The barbarism of “forever COVID” and the fight for socialist public health
We are publishing here the report to the Eighth Congress of the Socialist Equality Party (US) given by Evan Blake. The congress was held from August 4 to August 9, 2024.
The COVID-19 pandemic is a world historic tragedy which has killed an estimated over 27 million people and debilitated hundreds of millions worldwide. Since the start of the pandemic, the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), which publishes the World Socialist Web Site, has continuously advocated for policies to eliminate the coronavirus in every country. We remain the only political party in the world that has fought for this strategy and for a vast expansion of public health globally.
We have interviewed and collaborated with many leading scientists and anti-COVID activists, and hosted a major webinar, “How to end the pandemic” on October 24, 2021, which is linked below. We have also assisted workers in building rank-and-file committees independent of the pro-capitalist unions and political parties which are responsible for the pandemic policies that have been implemented.
We urge all of our readers to take up the fight for global elimination by filling out the form below, and to share WSWS material on the pandemic as widely as possible with your friends, family, coworkers and across social media.
Someone from the Socialist Equality Party will contact you to help build the movement for a Zero-COVID global elimination strategy
This video describes the current surge of the Omicron BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants, reviews the immense societal impacts of Long COVID and outlines a strategy of what must be done to end the pandemic. It has subtitles in German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Tamil, Sinhala, Russian, Polish and Italian.
We are publishing here the report to the Eighth Congress of the Socialist Equality Party (US) given by Evan Blake. The congress was held from August 4 to August 9, 2024.
The Biden administration has issued no public statements on the latest surge of the pandemic, and not a single public health official or politician has encouraged Americans to wear high quality N95 masks to protect themselves.
The normalization of a massive police presence targeting the working class in Paris during the Olympics has gone hand in hand with the normalization of mass infection.
The deepening threat of a bird flu pandemic is now concentrated in the United States, where the response of the dairy industry, in collusion with the Biden administration and all responsible federal agencies, has been nothing short of criminal.
This Inquest is necessary to break through the cover-up, falsifications and misinformation that have been deployed to justify policies responsible for the avoidable deaths of millions since the initial detection of SARS-CoV-2.
In this interview, Tynisa Williams, former teacher in Montgomery, Alabama, describes the experience of being forced to teach in-person in the fall of 2020 and winter of 2021. She and her coworkers waged a courageous struggle to stop the deadly return to in-person learning that cost the lives of eight educators in the district.
In this video testimony, Catherine Pace’s family describes the working conditions which led to her death and the deaths of countless other autoworkers during the still-raging pandemic.
In this interview for the Global Workers’ Inquest into the COVID-19 Pandemic, flight attendant Tim Yoder shares his experiences in early 2020. Tim caught COVID-19 in mid-March 2020 after being told he was an “essential worker” and had to continue flying despite feeling ill when multiple coworkers had already tested positive for COVID-19.
The CEO of Fractal Therapeutics discusses the false construct of “hybrid immunity” and the growing danger of new variants as SARS-CoV-2 is allowed to infect the world’s population without any mitigation.
Far-UVC techology can protect the population from SARS-CoV-2 and many other airborne pathogens.
Dr. Nardell, of Harvard University, is a preeminent researcher and practitioner in the field of airborne infections and the use of UV radiation to fight them.
“This was a historic moment in the annals of medicine... when patients came to the fore and alerted all of us scientists that something here is wrong and needs to be investigated and researched and gave the entity its name.”
The deepening threat of a bird flu pandemic is now concentrated in the United States, where the response of the dairy industry, in collusion with the Biden administration and all responsible federal agencies, has been nothing short of criminal.
The current response has prioritized the preservation of profits and uninterrupted operations of the dairy and poultry industries over controlling H5N1.
While testing of farm workers and broader serological surveillance remain essentially non-existent, the extent of potential infections is unknown.
Scientist and infectious disease experts warn that the ongoing spread and adaptation by the bird flu virus poses as an existential threat to human populations.
Amid this deepening crisis, Chinese public health officials have sought to allay fears by recycling the same propaganda and lies first promoted by the Western imperialist powers.
The pseudo-left’s hostility to public health and support for imperialism found sharp expression in their universal demand—echoing that of the Western corporate media and political establishment—that China abandon its Zero-COVID strategy.
Health based analytics estimates that COVID deaths in China have reached 1.3 million fatalities.
Xi echoed the empty platitudes of US President Joe Biden and capitalist politicians responsible for the devastation wrought globally by this preventable disease.
On October 24, 2021, the World Socialist Web Site and the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees hosted this webinar featuring leading scientists and epidemiologists from throughout the world to explain the case for the global elimination of the coronavirus.
2023 will be characterized by mass opposition of teachers and school workers to intolerable working conditions and mass infection. Teachers and school workers must learn from the experiences of the past three years, having been betrayed by the trade union bureaucracies in the interest of the capitalist state, and form independent rank-and-file committees to carry forward their fight!
Opposition to herd immunity and support for basic protective measures remains strong among broad sections of working people. These widespread sentiments must be directed towards the mobilization of the working class to fight for a global strategy to eliminate COVID-19.
The agreement is not worth the paper it is written on. It can only be described as a sellout of the struggle that thousands have been waging since the beginning of March for improvements in the working conditions in the social work and education professions.
Rank-and-file committees of educators, parents and students met across the US last weekend to adopt a resolution opposing the drive to World War III and calling for a mass movement of the working class to stop the pandemic.
The positions of the ruling class proceed from the defense of capitalist property: the private ownership of the means of production and the geostrategic interests of the nation state. The positions of the working class strive objectively toward socialism: the ending of the profit system and exploitation of labor, and its replacement with the scientifically planned reorganization of economic life on the basis of human needs and the global unification of mankind through the abolition of the nation-state system.
Amidst a lackadaisical public health response, two viruses with pandemic potential continue to spread in the United States.
With life-saving mpox vaccines barely trickling into Africa, cases continue to rise rapidly, including in Kinshasa, the capital of the DRC and home to 17 million people.
Amid the World Health Organization’s declaration of a public health emergency of international concern, officials in Canada are hoping that existing therapies combined with targeted vaccination of at-risk populations can limit the spread of the disease.
This year alone, there have been 17,451 cases of mpox and 517 deaths, a case fatality rate of 2.95 percent.