Party until 1992, when President Alberto Fujimori carried out a self-coup. Blanco found out that both Peruvian intelligence and the Shining Path group sentenced him to death and he then took refuge in Mexico.

He declared himself away from Trotskyism in the 1990s. When he was living temporarily in Mexico, the movement of the Zapatista National Liberation Army broke out, which had a strong influence on him.

In 2002 he suffered a stroke in Cuzco and was transferred to Mexico City for treatment, where he remained until 2003. His last years were spent in Sweden, along with his six children and several grandchildren.

3619. Almost Half the World Species Will Be Gone: Study Shows

By BelfastLive, May 28, 2023

Emerald glass frog (Espadarana prosoblepon), Ecuador, Photo:Roberto García-Roa

 

In the most comprehensive research of its kind to date, the team looked at the population density changes of 71,114 species across the globe. And they found the impact of human industrialization on these 5,969 mammals, 11,162 birds, 10,150 reptiles, 7,316 amphibians, 24,356 fish, and 12,161 insects is significantly more alarming than previously thought.

Birds are faring worst followed by mammals, amphibians, reptiles, fish and insects - although there are more unknowns in the latter three categories.

Catherine Finn, PhD student at Queen’s University Belfast and leading author on the research, said: “Almost half of animals on Earth for which assessments are available are currently declining.

“To make matters worse, many of the animal species that are thought to be non-threatened from extinction, are in fact progressively declining.”

Worldwide erosion of biodiversity is one of the most critical challenges facing humanity in the coming decades. It threatens the very ecosystems life depends on as well as food production, the spread of diseases and global economic stability.

According to this traditional method, 28% of life on Earth is threatened with extinction.

The academics behind this groundbreaking research adopted a new approach using a global-scale analysis of a different measure of extinction risk called “population trends” to see whether the population sizes of species are declining, remain stable or are getting better over time.

Using this approach, they found the magnitude of the extinction crisis is considerably more severe than shown by the traditional measure based on threat categories, with an alarming 48% of species declining towards extinction and only 3% showing signals of recovery.

Decreasing vs unknown (Image: QUB)

The team behind the report say the findings show the global crisis of biodiversity extinction is failing to compensate for lost species with the evolution of other species that could take their places in nature.

Their research also found 33% of species currently considered “safe” by the IUCN conservation categories are in fact declining towards risk of extinction.

Dr Daniel Pincheira-Donoso, Senior Lecturer in Evolutionary Biology and Macroecology at Queen’s University Belfast and the Principal Investigator of the project, said: “This new study method and global-scale analysis provides a clearer picture about the true extent of global erosion of biodiversity that the traditional approach cannot offer.

“Our work is a drastic alert about the current magnitude of this crisis that has already devastating impacts on the stability of nature as a whole, and on human health and wellbeing.”

Species in decline (Image: QUB)

The study was funded by the UKRI (NERC) QUADRAT Doctoral Training Programme.

“We show a widespread global erosion of species, with 48% undergoing declines, while 49% and 3% of species currently remain stable or are increasing, respectively,” the report’s abstract states.

“Geographically, we reveal an intriguing pattern similar to that of threatened species, whereby declines tend to concentrate around tropical regions, whereas stability and increases show a tendency to expand towards temperate climates.

“Importantly, we find that for species currently classed by the IUCN Red List as ‘non-threatened’, 33% are declining.

“Critically, in contrast with previous mass extinction events, our assessment shows that the Anthropocene extinction crisis is undergoing a rapid biodiversity imbalance, with levels of declines (a symptom of extinction) greatly exceeding levels of increases (a symptom of ecological expansion and potentially of evolution) for all groups.

3618. The Anthropocentric Industrial Capitalist Civilization and Ecological Crises

By Kamran Nayeri, April 1, 2023

The existential crises facing humanity are anthropogenic, either obviously so nuclear holocaust or there is scientific consensus that they are like climate change, the Sixth Extinction, and recurrent pandemics. In this book, I have argued that they are all caused by the anthropocentric industrial capitalist civilization. In this appendix, I will provide data from the recent economic history to show how global warming, hence climate change caused by increasing greenhouse gas emissions. In particular, I show how carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration in the atmosphere correlated with the advent of the English industrial revolution (1780-1840) and the spread of industrialization globally ever since. 

 

There is widespread denial in the climate movement of any role "capitalism" might have played in the climate crisis. Just recently, a fellow climate activist in Sonoma County Climate Activist Network (S0CoCan!) in northern California asked for a discussion on how to go before the Board of Directors of the Exxon-Mobile Corporation to convince them to stop exploring, drilling, refining, and selling oil and gas. In fact, since 2016, when I begin participating in Sonoma County climate activist groups, I have brought up this argument in a number of times. Even though there are individuals in the group that openly support “capitalism,” not a single voice has ever been raised in response to my argument. There has also been no expressed interest in discussing this or in my proposal that we need to work toward a self-organized and self-mobilized movement of working people to stop the climate crisis. The national leadership of the climate movement has followed the same “strategy” of supporting “climate-friendly” politicians.  

 

The following charts summarize some key features of modern economic history. Chart 1 shows the growth of the World Gross Domestic Product (World GDP), the annual market value of all goods and services produced in the world, which has increased exponentially since the advent of the English industrial revolution 1770-1840.  

Chart 1. Exponential increase in world GDP in the modern era 

 

Chart 2 shows the exponential or rapid increase in per capita GDP by economic regions.  These countries for each region are selected for their different degrees of industrialization and availability of data.

Chart 2. 

 

Chat 3 shows how during this period, the world population has also increased exponentially.

Chart 3.

Charts 4 and 5 show the rapid or exponential rise in food and energy consumption after World War II.    

 

Chart 4. The rapid increase in per capita food consumption

Chart 5. The exponential rise in energy consumption by source 

 

 

Chart 6 shows how the wealth expropriated by the capitalist system has largely accumulated in the U.S., Europe, Asia Pacific, and now China. 

Chart 6. World Wealth by Region in 2018

 

Finally, Chart 7 shows the exponential rise in carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere that follows the spread of industrialization and related factors, as discussed earlier. 

Chart 7. Annual World CO2 Emission

 

In combination, these charts tell a powerful story. With the advent of English capitalist industrialization and its spread across the world, the expropriation of wealth from nature through the exploitation of the working people has intensified many folds. Before the industrial revolution, humanity relied on sunshine, burned wood, straw, and dried dung for energy. The wind was used in sailing and water, and wind-powered simple machines grounded the grain and pumped water. Draft animals were used in land transport and farming. While there were ecological and environmental crises, some of which brought down civilizations, the impact was still local or regional. With the advent of the anthropocentric industrial capitalist civilization, the crises have become global and, in some cases, like climate change, existential. 

 

In the capitalist world economy, firms produce to make a profit and pursue expanded capital accumulation to amass wealth. However, profits generated in the process of production must be realized upon sale. The process of expanded (re)production requires not only the intensification of the exploitation of labor power but also the expansion of the labor force and consumer and capital markets. Thus, the population needs to increase. The charts show that since 1800 world population has grown exponentially as commodity markets, especially the consumption of food and energy, have expanded, supported by increasing per capita GDP and increasing life expectancy due to improvements in public health since the nineteenth century and the general introduction and use of antibiotics since the mid-twentieth century. 

 

By the end of World War II, the geological epoch, the Holocene, which began 11,650 years ago, has been giving way to the Anthropocene (The age of humankind). The Anthropocene, dated by some geologists to have begun after World War II, has been accompanied by the Great Acceleration: the exponential growth of human population, urbanization, real G.D.P. growth, foreign direct investment, primary energy use, large dams, air travel and tourism, water use, paper production, fertilizer consumption, transportation, telecommunications, emission of carbon dioxide, methane, nitrogen dioxide, surface temperature, stratospheric ozone, marine fish capture, ocean acidification, coastal nitrogen, shrimp aquaculture, tropical forest loss, domesticated land, and terrestrial biosphere degradation. 

 

Thus, accelerating ecological crises, especially existential ones, are rooted in the anthropocentric industrial capitalist civilization.