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Post by Admin on Jul 14, 2021 11:21:47 GMT
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Post by Admin on Jul 15, 2021 7:06:47 GMT
The statement correctly identifies the Conservative government’s strategy as one of “herd immunity by mass infection,” which will “place 48% of the population (children included) who are not yet fully vaccinated, including the clinically vulnerable and the immunosuppressed, at unacceptable risk.” It indicts Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his government for “recklessly exposing millions to the acute and long-term impacts of mass infection” and accuses them of an “abdication of the government’s fundamental duty to protect public health.” The authors cite head of the World Health Organisation Emergencies Programme Mike Ryan’s comment that “the logic of more people being infected is better, is I think logic that has proven its moral emptiness and its epidemiological stupidity previously.” At an emergency press conference organised the day the statement was released, Dr Helen Salisbury, a lecturer at Oxford University and columnist for the BMJ (formerly, British Medical Journal ) described the government’s pursuit of herd immunity by infection, rather than vaccination, as “criminal.” Dr Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of The Lancet, condemned the government’s chief medical officer Professor Chris Whitty and chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance. Horton stated, “The faux deference that you saw from both of them to the prime minister [at Monday’s Downing Street press conference] in trying to shore up his decision making, I thought, was an abdication of their independent role as government advisers.” Referring to Whitty’s claim that there was “widespread agreement across the scientific community” with the government’s position, Horton commented, “I’m afraid you have to conclude that the chief medical officer is wilfully misrepresenting scientific opinion across the country, and that is extraordinary to observe.” Over 1,200 doctors and scientists condemn UK COVID-19 policy as “dangerous and unethical” Thomas Scripps www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/07/15/pers-j15.html
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Post by snowstorm on Jul 15, 2021 10:00:29 GMT
Yes, it is going to be a confused situation, terrible plan. What's wrong with keepings masks mandatory in certain places?
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Post by Admin on Jul 15, 2021 13:02:32 GMT
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Post by Admin on Jul 15, 2021 13:11:22 GMT
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Post by Admin on Jul 15, 2021 22:12:49 GMT
INTERVIEW ENVIRONMENT & HEALTH Pandemic Fuels Global Hunger as More Than 2.5 Billion Lack Nutritious Food truthout.org/video/pandemic-fuels-global-hunger-as-more-than-2-5-billion-lack-nutritious-food/The COVID-19 pandemic has fueled a sharp increase in the number of people going hungry worldwide, along with conflict and the impacts of climate change. A new report on the state of food security and nutrition in the world found about one-tenth of the global population were undernourished last year, more than 2.5 billion people did not have access to sufficiently nutritious food, and one in five children now face stunted growth. Saskia de Pee, the World Food Programme’s head of systems analysis for nutrition, describes how the impact is “going to be long-term.” TRANSCRIPT This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form. AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh, as we look at how the COVID-19 pandemic has fueled a sharp increase in the number of people going hungry around the world. A new report on “The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World” found about one-tenth of the global population is undernourished last year. More than two-and-a-half billion people lacked access to sufficiently nutritious food. The United Nations says one in five children around the world now face stunted growth.
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Post by Admin on Jul 17, 2021 18:14:09 GMT
Not Everyone Can ‘Learn to Live with the Virus’ By Esther Kaner Throughout the pandemic, poor, minority and disabled people have been worst impacted by Covid and its fallout – the government knows many can't just 'learn to live with the virus,' but it increasingly doesn't care. tribunemag.co.uk/2021/07/not-everyone-can-learn-to-live-with-the-virusOn Monday, the British Government confirmed that it would press ahead with the lifting of all coronavirus-related legal restrictions in England on 19 July. This has been followed by widespread criticism from public health experts and healthcare practitioners, demanding the institution of new and existing public health mitigations to protect us from a devastating ‘exit wave’. While government messaging has shifted over the past week from heralding ‘freedom day’ to urging ‘caution’, the prospect of a U-turn seems incredibly unlikely. What has emerged is a renewed emphasis on ‘personal responsibility’, or rather the transfer of accountability from the state to individuals. SAGE’s most recent modelling predicts outcomes on the basis of behavioural patterns following reopening, tacitly accepting that the state can no longer bear any responsibility for what happens. And yet, government figures themselves admit that cases are likely to reach over 100,000 a day over the summer, with resulting pressures on the NHS and an enormous infectious burden among the unvaccinated young. It is no surprise then that many have criticised the government for the re-emergence of a ‘herd immunity’ strategy, where the virus is allowed to run rampant through the population until a certain threshold of immunity is reached. With only half of the UK population fully vaccinated and the prospect of vaccinating children looking increasingly unlikely, it is clear that this threshold will only be reached through widescale infection. The approach has rightly been denounced for creating the ideal grounds for vaccine escape, further burdening an already backlogged NHS, and facilitating mass disruption through Covid-related work and educational absences. Prior to the pandemic, the Tory government had overseen 130,000 preventable deaths as a result of austerity. This loss of life was distributed along the same lines of structural vulnerability and inequality that have characterised Covid-related mortality; in both instances, it is the poor, racialised, and disabled who have been most adversely affected. And while some heralded Rishi Sunak’s 2020 budget as a hard break from the politics of austerity, its failure to fix the punishing Universal Credit system, and the subsequent absence of meaningful sick pay or isolation support for precarious workers point to a continued disdain for the poor. Should we be surprised, then, that this government wishes to press ahead with a reckless re-opening that will ravage those communities whom the Conservative Party holds most in contempt? Is it surprising that they offer no means to remedy a crisis already conditioned to afflict the poor, disabled, and minorities? And further to this, should we be surprised that neoliberal logics will hold the most marginalised to blame for their own suffering? The individualisation of health is not unique to this government. Our lives have become increasingly medicalised as traits like body weight are understood to be the consequence of poor choice, accompanied by an expanding market centred on their regulation. The complexity of intersecting physiological, ecological, and social factors influencing body composition are elided under a rhetoric of ‘personal responsibility’. Health research’s own susceptibility to neoliberalism has become increasingly apparent with the marketisation of higher education; beyond this, though, is an overreliance on decontextualising, simplistic quantitative measures at the expense of in-depth, qualitative, and longitudinal research. This is not to say that such approaches do not have a critical role to play in public health, but an obsession with ‘evidence-based’ methods, where evidence is reduced to crude variables supposedly able to capture the entirety of rich concepts like ‘culture’ and ‘society’, risks foreclosing the deeper analysis necessary to fully understand the social contexts in which our health is situated. We have seen all of this play out during the pandemic. The link between infections and inequalities is well documented. If a population is already made vulnerable by wide-scale health inequalities and chronic illness, then a virus acting upon our already hampered immune systems will do enormous damage. Countless studies now point to evidence of heightened mortality and morbidity from Covid among minoritised and deprived communities. This coupled with low vaccine uptake—largely a function of accumulated state distrust and infrastructural neglect—will once again lead to the victims of structural violence being held responsible. This government plans to ‘live with the virus’ as it becomes ‘endemic’. We already know what this means through our experiences of other infectious diseases like tuberculosis as they remain concentrated among the poor in the Global North. We have accumulated much evidence on the health effects of oppression through innovative and radical social epidemiological and medical anthropological research. Disturbingly, however, this seems to have been ignored by even more critical epidemiological bents during the pandemic. Academics and researchers accuse the government of letting ‘politics’ tamper with public health. But this fundamentally misunderstands the nature and purpose of public health as something that is always political. This was noted by nineteenth-century German physician Rudolf Virchow, often credited with the emergence of social medicine. Analysing the 1848 typhus epidemic in Upper Silesia, he states that the outbreak could not have been solved by individualised interventions, such as minor adjustments to diet or the use of medication, but rather radical societal change was needed. This led him to famously state that ‘medicine is a social science, and politics nothing but medicine at a larger scale’. The attempt by some within public health to extricate themselves from politics is itself a political act – one that effectively naturalises conditions of inequality. Science is not a disinterested ‘view from nowhere’ but always bound up in wider political structures that delimit the imaginative possibilities of our health and wellbeing. While Virchow’s work has remained marginal, the tradition of social medicine has grown over time and facilitated the growth of popular public health movements globally. Such movements find local iterations in campaigning groups like Medact, a UK-based affiliate of the People’s Health Movement, who have fought tirelessly over recent months to highlight the inseparability of public health from economic injustice. We can ill afford to ignore such mobilisations. If public health is to remain meaningful it must allow for critical inquiry into the socio-political structures that determine not only our health, but what we understand health to be – not an individual asset but social harmony with each other and the world around us.
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Post by Admin on Jul 17, 2021 21:48:16 GMT
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Post by Admin on Jul 17, 2021 22:06:20 GMT
Lee Camp: America’s Impressive History of Bioweapons Attacks Against Its Own People Forget China-bashing conspiracy theories, let’s look at the fogging of SF, the microbial attack on the NYC subway and other unpleasantries perpetrated by the CIA and US military in our not-so-distant past by Lee Camp www.mintpressnews.com/lee-camp-america-impressive-history-bioweapons-attacks/277848/July 08th, 2021 Princeton, New Jersey (Scheerpost) — The Biden Administration, the mainstream media and pretty much all the politicians in our country continue to throw fuel on the Sinophobia fire initially stoked by former President and current Mar-a-lago “fungineer” Donald Trump. (Word to the wise, “Sinophobia” means anti-China hatred, not anti-cinema hatred as I had thought. So I apologize to all the people who posted a movie review for Fast And Furious 27 and noticed a response comment from me reading “GODDAMN SINOPHOBE!” Under the circumstances, that was an odd thing to yell.) During the Trump Administration, the Wuhan lab leak theory was called a ridiculous conspiracy that blossomed out of Trump’s racist brain — which it did. It absolutely did. And he should get some credit for that because anyone can be racist but Trump is a racist inventor. He comes up with new and exciting ways to be racist. So he deserves some credit for his innovation. Last year, Trump’s racist lab leak theory was thrown out by both the Democratic establishment and most of the mainstream media. However, now that the crackpot conspiracy can be useful for President Biden’s deranged anti-China rhetoric, all of a sudden the establishment and the media think it’s a wonderful conspiracy. A recent CNN headline blared: “What the lab-leak theory’s new credibility means for social media!” A CNBC headline screamed: “Biden orders closer review of Covid origins as U.S. intel weighs Wuhan lab leak theory.” While just a couple weeks ago, Yahoo News quietly reminded us: “There’s still no evidence of a Chinese lab leak.” But mainly you have to go to independent news sources to get the reality. Here’s Danny Haiphong at Black Agenda Report: “Similar to Russiagate, U.S. intelligence has run with an entirely unsourced narrative, that conveniently pins blame on another country for domestic ills and labels that country a ‘national security’ threat. … The lab leak conspiracy is an effective psychological operation because it is difficult to imagine evidence that could disprove or prove the claim.” Ah, those are the best kind of racist stories — the ones that can’t be disproven. But one thing you’ll certainly never hear from the mainstream media is that all of this is stacked on top of a mostly-forgotten, yet impressively prodigious, history of the American people probably being used as lab rats by our own government. For example, as reported at Business Insider, “On September 20, 1950, a US Navy ship just off the coast of San Francisco used a giant hose to spray a cloud of microbes into the air and into the city’s fog. The military was testing how a biological weapon attack would affect the 800,000 residents of the city.” So they, uh, perpetrated a biological attack on American citizens to find out what would happen in the event of a biological attack on American citizens?! … Honestly, the mind reels. In one of the largest human experiments in history, our military covered the people of San Francisco with “ …two kinds of bacteria, Serratia marcescens and Bacillus globigii…” (Nowadays you can only find that kind of treatment from Cleveland’s tap water.) The gas attack sickened many and was known to kill at least one man. According to Rebecca Kreston at Discover Magazine, this event ranked as one of the largest offenses against the Nuremberg Code since its inception because the code requires voluntary, informed consent to, you know, hit people with bioweapons. (Unless you’re trying to kill them, in which case I think the informed consent is off the table.) But that experiment did not mark the end of such things, just the beginning. “Over the next 20 years, the military would conduct 239 “germ warfare” tests over populated areas, according to news reports from the 1970s – after the secret tests had been revealed – in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Associated Press, and other publications, and also detailed in congressional testimony from the 1970s.” After it came out, the government explained that their goal was to deter the use of biological weapons and be prepared for them. Apparently we wanted to deter biological weapons attacks on Americans by dropping biological weapons on Americans first. What a genius strategy. Our enemies would never see it coming. Plus, why would our global nemeses attack us with germ warfare if we do it to ourselves? You can’t threaten to kill a man if he wants to die! Of the 239 biological and chemical warfare tests by the military, some were done across the Midwest to see how the pathogen would spread throughout the country (and probably to clear out some parking spots). When asked why military planes were dispersing unknown clouds of shit over cities, they claimed they were testing a way to mask the cities from enemy bombers. “Yeah, we’re just covering up the city from the bad guys. Just covering it with a warm blanket of… bacteria. Just a big ol’ protective germ blanket. All cozy and safe from the bad guys — who are not us. The bad guys are other people — who are not currently hitting you with bio-weapons… like we are.” – A US military spokesman, probably, at some point In another study of how vulnerable New York City subway passengers were to covert biological agents, for six days the U.S. military broke light bulbs brimming full of the bacteria Bacillus subtilis and S. marcescens inside NYC subway stations and watched it spread throughout the city. “Clouds would engulf people as trains pulled away, but documents say that the people ‘brushed their clothing and walked on.’ No one was concerned.” That’s New York for ya. Hit commuters with germ warfare — they just brush it off and keep moving. Every day to a New Yorker is germ warfare. I once rode from Montauk to Hoboken sitting across from a man relieving himself. A little experiment by the Military Industrial Complex doesn’t even register on a New Yorker’s list of things to worry about. Yet, the military was testing more than just germ attacks. “Other experiments involved testing mind-altering drugs on unsuspecting citizens.” That program went by the name MKUltra (which is also a great name for a metal band or a homemade cocktail containing absinthe). MKUltra continued for twenty years, during which the CIA tried to achieve mind control by using torture, LSD, hypnosis, and electro-shock therapy — sometimes on unwitting subjects. (And even if they were witting going into the experiment, afterwards not so much.) Among other things, this program resulted in the murder of a scientist named Frank Olson in 1953 and (accidentally) the creation of the Unabomber. (Who said the CIA doesn’t work hard? They’re killin’ people here, electrocutin’ people there, creatin’ terrorists. That’s a hell of a workload.) Next, there’s the well-known Tuskegee Experiments in which “… government researchers studied the effects of syphilis on black Americans without informing the men that they had the disease — they were instead told they had ‘bad blood.’” “Not to worry, young man — you just have bad blood. It’s gonna be fine. But you will also die soon. That’s one of the negative side effects.” The researchers withheld treatment from the participants so they could continue to study the illness, which the men weren’t even told they had. In sum, the Military Intelligence Industrial Complex are serial murderers — not just overseas — but of our own citizens. They performed hundreds of experiments on unsuspecting Americans, and yet the organizations responsible still exist and enjoy budgets in the hundreds of billions of dollars a year. No one went to prison for these heinous acts because when you or I do it, it’s called “a horrible crime,” but when the ruling elite do it, it’s called “research.” Feature photo | Biohazard suits hang in a Biosafety Level 4 laboratory at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Md. Patrick Semansky | AP Lee Camp is an American stand-up comedian, writer, actor and activist. Camp is the host of the weekly comedy news TV show “Redacted Tonight With Lee Camp” on RT America. He is a former comedy writer for the Onion and the Huffington Post and has been a touring stand-up comic for 20 years.
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Post by Admin on Jul 19, 2021 17:03:42 GMT
Under the Tories, There Is No ‘Freedom Day’ By Grace Blakeley The Tories have labelled today 'Freedom Day,' perpetuating the myth of their commitment to liberty – but their attacks on civil liberties and the means to live a decent life show how little they care about freedom. tribunemag.co.uk/2021/07/under-the-tories-there-is-no-freedom-dayAs new cases of Covid-19 hit 50,000 per day for the first time since the last lockdown, the government has suddenly and unapologetically granted us our ‘freedom’ back. Restrictions have been lifted, businesses have reopened and everyone is going back to work. The government’s approach to ‘Freedom Day,’ so-called, gives us an interesting insight into what ‘freedom’ really means to the modern Conservative Party. Boris Johnson and his cabinet seem to hold a very childish definition of the term. For them, freedom is simply freedom from constraints: not having anyone tell you what you can and can’t do. It isn’t hard to see why Boris Johnson and his colleagues favour this definition of freedom. Power and privilege has a tendency to warp one’s conception of what freedom means. For a person who has never struggled to pay their bills, who has never worried about feeding their children, who has never been forced to ask for help only to come face to face with an uncaring bureaucracy, the only real experience of ‘unfreedom’ will have involved external compulsion: parental constraints, school rules, laws. This idea of freedom as ‘the ability to do what one wants’ appears to stand in stark contrast with the increasingly authoritarian direction of this government’s legislative agenda – from the Spy Cops Bill to the Policing Bill. But while Johnson is pushing to release constraints on the behaviour of upstanding citizens, this doesn’t stand in the way of his authoritarian impulses towards the working class. The law, after all, should be a weapon to be used against the poor – not a constraint on the actions of the rich. What is more surprising is that this narrow definition of freedom also seems to resonate with a lot of people in the UK. Those who have protested the wearing of masks and mandatory vaccinations have done so on the basis that they are free to choose and no one—certainly not the government—can compel them to behave in a certain way. In part, this way of thinking stems from an internalisation of neoliberal governmentality. We are governed in ways that treat us all as isolated, atomised individuals – our behaviour affects only ourselves and our immediate families because ‘there is no such thing as society’. Whether or not I wear a mask should be up to me, because I’m the one who is going to have to live with the consequences. This is, of course, a highly simplistic—some might argue objectively incorrect—way to view human social relations. The behaviour of each of us impacts everyone else, especially when it comes to epidemiology. As many thousands of immuno-compromised people have pointed out, if the majority of the population decides not to wear a mask or get a vaccine, their health is compromised. But there is another factor at play here. People take comfort from asserting their narrow freedom in a world of pervasive unfreedom. Most people who live in capitalist societies rightly spend most of their time feeling unfree. Most are forced to work in jobs they detest simply to avoid starving, while being subtly reminded that their unhappiness is their own fault. If you’re not wealthy and successful, it’s probably because you’re not ‘hustling’; because you’re lazy; because you’re worthless. The tantalising prospect of escape from the drudgery of work and reproduction under capitalism is constantly dangled under peoples’ noses—whether in the form of the small business owner, the Instagram influencer, or the landlord—while remaining perennially out of reach. Those forced to rely on the state for help will be made to feel even more valueless through constant interactions with a bureaucracy that cares little whether they live or die. This sense of powerlessness to change the conditions of one’s own existence is at the root of many peoples’ poor mental health. Rather than seeing the way they are treated as an affront to human dignity in general, most people see it as a reflection of their own personal worthlessness. In this context of pervasive unfreedom, the prospect of ‘taking back control’ from those you see as responsible for your humiliation is an enticing one. The vote to leave the European Union, even among those likely to be materially harmed by such a move, is one clear example of this. But so is the insistence that ‘freedom day’ should go ahead, regardless of the impact on society as a whole. This coalition between wealthy and oppressed individualists is that which underpins the Conservative Party’s electoral success. The impulse to rebel—to claw back an inch of one’s autonomy—is increasingly strong both for those who want the state to get out of the way so they can pursue their own interests and to those who resent the state for ignoring and humiliating them, as should be obvious from the fact that ‘anti-lockdown protests’ are taking place across London on the day lockdown officially ends. There’s an authoritarian impulse in some progressive circles that manifests itself in the chiding of excited football fans, stupid anti-vaxxers, and ‘ignorant’ Leave voters, but such a reaction purposefully ignores all the ways in which these people are right to be suspicious about the exercise of state power. The Left can’t push back against neoliberal individualism by uncritically allying itself with the capitalist state. Instead, we need to be asserting the value of every human life, pointing to the pervasive unfreedom experienced by many under capitalism, and arguing for the protection and extension of democracy so that every voice can be heard. Such an argument should be based on expansive understanding of freedom that can’t be reduced to freedom from external compulsion, but instead signifies the freedom of every human being to flourish. About the Author Grace Blakeley is a staff writer at Tribune and the host of our weekly podcast A World to Win.
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Post by Admin on Jul 19, 2021 17:51:47 GMT
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Post by Admin on Jul 19, 2021 17:56:23 GMT
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Post by Admin on Jul 21, 2021 14:20:20 GMT
COVID-19 recession: One of America’s deepest downturns was also its shortest after bailout-driven bounceback July 21, 2021 1.16pm BST theconversation.com/covid-19-recession-one-of-americas-deepest-downturns-was-also-its-shortest-after-bailout-driven-bounceback-164816Thanks to a roaring economy, plunging joblessness and a consumer spending spree, it probably won’t come as a surprise that the COVID-19 recession is officially over. We didn’t know this, formally, however, until July 19, 2021, when a group of America’s top economists determined that the pandemic recession ended two months after it began, making it the shortest downturn on record. As an economist who has written a macroeconomics textbook, I was eagerly waiting to know the official dates. This is in part because I recently asked my Boston University MBA students to make guesses, and we all wanted to know who was closest to the mark. While many of my students ended up nailing it, I was off by a month. But why did it take over a year to learn the recession ended?
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Post by Admin on Jul 23, 2021 16:37:42 GMT
Prof Prem Sikka: Pandemics destroy lives but neoliberalism is deadly too UK politics is increasingly framed by markets, corporate profits and tax cuts rather than concerns about humanity, compassion and care, says Prem Sikka. leftfootforward.org/2021/07/prof-prem-sikka-pandemics-destroy-lives-but-neoliberalism-is-deadly-too/Most of the Covid-lockdown restrictions have been lifted, at least for the time being. Sadly, the lives of many have been torn apart by the loss of their loved ones. There have already been nearly 153,000 officially acknowledged Covid-related deaths in the UK. Many more have died because their hospital treatment was postponed. The death-toll is more than double the number of civilians that died during the Second World War. An independent public inquiry is needed to scrutinise the handling of the pandemic in all four home nations. It also needs to scrutinise the politics, economic and social policies which have delivered the high death-toll. UK politics is increasingly framed by markets, corporate profits and tax cuts for a select few rather than concerns about humanity, compassion and care. This is signified by Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s reluctance to tighten Covid restrictions because ‘Covid was only killing 80-year-olds’. Some 83,000 over 80s died. Such callous politics will bring more deaths and misery. Cutting investment in public services has become a neoliberal dogma. The National Health Service (NHS) has been starved of resources and was in a poor shape to handle the pandemic. An indication is provided by the number of beds. As we entered the pandemic, the UK had 2.4 beds per 1,000 of the population, compared to 5.4 in France, 7.9 in Germany and 12.8 in Japan. In April 2020, NHS England had 118,510 beds to serve a population of 56 million, compared to 299,000 in 1988. Due to low-pay and poor working conditions 38,000 nursing posts were unfilled. The lack of NHS capacity is the outcome of deliberate government decisions, which prioritised tax cuts for corporations and the rich over investment in the NHS and support services. The pandemic has shown that poverty and inequalities destroy lives. The poor, including individuals from ethnic minorities, have figured disproportionately in the Covid death-toll. This includes hospital staff, care home workers, transport staff, retirees, zero hour contract workers and many more. People with low incomes can’t afford good food, housing, healthcare and personal space for self-isolation, and are therefore more vulnerable to disease and pandemics. Nobody is born poor. People are made poor by political institutions. In 1976, workers’ share of gross domestic product, in the form of wages and salaries, was 65.1%. By the end of 2019, it shrank to 49.5%, a decline unmatched by any other industrialised nation. Successive governments used anti-trade union laws, zero hour contracts and austerity programmes to erode wages. The average wage had been stagnant in the decade preceding the pandemic. Unsurprisingly, 14.5 million people, including 8.1 million in working families and 4.5 million children live in poverty. Even people in work rely upon foodbanks to make ends meet. Too many people are unable to access good food, healthcare and housing and become easy victims of disease and pandemics. Many people tested positive for Covid but could not afford to take time off work. They also lacked a safe place to isolate as they live in cramped accommodation because they are poor. Government policies have weakened people’s resilience to pandemics. During the current pandemic, care homes became the dumping ground as hospital managers sought to free-up beds. Local authorities in England are responsible for providing social care, but since 2010, central government grants have been cut by 38% in real terms. This accelerated privatisation and cash extraction. In private equity owned care homes, 10.83% of the revenues vanish in servicing contrived debt. Private equity also expects a return of 12-14% on its investment. So 20-25% of the revenues disappear, leaving less for frontline services. Care home workers have been squeezed. Of the 1.52 million workers in care homes, 50% are full-time employees. Nearly 24% are on zero hour contracts. Almost 42% of the domiciliary care workforce is on zero-hour contracts. Staff turnover is over 30%. In March 2020, the real-term median hourly pay of staff was £8.50 per hour. In these circumstances, it is very difficult for carers to get to know patients and provide personalised care. Low-paid staff are also vulnerable because they can’t easily access good food, housing and healthcare. They can’t easily isolate or take time off to recover. The financialisation of care homes enabled companies to pay massive dividends. Executive pay has soared to more than 120 times the pay of frontline staff, even though it delivered death and misery. Over 39,000 people have died from Covid in care homes. It is hard to recall any privatisation which has been accompanied by its impact on people’s lives or the country’s ability to resist pandemics and disease. Pandemics destroy lives and political ideologies are deadly too. The UK’s high Covid death-toll is facilitated by neoliberal ideologies which prioritised neglect of public services, tax cuts for the few, low wages, high corporate profits, unrestrained executive pay and privatisation of healthcare. There are no signs that such ideologies will change anytime soon. We have to demand that all government policies be accompanied by an analysis of their impact on the lives of the people. As you’re here, we have something to ask you. What we do here to deliver real news is more important than ever. But there’s a problem: we need readers like you to chip in to help us survive. We deliver progressive, independent media, that challenges the right’s hateful rhetoric. Together we can find the stories that get lost. We’re not bankrolled by billionaire donors, but rely on readers chipping in whatever they can afford to protect our independence. What we do isn’t free, and we run on a shoestring. Can you help by chipping in as little as £1 a week to help us survive? Whatever you can donate, we’re so grateful - and we will ensure your money goes as far as possible to deliver hard-hitting news.
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Post by Admin on Jul 23, 2021 23:16:52 GMT
Sage adviser claims ministers trying to get as many as possible infected with Covid Exclusive: Prof Robert West says rhetoric about caution is ‘a way of putting blame on public’ www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/23/ministers-letting-young-people-catch-covid-to-prepare-for-winter-sage-adviser-claimsA scientist advising the government has accused ministers of allowing infections to rip through the younger population in an effort to bolster levels of immunity before the NHS faces winter pressures. The allegation comes after England’s remaining Covid restrictions were eased on Monday, with nightclubs throwing open their doors for the first time in the pandemic and all rules on social distancing and mask wearing dropped even as infections run high. Ministers were made aware of scientists’ concerns about reopening nightclubs and other crowded, close-contact and poorly ventilated venues without testing or other checks in place. On Monday Boris Johnson made the surprise announcement that Covid passports will be required for such settings – but not until the end of September, in two months’ time. “What we are seeing is a decision by the government to get as many people infected as possible, as quickly as possible, while using rhetoric about caution as a way of putting the blame on the public for the consequences,” said Prof Robert West, a health psychologist at University College London who participates in Sage’s behavioural science subgroup. “It looks like the government judges that the damage to health and healthcare services will be worth the political capital it will gain from this approach,” West said, adding that ministers appear to believe the strategy is now sustainable – unlike last year – because of the vaccine rollout. A large wave of infections, coupled with mass vaccination, would push the UK closer to “herd immunity”, where enough people in the population are resistant to the virus that it no longer spreads. The threshold for herd immunity with the Delta variant is unclear, but scientists estimate that transmission would need to be blocked in about 85% of the population. Ministers have repeatedly denied that achieving herd immunity by letting cases rise is the government’s goal. Monday’s easing of restrictions removed social distancing, the work-from-home order and legal requirements around mask wearing, though ministers called on the public to remain cautious. The move prompted a flurry of regional mandates to maintain masks on public transport, including the London tube, buses and trains, and Manchester Metrolink trams. Legal limits on mixing indoors lifted at the same time, allowing all businesses to reopen. The change in rules led some clubs to open at midnight on Sunday, leading to packed bars and dancefloors across England. Similar scenes in the Netherlands in recent weeks led the Dutch premier, Mark Rutte, to reimpose curbs on bars, restaurants and nightclubs as new cases rose sevenfold. The shadow health secretary, Jon Ashworth, said: “Abandoning all precautions and allowing infections to climb not only risks further restrictions in the future, it condemns thousands to long-term illness and places huge pressure on the NHS. Rising Covid admissions are helping exacerbate a summer NHS crisis, with operations cancelled and increasing waiting times. It means we are heading into another difficult winter and high levels of virus circulating could see a vaccine-evading variant emerge. This is an utterly reckless strategy from Boris Johnson.” Data from the Office for National Statistics show that coronavirus in England is now largely an infection among young adults. Cases in 11-to-16-year-olds are nearly four times more common, and in 16-to-24-year-olds nearly six times more common, than in 50-to-69-year-olds. While generally at low risk from the disease, young people can still develop long Covid and help fuel the epidemic, which drives up cases in those who are more vulnerable. Prof John Drury, a social psychologist at the University of Sussex, is concerned about the changes that came into force on Monday, such as dropping the mandate on mask-wearing, which “sent a very strong signal” that the Covid crisis is now less serious. Speaking in a personal capacity, Drury, who participates in meetings of the Sage behavioural science subgroup, said recent research showed that people use government policy to make judgments on risk and how to behave. “The overall message is that the actions by the public – not only mask-wearing, but also distancing and avoiding crowded places – are no longer required.” This has already affected public behaviour, he said, though those ditching Covid precautions appear to be a large minority rather than the majority. “Fortunately, many people are aware of the rocketing infection rates and the risk posed to many people in society including the most vulnerable and are continuing to wear masks and keep their distance out of solidarity as much as self-protection,” Drury said. A government spokesperson said: “Herd immunity has never been part of our pandemic strategy. Our approach has always been to protect the NHS and social care, save lives, and ensure as many people as possible are vaccinated as we learn to live with Covid-19. “While the vaccination programme has substantially weakened the link between infection and serious illness or death, we have been clear about the need to exercise personal caution as we ease restrictions. “We are encouraging settings to make use of the NHS Covid pass by requiring either proof of full vaccination or a negative test and we reserve the right to mandate certification if necessary to reduce transmission.”
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