A Frightening Glimpse of an Uncertain Future COVID-19 IS NOT just out of control, but on a global rampage. There have now been 52 million cases and 1,300,000 deaths world-wide. Another million deaths have gone unrecorded, and another million have died because of hospital failure under the pressure. The vast majority of European countries are into a second wave of the pandemic and are declaring more cases each day now than they were during the first wave earlier in the year. The euphoria that has greeted the announcement by Pfizer, along with the German biotechnology company BioNTech, that they are on the brink of producing an effective vaccine for Covid-19 should be treated with extreme caution. They possibly have, and an effective vaccine should indeed be celebrated, but premature predictions can be cruel and counter-productive. In any case safety trials have yet been completed, and no one yet knows how long the immunity it provides will last or whether it will give protection to all demographics – or indeed any demographics.
On COVID and the Plague of Capital The COVID-19 virus and these other pathogens are emerging out what we call a circuit of production. Some are at the point of contact in which industrial agriculture is cutting into the forest, increasing the interface between wildlife that is the pathogens’ natural reservoir and spilling over into local livestock or laborers.
2020-12-10 Coronavirus Protocols as Tools of Repression Covid-19 is a convenient excuse for governments to ban or restrict activities they don’t like. “The CARES Act further entrenched power upwards by redistributing vast wealth to oligarchs and mega corporations.” Whatever the scientific truths about coronavirus, state measures to control it undoubtedly have great potential for justifying state repression and surveillance. Workers struggle, small businesses close their doors, long lines queue either in cars or standing six feet apart outside food banks, and we face a dystopic future in which most of us work and shop at a few mega corporations, possibly including an Uber-Lyft-Doordash-Instacart conglomerate before Amazon swallows them all whole. Poor people, people of color, prisoners, and farmworkers all suffer disproportionately from the disease and the economic consequences of the lockdowns. One of the only positive developments is that the virus didn’t stop Black Lives Matter protestors from rising up across the country in response to the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and other victims of racist police and vigilante attacks.
2020-11-00 Can Schools Really Reopen Safely? WHY OPEN SCHOOLS when everyone who believes in science knows it is unsafe? As soon as schools began to open in August, closings began — in some cases within days — due to spikes in coronavirus cases. When we examine why, we need to look at the big picture: capitalism and the prioritization of profits over people. Because our cities and states barely tax the rich or major corporations (as has been noted recently with the President’s tax writeoffs), most school districts are overly dependent on property taxes and on revenue from sources such as gambling, sales tax etc. Right-wingers and some neoliberals who seek to undermine public education regularly campaign against school bonds and other funding, leaving many school districts without adequate revenue.
2020-09-10 The COVID-19 infodemic: What can be done about the infectious spread of misinformation and disinformation The combination of the psychology of pandemic—which causes societies to grasp at (mis)information in the midst of panic—and political polarization—which leads people to attribute partisan motivations to public health measures—have made the spread of false information about COVID-19 particularly problematic. This combination is compounded by a global information ecosystem that combines traditional and social media, interacting with human cognition in ways that accelerates the spread of misinformation. In addition, today’s global media environment makes possible the active spread of disinformation by states and other actors on an unprecedented scale to achieve geopolitical objectives or sow confusion among their adversaries, amplified by unwitting online communities predisposed to believe in and amplify false information about the pandemic. This combination has contributed to the virulent spread of disinformation and misinformation about the novel coronavirus on an unprecedented scale, and it challenges the capacity of states and public health authorities to develop, implement, and communicate scientific evidence-based responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.
2020-09-10 The Evidence is Clear: The US Public Wants Science-Based Policies for COVID-19 You would think that after 190,000 COVID-19 deaths, the Trump administration might finally develop a national strategy to control spread of the coronavirus. No. Instead, it foists on us a new member of the coronavirus task force with no expertise in infectious disease or epidemiology. Scott Atlas, a radiologist and conservative pundit at the Hoover Institution, essentially believes we should drop our masks and inhale the virus to create “herd immunity.” Instead of urging robust testing and tracing or salvaging crumbling public credibility for a vaccine amid government politicization, HHS, as reported by Politico, wants to “defeat despair and inspire hope,” to “instill confidence to return to work and restart the economy.” The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington’s School of Medicine clearly said it does not have to be so. It emphasized that we could save 122,000 lives with universal masking and strict social distancing. If, instead, we took Atlas’s advice and officially adopted a herd immunity strategy, the IHME estimates we could see 620,000 deaths, rivaling the 675,000 deaths in the United States from the 1918 flu pandemic.
2020-09-00 Opening Up the Schools? SIX MONTHS SINCE the worst health crisis in 100 years began, there is no sign that it is under control in most parts of the world. In the United States, it has created mass unemployment, exposed the vast rifts between the rich and poor, and promises to widen them unless the social movements impelled by Black Lives Matter and teacher/community organizing can continue to reframe the political, social and economic landscape.Until mid-March, when governors and mayors took drastic steps, with orders to shelter in place, closing businesses and schools to slow the spread of the virus, many people continued their lives with a growing sense of fear of what would happen. Most schoolteachers had just a few days of warning before their schools were (rightly) closed. Let’s imagine how a socialist society would confront this crisis. First, it would have already prioritized the infrastructure that people need. Hospitals and neighborhood clinics would have been built on a public health model. That is, it would develop sustainable and preventive measures as opposed to the high tech and expensive approach used in the country today.
2020-09-00 The Pandemic and the Vote BY ALL POLITICAL leading indicators, Donald Trump is taking down the Republican Party to its most shattering electoral debacle in decades. “Presiding,” if that’s a word for anything Trump does, over the entirely preventable health and economic COVID-19 calamity, he’s proving himself willing to sacrifice anything for his own interests. This administration — tragicomic in its incompetence, vicious and sadistic in its treatment of immigrants and asylum seekers, grasping dangerously although ineptly for authoritarian presidentialist rule — presents the most repellent picture to an increasingly desperate domestic population and a disbelieving world.
2020-08-28 Professors Speak Out About College Reopenings Amid Coronavirus As campuses reopen and then close, faculty express concern about lack of safety protections and blame-shifting to students. Universities and colleges are beginning to reopen for some in-person classes around the U.S., despite fears and concerns from students, professors, and staff about the risks of doing so. In July 2020, the Trump administration pressured universities and colleges to reopen in the fall. Since reopenings began this month, several schools have already shut down or changed their plans in response to outbreaks. “No one is safe until there is an effective and widespread use of a vaccine. So all the things put in place, nothing will prevent the spread of the virus among young people who are not taking the virus seriously,” “We could be educating people at home and not transporting people from around the U.S., but instead we’re putting a lot of people’s lives at risk, then they are blaming the youngest around for any sort of outbreak that happens. There could be no parties, no violations, and the virus could still spread.”
2020-08-28 US Sanctions Russian Research Institute that Developed COVID-19 Vaccine Russia won the race to develop the first vaccine against the novel coronavirus. The United States has responded by slapping sanctions on a Russian research facility involved in creating it. The U.S. government has blacklisted several Russian scientific institutes, including the Russian Defense Ministry’s 48th Central Research Institute, which has worked with other non-military medical centers to develop and test the world’s first Covid-19 vaccine.
2020-08-17 Trump’s America Fails Coronavirus as 170,000 to 204,000 Die, Child Cases Spike, While Other Countries Are Back to Normal This situation is the fault of Donald J. Trump, whose team did not put in place national, quick testing. Trump still has put forward no national testing regime. Some 40% of all tests in the US come back too late to stop transmission, according to CNBC. If the tests take more than 2 or 3 days to come back, people stop quarantining, so they are spreading the disease while waiting for results. This situation is the fault of Donald J. Trump, whose team did not put in place national, quick testing. Trump still is not coordinating a national contact tracing program. It isn’t very useful to test people if you don’t then quickly tell the friends and family of those who test positive to quarantine. The country does not have the needed 100,000 contact tracers. In many places, it is taking a week just to contact Covid-19 patients, by which time all the people they had given it to had gone on to transmit it widely to others. Also, since Trump convinced a lot of Americans that the coronavirus is just a mild flu and will suddenly go away, or that the deep state is persecuting them, Americans are unusually reluctant to tell the tracers with whom they had been in contact during the previous two weeks. And, those contacts are unusually reluctant to take the call of the contact tracers.
2020-07-28 COVID-19’s Class War The greatest predictor of coronavirus deaths appears to be income. The pandemic is exposing the racial fault lines that divide our society. More African American and Hispanic people are hospitalized than Anglos, and more people of color die from COVID-19 in every age group as a percentage of their respective populations. The data supporting this reporting is solid, but there may be more to the story. By working with demographic and COVID-19 statistics in New York City, a small group of researchers and I have found that income, even more than age, race, or ethnicity, might be the most significant driver of COVID-19 deaths. We make this claim cautiously, because in the United States, public-health data rarely includes income or occupation, the information required for definitive proof. To determine the impact of class on COVID-19 death rates, we have had to use indirect methods of statistical evaluation. But it still appears to show a strong correlation.
2020-07-07 Trump Owns the COVID-19 Catastrophe The economy isn’t roaring back. Just over half of working-age Americans have jobs now, the lowest ratio in over 70 years. What’s roaring back is COVID-19. Until it’s tamed, the economy doesn’t stand a chance. The surge in cases isn’t because America is doing more tests for the virus, as Trump contends. The surge is occurring because America reopened before COVID-19 was contained. Trump was so intent on having a good economy by Election Day that he resisted doing what was necessary to contain the virus. He left everything to governors and local officials, then warned that the “cure” of closing the economy was “worse than the disease.” Trump even called on citizens to “liberate” their states from public health restrictions. Yet he still has no national plan for testing, contact tracing, and isolating people with infections. Trump won’t even ask Americans to wear masks.
2020-07-00 Authoritarianism & Lockdown Time in Occupied Kashmir and India PANDEMICS GENERATE THEIR own vocabularies, and the “novel coronavirus” is no exception. In the United States the vocabulary of COVID-19 of “sheltering-in-place” and “lockdowns” resonates with Cold War era anxieties about nuclear war and more recent fears about gun violence. In India the context involves growing Hindu majoritarianism materialized in a national-security state intent on demonizing Muslims and stripping them of citizenship. It is also a state determined to crush Kashmiri aspirations to sovereignty.
2020-07-00 The Virus in Latin America When the virus began to spread around the world, pundits declaimed that it was no respecter of person, that it infected rich and poor, Black and white, Christian and Muslim alike. As the stories of Gonçalves and others have made readily apparent, however, much like disasters and hunger, the outcome of the coronavirus is not “natural” but the result of political decisions that lay bare the class contradictions in society. There is much we do not understand about the coronavirus and how it spreads. But it is now readily apparent how the virus does discriminate, or rather, how society has been constructed that makes some more susceptible than others to the infection. Immense and innumerable disparities and vast inequalities mean that the virus disproportionately attacks those in marginalized situations with limited access to resources, which often particularly means people of color.
2020-07-00 Ending the Lockdown? The rapid rates of infection illustrate how the big lockdown was less a public health measure than an exercise in Modi’s authoritarian power. Implemented with minimal planning, particularly to prevent infection among India’s most precarious workforce, migrant workers, the government also neglected to improve or expand India’s health infrastructure during the lockdown. Rather than Ram Rajya, governance by ghoulish decrees better describes India under Modi.
2020-07-00 Science, Politics and the Pandemic This is one of those viruses that came from infecting both people and infecting animals — so that eventually the genetic alterations that could happen in an animal, say a bat, could make it more and more dangerous not necessarily for the bat, but for humans. The transmission to humans follows essentially the path of many other very dangerous viruses, going all the way back to AIDS and HIV, or Ebola, or Zika, or Bolivian hemorrhagic fever. A whole bunch of these are viruses that affect us. And to get right to the immunology of it and why it affects us, and why it affects mainly older people, is that our immune systems have evolved — that is, in all of the animal species — before trains, planes and cars. When you get a vaccination, or you have measles, or mumps, you have cells called lymphocytes — two categories, T and B cells — which not only respond to get rid of the infection, the microbe, bacteria, viral, fungal and so on, but they divide a thousandfold. They live as long as you do, as memory cells. And each of them is specific for the particular infection that drove them from the beginning. That’s how you get immunity to the microbes you encounter. By the time you reach puberty, whether you were a mouse or a human or a monkey, you’d encountered most of them. So you now were prepared, if you didn’t migrate, to have immune cells that immediately and effectively respond to get rid of the infection.
2020-05-20 Indict and Punish the Perpetrators of Covid Mass Death Not just Trump, but the whole US ruling class must pay for the mass Covid death toll among Blacks, because only the ruling class has the power to systematically allocate life-death chances for whole populations over generations. The novel, or new, coronavirus is ending the lives of African Americans at a nationwide rate that is 2.6 times that of whites, 2.3 times the death toll among Asian Americans and 2.2. times that of Latinos, according to the APM Research Lab’s breakdown of mortality by race. Collectively Blacks have suffered 27 percent of all Covid-19 deaths in the United States, which would mean that 24, 930 of the 92, 333 total U.S. deaths from the virus as of this week, were African Americas, who make up only 13 percent of the population. What will be the Black political response to such gruesome numbers? Who will be made accountable for a slaughter that was pre-programmed by the very nature of a society birthed in genocide, slavery and the glorification of conquest and plunder? Just as infant mortality is the best measure of a society’s general health, so does the Covid-19 death toll indict the United States for systematically undermining the life chances of all of its constituent peoples. These are crimes that only the ruling class can commit, because only the ruling class has the power to systematically allocate life-death chances for whole populations over generations.
2020-05-00 Two-Tier Response to COVID-19 – Against the Current THERE ARE TWO stories of Canada’s response to the novel coronavirus. One story, spoken in daily briefings by politicians, is bailouts and the warm embrace of state support. This is the story of $5.8 billion in federal monies for beleaguered oil and gas extraction corporations, and $500 million for property and homeowners in mortgage forgiveness.
2020-04-27 When It Comes to Coronavirus Deaths, Race Matters Pre-existing racial disparities in access to healthy environments have made COVID-19 particularly deadly to African Americans. The COVID-19 virus was once called the “great equalizer” because of its potential to infect anyone and everyone at pandemic speed. But data on mortality rates tell a different story. Instead of affecting everyone equally, the coronavirus is amplifying the racial disparities in health outcomes across the United States. The disparities result from the country’s own pre-existing condition: an environment where people’s living and working conditions are anything but equal when it comes to pollution levels and protection from harmful toxins.
2020-04-27 The Coronavirus Chronology From Hell Before the coronavirus pandemic hit first China and then the rest of the globe, the question of whether the American imperial era might be faltering was already on the table, amid that country’s endless wars and with the world’s most capricious leader. To assess that question objectively in this unsettled moment, it’s necessary to examine on a day-to-day basis how the two contemporary superpowers handled the Covid-19 crisis, and ask the question: Who has proved better at combating the deadliest disease of modern times, President Donald Trump or President Xi Jinping? It’s chastening to note that whereas China under Xi has suppressed the latest coronavirus at the human cost of three lives per million population, the U.S. under Trump is still struggling to overpower it, having already sacrificed 145 of every million Americans. Ignoring the warnings of scientists and public health experts, President Trump threatens to disastrously extend his coronavirus chronology from hell into an increasingly painful future by “reopening” the country too soon. By so doing, he will only accelerate the day when the World Leadership Trophy, held by America since 1946, is handed to the People’s Republic of China. Article has good chronology of first 3 months of Covid-19.
2020-04-22 Cuba: From AIDS, Dengue, and Ebola to COVID-19 Before Cuba experienced its first COVID-!9 case it had already updated a plan to prevent and control the disease. “Cuba has 8.2 doctors per 1,00 people while the United States has 2.6 doctors per 1,000.” Preparing for a pandemic requires understanding that a change in the relationship between people is primary and the production of things is secondary and flows from social factors. Investors in profit-based medicine cannot comprehend this concept. Nothing could exemplify it more clearly than Cuba’s response to the corona virus (COVID-19). The US dawdled for months before reacting. Cuba’s preparation for COVID-19 began on January 1, 1959. On that day, over sixty years before the pandemic, Cuba laid the foundations for what would become the discovery of novel drugs, bringing patients to the island, and sending medical aid abroad. It had an overarching concern with health care , even though it had never escaped from poverty. This resulted in Cuba’s eliminating polio in 1962, malaria in 1967, neonatal tetanus in 1972, diphtheria in 1979, congenital rubella syndrome in 1989, post-mumps meningitis in 1989, measles in 1993, rubella in 1995, and tuberculosis meningitis in 1997. Cuba’s second focus has been to manufacture drugs cheaply enough for poor counties to be able to afford them. Third, Cuba has sought to work cooperatively, with countries such as China, Venezuela, and Brazil, in drug development. Collaboration with Brazil resulted in meningitis vaccines at a cost of 95¢ rather than $15 to $20 per dose. Finally, Cuba teaches other countries to produce medications themselves, so they do not have to rely on purchasing them from rich countries. In virtually every way, corporate research has been the opposite of that in Cuba. Big Pharma spends millions investigating male pattern baldness, restless legs, and erectile dysfunction because these could reap billions in profits.
2020-04-22 U.S. Response to COVID-19 Equals Genocide for Blacks, but “Progressive” Leaders Offer Nothing But Words AOC and Bernie Sanders made public condemnations of the corporate bailout but did little in the way of resistance. “The epidemic represented a second virus for Black America which has only accelerated the genocide.” The settler colonial history of the United States is rife with examples of outright genocide committed against Black Americans. COVID-19 has only exacerbated the genocide of Black Americans and so-called “progressive” leaders in the Democratic Party have offered nothing but words in response. Even worse, Black elected servants of the lords of capital such as Cory Booker and Kamala Harris have teamed up with Elizabeth Warren to exploit Black death for political gain. Their shiny statement urging the Trump administration’s Health and Human Services to address racial disparities in its COVID-19 response will undoubtedly produce nothing substantial for Black Americans or anyone else since the Democratic Party possesses no political accountability with Black Americans or the rest of its captive base. The Democratic Party has already pushed through a multi-trillion-dollar bailout to the largest corporations and banks and no amount of statements or harsh words for Trump from Democrats in Congress will reverse it. Democratic Party, especially members of the Congressional Black Caucus, offered only fake resistance to the Republican Party when there was no possibility of moving concrete progressive policies forward. When Democrats own a majority in the House and Senate, such as during the first term of the Obama administration, the Democratic Party machine abandons all promises and pushes for austerity and war in the name of compromise.
2020-04-15 Systemic Racism Is Making Coronavirus Worse in Black America COVID-19 is a perfect storm of systemic inequities operating together to worsen existing vulnerabilities. “Long before COVID-19, Black communities were experiencing deep health and economic inequities that are only intensified by a public health crisis of this magnitude.” The COVID-19 global pandemic is a nightmare unfolding before our eyes that could have devastating impacts that Black Americans could feel most acutely. With scarce testing, health care workers and ventilators, combined with a pattern of red state governors ignoring science and placing profits above people, there are signs that Black communities across the country are bearing the brunt of an inept federal response and unjust health care system unprepared to handle the surge of COVID-19 patients.
2020-05-31 Documenting the Origins of COVID-19 Author and COVID-19 news aggregator Rachel Graham discusses how she tracked the pandemic from its inception and helped inform public health on Twitter. Of course, the real frightening part of it in early January was the fact that the Chinese New Year was coming up and that was sort of going to be an exacerbating event, a series of events, with people traveling and congregating. There was such poor communication from the government line in China and then just repeated by the United States, by Governor Cuomo, initially by President Trump. It was like the novelty of it could not be appreciated in the way [and] your particular public health communication expertise helped with the aggregation. You were aware of the potential scope of the crisis.
2020-05-10 The Push to Relax COVID-19 Protections Exposes Age-Old Racial Wounds With unemployment approaching Great Depression levels, the nation is waving the white flag on controlling the coronavirus. It appears not to shock the senses at the White House or at many governors’ mansions around the country that the 76,000 deaths from COVID-19 in three months could fill the Superdome with coffins. Instead, these leaders are pushing to “open up America” as much as they can for commerce. Following the lead of the Trump administration, governors tell us we cannot let the cost of the lockdown become worse than the disease. But scientists are already raising their death estimates by the tens of thousands to adjust for the rush back to business. The estimates make opening up the country this soon unconscionable on its face. What makes it worse is that the haste to hear assembly lines humming and cash registers ringing also represents America turning its face away from the communities most flattened because this nation failed early in the pandemic to flatten the curve.
2020-05-05 We Need an Essential Workers Bill of Rights—Now In response to the coronavirus pandemic, Congress has now passed four separate relief and recovery measures allocating trillions of dollars in aid, but none have provided meaningful protections to working people. Workers continue to be required to work without protective gear. Sick workers continue to lack access to paid sick leave. And, when workers try and speak up for themselves and each other, they are fired. Workers are dying as a result. Even a global pandemic has not been enough for policymakers to place the needs of working people ahead of corporate interests. As Congress turns its attention to another relief and recovery package, it must prioritize policies and investments that help working families mitigate the economic and public health disaster they are experiencing.
2020-04-09 Resistance Growing to Covid-Capitalism Covid-19 has laid bare a fundamental truth: that capitalist healthcare is a contradiction in terms, since capital – like the killer virus — cares for nothing but reproducing itself. “We have to ensure that we never return to the society that enabled this pandemic to emerge.” What some may remember as the Year of the Lost Spring – lost loved ones, lost jobs, lost freedom of movement – may also become the year that the oligarchy and its servants in both corporate parties lost popular permission to dictate the terms of life and death in the United States. For the second time this century, the economies of the U.S. and Europe are circling the abyss, dragging much of the rest of the planet with them, while China, site of the first large eruption of Covid-19, leads the world in both economic resilience and global mutual aid — and Cuba has stepped forward once again as the champion of medical solidarity. The superpower that has killed millions in its quest for global supremacy has utterly failed the most basic test of legitimacy at home: the ability to protect its own population. Covid-19 has laid bare a fundamental truth: that capitalist healthcare is a contradiction in terms, since capital – like the killer virus — cares for nothing but reproducing itself.
2020-03-30 In Fighting the Coronavirus Pandemic in the US, Nothing Beats Traditional Medicare The argument has always been that establishing a public health insurance system would cost too much and cause too much disruption. The 36 million people with traditional Medicare have few if any financial or procedural barriers to care, so long as they have insurance that fills gaps in coverage—Medigap, Medicaid, or retiree coverage from a former employer. They can use virtually any doctor or hospital without a referral or prior authorization, their costs are fully covered, and they have no risk of losing their coverage. What about older adults who are enrolled in a Medicare Advantage plan, a health plan run by a corporate health insurer? Unfortunately, they have far less comprehensive coverage than people with traditional Medicare and supplemental insurance. Older adults and people with disabilities in Medicare Advantage plans face huge out-of-pocket costs if they need COVID-19 treatment or any other costly care. They could be responsible for as much as $6,700 each year for in-network care alone, depending on the plan they’re in.
2021-03-29 COVID-19: Greed Drove Big Pharma Companies to Privatize Vaccines “The reason we have the vaccine success is because of capitalism, because of greed my friends,” Boris Johnson reportedly told Conservative MPs, before pleading “forget I said that.” The timing of the comments was distasteful in the extreme as countries across the world are struggling to find any vaccines, while Britain has acquired several times the doses it needs by bypassing the international bodies meant to ensure a fair global allocation. But more worrying was the warped understanding revealed by the remark of what is actually behind Britain’s successful vaccine rollout. Johnson claimed the vaccine breakthrough was brought about by “giant corporations that wanted to give good returns to shareholders.” But nothing could be further from the truth. The British government, like other governments, invested heavy public funds into the research and development of vaccines, assuming most of the risk in the process. The AstraZeneca jab was actually developed by scientists from the University of Oxford, a publicly-funded institution, working with scientists from a range of backgrounds, including many educated in state schools. Those scientists had initially wanted to make their vaccine patent-free, before AstraZeneca entered the scene, effectively privatizing the research.
2020-03-25 COVID-19: The Deadly Polio Epidemic and Why it Matters for Coronavirus The mounting fear as coronavirus spreads is reminiscent of poliomyelitis. It’s instructive to remember what it took to nearly eradicate polio and a reminder of what we can do when faced with a common enemy. Like a horror movie, throughout the first half of the 20th century, the polio virus arrived each summer, striking without warning. No one knew how polio was transmitted or what caused it. There were wild theories that the virus spread from imported bananas or stray cats. There was no known cure or vaccine. For the next four decades, swimming pools and movie theaters closed during polio season for fear of this invisible enemy. Parents stopped sending their children to playgrounds or birthday parties for fear they would “catch polio.” In conjunction with the 50th anniversary celebration of the polio vaccine, I produced a documentary, “The Shot Felt ‘Round the World,” that told the stories of the many people who worked alongside Salk in the lab and participated in vaccine trials. With the success of the polio vaccine, Jonas Salk, 39, became one of the most celebrated scientists in the world. He refused a patent for his work, saying the vaccine belonged to the people and that to patent it would be like “patenting the Sun.” Leading drug manufacturers made the vaccine available, and more than 400 million doses were distributed between 1955 and 1962, reducing the cases of polio by 90 percent. By the end of the century, the polio scare had become a faint memory.
2020-03-25 Don’t Let Big Pharma Make a Killing by Profiteering Off COVID-19 Treatments There’s much we don’t yet know about COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. We don’t know how long the pandemic will last, when a vaccine will be developed, or how many lives antiviral medications can save. But there’s one thing we know for sure: U.S. taxpayers have already paid for the research and testing of the most promising treatments. These treatments should be available to everyone who needs them at no cost. But the Trump administration’s drug policy is led by two former pharmaceutical executives, and that is having devastating consequences for potential access to treatments and vaccines for the COVID-19 pandemic. Over and over again, Trump talks up big pharma corporations and thanks them for their work on COVID-19 treatments and a potential vaccine. He refers to them as “great companies” and their executives as “geniuses.” Trump fails to mention that taxpayers have spent nearly $700 million on coronavirus research through the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Nor does he mention that big pharma corporations spend more money enriching themselves through stock buybacks than they do on research and development.
2020-03-09 How to Combat the Coronavirus Recession Simply put, smart responses must be tailored to the type of recession the outbreak could cause if policymakers didn’t act. The three key elements of a potential COVID-19 recession are: If it comes it will come fast, It will hit lower-wage workers first and hardest, and It will impose even faster and larger costs on state and local governments than recessions normally do. Each one of these should be targeted directly. Any economic relief package should come online quickly, it should be even more targeted to help lower-wage workers than usual, and it should rapidly boost state and local government capacity on both the public health and economic fronts. Below I sketch out why these characteristics of the COVID-19 slowdown are likely, and what a tailored response to each would be.
2020-03-04 Trump’s Economy Goes Viral The U.S. faces its most severe economic collapse since 2008, on several fronts. One is the economics of quarantine—canceled schools, conventions, business travel, tourism, and all the knock-on effects on the consumer and producer economy; in short, the collapse of normal daily economic life. The second is the collapse of global supply chains on which far too much of the U.S. economy has come to depend. The emblematic factoid here is that most surgical masks are made in Wuhan. Neither the collapse of demand nor the collapse of supply lends itself to the usual economic remedies. The Fed could cut rates to zero and that will not restore travel to Italy or cause the resumption of canceled conferences. The only entity with the reach to stem some of the damage is the same one on which we are relying to guide us through the public-health catastrophe—the U.S. government, which is not exactly in good hands. In the short run, we will rely on the residual competence of the deep state that Trump keeps trying to destroy. If we can just replace Trump in November, the lessons of the pandemic will demonstrate the case for more robust and competent government.
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Coronavirus Covid-19 Research History – Index
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