Vaccines have brought hope amid the coronavirus pandemic that has killed more than 2.4 million people and brought world economies to a halt. Vaccines have been presented as a remedy that would put an end to the immense suffering – physical, emotional, and economic – caused by the COVID-19 outbreak.

If deployment of the vaccine continues at the present rate, only a few of the world’s richest countries are expected to achieve herd immunity before the end of the summer.

The head of the World Health Organization (WHO),  Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, thanked the G7 countries for their pledges to provide $7.5 billion to support “affordable and equitable access to vaccines” and treatments for COVID-19.

But he said that “even if you have the money, if you cannot use the money to buy vaccines … having the money doesn’t mean anything”. He said some rich countries’ approaches to manufacturers to secure more vaccines are “affecting the deals with COVAX, and even the amount that was allocated for COVAX was reduced because of this”. 

Tedros underlined the importance of using every opportunity to step up vaccine production “because, with increased production, the pie is increased, then there is a better volume to share. Otherwise, with shortages, sharing is difficult,” he said. “And that’s exactly what’s happening now.”

 German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier conceded that money alone was not the solution, adding that vaccines were still a “scarce commodity”.

The Lancet concludes, “new vaccines will mean little to individuals around the world if they are unable to get vaccinated in a timely manner”.

Some have put the blame for the vaccine debacle on the cumbersome bureaucracy of governments and on anti-vaxxer sentiments. But the root of the problem lies elsewhere. It has to do with a dysfunctional  economic system propped up by three ideological myths: that the private sector is best at innovation; that markets are best at managing supply and demand; and that the outcome of globalisation is fair for all.

One myth of capitalism is that entrepreneurship is the only effective source of innovation and progress. But Big Pharma has long demonstrated this is not necessarily so. For decades, vaccines have been de-prioritised by the industry as insufficiently profitable. 

Another capitalist myth is that competitive markets are the best regulators of supply and demand and the best at achieving the optimal distribution of goods. In early 2020, we witnessed countries started to outbid each other for vital medical equipment, such as PPE and ventilators. Demand was high across the board, but supply only went to the wealthy few, at the price of many human lives. This is now happening again, as, amid severe undersupply of vaccines.

The third  myth of capitalism portrays globalisation as equally beneficial for all. But a  look at the global distribution of vaccines shows that this is far not the case. Western countries are able to acquire vaccines while poorer nations are struggling to access supply.

WHO chief urges rich nations not to undermine COVAX scheme | Coronavirus pandemic News | Al Jazeera

 Between 2015 and 2019 there were 44,225 raids on private homes resulting in  7,578 people deported. 

There were also 190 raids carried out on care homes resulting in 37 care workers removed from the UK.

Mary Atkinson, campaigns officer at the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, said: “These figures show just how out of control the hostile environment has become. Carers are being arrested in the middle of their shifts, often as they look after elderly and vulnerable people – it is difficult to see who could possibly benefit from that. Ours is a government relentlessly pursuing an anti-immigration agenda, regardless of the harm it causes – in this case, to some of the very same carers whose hard work and sacrifice has been rightly applauded throughout this pandemic…”

Susan Cueva, trustee at Kanlungan Filipino Consortium, which works with migrants including those working in care homes said: “We know that care homes lack staff. The Home Office should stop raiding care homes. It is counter-productive. The solution is to regularise the immigration status of these workers who are carers. That’s the most practical way to deal with this situation.”

Fewer than one in six ‘hostile environment’ raids led to deportations | Immigration and asylum | The Guardian

Saturday February 20 was a National Day of Solidarity with Amazon workers in Alabama.

Between February 8 and March 29, about 6,000 Amazon warehouse workers in Bessemer, Alabama are voting by mail on whether to be represented by the Retail, Wholesale Department Store Workers Union (RWDSU). The harsh working conditions at Amazon warehouses, along with Amazon’s refusal to adopt measures that protect workers from COVID 19, have pushed Amazon and Whole Foods workers everywhere to step up organizing efforts.

These mostly Black workers, who have in recent months formed the BAmazon Workers Union, face one of the biggest and most powerful transnational corporations in the world, and its super rich union-busting owner, Jeff Bezos. They are also defying the racist anti-union laws that suppress labor across the South.

Solidarity from every corner of the labor and progressive movements is needed now to show the workers in Bessemer that they are not alone. This is especially needed as Amazon ramps up its union-busting tactics.

The Southern Workers Assembly has issued a call for a National Day of Solidarity with Amazon workers in Alabama on Saturday, February 20. Actions are planned across the country at Amazon facilities (warehouses, distribution centers, Whole Foods, etc.) — pickets, rallies, marches, leafleting, car caravans, bike brigades. Social distancing will be observed.  

For details of the actions planned, please follow this link.

Taken from the WSPUS website

Solidarity with Alabama Amazon Workers | World Socialist Party of the US (wspus.org)

 Texas has the third-highest number of billionaires in America.  The mayor of Colorado City,  accused his constituents – trapped in near sub-zero temperatures and complaining about lack of heat, electricity and drinkable water – of being the “lazy” products of a “socialist government”, adding “I’m sick and tired of people looking for a damn handout!” and predicting “only the strong will survive and the weak will perish”.

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which manages the flow of electric power, exempted affluent downtowns from outages, leaving thriving parts of Austin, Dallas and Houston brightly lit while pushing less affluent precincts into the dark and cold.

In Texas, for-profit energy companies have no incentive to prepare for extreme weather or maintain spare capacity. Even if they’re able to handle surges in demand, prices go through the roof and poorer households are hit hard. If they can’t pay, they’re cut off.

Rich Texans take spikes in energy prices in their stride. If the electric grid goes down, private generators kick in. In a pinch – as last week – they check into hotels or leave town. On Wednesday night, as millions of his constituents remained without power and heat, Senator Ted Cruz flew to Cancún, Mexico for a family vacation.

Like the poor across America and much of the world, poor Texans are getting hammered by climate change. Many inhabit substandard homes, lacking proper insulation. The very poor occupy trailers or tents, or camp out in their cars. Lower-income communities are located close to refineries and other industrial sites that release added pollutants when they shut or restart. Shutdowns led to the refineries flaring, or burning and releasing gases, to prevent damage to processing units. That flaring darkened the skies in eastern Texas, with smoke visible for miles.

Climate change, Covid-19 and jobs are together splitting Americans by class more profoundly than Americans are split by politics. The white working class is taking as much of a beating as most Black and Latino people.

White working class has been seduced by conservative Republicans and Trump cultists, of which Texas has an abundance, into believing that what’s good for Black and Latino people is bad for them. White grievance helps keep Republicans in power, protecting their rich patrons from a majority that might otherwise join to demand what they need – such as heat, electricity, water and reliable sources of power.

Lower-income Texans, white as well as Black and Latino, are taking it on the chin in many other ways. Texas is one of the few states that hasn’t expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, leaving the share of Texans without health insurance twice the national average, the largest uninsured population of any state. Texas has double the national average of children in poverty and a higher rate of unemployment than the nation’s average. Although Texans have suffered multiple natural disasters stemming from climate change, Texas Republicans are dead set against a Green New Deal that would help reduce the horrific impacts.

Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, went on Fox News to proclaim, absurdly, that what happened to his state “shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States”. Abbott blamed the power failure on the fact that “wind and solar got shut down”. The loss of power from frozen coal-fired and natural gas plants was six times larger than the dent caused by frozen wind turbines. Texans froze because deregulation and a profit-driven free market created an electric grid utterly unprepared for climate change.

In Texas, oil tycoons are the only winners from climate change. Everyone else is losing badly. With huge gaps in the state and local response to the winter crisis, volunteers are stepping up to provide vital services

Texas freeze shows a chilling truth – how the rich use climate change to divide us | Texas | The Guardian

Deaths among homeless people have risen by more than a third in a year, according to an analysis by a social justice group that found that almost 1,000 unhoused people had died across the UK in 2020.  Among cases where a cause of death was confirmed, 36% were related to drug and alcohol use and 15% were suicide. Separate figures by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) published in December 2020 found that the number of people dying while homeless in England and Wales rose for the fifth year in a row in 2019.

Jess Tuttle, the organisation’s co-founder, said the findings demonstrated how the pandemic had hit a system “already cut to the bone from 10 years of austerity”. She called on the government to “stop repackaging old funding commitments as new support”, urging authorities to “do more to stop this terrible loss of life”.

The steep rise in fatalities comes despite the government’s Everybody In scheme, which was launched at the beginning of the coronavirus crisis to provide safe shelter for thousands of rough sleepers. During the first lockdown, approximately 29,000 people were helped into settled accommodation, with thousands initially housed in budget hotels.

Less than 3% of recorded causes of death were directly due to Covid-19, the MoH found, which it said was one of the programme’s “significant achievements”. However, Tuttle said the scheme failed to prevent “a staggering increase in the number of people dying while homeless”.

Polly Neate, chief executive of Shelter, said that despite the hard work to get people off the streets at the start of the pandemic, people continue to become homeless daily because of a lack of affordable housing. “Pre-pandemic, there were over a million households on the social housing waiting list. As we look towards recovery, ending the housing crisis must be a priority,” she said.

More than 70,000 households across the UK have been made homeless since the start of the pandemic, the Observer found in January, while tens of thousands more were threatened with homelessness despite a government ban on evictions for most of 2020. The tenants’ union, Acorn, blamed the rise on a combination of factors including illegal evictions, landlords pressuring tenants to leave before eviction, and a lack of protections for lodgers.

The number of people sleeping rough on the streets of London surged by a staggering 170% between 2010 and March 2020.

UK homeless deaths rise by more than a third in a year, study finds | Homelessness | The Guardian

Oxfam has accused the British government of prolonging the war in Yemen by allowing the export of air-to-air refuelling equipment that could be used to help the Saudi air force conduct indiscriminate bombing in the country.

The technology was licensed to Riyadh last summer when arms restrictions were lifted, alongside £1.4bn of other sales, and can be used to help war planes fly longer missions at a time when the conflict is intensifying.

Sam Nadel, head of policy and advocacy at Oxfam, said: “As the US has called for an end to the conflict in Yemen, the UK is heading in the opposite direction, ramping up its support for the brutal Saudi-led war by increasing arms sales and refuelling equipment that facilitate airstrikes.  The UK claims to support peace in Yemen. It can start by immediately ending the sale of all arms that risk being used against civilians and exacerbating the humanitarian crisis,” Nadel added.

British arms sales prolonging Saudi war in Yemen, says Oxfam | Saudi Arabia | The Guardian

  8 million people in England live in overcrowded, unaffordable or unsuitable homes.

The Church of England owns about 81,000 hectares (200,000 acres) of land. Assets include land suitable for the delivery of 28,500 new homes across England. However, fewer than a quarter of the 3,820 new homes that the church commissioners have secured planning permission for since 2015 were affordable.

A proposal to convert a former C of E school in Arkengarthdale in the Yorkshire Dales into affordable housing was blocked last year when the diocese of Leeds and the local parish said they were legally obliged to accept the highest offer for the property.

Church of England land should be used to help tackle housing crisis, says report | Housing | The Guardian

 Millions of council tax payers are in line for increases of up to 5% in their annual bills from April, with those on low and middle incomes hit hardest by a sixth year of increases in England above the rate of inflation. Hundreds of councils must decide soon whether to raise the tax by the maximum allowed by government of 4.99%, or to make big cuts in services.

Manchester city council has told residents that without a 5% increase in bills it must make savings of £8.5m in addition to the £50m it is seeking to cut from current spending.

David Phillips, associate director at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, said council tax was a regressive tax that favoured wealthier people. “Council tax bills represent a larger share of income for low-to-middle income households than high-income households,” he said.

“This means increases in council tax will typically take up a larger share of their income too …” 

Figures show that a band D council payer in the lowest 20% of income earners last year paid £1,000 after extra government subsidies out of a disposable income of £16,776. A council tax payer in the top 20% of earners paid £1,823 out of a disposable income of £91,472.

 Tony Travers, a local government expert at the London School of Economics, said: “It is the ‘not quite poor’ who suffer the most. Those who have enough income that means they don’t qualify for benefits. They get hammered by council tax increases as a proportion of their income.”

Middle-income households to be hit by ‘£2bn council tax bombshell’ | Council tax | The Guardian

 Mercenary chief, Erik Prince, a Trump supporter and brother of former education secretary Betty DeVos, violated a United Nations arms embargo on Libya, UN investigators have found.

Prince deployed a force of foreign mercenaries and weapons to military commander Khalifa Haftar. The $80m operation included plans to form a hit squad to track and kill Libyan commanders opposed to Haftar – including some who were also European Union citizens, The New York Times said.

Trump ally Erik Prince violated Libya arms embargo: UN report | Conflict News | Al Jazeera

 Around 120 million more people were pushed into extreme poverty in 2020, a number that could rise to 150 million in 2021. 

An estimated 250 million jobs have been lost around the world, 

And the number of people affected by acute food insecurity was estimated to have doubled to 272 million by the end of last year. 

More than a billion children have been out of school during the Covid-19 pandemic,  they will be less likely to find jobs and fulfil their potential, and girls are much less likely to return to the classroom.

People who have lost their main source of income are struggling to feed their immediate households and are unable to send much-needed remittances to their families in rural areas.

Industrialised countries have spent up to 20% of their GDP on stimulus packages. But for the poorest countries, that figure is less than 2%.

Pandemics, world recessions and the climate crisis do not respect national borders. The answer must be global. Strong and sustained cooperation is essential. The longer the delay, the deeper the damage will become.

A “business as usual” approach will not deliver. 

The number of people in need is frightening – we need a global response | Debt relief | The Guardian