FAQ Bread and Circuses pt.1 – introduced by Mike Foster, 11th November 2020
Attachment Theory pt.1 – Tim Kilgallon, 13th November 2020
New Atheism pt.1 – Nigel McCullough, 20th November 2020
It will be a cold, chilly winter for many
More than half a million households have fallen behind on their energy bills since February, taking the total number of billpayers in arrears to more than 2 million.
Citizens Advice said an extra 600,000 households owed payments to their energy suppliers, with the coronavirus outbreak leading to record high redundancies this year.
On average, billpayers who have fallen behind on their payments owe their energy suppliers about £760 for electricity and £605 for gas, according to Citizens Advice.
The findings show that about 16% of homes that use energy prepay meters – or almost 700,000 households – have not been able to afford a top-up since March.
Citizens Advice warned that financial woes were likely to deepen through the colder months and that an estimated 7 million households were expected to struggle to pay their winter energy bills this year.
Alistair Cromwell, the acting chief executive of Citizens Advice, said: “We’re heading into the coldest months of the year and the full financial impacts of the pandemic are still to be felt.”
More than 2m UK households in arrears on energy bills | Money | The Guardian
New Zealand’s Shame
A quarter of a million New Zealanders held in state care suffered some form of abuse with the true number believed to be higher.
A royal commission into abuse in state care is investigating historic abuse of children, young adults and vulnerable adults by state-run institutions between 1950 and 1999, as well as in affiliated religious institutions, such as church-run orphanages. It is the largest and most complex royal commission ever undertaken in New Zealand.
Those most frequently abused by the state were society’s “most disadvantaged or marginalised segments of the community … particularly from Māori whanau [family], Pacific families, children from impoverished backgrounds, disabled people and women and girls”.
The report found that many children were removed from their homes due to issues related to poverty, but were returned from state care to their families severely traumatised. Māori were over-represented in the number of children entering state care and the number of those who suffered abuse, and the “discriminatory attitudes” of officials contributed to this, the report found. Māori children continue to be over-represented in the state care system, making up 69% of children in state care, and 81% of children abused in care, despite representing only 16% of New Zealand’s population of five million.
Physical and sexual abuse was the most common type of abuse reported to the commission, but abuse also included the use of medication and medical acts [electro-convulsive therapy] as punishment, unjustified solitary confinement and isolation, improper strip searches and vaginal examinations, verbal abuse, racial slurs and “cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment”, as well as widespread neglect.
Those who complained were routinely silenced or abused again as punishment, and the commission also found attempts at active cover-ups.
Glenis Philip-Barbara, assistant Māori commissioner for children, said, “It’d be a mistake to think that what happened in the past is not still happening today.”
Singapore’s Pandemic “Internment”
It has been revealed almost half of Singapore’s migrant workers have been infected with Covid-19 in the past nine months.
New data shows that 152,000 foreign workers – 47% – have been infected.
Without counting the migrant workers, fewer than 4,000 people have tested positive in Singapore.
The men, the majority of whom live in large dormitories where several men share a room amid cramped facilities, have essentially been quarantined from the rest of the population since April. The dorms – often holding thousands of workers – were essentially locking the workers inside.
“There is no justification for Singapore to treat migrant workers like prisoners,” Alex Au of the charity Transient Workers Count Too (TWC2) told the BBC. “Many have been locked in for eight months.” He continued, “These new figures don’t surprise us,” Mr Au said. “During the middle of the year, workers who tested positive were telling us that they were told to stay in their rooms and not taken into isolation. They remained in contact with their room-mates.”
Singapore’s foreign workers – typically low-wage migrant labourers from South Asia who largely work in the construction and manufacturing sectors – still face restrictions on their freedom of movement which will only be gradually lifted next year.
Mr Au said. “We’re more concerned that Singapore continues to treat the workers as prisoners even though the same statement by the ministry says that ‘since October, no new cases were detected in the dormitories on many days’.”
He argues that since the active infection rate is virtually zero and workers are tested regularly every two weeks, there is no reason to place such hard restrictions on them.
Healthy workers are only allowed out to be taken to their work sites and occasionally to shop in designated shops near their dorms. Au said, “Workers are still interned and treated like prisoners, used for their labour with no freedom of movement.”
Sweden’s Elderly Paid the Price of Pandemic Policy
Sweden has so far recorded about 341,000 infections and more than 7,600 deaths from the pandemic with one of the highest per capita death rates in the world.
Nearly 90% of fatalities were of elderly at least 70 years old and half of them were in long-term residential care.
Sweden’s Prime Minister Stefan Lofven admitted the country’s officials did not adequately care for the elderly during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Mats Melin, the chair of an independent commission made up of political scientists, crisis management experts and public health experts, explained, “The government should have taken measures to ensure the elderly care was better equipped to deal with the pandemic.”
The commission concluded that the “ultimate responsibility for these shortcomings rests with the government in power – and with the previous governments.”
The commission said there were “structural shortcomings that have been well-known for a long time” which “led to residential care being unprepared and ill-equipped to handle a pandemic.” Such shortcomings included a lack of protective equipment and delays in testing. The report warned of they described as “fragmentation” in the Swedish healthcare systems. Elderly care is divided between 21 regions and 290 municipalities.
Vaccine? What about the poor?
The blog as an advocate of world socialism makes no apologies for drawing attention to the various national inequalities of the pandemic.
Billions of the world’s population may not have access to a Covid-19 vaccine until 2022, according to a study by Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, with wealthier nations reserving more than half of next year’s potential doses. Eager to increase their chances of having access to at least one of the dozens of vaccines in development, many nations have snapped up allocations of several different drugs. Wealthy nations — accounting for just 14 percent of the global population — have pre-ordered just over half of the vaccine doses expected to be produced by the 13 leading developers next year.
Even if the drug makers all produce effective, safe vaccines and meet their maximum global manufacturing targets, the study said “at least a fifth of the world’s population would not have access to vaccines until 2022”.
The research, published in the BMJ medical journal, looked at publicly available data and found that as of mid-November, reservations totalled 7.48 billion doses — equivalent to 3.76 billion immunisation courses, because most vaccines require two jabs. That is out of a total maximum projected manufacturing capacity of 5.96 billion courses by the end of 2021. Only 40 percent of the vaccine courses from the leading manufacturers might be available for low- and middle-income countries, but said this would depend on how rich countries share what they have bought.
The implications could go well beyond health.
“To varying degrees, trade with and travel to countries might face continued disruption until access to effective preventive or treatment measures, such as Covid-19 vaccines, becomes more widely available,” the report said.
In the BMJ editorial, Jason Schwartz, of the Yale School of Public Health, said the requirement for two doses and the very low temperatures needed to store some of the vaccines added to the challenges for many countries.
“The operational challenges of the global Covid-19 vaccination programme will be at least as difficult as the scientific challenges associated with rapidly developing safe and effective vaccines.”
It is the poor who suffer…as always
END THE PANDEMIC – END CAPITALISM
Pre-existing social inequalities contributed to the UK recording the highest death rates from Covid in Europe, Sir Michael Marmot, a leading authority on public health, said, and also warning that many children’s lives would be permanently blighted if the problem is not tackled.
In ‘Build Back Fairer’, Marmot argued in the new report that families at the bottom of the social and economic scale were missing out before the pandemic, and were now suffering even more, losing health, jobs, lives and educational opportunities. He said these social inequalities must be addressed whatever the cost and it was not enough to revert to how things before the pandemic.
“We can’t afford not to do it,” he commented, “It is simply unacceptable that we say it’s OK for children to go to bed hungry … we’ve got some incorrect notions about the necessity of austerity … What is the society we want? We want to guarantee the health and wellbeing of all members and the fair distribution of health and well being. We simply can’t afford not to do it. The government debt is no excuse. We know that is incorrect understanding of economics.”
Marmot’s report painted a grim picture, underscored by statistics that showed the most-deprived families are worst hit. Men and women living in overcrowded conditions in the most deprived areas of the country are the most likely to die from Covid. Carers and those who work in the leisure and service industries have the highest death rates under the age of 64. People from black, Asian and ethnic minority groups who work as taxi drivers, bus drivers, security guards, carers and other low-paid occupations have a higher risk of death. High rates of unhappiness or depression, particularly among young people. Young people were also at greater risk of losing jobs in the pandemic.
Children and young people living in deprived areas had suffered disproportionately from lockdown, he found. “One of the effects of the pandemic was to increase the educational divide,” said Marmot. In the least deprived schools, few children were behind as a result of closures. In the most deprived, children were reported as four to six months behind. There had been “dramatic increases in food insecurity.” Marmot explained.
The government had already failed to act on his report in February showing austerity policies had already damaged health and cut life expectancy in England.
“Before the pandemic, life-expectancy increase had stalled, inequalities were increasing, and life expectancy for the poorest people was going down,” he said. “That was a measure that society wasn’t doing well. And then the high excess mortality during the pandemic is simply a measure of society not doing well.” The recommendations from his report addressed the reasons, he said, relating to governance and political culture as well as the widening gulf between those who have power, money and resources and those who do not. “We have to reverse the reduction in spending on public services – as I said we were ill prepared. We were unhealthy coming into the pandemic. Which means that we have to put the fair distribution of health and wellbeing at the heart of all government policy.”
Funding for public health had been slashed during the austerity years. “The budget for Public Health England was cut after its foundation in 2012 by 40% and the spending on public health in local government was cut by about £800m.
“So back in February/March, when we should have been setting up a national test, trace and isolate system, public health should have organised it,” he said.
But it did not happen that way. First of all, the policy was not to do it at all, he said, and then it was to hand it to a private company “and it doesn’t matter if the person running it doesn’t have any expertise, because we know private solutions are always better than public solutions so we’ll give it to the private sector to manage.
“Colossal error. We should have used public health, local public health – fund them properly, get them to do it.”
Jennifer Dixon, the chief executive of the Health Foundation, said there was no doubt the pandemic would be taking a toll for years to come. “Mitigating the damage caused by the pandemic to education, employment and income must be at the heart of the government’s plans for recovery and levelling up.
“It is absolutely unacceptable that in a country of such means there is such a strong divide between the richest and poorest in society.” she stated.
The Pandemic Pain Falls on Working People
More than half of furloughed jobs in the UK are at the highest risk of automation as the Covid crisis accelerates workplace technology change, driving up redundancies and inequality across the country, according to a two-year commission on workers and technology, organised by the Fabian Society and the Community trade union, found.
As many as 61% of jobs furloughed in the first half of this year were in sectors where automation is most likely to lead to job losses. 5.9 million of the 9.6 million furloughed workers were in the third of sectors with jobs at highest risk of automation, according to analysis of Office for National Statistics figures.
Rapid adoption of technology during the coronavirus pandemic has helped protect jobs as millions of employees work from home. But while employers have used new technologies to survive, the commission said many furloughed jobs would not return as a result. Physical-distancing requirements, remote working and online shopping have driven consumers and firms to make permanent changes to the way they use technology this year, with the pandemic likely to have a lasting impact on business and society. While spending in some physical shops has collapsed, resulting in thousands of job cuts by well-known high street employers, online spending has boomed – benefiting firms with fewer staff and highly automated operations.
The low-paid and disadvantaged workers were more likely to work in jobs at high risk of automation, with women, younger and older workers, people from minority ethnic backgrounds and disabled staff most likely to lose out.
The commission chair, Labour MP Yvette Cooper, commented, “There’s a real danger of widening inequality, long-term structural unemployment and low pay, as a result of people not being able to benefit from the economic recovery and improvements in technology that we all want to be able to benefit from.”
More than half of UK’s furloughed jobs at risk of automation – report | Business | The Guardian
The Poor Last in Line for Vaccine
Already Americans, Britons and Canadians are receiving coronavirus vaccines. Coronavirus has exposed vast inequities between countries.
“The whole call for global solidarity has mostly been lost,” said Dr. Katherine O’Brien, WHO’s vaccines chief.
Kate Elder, vaccines policy adviser at Doctors Without Borders, said “it’s increasingly looking like the ship has sailed on equitable vaccine distribution”
As more countries in the West authorize the vaccine, “the difference between people in rich countries getting vaccinated and the lack of any vaccines for the developing world will become quite stark,” said Anna Marriott, health policy manager at Oxfam. “And it will only prolong the pandemic.”
COVAX was created to ensure the entire world has access to COVID-19 vaccines. COVAX was set up by the World Health Organization, vaccines alliance GAVI and CEPI, a global coalition to fight epidemics, to avoid the international stampede for vaccines that has accompanied past outbreaks and would reinforce those imbalances.
But COVAX has secured only a fraction of the 2 billion doses it hopes to buy over the next year, has yet to confirm any actual deals to ship out vaccines and is short on cash. Some experts say the chances that coronavirus shots will be shared fairly between rich nations and the rest are fading fast. With vaccine supplies currently limited, developed countries, some of which helped fund the research with taxpayer money, are under tremendous pressure to protect their own populations and are buying up shots. Meanwhile, some poorer countries that signed up to the initiative are looking for alternatives because of fears it won’t deliver.
“It’s simple math,” said Arnaud Bernaert, head of global health at the World Economic Forum. Of the approximately 12 billion doses the pharmaceutical industry is expected to produce next year, about 9 billion shots have already been reserved by rich countries. “COVAX has not secured enough doses, and the way the situation may unfold is they will probably only get these doses fairly late.”
COVAX’s only confirmed, legally binding agreement is for up to 200 million doses, though that includes an option to order several times that number of additional doses, GAVI spokesman James Fulker said. It has agreements for another 500 million vaccines, but those are not legally binding. The 200 million doses will come from the Serum Institute of India, the company that will likely make a large portion of the coronavirus shots destined for the developing world. CEO Adar Poonawalla says it has a confirmed order for 100 million doses each of a vaccine developed by Oxford University and AstraZeneca and one from Novovax.
“We don’t have anything beyond that in writing,” he told The Associated Press. “If they want more, they’ll have to place more orders.”
He said the lack of commitment from COVAX will mean a much longer wait for people in developing countries.
Even with vaccines in hand, the rollouts will take many months, even in rich countries, and many developing ones are facing serious logistical challenges that will add to delays, noted Dr. Gagandeep Kang, an infectious diseases expert at the Christian Medical College at Vellore in southern India.
According to a report GAVI, the alliance itself concluded that the risk COVAX will fail is “very high,” saying it was “established in record time and has to navigate unchartered territory.”
Amid fears COVAX can’t deliver, some developing countries are pulling out entirely or seeking their own private deals. Earlier this month, the tiny Pacific island nation of Palau announced it was abandoning the initiative and would get donated vaccines from the U.S. instead. Other low and middle-income countries, including Malaysia, Peru, and Bangladesh, have stayed in the initiative but also recently inked their own deals with drug-makers as a Plan B.
Anban Pillay of the South African Ministry of Health said that joining COVAX was just a stop-gap measure before signing bilateral deals with pharmaceutical companies.
South Africa and India have asked the World Trade Organization to waive some provisions regulating intellectual property rights to make it easier for manufacturers in poor countries to make COVID-19 drugs and vaccines. But many rich countries are reluctant to do that.
Poor countries face long wait for vaccines despite promises (apnews.com)
Uighur Slave Labour
More than half a million people from ethnic minority groups in Xinjiang have been coerced into picking cotton, on a scale far greater than previously thought.
The Xinjiang region produces more than 20% of the world’s cotton and 84% of China’s, but according to a new report by the Center for Global Policy there is significant evidence that it is “tainted” by human rights abuses, including forced labour of Uighur and other Turkic Muslim minority people.
The revelations came as the international criminal court (ICC) said it did not have the jurisdiction to investigate allegations of crimes against humanity and genocide in Xinjiang. China’s treatment of the minority populations – including the mass internment of people in re-education camps, enforced sterilisation of women, technological and human surveillance – has been labelled cultural genocide by analysts. In July, exiled Uighurs delivered a dossier of evidence to the ICC asking it to investigate crimes against humanity and genocide in Xinjiang. On Monday, the office of prosecutor Fatou Bensouda said it was unable to do so because the alleged crimes happened inside China, which was outside the ICC’s jurisdiction.
China’s labour transfer scheme is purported to be part of the government’s massive poverty alleviation campaign, but growing evidence indicates it targets Uighur and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang and coerces participation. Areas in the south of Xinjiang – which produce a far larger share of the cotton – remain heavily reliant on manual picking. And while the number of workers brought in from other provinces for the harvest season had dropped, the report found the proportion of local ethnic minority labourers had increased dramatically. 570,000 people came through three minority-heavy prefectures alone – Aksu, Hotan, and Kashgar – and that labor programs in other ethnic minority regions as well as prison labor would probably add hundreds of thousands to the figure.
In September research which was corroborated by Reuters, found authorities in Tibet were massively expanding the labour transfer program, setting quotas to move hundreds of thousands of people off their land and into military-style work training facilities.
Xinjiang: more than half a million forced to pick cotton, report suggests | Xinjiang | The Guardian