Ryuki Yamamoto (Japan), Chaos – Spin, 2019.
Dear friends,
Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
As we enter the new year almost two years after the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared a pandemic on 11 March 2020, the official death toll from COVID-19 sits just below 5.5 million people. WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus says
that there is a ‘tsunami of cases’ due to the new variants. The country
with the highest death toll is the United States, where the official
number of those who succumbed to the disease is now over 847,000; Brazil
and India follow with nearly 620,000 and 482,000 deaths respectively.
These three countries have been ravaged by the disease. The political
leadership of each of these countries failed to take sufficient measures
to break the chain of infection and instead offered anti-scientific
advice to the public, who suffered from both a lack of clear information
and relatively depleted health care systems.
In February and March 2020, when the news of the virus had already been communicated by China’s Centre for Disease Control to their counterparts in the United States, US President Donald Trump admitted to The Washington Post
reporter Bob Woodward, ‘I wanted to always play it down. I still like
playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic’. Despite the
warnings, Trump and his health secretary Alex Azar completely failed to prepare for the arrival of COVID-19 on US soil by cruise ship and aircraft.
It
is not as if Joe Biden, who succeeded Trump, has been monumentally
better at managing the pandemic. When the US Food and Drug
Administration paused
the use of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine in April 2021, it fed into
growing anti-vaccine sentiment in the country; confusion between
Biden’s White House and the Centre for Disease Control over the use of
masks furthered the chaos in the country. The deep political animosity
between Trump supporters and liberals and the general lack of concern
for hand-to-mouth earners with no social safety net accelerated the
cultural divides in the United States.
Carlos Amorales (Mexico), The Cursed Village (still), 2017.
The
wildness of state policy in the United States was replicated by its
close allies Brazil and India. In Brazil, President Jair Bolsonaro mocked
the severity of the virus, refused to endorse the simple WHO guidelines
(mask mandates, contact tracing, and later vaccination), and pursued a
genocidal policy to refuse funds for clean water delivery in parts of
the country – notably in the Amazon – which are essential to preventing
the spread of the disease. The term ‘genocide’ is not used loosely. It
was put on the table twice by Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Gilmar
Mendes, once in May 2020 and then again
in July 2020; in the former case, Justice Mendes accused Bolsonaro of
implementing ‘a genocidal policy in the management of health care’.
In India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi neglected the WHO’s advice, rushed into an ill-crafted lockdown,
and then failed to properly assist the medical establishment –
especially public health (ASHA) workers – with the provision of basic
medical supplies (including oxygen). Instead, they encouraged the
banging of pots in public and prayed that this would confuse the virus,
creating an unscientific attitude toward the severity of the disease.
All the while, Modi’s government continued having mass gatherings during
the election campaigns and allowed religious mega-festivals to take
place, all of which became super-spreader events.
Studies of leaders such as Bolsonaro and Modi show
that they not only failed to manage the crisis in a scientific manner,
but that they have been ‘stoking cultural divides and have used the
crisis as an opportunity to expand their powers and/or to take an
intolerant approach to government opponents’.
Tarsila do Amaral (Brazil), Carnival in Madureira, 1924.
Countries
such as the United States and India – and to a lesser extent Brazil –
were hit hard because their public health infrastructure had been
weakened and their private health systems were simply not capable of
managing a crisis of this proportion. During the recent spread of the
Omicron variant in the United States, the Centre for Disease Control
tried to encourage vaccinations by saying that while the vaccine was free, ‘hospital stays can be expensive’. Bonnie Castillo, the head of National Nurses United responded,
‘Imagine a dystopia in which the public health strategy is to threaten
the people with the health care system itself. Oh wait, we don’t have to
imagine…’.
In 2009, then WHO Director-General Dr Margaret Chan said,
‘user fees for health care were put forward as a way to recover costs
and discourage the excessive use of health services and the
over-consumption of care. This did not happen. Instead, user fees
punished the poor’. User fees, or co-pays, and payment for private
health care where public health care does not exist continue to be ways
to ‘punish’ the poor. India – currently the country with the third
highest COVID-19 death toll – has the highest out-of-pocket medical
expenses in the world.
The
sharp words from the head of the nurses’ union in the United States are
echoed by doctors and nurses around the world. Last year, Jhuliana
Rodrigues, a nurse at the São Vicente Hospital in Jundiaí, Brazil told
me that they ‘work with fear’, recounting that the conditions are
appalling, the equipment minimal, and the hours long. Health
professionals ‘do their jobs with love, dedication, care of human
beings’, she told me. Despite all the early talk about ‘essential
workers’, health workers have seen little change in their working
conditions, which is why we have seen a wave of strikes across the world
– such as the recent militant strike by doctors in Delhi, India.
Valery Shchekoldin (USSR), Workplace Gymnastics, 1981.
The
mishandling of the COVID catastrophe in countries like the United
States, Brazil, and India is a major human rights violation of treaties
to which all of these countries are signatories. Each of these countries
is a member of the WHO, whose Constitution, written in 1946, envisages
‘the highest attainable standard of health [as] one of the fundamental
rights of every human being’. Two years later, the International
Declaration of Human Rights (1948), Article 25, asserted
that ‘everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the
health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food,
clothing, housing, and medical care and necessary social services, and
the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness,
disability, widowhood, old age, or other lack of livelihood in
circumstances beyond his control’. The language is dated – ‘himself’,
‘his family’, ‘his’ – but the point is clear. Even if the declaration is
a non-binding treaty, it sets an important standard that is routinely
violated by the major world powers.
In 1978, at Alma-Ata (USSR), each of these countries pledged
to enhance public health infrastructure, which they not only failed to
do, but which they systematically undermined by extensively privatising
health care. The evisceration of public health care systems is one
reason why these capitalist states could not handle the public health
crisis – a stark contrast to the states of Cuba, Kerala, and Venezuela,
which were vastly more successful at breaking the chain of infection with a fraction of the resources.
Finally,
in 2000, at the UN Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights,
member states of the United Nations endorsed a document that affirmed
that ‘health is a fundamental human right indispensable for the
exercise of other human rights. Every human being is entitled to the
enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health conducive to
living a life in dignity’.
A
toxic culture has emerged in many of the largest countries in the
world, where there is routine disregard for the well-being of ordinary
people, a disregard that violates international treaties. Words like
‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’ need to be rethought from the root; they
are cheapened by their narrow use.
Our colleagues at New Frame started the new year with a strong editorial
calling for resistance to these malign governments and for the need for
a new project to restore hope. On the second point, they write: ‘There
is nothing utopian about this. There are plenty of examples – all with
their limits and contradictions, to be sure – of rapid social progress
under progressive governments. But this always requires popular
organisation and mobilisation to build a political instrument for
change, to renew and discipline it from below, and to defend it from
domestic elites and imperialism, most particularly the revanchism of
American foreign policy, covert and overt’.
Warmly,
Vijay
SOURCE ;Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
0 Comments