WASHINGTON, DC, March 11 – Following an October overnight protest at the home of Jeffrey Zients, Counselor to  President Joe Biden, Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members joined a protest this week calling out Zients Joe Biden’s new blood soaked Covid-Czar.  The march, organized by Justice is Global, Public Health Awakened, and R2H (Right to Health),  denounced the COVAX program, the disastrous U.S. led global vaccine distribution and development initiative. With 18.2 million Covid-19 related deaths worldwide as a result of the vaccine apartheid  (Washington Post, 3/14) and only 12 percent in many of small capitalist countries having been vaccinated( ourworldindata.org).
As we marched against Zients, Biden, and capitalist disregard overall, we took aim at the entire system of U.S. imperialism and its racist sexist healthcare system. As long as the fate of the world rests in the hands of imperialist butchers and profit hungry bosses, misery and death will continue to rain down on workers across the globe. Smashing capitalism is not just a moral imperative; it’s a life and death battle. Now more than ever we need communism, a system that is run by working people for the benefit of all. Under communism the core values of health and science care will put human life and progress at the forefront, and will be available to all. Money and the profit incentive will be eradicated along with preventable deaths from treatable illnesses.
A PL’er addressed the rally by linking the racist vaccination policy failures to capitalism and rising imperialism. She pointed out that the U.S. oligarch Bill Gates, in keeping with capitalism’s profits-only goal, fought to keep the profits flowing to the drug companies by limiting the Covid-19 vaccine supply and refusing to make the mRNA vaccine recipe available to the world.
Several additional people joined us at the rally and were introduced to PLP with our revolutionary newspaper, CHALLENGE. PLP members have been working with these organizations as well as the American Public Health Association to build international solidarity and raise revolutionary politics (see CHALLENGE, 11/17/21 and CHALLENGE Letters, 3/2).
Some demonstrators and members of these organizations have illusions that we can pressure politicians into serving the working class. In reality, these cronies, Democrats and Republicans alike, are controlled by the U.S. financial oligarchs and pharmaceutical corporations and will never seek to do right by our class.
Never-the-less we fight back. We are still planning to attack the pharmaceutical companies directly with a rally in Boston at Moderna headquarters in late April.
We continue to demand that the TRIPS Agreement waiver and technology transfer (a waiver that would temporarily waive intellectual property rights protections for technologies needed to prevent, contain, or treat Covid-19, including vaccines) be approved so that there can be worldwide capacity to respond to epidemics without companies like Moderna and Pfizer amassing huge profits by selling vaccines only to rich countries.
Other speakers described the risk of new Covid variants without widespread vaccinations. One worker movingly read an organizer’s account of the impact of Covid-19 on her life as a disabled person who has lost friends because they disagree with her safety requests (masks and vaccination). Others described the struggles of health workers, the fights to keep schools safe, and international lives lost without vaccinations. The pandemic has been so politicized that public health for everyone, already a pipe-dream under capitalism, has been compromised.
At the rally, a large prescription poster calling for firing Jeffrey Zients and replacing him with a public health expert was erected next to a giant report card giving him an F for public safety but an A+ for supporting corporate interests!
Several cardboard bottles called for PUBLIC HEALTH not PROFIT. The rally ended with a two-minute die-in complete with gravestones to commemorate two-years since the Covid-19 pandemic struck the U.S.
As similar protests were held simultaneously in many cities and towns in the U.S. and internationally, we as PLP members take a moment to remind ourselves and our comrades that under capitalism there is no just healthcare or equitable care for the working class. It is only under communism, where medicine and its supporting systems are built to put the patient not profit first will we ever truly know health. Fight for communism, power to the working class!