27 March 2020 — The Lancet
Richard Horton
“When this is all over, the NHS England board should resign in their entirety.” So wrote one National Health Service (NHS) health worker last weekend. The scale of anger and frustration is unprecedented, and coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is the cause.
27 March 2020 — Novara Media
Covid-19 has forced the government to make drastic changes to the fundamental structure of the NHS, as the service struggles to cope.
Since the 1990s the UK’s healthcare provision has been subjected to increasing marketisation, in particular through the so-called internal market. Introduced by Margaret Thatcher, this system splits the NHS into purchasers and providers who must trade with one another.
27 March 2020 — Off Guardian
OK, I’ve got some good news and I’ve got some bad news. The good news is mainly for authoritarians who missed all the fun during the War on Terror. The news is … welcome to the War on Death!
26 March 2020 — Asia Times
By Pepe Escobar
What’s going on in the fifth largest economy in the world arguably points to a major collusion scandal in which the French government is helping Big Pharma to profit from the expansion of Covid-19. Informed French citizens are absolutely furious about it.
26 March 2020 — Tricontinental
Li Zhong (China), Paintings for Wuhan, 2020.
Dear Friends,
Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
It is hard to remember that just a few weeks ago, the planet was in motion. There were protests in Delhi (India) and Quito (Ecuador), eruptions against the old order that ranged from anger at the economic policies of austerity and neoliberalism to frustration with the cultural policies of misogyny and racism. Ingeniously, in Santiago (Chile), during its wave after wave of protests, someone projected a powerful slogan onto the side of a building: ‘we won’t go back to normal, because normal was the problem’. Now, in the midst of the novel coronavirus, it seems impossible to imagine a return to the old world, the world that left us so helpless before the arrival of these deadly microscopic particles. Waves of anxiety prevail; death continues to stalk us. If there is a future, we say to each other, it cannot mimic the past.
25 March 2020 — WSWS
“Without a huge national effort to halt the growth of this virus, there will come a moment when no health service in the world could possibly cope; because there won’t be enough ventilators, enough intensive care beds, enough doctors and nurses,” Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson declared Monday.
26 March 2020 — Youtube
A blast from my youth! My dad used to take me to the Goon Show, recorded before a live audience at a theatre in North London.
26 March 2020 — Inforos
Yuri Veselov, military observer
Turkey is unable to fulfill all the agreements with Russia. Following the March 5 Moscow talks, Recep Erdogan vowed to establish joint patrol of the M4 highway between Aleppo and Latakia starting March 15 in exchange for Syrian government army’s terminated offensive in the Idlib province. But he never got round to get this agreement done. The Turkish leader has pledged to ensure that all the detachments and weapons along the highway are withdrawn by mid-March for a distance of six kilometers on both sides. The militants do not shy away from their unwillingness to leave the positions.
25 March 2020 — Climate & Capitalism
New research shows that breathing near a site where trash is burned or buried may be dangerous to your health.
Breathing can be dangerous when bacteria and Antibiotic Resistance Genes travel through the air from municipal waste to humans. (Diagram from Environmental Science & Technology)
by Ian Angus
25 March 2020 — RT
Dave Lindorff is an award-winning US journalist, former Asia correspondent for Business Week, and founder of the collectively-owned journalists’ news site ThisCantBeHappening.net.
The Senate and the White House have finally managed to negotiate a record $2-trillion stimulus aid package to ease the economic impact of the coronavirus outbreak. But the money may well be too little too late.
26 March 2020 — True Publica
By TruePublica: In the UK, the government response to the Covid-19 outbreak was initially to allow the population to be infected as a means of defence by creating what they termed ‘herd immunity.’ This strategy was met with clear opposition by almost all scientists, health professionals and experts very quickly. Public reaction was muted early on but rapidly turned to anger as the realisation set in that ‘herd immunity’ was a programme that, in the end, encouraged the ‘culling’ of those most vulnerable, such as those with underlying health conditions. For modern societies, this is completely unacceptable. It is immoral on every level no matter what the science or logic points to. For instance, logic tells retired (high risk) medics to stay away, but the human spirit is such that thousands have stepped forward to help complete strangers get through this deadly pandemic.
25 March 2020 — Voltaire Network
The CIA is waging a campaign, which it portrays as “re-information,” claiming that Covid-19 originated in China while, at the same time, Russia is seeking to expose it as a US plot.
Thus, according to Reuters, the European External Action Service (EEAS) has issued an internal nine-page document highlighting 80 cases of disinformation (Fake News) allegedly disseminated by Russia to sow panic in the European Union [1].
26 March 2020 — Left Voice
Although Italy is on lockdown, many non-essential sectors are still going to work. Today a general strike is being called to protest the government’s insistence on maintaining “business as usual” in the face of a devastating pandemic.
25 March 2020 — Dispatches from the Edge
As the viral blitzkrieg rolls across one European border after another, it seems to have a particular enmity for Italy. The country’s death toll has passed China’s, and scenes from its hospitals look like something out of Dante’s imagination.
Why?
25 March 2020 — Craig Murray
Unfortunately I am in lockdown at home in Edinburgh and cannot get down to Westminster Magistrates Court for Julian Assange’s urgent bail application today. Several hearings ago, Magistrate Baraitser stated pre-emptively that she would not grant bail, before any application had been made. Today’s application will argue that Assange’s ill health puts him at extreme danger from COVID-19, and that prison conditions make it impossible to avoid infection.
24 March 2020 — MROnline
by Fabio Vighi
Understandably, these days we hear a lot about the symptoms of Covid-19 (dry cough, high fever, etc.). Conversely, there is much less discussion of the virus as a symptom. Let’s say then that to intervene on the symptoms of the virus it is necessary not only to have specific scientific knowledge, but also to put in place a serious reflection on the structural causes of its global spread and, with them, the possibilities of change that the emergency opens up for us, at least theoretically. If mainstream information focuses on the management of the epidemic, reflecting on its causes could lead to a series of far from irrelevant considerations.
24 March 2020 — Climate & Capitalism
Ian Angus
“A conscious and collective struggle to stop capitalism’s hell-bound train is our only hope for a better world.”
In an interview with the African Review of Political Economy, Climate & Capitalism editor Ian Angus discusses the environmental crisis, the Anthropocene and Covid-19.
25 March 2020 — Declassified UK
By Mark Curtis
The British Royal Navy’s future flagship aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth arrives at her new home port of Portsmouth, Britain, 16 August 2017. (Photo: EPA-EFE / Gerry Penny)
New analysis shows that Britain plans to spend hundreds of billions of pounds on expensive military projects while the UK’s under-funded public health system struggles to address pandemics such as Covid-19.
25 March 2020 — Monthly Review Press
(Sep 01, 2000)
Readers will note that this article is nearly twice the length of the normal MR piece, but because of the importance of the subject we are publishing it in its entirety. The text is based on a talk given by the author at the Brecht Forum in New York. —Eds.
Richard Levins (1930–2016) was a professor of biology at Harvard University. He achieved international recognition for decades of work over in the field of epidemiology.
The scientific tradition of the “West,” of Europe and North America, has had its greatest success when it has dealt with what we have come to think of as the central questions of scientific inquiry: “What is this made of?” and “How does this work?” Over the centuries, we have developed more and more sophisticated ways of answering these questions. We can cut things open, slice them thin, stain them, and answer what they are made of. We have made great achievements in these relatively simple areas but have had dramatic failures in attempts to deal with more complex systems. We see this especially when we ask questions about health. When we look at the changing patterns of health over the last century or so, we have both cause for celebration and for dismay. Human life expectancy has increased by perhaps thirty years since the beginning of the twentieth century and the incidence of some of the classical deadly diseases has declined and almost disappeared. Smallpox presumably has been eradicated; leprosy is very rare; and polio has nearly vanished from most regions of the world. Scientific technologies have advanced to the point where we can give very sophisticated diagnoses, distinguishing between kinds of germs that are very similar to each other.
