“That’s the reality,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus says.
1 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered globally but 82% of them were given in high- and upper-middle-income countries.
Just 0.3% of all vaccines administered so far were given to people in low-income countries.
An article by Arundhati Roy, the author and activist, lays bare the reality of the Covid pandemic in India.
“…The “system” has collapsed, they say, again and again. The virus has overwhelmed India’s health care “system”.
The system has not collapsed. The “system” barely existed. The government – this one, as well as the Congress government that preceded it – deliberately dismantled what little medical infrastructure there was. This is what happens when a pandemic hits a country with an almost nonexistent public healthcare system. India spends about 1.25% of its gross domestic product on health, far lower than most countries in the world, even the poorest ones. Even that figure is thought to be inflated, because things that are important but do not strictly qualify as healthcare have been slipped into it. So the real figure is estimated to be more like 0.34%. The tragedy is that in this devastatingly poor country, as a 2016 Lancet study shows, 78% of the healthcare in urban areas and 71% in rural areas is now handled by the private sector. The resources that remain in the public sector are systematically siphoned into the private sector by a nexus of corrupt administrators and medical practitioners, corrupt referrals and insurance rackets.
Healthcare is a fundamental right. The private sector will not cater to starving, sick, dying people who don’t have money. This massive privatisation of India’s healthcare is a crime.
The system hasn’t collapsed. The government has failed. Perhaps “failed” is an inaccurate word, because what we are witnessing is not criminal negligence, but an outright crime against humanity. Virologists predict that the number of cases in India will grow exponentially to more than 500,000 a day. They predict the death of many hundreds of thousands in the coming months, perhaps more…
Fredrick Douglass said it right: “The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” How we in India pride ourselves on our capacity to endure. How beautifully we have trained ourselves to meditate, to turn inward, to exorcise our fury as well as justify our inability to be egalitarian. How meekly we embrace our humiliation…”
Previously comfortably-off people who suffered sudden and massive drops in household income during the pandemic crisis recorded the sharpest increases in mental illness, according to a major survey.
While mental health worsened across all groups during the period, those forced to become newly dependent on universal credit and self-employment grants experienced the most dramatic and ongoing decline in mental wellbeing.
“The pandemic took people who had been for decades living on a comfortable income into a totally different world overnight. The shock of that sudden drop towards the poverty line was enormous,” said Neil Smith, head of analysis at the National Centre for Social Research, which carried out the study. He said: “We can observe increased mental distress across the population as a consequence of the pandemic, but people faced with growing financial insecurity have been far harder hit than the financially secure. With the economic fallout of the pandemic expected to continue, the mental health of people relying on employment and benefits support during the crisis should not be ignored.”
The lowest rates of mental illness were people whose incomes increased during the pandemic – and those whose incomes were unaffected, often pensioners.
Bangladeshi climate refugees fleeing the coast due to rising sea levels could trigger waves of migration across the country that will affect at least 1.3 million people by 2050, according to a new study.
600 million people are at risk of being displaced by sea level rise in coastal regions worldwide in this century.
Bangladesh migrants fleeing rising seas may affect 1.3 mln by 2050 (trust.org)
“The law forbids any motivation for their actions, whether to assist workers, improve the environment, or help consumers save money. They can do these things with their own money, as private citizens. As corporate officials, however, stewards of other people’s money, they have no legal authority to pursue such goals as ends in themselves – only as means to serve the corporations own interests, which generally means to maximise the wealth of its shareholders. Corporate social responsibility is thus illegal – at least when its genuine.”– Canadian law professor, Joel Bakan, author of The Corporation.
The World Socialist Movement (WSM) possesses a long tradition of opposing the many deadly problems of capitalism from the daily exploitation and oppression of working people to the never-ending wars as well as the environmental crises. In the politics of socialist working-class solidarity and political consciousness in relation to the environmental emergencies we go beyond what too often remains at the level of personal habit, individual morality and lifestyle and expose the root cause. Further, we have been critical of some of the popular responses such as primitivism (a romantic return to a pre-industrial past) and anti-global localism as obstacles to the coordination and planning necessary to tackle the climate crisis democratically and in its planetary proportions.
With COP26, governments, reformist parties and NGOs seek the imposition of a more practical and “moderate” framework of tackling carbon emissions but this is matched by the determination of many outside the conference halls to maintain an effective lobby but as the jostle around for a voice and audience we should be aware that they are often on divergent trajectories. For their part, the capitalist media ensures that the only voices heard in public discussion are from members of their own chorus, praising the virtues of the elite’s economic plans.
The World Socialist Movement view the international gathering as an opportunity to share information across borders, worldwide, building links from a common global pool of knowledge and strategies, all inter-linked in opposition to the corporations of international capitalism, the agencies, institutions and governments that they control. Within such a context the WSM seeks to become a more effective force in local, regional and global struggles for a better world. It is definitely not time to give up on the struggle for environmental justice. The ecology movement is alive with radical ideas and revolutionary prospects, if it is way-laid into sidetracks and diversions. The most welcoming aspect is the trust placed in internationalism, muddying the concepts of national frontiers and borders.
In reporting the calamities inflicted upon our world we can offer only small snap–shots from a huge collection of global disaster scenarios caused by a world political system forging ahead conscientiously to achieve its main objective – profit whatever the consequences.
Very few can deny that the world today is in upheaval, turmoil and conflict. The WSM has repeatedly demonstrated that the capitalist system that does not and cannot work in the interests of the majority. Against this insane capitalist system the WSM raises its voice in emphatic protest and unqualified condemnation.
The World Socialist Movement calls upon all who understand the critical situation of our times, and who may be increasingly aware that a basic change in our society is needed, to place themselves squarely on working-class principles. Join us in this effort to put an end to the existing class conflict and all its malevolent results by placing the land and the instruments of social production in the hands of the people as a collective body in a cooperative socialist society. Help us build a world in which everyone will enjoy the free exercise and full benefit of their individual faculties, multiplied by all the technological and other factors of modern civilisation.
This Friday’s (30/4) meeting on Discord will be a virtual May Day rally.
The speakers will be comrades Bill Martin and Howard Moss.
It will start soon after 7.30 BST (which is GMT + 1).
As this is online you can be there wherever you are in the world.
There is still time if you sign to join Discord.
£33,628
There is a practice of paying executives health and safety bonuses if none of their employees dies on the job.
Research by the shareholder advisory firm Pensions & Investment Research Consultants, looked at annual reports from 38 FTSE 350 companies in which at least one person died at work between 2015 and 2019.
It found docking their top executive’s bonus led to an average cut of £33,628 – the equivalent of less than 1% of the executive’s total annual pay.
“The only way that you’re going to adequately respond to a global pandemic is by having a global response, and a global response means equity throughout the world. And that’s something that, unfortunately, has not been accomplished.” – Dr Anthony Fauci, the White House’s chief medical adviser, on the situation in India
Commission Vice-President Margaritis Schinas, who also holds the title of Promoting the European Way of Life at the Commission, told reporters, “Europe will remain an asylum destination for those fleeing persecution and war. However, those with no right to stay will have to be returned to their countries of origin. Not doing so undermines the credibility of our system and prevents us from protecting those who need it.”
Catherine Woollard, director of the European Council on Refugees and Exiles (ECRE), said that while generally voluntary returns were preferable to forced relocations, the EU focused disproportionately on sending people back.
“Asylum decision-making in Europe remains a lottery, with wildly divergent protection rates across the EU. In addition, flight from violence is still not well handled by asylum-systems,” she explained. “This means that people are receiving rejections when they have protection needs and when it is not safe for them to be returned. Member states are returning people to places that are not safe.”
EU presents strategy to send unauthorized migrants back | News | DW | 27.04.2021
Many of the technologies needed to stop climate change are still in early stages of development, a study of green tech patents has revealed. This is the conclusion of a joint report from the European Patent Office (EPO) and the International Energy Agency (IEA).
The report “Patents and the energy transition: global trends in clean energy technology innovation” looks at trends in low-carbon energy innovation between 2000 and 2019 in terms of international patent families (IPFs). An IPF represents a unique, high-value invention for which a patent application was filed at two or more patent offices around the globe. Patent applications can be considered an early indicator of future technological trends as they are filed months or years before the products go to market.
The report found that the number of patents for inventions related to low-carbon energy technologies has gone up over the past two decades. However, the average annual growth rate of low-carbon energy patents in recent years is only a quarter of what it was a decade ago. Between 2017 and 2019, the number of patents for inventions related to low-carbon energy technologies around the world grew by an average rate of 3.3% per year. The average growth rate from 2000 to 2013, by contrast, was 12.5%.
“This report is a clear call for action to step up research and innovation into new low-carbon energy technologies and improve existing ones,” said EPO President Antonio Campinos. “While it reveals some encouraging trends across countries and industry sectors, including in key cross-cutting technologies, it also highlights the need to further accelerate innovation in clean-energy technologies, some of which are still only emerging.”
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