As the Covid-19 pandemic nears a harrowing winter, with deaths surging to record levels around the globe, the profit system is killing masses of people by the day. Worldwide, thanks to capitalist inaction, incompetence, misleadership, and greed, more than 55 million workers have been sickened and over 1.3 million have died—official numbers that are surely huge undercounts. In Belgium, nurses and doctors were ordered to keep working after testing positive, as long as they weren’t coughing in patients’ faces (nbcnews.com, 11/2). In Mexico, where the fake-left president dismisses masks and under two  percent of the population has been tested, intensive care units are overrun (aljazeera.com, 11/15). Latin America, said The Lancet, the top British medical journal, is facing a humanitarian crisis borne out of political instability, corruption, social unrest, fragile health systems, and perhaps most importantly, longstanding and pervasive inequality…. (11/7).
In other words, the working class is suffering from capitalism, the deadliest plague in human history. Exhibit A is the United States, the planet’s wealthiest nation and the runaway leader in Covid carnage. In mid-November, the U.S. logged a million new cases in six days. Hospitals are once again scrounging for medical-grade masks. It can take hours to get tested and precious days to get the results. Rural patients are dying while waiting for space in jammed urban hospitals (USA Today, 11/15). In El Paso, county inmates were enlisted to move an overflow of bodies to mobile morgue units (Texas Tribune, 11/15). By treating us as commodities, capitalism devalues human life as a matter of course, through war and exploitation and the rationing of healthcare. For the bosses, the pandemic is a crisis only insofar as it threatens their revenues. Workers, as per usual, are expendable.
We Are Who We Need!
According to a gold-standard statistical model from the University of Washington, we can expect 80,000 more women, men, and children in the U.S. to die of Covid by January 1, and nearly 200,000 more by March 1. By December, fatalities are projected to reach 3,000 per day (cnn.com, 11/18), more than the 9/11 death toll. And because of racist inequalities in healthcare, housing, and employment, Black workers continue to die at greater than twice the rate of white workers (COVID Tracking Project).
As inter-imperialist competition drives a divided, weakened U.S. ruling class toward fascism and World War III, the pandemic has exposed the bosses as the monsters and frauds they are, utterly unfit to run society. Only the international working class, led by a vanguard mass communist party, can protect our lives and our health. Only a communist revolution can smash the rotten capitalist state and meet our needs. But to get there, workers must reject the rabbit hole of reformism, the illusion of electoral democracy, and the lethal deceit of lesser-evil liberal politicians. Our most dangerous class enemies are the president- and vice president-elect, Jim Crow Joe Biden and Top Cop Kamala Harris.
It’s All About the Money, Honey
In a November 11 interview with Yahoo Finance, Michael Osterholm, the eminent Minnesota epidemiologist on Biden’s blue-ribbon pandemic advisory panel, spoke out of turn. Osterholm posed a simple way to crush Covid case numbers and save tens of thousands of lives: a strict four-to-six-week national lockdown. By borrowing at historically low interest rates, the federal government could cover lost wages for individual workers … losses to small companies, to medium-sized companies or city, state, county governments…Then we could really watch ourselves cruising into the vaccine availability in the first and second quarter of next year(abc.com, 11/12).
This was only common sense. As daily infections approach the 200,000 mark, contact tracing is impractical. (If a typical person has 50 contacts, that’s 10 million traces per day.) In a degraded capitalist culture, appeals to “individual responsibility” won’t cut it—not when millions of cynical workers follow the bare-faced lead of Sociopath in Chief Donald Trump, and millions more give in to pandemic fatigue. For now, the one way to quell the virus is by keeping most people home.
But the next day, Vivek Murthy, the panel co-chair, made clear that a national lockdown was off the table. With caseloads rising in all 50 states and spiking across most of them, Murthy said: The way we should be thinking about this is more like a series of restrictions that we dial up or down depending on how bad the spread is taking place in a specific region (abc.com, 11/13). The upshot is that Biden will pass the buck to state and local governments and their random crazy quilt of mandates—not so different from Trump’s approach.
Murthy is an internist who served as Barack Obama’s surgeon general. He has no formal training in epidemiology. But he understands that the president-elect can’t afford to offend the Big Fascist liberal bosses who put Biden where he is today. A lockdown would be bad for business, at least in the short run. Giving workers what we need would be a drain on finance capital. It’s why New York City has closed the city’s schools before shuttering bars and restaurants. Under capitalism, money talks—first, last, always.
Vaccine politics
Hours after Pfizer released promising data from a Phase three  trial, CEO Albert Bourla sold $5.6 million in company stock (Wall Street Journal, 11/11). Though the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines may indeed be game-changers, capitalist medicines are like sausage; the more you learn about how they’re made, the less appealing they get. After months of cowardly kowtowing to Trump, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) —the vaccine approval agency—has lost credibility. At least seven states plan to add their own expert vetting. The people of this country don’t trust this federal government, said New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, the hospital closure king who killed thousands by forcing positive cases back into nursing homes.
Even the best medicines won’t work if they don’t get delivered to those who need them. As big pharma is showered with billions of federal dollars, state and local public health departments are starved of needed resources to distribute and track two doses on an enormous scale. Whenever there’s scarcity under capitalism, racism determines who gets left behind. A Maine official acknowledged that “insufficient funding” would slow the rate of vaccination, particularly among disadvantaged populations that are harder to reach” (NYT, 11/14). Internationally, a criminal lag in access to older vaccines—for polio, tuberculosis, and measles—bodes ill for the Covid crisis: The historical norm is that a vaccine of this sort is quickly given to those privileged to live in the world’s richest nations, while the rest of the world’s population often suffers for several decades before deadly diseases are eradicated—if they ever are”(Foreign Policy, 11/12). The poorest countries have next to no public health infrastructure, making it more likely that substandard and falsified vaccines will appear on the market.
Polls suggest that a third or more of the U.S. population may be reluctant to get inoculated, a deadly obstacle to herd immunity. Between the anti-vaxxer disinformation machine and workers’ reasonable doubts about the FDA and Centers for Disease Control, there’s little trust in capitalist medicine these days. It all adds up to a very dark winter, as Biden has warned. But we know that spring will come when Progressive Labor Party leads the international working class to the cure for what ails us: fight for  communism, where decent healthcare will be available to the entire working class. Join us!