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COVID-19

Biden Needs To Grant Clemency To People On Home Confinement

July 31, 2021 Scott Roberts, The Root. , , ,
President Biden campaigned on the promise to cut the prison population by half and end racialized mass incarceration. However, if he doesn’t grant clemency for those on home confinement, he’ll be responsible for the fastest expansion of the federal prison population in history. Decades of failed legislation has led to the disproportionate and overwhelming incarceration of Black people, oftentimes on first offenses due to strict mandatory minimums and overly harsh sentencing guidelines.

Happy Birthday, Medicare

July 30, 2021 F. Douglas Stephenson, PNHP.org. , , ,
2021 is also a very special year in the history of single-payer health insurance and public health in the U.S. because Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) introduced the modern Medicare for All Act of 2021 (H.R. 1976) in Congress. M4A 2021 is new legislation establishing a cutting edge single-payer national health program in the United States that addresses decades of health/mental health-related injustices that have been made even more painfully apparent by the Covid-19 pandemic.

More Protests In Brazil Over COVID Crisis

July 26, 2021 Al Jazeera. , ,
Protesters have taken to the streets across Brazil once more to demand far-right President Jair Bolsonaro step down over his government’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic as well as recent corruption allegations. Demonstrators marched in Rio de Janeiro and several other cities nationwide on Saturday in the latest display of public anger and frustration to hit the South American nation in recent weeks.

China Has Every Right To Reject WHO’s Embrace Of Lab Leak Theory

July 24, 2021 Danny Haiphong, CGTN. , , ,
Deputy of the National Health Commission Zeng Yixin asserted that China will not follow the World Health Organization's (WHO) suggested plan to focus second phase research into the origins of COVID-19 on the lab leak theory. The remarks came at a press briefing held on July 22. Outlets such as CNN and Reuters reported on the development with a strong negative bias. Each report appeared to conclude that China was shirking its commitments to the international effort to uncover COVID-19's origins.

Preserving A People’s History Through Quilts

July 21, 2021 Loretta Graceffo, Waging Nonviolence. , , ,
More than 600,000 people in the United States have died of coronavirus since the pandemic began, a number that is incomprehensible. Few people understand the magnitude of this loss more than 14-year-old Madeleine Fugate. Since April 2020, the eighth grader from California has spent her weekends constructing the Covid Memorial Quilt, a tribute to the casualties of the virus.

US Life Expectancy In 2020 Saw Biggest Drop Since WWII

July 21, 2021 Mike Stobbe, Associated Press. , ,
The drop spelled out by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is due mainly to the COVID-19 pandemic, which health officials said is responsible for close to 74% of the overall life expectancy decline. More than 3.3 million Americans died last year, far more than any other year in U.S. history, with COVID-19 accounting for about 11% of those deaths.

Only International Solidarity Can Defeat Covid For Good

July 19, 2021 Nivedita Majumdar, Tribune Magazine. , , ,
In early March of this year, I was in a hospital bed in Delhi for a week following a Covid diagnosis. This was just about four weeks before the second wave hit the country, showcasing the dystopic deadliness of the virus. It was strangely calm at that time with fewer than ten Covid patients at the facility; the same hospital was recently treating close to 400. I’d occasionally chat with the nurses who recalled the ‘Covid times’ earlier in the year when each nurse had to attend to up to a dozen patients at a time. But thankfully that, they said, was in the past; the virus had been controlled. Later, I thought of those nurses and how in a mere few weeks their lives had been upended, of the nightmare they were living through. How many patients were they attending to during the latest peak: 25, 30, 40? Were they themselves OK? Not all of them had been vaccinated.

The Drug Companies Are Killing People

July 19, 2021 Center For Economic and Policy Research. , , ,
After the Biden administration indicated its support for this limited waiver, many other rich countries signed on as well. Germany, under longtime chancellor Angela Merkel, has been largely left alone to carry water for the pharmaceutical industry in opposing the vaccine waiver. I had the chance to confront the industry arguments directly last week in a web panel sponsored by the International Association for the Protection of Intellectual Property (link included when it becomes available). It’s always educational to see these arguments up close and real people actually making them. The first line of defense is that the waiver of patent rights by itself does not lead to any increase in vaccine production. This is of course true. Vaccines have to be manufactured, eliminating patent rights is not the same thing as manufacturing vaccines.

Black People’s Reasons For Not Getting Vaccinated Are Much Deeper

July 11, 2021 Elisa J. Sobo, Diana Schow, and Stephanie McClure, News One. , , ,
By early July 2021, nearly two-thirds of all U.S. residents 12 years and older had received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine; 55% were fully vaccinated. But uptake varies drastically by region – and it is lower on average among non-white people. Many blame the relatively lower vaccination rates in communities of color on “vaccine hesitancy.” But this label overlooks persistent barriers to access and lumps together the varied reasons people have for refraining from vaccination. It also places all the responsibility for getting vaccinated on individuals. Ultimately, homogenizing peoples’ reasons for not getting vaccinated diverts attention away from social factors that research shows play a critical role in health status and outcomes.

Hijacking The Recovery Through Hydrogen

July 9, 2021 Fossil Free Politics. , , ,
EU Covid-19 recovery funds are supposed to drive the ‘green transition’ and move us beyond fossil fuels – but industry lobbying at both national and EU level has ensured oil and gas firms and utilities remain some of the biggest beneficiaries in Italy, the Spanish State, Portugal and France. The European Commission has said it wanted to avoid giving billions in bailouts to the fossil fuel industry. Despite sending mixed signals, to its credit, in these four cases it has tried to exclude direct financing for fossil fuel projects, including controversial carbon capture and storage (CCS). However, the hugely outsized role for hydrogen and renewable gases in national recovery plans has thrown a lifeline to the fossil fuel firms involved, as well as their main product: fossil gas.

The Tokyo Olympics Are In Peril

July 8, 2021 Dave Zirin, Edge of Sports. , , ,
Ten thousand people. That’s how many Olympic volunteers quit their posts in Tokyo, with the games just 50 days away. That is one of every eight volunteers needed to pull off the 2021 (still called the 2020) Olympics. This is just the latest warning sign that, despite the Panglossian protestations of the International Olympic Committee, this summer’s Games are in peril. Japan is currently wrestling with a coronavirus upsurge and less than 3 percent of the population is vaccinated. According to polls, as much as 80 percent of the country does not want to host the games, for fear of it exacerbating this omnipresent public health crisis, currently classified as a state of emergency. The masses of Tokyo want to postpone or cancel the games, but the government says it’s the IOC’s decision, not the host country’s, sovereignty be damned.

Cuba’s Vaccine Shield And The Five Monopolies That Structure The World

July 2, 2021 Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. , , ,
In 1869, at the age of fifteen, José Martí and his young friends published a magazine in Cuba called La Patria Libre (‘The Free Homeland’), which adopted a strong position against Spanish imperialism. The first and only issue of the magazine carried Martí’s poem, ‘Abdala’. The poem is about a young man, Abdala, who goes off to fight against all odds to free his native land, which Martí calls Nubia. ‘Neither laurels nor crowns are needed for those who breathe courage’, Martí wrote. ‘Let us run to the fight … to war, valiant ones’. And in the rousing address by Abdala, comes these lyrical words: Let the warlike valour of our souls Serve you, my homeland, as a shield. Martí was arrested and sentenced to six years of hard labour.

The G7 Reality Check

July 1, 2021 Natalie Rhodes, People's Dispatch. , , ,
There were cautious hopes for the G7 meetings held in early June this year, where the leaders of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States – the world’s seven economically wealthiest countries – came together to discuss key global issues. A remnant of the neo-colonial nature of such forums, they represent a place where decisions with global impact are made. The G7 produced two notable outputs that concern global health governance: the first being the Carbis Bay Health Declaration which commits to taking efforts to prevent a pandemic similar to COVID-19 occurring again in the future; and the second being a commitment to provide more than a billion vaccine doses for low and low-middle income countries over the next year.

Relief For Millions As US Apex Court Keeps Eviction Bans In Place

June 30, 2021 People's Dispatch. , , ,
In a step that brings relief for millions of low-income families across the United States, the Supreme Court decided against a stay on a federally-imposed eviction moratorium. On Tuesday, June 29, the Supreme Court decided by a split vote (5-4) to deny a request by a group of landlords seeking to impose a federal district court’s ruling to block a residential eviction moratorium put in place by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The justices decided to not allow the stay as the federal judge’s ruling is being appealed by the federal government. In May this year, a group of corporate landlords and realtors’ association secured a judgement to block the Joe Biden administration’s decision to extend the CDC eviction moratorium until July 31.

US Media Give New Respect To Lab Leak Theory

June 29, 2021 Joshua Cho, Fairness And Accuracy In Reporting. , , ,
While many Western media outlets (e.g., NBC, 5/4/20; BBC, 4/26/20) reported on the evidence-free speculations surrounding a potential lab leak of the SARS-CoV-2 virus from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China’s Hubei province last year (FAIR.org, 4/17/20), it has never enjoyed as much mainstream credibility as it has in recent months. Although several reports in 2020 uncritically parroted US officials like Sen. Tom Cotton and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and discredited defectors like Yan Li-Meng, there were also many reports at the time disputing and dismissing their claims of a lab leak as a “conspiracy theory” (e.g., Vox, 3/12/20; AP, 12/17/20; Business Insider, 6/2/21). Nowadays, an abundance of Western media reports purport to explain how the once-dismissed theory that SARS-CoV-2 came out of a Chinese lab in Wuhan has gained more credibility among journalists and the US public.
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