Yet another report that polluted air risks around six million people aged over 65 in England lung damage and asthma attacks because of toxic air.

 Further to the previous post on Trump’s death toll the commission emphasized that the country entered the pandemic with an already degraded public health infrastructure. Between 2002 and 2019, US public health spending fell from 3.21% to 2.45% – approximately half the share of spending in Canada and the UK.

The commission found if US life expectancy was equivalent to the average in the other G7 countries, 461,000 fewer Americans would have died in 2018.

Between 2017 and 2018, the health insurance coverage rate decreased by 1.6 percentage points for Latinos – roughly 1.5 million people – and by 2.8 percentage points for Native American and Alaska native people, while remaining stable for the white population.

US could have averted 40% of Covid deaths, says panel examining Trump’s policies | US news | The Guardian

Jonas Salk, who developed the polio vaccine, insisted that it remain patent free. Asked who owned the patent 65 years ago, he replied, “The people I would say. There is no patent. You might as well ask, could you patent the sun?”

Making life-saving vaccines, medicines and equipment available, freely or affordably, has been crucial for containing the spread of many infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, HIV-AIDS, polio and smallpox. Refusal to temporarily suspend several World Trade Organization (WTO) intellectual property (IP) provisions to enable much faster and broader progress in addressing the COVID-19 pandemic is resulting in the deaths of many and some experts say should be grounds for a International Criminal Court prosecution. Enforcement of intellectual property rights (IPRs) is relatively recent. The 1994 WTO Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) greatly strengthened and extended IP transnationally. IPRs have effectively denied access to patented formulas and processes except to the highest bidders.

Vaccine developers expect to be very profitable, thanks to national and transnational IP laws. Thus, IP has distorted research priorities and discouraged cooperation and knowledge sharing, so essential to progress. Wealthier nations are falling out among themselves, fighting for access to vaccine supplies, as IP profits take precedence over lives and livelihoods. ‘Vaccine nationalism’ involves cut-throat contests responding to scarcity due to limited output. Vaccine nationalism has also meant that among the rich, the powerful come first. Consequently, most developing countries and most of their people will have to wait longer than necessary for vaccines, while the powerful and better off secure prior access, regardless of need or urgency.

Although TRIPS now allows such government public health efforts, developing countries remain constrained by compulsory licensing’s complex rules, procedures and conditions. Threats and inducements by transnational corporations and their governments limit its use. Hence, use of compulsory licensing by developing countries has been largely limited to several more independent middle-income countries and HIV/AIDS medicines.

 The combination of IP and vaccine warfare is responsible for more avoidable losses of both lives and livelihoods. Developing nations, especially the poorest and most vulnerable, have been left far behind in most programmes for COVID-19 prevention, containment, treatment and vaccination.

World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General (DG) Tedros warns “the world is on the brink of a catastrophic moral failure…the price of this failure will be paid with lives and livelihoods in the world’s poorest countries”. He explains that “the international community cannot allow a handful of companies to dictate the terms or the timeframe for ending the pandemic”; “vaccine nationalism combined with a restrictive approach to vaccine production is in fact more likely to prolong the pandemic … tantamount to medical malpractice on a global scale”

At current rates, more than 85 poor countries will not have significant access before the end of 2023! In 70 lower income countries, only one in ten will be vaccinated. Of the 7.2 billion confirmed sales of COVID-19 vaccine doses, 4.2 billion have gone to the wealthiest nations. With only 16% of the world’s population, high income countries have secured 60% of available doses. Meanwhile, the African Union has only procured 670 million for the continent’s 1.3 billion people.

The IP system discourages, rather than encourages cooperation and sharing, both essential for accelerating progress. Although IP requires sharing research results, no vaccine developer has done so yet. Vaccine developers do not expect to profit much from the poor, so there exists little commercial incentive to provide them with adequate supply.  Many people die needlessly for profit.

Intellectual Property Cause of Death, Genocide | Inter Press Service (ipsnews.net)

 Four Ocado bosses are being handed shares worth £116m after its stock market value soared on the back of the pandemic boom in grocery home shopping.

The company’s chief executive, Tim Steiner, will be granted 2.45m shares, worth £66.2m at the current share price. Minerva, a shareholder adviser, said the scheme could transfer significant equity value to the chief executive and considering Steiner was already a significant shareholder it was hard to accept it was there to “attract, recruit and retain”.

The group’s chief operating officer, Mark Richardson; Luke Jensen, who runs its tech business, Ocado Solutions; and Neil Abrams, the company secretary, will also each receive 600,000 shares, worth £16.2m under the so-called “value creation plan”. 

The pay gap between the Ocado chief executive and the company’s median employee is already the widest of any company in the FTSE 100.

Luke Hildyard of the High Pay Centre said,  “The size of these payouts will prompt debate about governance reforms such as profit sharing schemes or worker representation on boards that would enable some of the company’s 17,000 delivery drivers, warehouse operatives and administrative staff to win a share of the tens of millions lavished on directors.”

Ocado bosses pocket shares worth £116m amid pandemic home deliveries boom | Ocado | The Guardian

Research, published in a special issue of the Lancet Planetary Health journal, looked at three scenarios: carrying on the current path, increasing efforts to achieve the Paris goals, and a more ambitious scenario, which put health at the heart of tackling climate change.

 In the UK, implementing policies to meet international climate goals would save 98,420 lives a year by 2040 through better “flexitarian” diets, which involve less meat and more vegetables, legumes and fruit.

Meanwhile, 21,480 lives could be saved by people taking more exercise and 3,458 from reductions in air pollution.

If even more ambitious plans were put in place to make sure health was the focus of climate policy, 100,000 lives a year could be saved through dietary changes, with 50% adopting flexitarian diets and 50% going vegan.

A further 5,770 lives could be saved from cuts to air pollution and 38,440 from more active travel, with 75% of people walking or cycling over the course of a week, the modelling suggests.

 Across nine countries, including the US, China and Brazil, implementing national climate plans which meet the Paris goals could save 5.8 million lives due to better diet, 1.2 million lives due to cleaner air, and 1.2 million lives due to increased exercise. 

And putting explicit health objectives in their plans, known as nationally determined contributions or NDCs under the Paris accord, could lead to a further reduction of 462,000 deaths due to air pollution, 572,000 from diet, and 943,000 from physical inactivity a year by 2040.

The lead author, Ian Hamilton, executive director of the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change, said: “Unlike the direct benefits of carbon mitigation which are ultimately long-term and understood in terms of damage limitation, the health co-benefits of ambitious climate policies have an immediate positive impact. Not only does delivering on Paris prevent millions dying prematurely each year, the quality of life for millions more will be improved through better health.

Climate action could save ‘millions of lives’ through clean air, diet and exercise | Climate change | The Guardian

 In 2020 nearly 2 million people died from coronavirus , tens of millions more lost their jobs and countless others faced unprecedented disruption to their daily lives.

Yet for a privileged few, it was a very profitable year.

The world’s top 15 hedge fund managers collectively made $23.2bn (£16.9bn) last year. That is the equivalent of more than six Marks & Spencers or more than the gross domestic product of Iceland or Zambia.

The best performing hedge fund manager, Chase Coleman III, the founder of Tiger Global Management (TGM), made $3bn in performance management fees and gains on his personal investment in the fund. Coleman’s personal pay last year was more than the GDP of dozens of countries including Gambia, Bhutan and Eritrea. It is thought to be the biggest single year’s pay for anyone since another hedge fund manager, John Paulson, made $5bn in 2010. Coleman’s $3bn adds to the $4.5bn fortune he had already amassed. He was born into money and got his start in hedge funds at 24 when Julian Robertson, the founder of Tiger Management, gave him $25m seed money to start Tiger Global. Coleman attracted Robertson’s attention as he was good friends with Robertson’s son Spencer, growing up in the wealthy Glen Head community on Long Island. He married Stephanie Ercklentz, the daughter of banker and industrialist Enno Ercklentz who once said she gave up working for a living because it required “too many hours”.

 The second-highest paid was Jim Simons, the founder of Renaissance Technologies, who made $2.6bn. Third was Israel Englander of Millennium Management. Also on the list is Bill Ackman, the founder and chief executive of Pershing Square Capital Management. Ackman, who according to the list made $1.3bn.

Luke Hilyard, the executive director of the High Pay Centre thinktank, said: “The research shows the extraordinary riches accruing to a tiny number of individuals for speculative financial activities of dubious value to wider society. “It ought to be completely clear that this is a really terrible way for wealth to be distributed, in the midst of a global pandemic with families losing jobs and homes, businesses going under and public services under immense strain.”

World’s top 15 hedge fund managers made $23.2bn in total last year | Hedge funds | The Guardian

 Even before the current pandemic, millions of people in the U.S. went hungry. 

In 2019 the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimated that over 35 million people were “food insecure,” meaning they did not have reliable access to affordable, nutritious food. Now food banks are struggling to feed people who have lost jobs and income thanks to COVID-19.

As unemployment has risen during the pandemic, so has the number of hungry Americans. Feeding America, a nationwide network of food banks, estimates that up to 50 million people – including 17 million children – may currently be experiencing food insecurity. Nationwide, demand at food banks grew by over 48% during the first half of 2020. 

Through 2020, consumer food costs rose by 3.4%, compared to 0.4% in 2018 and 0.9% in 2019.  Research shows that retail concentration correlates with higher prices for consumers. It also shows that when food systems have fewer production and processing sites, disruptions can have major impacts on supply.  In 2020 Christopher Lischewski, the former president and CEO of Bumblebee Foods, was convicted of conspiracy to fix prices of canned tuna. He was sentenced to 40 months in prison and fined US$100,000. In the same year, chicken processor Pilgrim’s Pride pleaded guilty to price-fixing charges and was fined $110.5 million. Meatpacking company JBS settled a $24.5 million pork price-fixing lawsuit, and farmers won a class action settlement against peanut-shelling companies Olam and Birdsong. 

Industry consolidation is hard to track. Many subsidiary firms often are controlled by one parent corporation and engage in “contract packing,” in which a single processing plant produces identical foods that are then sold under dozens of different brands – including labels that compete directly against each other.

Recalls ordered in response to food-borne disease outbreaks have revealed the broad scope of contracting relationships. Shutdowns at meatpacking plants due to COVID-19 infections among workers have shown how much of the U.S. food supply flows through a small number of facilities.

With consolidation, large supermarket chains have closed many urban and rural stores. This process has left numerous communities with limited food selections and high prices – especially neighborhoods with many low-income, Black or Latino households.

Consolidation makes it easier for any industry to maintain high prices. With few players, companies simply match each other’s price increases rather than competing with them. Concentration in the U.S. food system has raised the costs of everything from breakfast cereal and coffee to beer.

 Disruptions in food supply chains forced farmers to dump milk down the drain, leave produce rotting in fields and euthanize livestock that could not be processed at slaughterhouses. Between March and May of 2020, farmers disposed of somewhere between 300,000 and 800,000 hogs and 2 million chickens – more than 30,000 tons of meat.

A few months into the pandemic, meat shelves in some U.S. stores sat empty, while some of the nation’s largest processors were exporting record amounts of meat to China. U.S. Senators. Elizabeth Warren, and Cory Booker, cited this imbalance as evidence of the need to crack down on what they called “monopolistic practices” by Tyson Foods, Cargill, JBS and Smithfield, which dominate the U.S. meatpacking industry.  Store shelves are no longer empty for most cuts of meat, but processing plants remain overbooked, with many scheduling well into 2021.

Opinion | Corporate Concentration in the US Food System Makes Food More Expensive and Less Accessible (commondreams.org)

Deborah French,  Arconic’s UK sales manager, that made Grenfell Tower’s cladding would “by default” sell flammable materials to construction projects, including high-rise buildings.

 In China, the most populated country in the world, the birthrate is plummeting, with a 15% fall in 2020. Some cities and regions recorded drops of more than 25%. The number of new birth registrations in 2020 was 10.035m, compared with 11.8m in 2019. The 2019 figure marked the lowest point since the People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949. The government has tried to encourage couples to have more children, but a 2017 study found 50% of families with one child had no intention of having a second.

 The reasons for the low birthrates include the high costs of housing and education, and growing rejection of marriage among young women. In 2019 the marriage rate hit a 14-year low.

The decline in births has prompted warnings for China’s economy as its population ages quickly without sufficient support for all elderly people. About one-third of the population is predicted to be aged over 60 by the year 2050, and a 2019 report by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences said the state pension fund was likely to run out of money by 2035.

Prof Peter McDonald, of the University of Melbourne’s school of population and global health, said, the ongoing impact from coronavirus would be relatively small because the birth rate has been falling for years and the total population was already on a downward curve, despite the lifting of the one-child policy in 2016, which brought only a short-lived spike.

“It showed that the China fertility rate was reflecting what was going on in society, and that was that people only really wanted a small number of children,” McDonald said. “Even in areas where the one-child policy was not applied, the birthrate was low.”

Lijia Shang, a writer, journalist and social commentator, said there was a change in attitude and many women – especially urban-living and highly educated – no longer regarded marriage and parenthood as “necessary passages in life or the essential ingredients of a happy life. In another word, it is about choice. Better education, higher income and more career options grant these women the freedom to choose a lifestyle they desire. They are assertive enough to resist the pressure from their parents to produce children. And the society is more tolerant than before.”

Xiong Jing, a feminist activist based in China, said the social support system for new mothers was lacking, with inadequate parental leave, gender discrimination in the workplace, high expense and competitiveness in childcare, and social pressures on women to be the primary carer.

Liang Jianzhang, an economics professor at Peking University’s Guanghua School of Management. “If the fertility rate cannot be increased significantly, this decline will not bottom out,” he said.

China birthrate slumps as experts blame changing attitudes | China | The Guardian

Air pollution caused by the burning of fossil fuels such as coal and oil was responsible for 8.7m deaths globally in 2018, which was one in five of all people who died that year. The death toll outlined in the study may even be an underestimate of the true picture, according to George Thurston, an expert in air pollution and health at the NYU school of medicine who was not involved in the research.

 The study finding more than one in 10 deaths in both the US and Europe were caused by the resulting pollution.

As well as nearly a third of deaths in eastern Asia, which includes China.

The death toll exceeds the combined total of people who die globally each year from smoking tobacco plus those who die of malaria.

 Without fossil fuel emissions, the average life expectancy of the world’s population would increase by more than a year.

“We don’t appreciate that air pollution is an invisible killer,” said Neelu Tummala, an ear, nose and throat physician at George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences. “The air we breathe impacts everyone’s health but particularly children, older individuals, those on low incomes and people of color. Usually people in urban areas have the worst impacts.”

‘Invisible killer’: fossil fuels caused 8.7m deaths globally in 2018, research finds | Environment | The Guardian