Poland, a nation with a population of more than 38 million, registered 357,400 births last year and some 486,200 deaths from various causes. The overall data showed a population loss of some 129,000 people, compared with a decline of some 36,400 the year before. Poland’s population has slowly decreased in the past 20 years mostly due to the emigration of young people seeking better opportunities.

The low birth rate surprised observers because some experts predicted the lockdown measures the Polish government has imposed on and off since mid-March would lead to a baby boom

Economist Rafal Mundry said, “We have a huge demographic crisis.” 

‘Demographic crisis’: Poland population shrinking under pandemic | Poland News | Al Jazeera

For capitalism a fall in numbers but accompanied by an ageing population is a problem.

Less people means a smaller market to sell to but it also means less people of working age supporting more who aren’t being productive.

China suffered it with their one-child policy and call it the 1-2-4 problem…one worker supporting his or her parents and also grandparents. It being made worse by the lack of an effective state welfare system in China to take up the burden of looking after the elderly.

Capitalism does offer solutions to this under-population. Increased productivity of those who are working. Reducing the dependency by raising the retirement age. Encouraging more immigration of younger healthier workers. To some degree or other, all three options are being introduced but not with equal priority. Japan, for instance, has done very little to invite immigration.

But we also have to note that even with fertility drop the population still grows because of what is called population momentum

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_momentum

Socialism will not suffer any unwelcomed consequences of a reduced population and we would welcome it, in general.

But our current political problem are those who wish to embark upon eugenic programmes supposedly to protect the environment. Delve a bit deeper and it is racist family-planning policies aimed at the undeveloped and developing countries with the purpose to protect the high levels of, and very profitable for capitalism, consumption and GDPs of the industrialised developed nations. Also with the land-grab and the mechanisation of plantation farming and high-tech extractive idustries, much of the labour-force is superfluous and surplus to requirements so push them into the mega-city slums and engage in service work.

EXTERMINATE

Autonomous and automated weaponry with artificial intelligence (AI) is humanitarian, according to  a government-appointed panel has said in a draft report for Congress.

The US should not agree to ban the use or development of robotic weapons, the panel, led by former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt concluded. Instead it should consider AI for national security and technological advancement.

Vice-chairman, Robert Work, a former deputy secretary of defense, said such weapons are expected to make fewer mistakes than humans do in battle, leading to reduced casualties or skirmishes caused by target misidentification.

Concern has been mounting with the development of AI to power such systems, along with research finding biases in AI and examples of the software’s abuse.  Previously, a coalition of non-governmental organisations has pushed for a treaty banning “killer robots”, saying human control is necessary to judge attacks’ proportionality and assign blame for war crimes. Thirty countries including Brazil and Pakistan want a ban and a UN body has held meetings on the systems since at least 2014. This panel said would be against US interests and difficult to enforce.

US has ‘moral imperative’ to develop AI weapons, says panel | Weapons technology | The Guardian

 As Indian farmers protest and resist new laws that they claim will threaten their livelihoods, the wealth of the country’s billionaires increased by an estimated 35 per cent during the lockdown, while 84 per cent of households suffered varying degrees of income loss.

 The  income increases for India’s top 100 billionaires since March 2020, when the lockdown was enforced, was enough to give each of the 138 million poorest people a cheque for 94,045 rupees. If India’s top 11 billionaires were taxed at just one per cent on the increase in wealth during the pandemic it could increase allocation to the Jan Aushadhi scheme – which makes quality medicines available at affordable prices – by 140 times.

It would take an unskilled worker 10,000 years to make what Reliance Industries’ Chairman Mukesh Ambani made in an hour.  And three years to make what Ambani made in one second.

 Covid protocols like social distancing and washing of hands were a luxury when 32 per cent and 30 per cent of households live in one room and two room houses, respectively, in urban India.

Wealth Of Indian Billionaires Increased 35% During Covid Pandemic | Countercurrents

 Most poor countries will not achieve mass Covid-19 immunisation until at least 2024 and some may never get there, according to a new forecast, which maps a starkly divided world over the next few years in which a handful of developed countries are fully vaccinated while others race to catch up.

84 countries that make up the world’s poorest will not receive enough doses to sufficiently immunise their populations for at least a further year, a global faultline that will run through the first half of this decade, said Agathe Demarais, of the the Economist Intelligence Unit global forecasting director and author of the report.

The key reason is the myriad hurdles in delivering doses: securing vaccine ingredients, production constraints, delays in delivery, poor medical infrastructure in some countries and lack of trained health workers to administer injections, among others.

The report was sceptical of forecasts by Covax, a global vaccine-sharing alliance, that it would supply enough doses this year to cover 27% of populations in member countries including more than 92 lower-income ones. The scheme aims to being administering vaccines next month and will announce each country’s first allocations this week. “There’s a lot of political hope that the targets will be hit … but we can see there are already delays for production and delivery in richer countries, so we can expect some delay in poor countries,” Demarais said.

A report from the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) said. “Sharing vaccines equitably is not charity, it is economic common sense,” said the ICC’s secretary-general John Denton.

The WHO director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said the world was on the edge of a “catastrophic moral failure” in the unequal distribution of vaccines so far, with more than 40m doses given in about 50 countries, most of them wealthy or upper-middle income.

Medical rights groups have called for patents on Covid-19 vaccines and treatments to be shared so that qualified manufacturers can also begin producing them and ease global shortages. Demarais said that, even if pharmaceutical companies shared their technology, patents and knowhow, there would still be challenges in finding workers trained to produce vaccines.

“There are a number of factories now that are running out of labour supply, experienced workers who can manufacture the vaccines to sufficient quality,” she said.

Most poor countries will not achieve mass Covid-19 immunisation until 2024 | Society | The Guardian

 $13,000,000,000 is how much Jeff Bezos added to his net worth in one day last July after the pandemic caused Amazon’s stock price to surge. He could have paid all 876,000 Amazon employees a $105,000 bonus in September 2020 and remained just as wealthy as he was pre-pandemic. Bezos’s $13bn (£10bn) pay-day set a record for the largest single-day increase in individual wealth ever recorded.  However, he was far from the only billionaire.

 According to a report by Oxfam, the combined wealth of the world’s 10 richest men has increased by over half a trillion dollars since March 2020.  Enough to vaccinate everyone in the world and ensure no one is pushed into poverty by the pandemic, Oxfam’s report, The Inequality Virus, claims.

The richest 660 people in the US have collected a $1.1tn (£800bn) “windfall of wealth” since the coronavirus pandemic began, according to a report by the Institute for Policy Studies. The report found that the collective wealth of America’s 660 billionaires has risen by 39% since the World Health Organization declared that Covid-19 was a pandemic virus in March 2020. The billionaires combined wealth has increased from just under $3tn on 18 March 2020 to $4.1tn, according to Forbes magazine data. The report noted that there had also been “46 newly minted billionaires since the beginning of the pandemic”, when there were 614.

At $4.1tn, the total wealth of America’s 660 billionaires is two-thirds higher than the $2.4tn in total wealth held by the bottom half of the population, 165 million people. The report said that the $1.1tn gain the billionaires have made could be used to pay for all of the relief for working families contained in Biden’s proposed $1.9tn pandemic rescue package, which includes $1,400 in direct payments to individuals, $400-a-week supplements to unemployment benefits and an expanded child tax credit.

The world’s 10 richest people made $540bn in a year – we need a greed tax | Rich lists | The Guardian

US billionaires ‘have received $1.1tn windfall in Covid pandemic’ | The super-rich | The Guardian

 Pharmaceutical companies “continue to inch forward” to improve access to medicines in poorer countries, said a report published by the Access to Medicine Foundation, a Netherlands-based nonprofit organisation.

It said there has been progress, but that progress is slow. And profit appears still to be the main driver for research and development (R&D) in medicines and vaccines.

The report  said that most of the pharmaceutical industry’s products approved since 2018 have targeted “more profitable non-communicable diseases than less profitable communicable diseases.” The 2021 analysis showed that only two recently approved products target neglected tropical diseases (NTDs). They include dengue, rabies, trachoma, yaws and guinea-worm disease. The latter two have been identified as candidates for disease eradication or disease control.

Non-communicable diseases, such as cancers, continue to dominate R&D at the top companies. Cancers account for more than two-thirds of all projects. Research into maternal and neonatal health conditions was by 1% of all R&D projects.

On the current COVID-19 pandemic, it reported that the “industry only mobilized once it became clear that the outbreak affected rich as well as poor countries,” because that opened up the potential for “substantial recurring pharmaceutical revenues.”

“The state of infectious disease research today is, if I can put it mildly, on thin ice,” said Dr. Jayasree Iyer, executive director of the Access to Medicine Foundation, explained. “It’s heavily reliant on public funds and the goodwill of a few pharmaceutical companies. Many companies have actually left infectious disease R&D.” 

Access to Medicine’s findings also show so-called “empty pipelines” for 10 out of 16 of the emerging infectious diseases in the world. Basically, nothing’s happening there — no research, no development. One such example, said Iyer, is Nipah, an infectious disease that transmits from animals to humans, a “zoonotic” virus. It has been found in Asia, Southeast Asia and Africa, with recent outbreaks affecting Malaysia, Singapore, Bangladesh, India and Thailand. And there is no vaccine.

2021 Access to Medicine Index: No profit, no pharma? | Science| In-depth reporting on science and technology | DW | 26.01.2021

Action on Armed Violence, said they represented “a systemic failure to consider the human rights record of states before exporting weapons to them”.

Murray Jones, of Action on Armed Violence, said his research – which reviewed UK export records between January 2015 and June 2020 – “demonstrates the frailty of the UK’s commitment to human rights abroad”.

Meanwhile, Sarah Champion, the chair of parliament’s international development select committee, said: “Our ambassadors have today been instructed by the Foreign Office to cut 50-70% from the aid budget.” Describing the speed of the planned cuts as catastrophic, she added: “There is no doubt that lives will be lost as a consequence and our global standing as humanitarians destroyed…”

UK sells arms to nearly 80% of countries under restrictions, says report | Arms trade | The Guardian

UK diplomats told to cut up to 70% from overseas aid budget | Aid | The Guardian

 Investors in Britain’s largest cinema chain have approved an incentive scheme that could result in bosses being awarded more than £200m in shares.

Cineworld, which closed all of its 127 sites in the UK and Ireland indefinitely in October, held a vote on a new pay policy and long-term incentive plan at a special meeting. The proposed long-term incentive plan will reward the company’s senior executive team if Cineworld’s share price bounces back to 190p within three years. If this level – which is close to its pre-pandemic level of 197p – is reached, bosses will share £104m. If the share price reaches the upper cap of 380p, executive directors would between them be awarded shares worth a total of £208m.

The schemes, which required 50% voter approval to be implemented, were never in any real doubt of being passed as the Greidinger family control 20% of Cineworld. If the scheme hits its top target then the chief executive, Mooky Greidinger, and his brother and deputy, Israel, will receive awards worth £33m each.

Cineworld’s 5,500 UK staff have been out of work and furloughed since October, when the company closed all its sites indefinitely. There has been a significant round of voluntary and compulsory redundancies since then.

Cineworld bosses’ bonus scheme worth up to £208m gets green light | Cineworld | The Guardian

 More than a third of households in the UK have not managed to put aside any money since the first coronavirus lockdown began last year, and more than half are worried about running out of savings, a survey found. Many households are struggling with lower incomes and are eating into their savings.

The latest household financial confidence tracker, for Comparethemarket, found 52% of those surveyed were spending savings and 53% were worried they would run out of money. Of those with families, more than a quarter said they had struggled to pay bills in the past week, while 16% of those with no children at home said the same. 

The same proportions said they felt less financially secure now than in previous lockdowns, while 10% of families said if lockdown restrictions continued beyond April they were worried they would not be able to pay their mortgage or rent.

Ursula Gibbs, the commercial director of Comparethemarket, said: “…for many families the financial impact of coronavirus will be felt long after lockdown lifts. Families with children at home are particularly affected, and many are more concerned now about their ability to pay bills and make ends meet than at any other point in the past year.”

By December 2020 more than 9 million people had borrowed more than usual since the pandemic began. 

Laith Khalaf, an analyst at the finance firm AJ Bell, said: “There’s a pandemic paradox at the heart of personal finances in the UK, with signs of both financial distress and excess savings at the same time. “It is clear that the young, the self-employed and those on lower incomes have borne the brunt of the financial damage inflicted by the pandemic…” But adding, “… more affluent households with steady, undisturbed income streams have found themselves awash with cash, as spending options have been severely curtailed by ongoing lockdowns.”

More than half of UK households fear losing savings in Covid crisis | Family finances | The Guardian

 Poor white youngsters in England’s former industrial towns and those living on the coast are among the most likely to miss out on university, warns the watchdog for fair access.