Covid-19, the respiratory disease caused by the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, had killed more than 366,000 people, and infected over six million by 29 May. The free market, neoliberal capitalist states are the epicentres of the pandemic. The United States and Britain are amongst the worst affected. At least 35% of global infections and 50% of deaths have been in Europe’s virus-stricken nations. The US accounts for 30% of infections and 30% of deaths, with over 100,000 deaths by the end of May. Covid-19 has exposed the huge racial and class inequalities in capitalist societies. Meanwhile countries with a socialist system like Cuba, or progressive governments such as in Venezuela, or where the state plays a centralised, directive role such as in China, have shown that the pandemic can be controlled. Charles Chinweizu reports
WHO advice
Only international cooperation can defeat the pandemic. On 14 February the Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said ‘this is the time for solidarity, not stigma’, repeating at a 24 April virtual summit: ‘We will only halt Covid-19 through solidarity.’ At that summit – which was boycotted by the US – the WHO brought together world and global health leaders to commit to ‘work together to accelerate the development and production of new vaccines, tests and treatments for Covid-19 and assure equitable access worldwide’. The WHO reiterated on 22 May that Covid-19 vaccines must be recognised as ‘global public health goods’. On 16 May, Ghebreyesus repeated: ‘test, test, test’, adding ‘test every suspected Covid-19 case. If they test positive, isolate them and find out who they have been in close contact with up to two days before they developed symptoms and test those people too’.
WHO guidelines, made available to all countries, are clear about what Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) is needed for health workers treating Covid-19 patients: face masks (or respirators for aerosol-generating procedures), gowns, gloves and eye protection (visors or goggles). Even cleaners and visitors entering the room of a Covid-19 patient, require masks, gloves, gowns and eye protection (if there is a risk of splash).
Imperialism and its allies: unable and unwilling
The imperialists and their allies have ignored WHO advice. The US Trump administration has led an unconscionable attack on the organisation, cutting $400m in annual WHO funds in the middle of the acute phase of the pandemic, demanding on 19 May that if there are no ‘major substantive improvements within the next 30 days’, the cut would be permanent and the US would ‘reconsider our membership’. This 15% cut will affect delivery of essential health services to the most vulnerable people in the world. But these actions are more than just a distraction from the US’s inability to respond to the pandemic: they are also a sign of its unwillingness to do so.
The imperialists are motivated by the desire to protect the profits of the capitalist class. Jared Kushner, Trump’s adviser, argued that ‘testing too many people, or ordering too many ventilators, would spook the markets’. Governments in Britain and Italy also delayed their responses, including the implementation of the lockdown, as they did not want to undermine their economies. Even as the number of deaths continued to rise, the capitalists are starting to re-open their economies, forcing workers back to work with little or no concern over their health and safety, driven by the need to accumulate capital and prevent their economies falling too far behind China. ‘Vaccine or no vaccine we’re back’ said Trump. As a result, the US is building mass graves; estimates suggest 135,000 US citizens will die by 4 August.
Fewer than 3% of people in the US had been tested by mid-May, yet mass testing, isolation of positive cases, and identification and isolation of their contacts are the only strategies to curb the spread of the virus, for which there are very few proven treatments, and no vaccines. There is widespread confusion about how testing data in the US should be reported, with the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) mixing up results from viral and antibody tests, thereby providing an inaccurate picture of the state of the pandemic.
In Britain, Office for National Statistics (ONS), National Records of Scotland and Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency figures for all deaths where Covid-19 was mentioned on the death certificate, show the true UK death toll was already over 45,000 people by 21 May. The Financial Times economics editor Chris Giles estimates there have been about 62,600 excess deaths in UK, the best ultimate measure of the deadly impact of Covid-19, as it includes people who died without being tested, as well as the indirect victims who were unable or unwilling to attend hospital. This is by far the worst death toll in Europe.
Throughout January and February the British government made no attempts to boost supplies of PPE for health workers; ventilators to treat acute respiratory symptoms; or swab tests to detect the infection. Emergency stockpiles were depleted and allowed to expire, and the lockdown was reluctantly imposed six weeks too late. The disease was also callously allowed to run rampant through nursing homes.
As we go to press, the US and UK lead the world in death rates, performing hopelessly inadequate levels of testing, followed by Italy, Spain and France. US and British imperialism stand out as emblems of global ineptitude and callous indifference, with Trump tightening sanctions on Cuba, Venezuela, and also Iran during the pandemic.
Allies of imperialism such as Brazil, Ecuador, Chile and Peru, where reactionary racist governments are in power, are proving no less inhumane:
- Brazil, which in 2018 expelled 8,500 Cuban doctors, was by 29 May behind only the US in terms of Covid-19 infections with over 460,000 confirmed cases, and had become the epicentre of the pandemic in Latin America, with over 28,000 deaths and rising.
- Ecuador, where neoliberal president Lenin Moreno also expelled 382 Cuban doctors in 2019, Covid-19 victims have been found dead on streets in the capital Quito and the port city of Guayaquil. There is virtually no testing in Ecuador (only 2.9 tests per confirmed case, 104,000 tests).
- In Chile, after the Pinera government lifted some lockdown measures too early, the disease is running rife through the capital Santiago where a new lockdown has been enforced; there have been riots because of food shortages in working class areas.
- In Peru, indigenous groups have complained to the UN that they were left to fend for themselves against the coronavirus. Peru’s riot police fired teargas into crowds trying to flee lockdown in Lima. Hospitals have run out of oxygen, the supply of which is monopolised by private corporations.
Collaborative states
That the epidemic can be brought under control with decisive public health measures has been shown by countries like Vietnam, China. Venezuela and socialist Cuba. They have shown solidarity and worked to assist other nations fighting the pandemic. Cuba’s centralised system allows authorities to better monitor the outbreak and rapidly move resources where they are most needed: its active public health management means that of 2,005 confirmed cases of Covid-19 by the end of May, only 163 remained active, with 82 deaths. Venezuela, with 1,300 cases, has had the lowest mortality per million inhabitants on the Latin American continent, with just 11 deaths by 29 May.
Vietnam, despite its proximity to China, has had only 324 cases and not one single death. By 17 January, Vietnam started implementing protective measures and an infectious disease monitoring system. Schools were closed in January, and intensive contact tracing implemented. All visitors and contacts of positive cases were quarantined. Emerging clusters resulted in entire towns of 10,000 people being locked down for 14 days. Vietnam has the second highest testing rate in the world (850 tests per confirmed case), and the lowest infection rate in the world so far.
FRFI 275 (April 2020) covered China’s response to the coronavirus, and the possible origins of such zoonoses. There is no evidence of the supposed cover-up claimed by the imperialists.* The US government’s use of the coronavirus to attack China, and the attack on the WHO has not been condemned by the British government. Bigoted behavior — for instance, referring to the coronavirus as the ‘Chinese virus’ — only fuels racist demonisation and attacks. The outbreak may have begun in Wuhan, but the virus doesn’t necessarily originate there; it could have come from anywhere. While the 2009-2010 H1N1 swine influenza pandemic outbreak started in Mexico, the virus originated primarily in the US but it is not called the ‘American virus’; at the time it was referred to as the ‘Mexican virus’ or the ‘fajita flu’. Mexicans and other Latinx living in the US were quickly stigmatised as carriers of the virus.
Vaccines
The advanced capitalist countries see vaccination as an eventual way out of the coronavirus crisis. However the vaccine industry hasn’t invested in the resources to be able to scale up production in advance of a pandemic as there was no ‘market’. Just four companies accounted for 90.1% of vaccine revenue: Sanofi Pasteur, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck and Pfizer in 2017. There is only enough production capacity to vaccinate 3.2 billion people, or 41% of the global population, with the imperialists first in the queue.
Big pharma has demanded that governments guarantee their profits by committing to underwrite purchases of the most promising experimental vaccines even before final proof that they work. This is despite profits of billions of dollars, fuelled by aggressive drug price increases. Public money has been handed over to multinationals with no questions asked. British company AstraZeneca (AZ) has received $1bn (£0.82bn) from the US to ‘develop, produce and deliver’ the vaccine. AZ has already concluded deals for the first 400 million doses. French company Sanofi has said the US would receive its vaccine first, despite French President Macron’s protestations that it be treated as ‘public good for the world, and not subject to the laws of the market’. The US tried and failed to acquire exclusive rights to German vaccine company CureVac in March.
On 4 May, a WHO global summit of world leaders held to raise the first $8bn of $40bn needed to fund research into vaccines and treatments for Covid-19 was boycotted by the US. G20 nations including China attended. Instead, the US has launched ‘Operation Warp Speed’ to accelerate vaccine development for ‘America First’. The imperialists are worried that China, with four projects underway, will develop a vaccine ahead of them, getting a ‘head start’, ‘economic rudder’ or ‘propaganda coup’; the Chinese government has stated that any vaccine it develops will be made freely available to the rest of the world. The British media, with no evidence, has already accused China of ‘stealing Covid-19 data’. The imperialists will frustrate any international agreement over how a vaccine will be produced and distributed, and the WHO, which is best placed to coordinate this and set standards, has no authority over price-gouging monopoly pharma companies.
Anthony Costello, professor of global health at UCL, predicts a series of waves of infections followed by a series of lockdowns, unless there is the programme of mass testing, community surveillance and contact tracing that the WHO has insisted on. This the imperialist countries and their neoliberal allies refuse to organise, condemning thousands to die as a consequence.
*China and CoronaShock by Vijay Prashad, Du Xiaojun and Weiyan Zhu documents China’s response to the pandemic in a systematic way and is highly recommended reading.
