COVID-19

Global Food Prices Post Biggest Jump In Decade

June 6, 2021 The Straits Times. Educate! COVID-19, Food and Agriculture, Global Economy, Inflation

London - Global food prices have surged by the biggest margin in a decade, as one closely watched index jumped 40 per cent last month, heightening fears that the inflation initially stoked by pandemic disruption was accelerating. The year-on-year rise in the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation's (FAO) monthly index was the largest jump since 2011, as commodity prices surged. The higher inflation will hit poorer countries reliant on imports for staple goods. For richer countries, the cost of raw ingredients accounts for only part of the overall price paid for products at supermarkets and restaurants. But the rise in raw material prices has been so steep that big firms like Nestle and Coca-Cola have said they would pass on any increases.

Critics Call Biden’s Vaccine Sharing Plan ‘Woefully Inadequate’

June 6, 2021 Kenny Stancil, Commondreams. Educate! COVID-19, Health Care, Joe Biden, Vaccine apartheid

The White House announced Thursday its plan to donate 25 million excess Covid-19 vaccine doses to other nations—a plan progressives described as an "inadequate" response to the ongoing pandemic, urging the Biden administration to invest $25 billion to ramp-up global vaccine manufacturing. According to he Associated Press, the U.S. "aims to share 80 million doses globally by the end of June, most through COVAX," the United Nations-backed program for global vaccine sharing. "Of the first tranche of 25 million doses, the White House said about 19 million will go to COVAX," with the remaining 6 million directed to "U.S. allies and partners." "The donation of these few doses is welcome but deeply insufficient, and no substitute for a plan of scale and urgency to end the pandemic," Peter Maybarduk, director of Public Citizen's Access to Medicines program, said in a statement.

A Truly Free Society Would Have No Official Narratives

June 4, 2021 Caitlin Johnstone, Caitlin's Newsletter. Educate! Anthony Fauci, COVID-19, Media, Propaganda

Many of Anthony Fauci's emails during the US Covid-19 outbreak last year have been obtained via Freedom of Information Act and published by BuzzFeed News and The Washington Post. Depending on what ideological echo chamber you inhabit you may have heard that they are completely innocuous or historically damning; the ones eliciting the most controversy right now include a scientist telling Fauci that the virus could potentially look engineered, and a zoologist linked to both the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the World Health Organization's Covid investigation thanking Fauci for supporting the natural origin theory over the lab leak theory. This will all play into the reinvigorated controversy surrounding the origins of the virus, which will ultimately lead nowhere.

Lab Leak Theory And Anti-China Mania

June 3, 2021 Margaret Kimberley, Black Agenda Report. Educate! Bioweapons, China, COVID-19, Media

It has suddenly become popular to say what was once whispered by just a few people. Politicians and the corporate media have now convinced millions of people that the COVID-19 virus was created by experimentation gone awry. The COVID-19 virus was first observed in late 2019 in Wuhan, China, which is the location of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). The question is whether gain of function research on bat viruses may have accidentally caused the pandemic. Dr. Anthony Fauci, who was all but canonized due to his public conflicts with Donald Trump, is now viewed as a villain because the National Institutes of Health funded research which took place at WIV. It isn’t clear whether that research can be classified in the gain of function category. Fauci says it wasn’t and others disagree. Yet the disagreement has been given short shrift in favor of sensational headlines, political one upmanship, and blatant Sinophobia.

Mass Incarceration Has Worsened The COVID-19 Pandemic

June 3, 2021 Eric Reinhart, Jacobin Magazine. Educate! COVID-19, Health Care, Prison, Prisoner rights

A massive pandemic risk factor has been hiding in plain sight across the United States, growing exponentially in scale over the last four decades with the support of trillions of dollars spent by federal, state, and local governments. But, inexplicably, the current national policy conversation about rebuilding public health, pandemic preparedness, and biosecurity has entirely ignored it. What is this epidemic engine that multiplies harm and then distributes it to every corner of the country? In a cruel irony, it is the very system that both Republicans and Democrats have built and defended for decades as the centerpiece of a misleading concept of “public safety“: mass incarceration. Evidence has long shown that America’s unparalleled system of human caging does not effectively deter crime, and that US residents are no safer than peer nations, whose governments on average incarcerate at only 15 percent the US rate.

African Countries Urged To Manufacture COVID-19 Vaccines

June 2, 2021 Telesur English. Educate! Africa, COVID-19, Health Care, Vaccine apartheid

According to the council, the manufacturing of COVID-19 vaccines in Africa could be achieved through sharing of the intellectual property right, technology transfers and open non-exclusive licensing.

The Politics Of The Wuhan Lab Leak Hypothesis

June 2, 2021 Stephen Gowans. Educate! Bioweapons, China, COVID-19, Joe Biden

US president Joe Biden has ordered a “hunt for new intelligence to determine whether the Chinese government covered up an accidental leak” [1] at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a laboratory in Wuhan, the city in which the novel coronavirus was first identified. The lab is a biosafety level 4 (BSL4) facility, the highest level. Twelve months ago, then secretary of state Mike Pompeo also “asked intelligence agencies to continue looking for any evidence to support” (what the New York Times at the time) called “an unsubstantiated theory that the pandemic might be the result of an accidental lab leak.” Times’ reporters Edward Wong and Ana Swanson added that the intelligence community had told Pompeo that “they most likely will not find proof.”

World Health Assembly 74: One year into the pandemic

June 1, 2021 WHO Watch Team, People's Dispatch. Educate! COVID-19, Health Care, Pandemic, World Health Organization

One year into the pandemic, the World Health Assembly is holding its annual meeting. The continued financial challenges loomed over delegates as they discussed the possibility of a Pandemic Treaty, local production of medicines, and WHO’s COVID-19 response

What Matters About The Origins Of The COVID-19 Virus

May 31, 2021 Glen Janken, Popular Resistance. Educate! Bioweapons, COVID-19, Neoliberalism, US military

Up until recently I dismissed the hypothesis that the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 escaped from a Chinese lab as a crackpot conspiracy theory meant to increase anti- China sentiment in the US. Then two friends gave me very well researched articles making the case that the Lab Theory, as I will call it, was credible and should not be dismissed. There is as yet no proof for either the Lab Theory hypothesis, or for the From Nature hypothesis. Still, the issue will rage in the mainstream media. If we don’t address it properly, we will look ignorant, and we will be dismissed. Here are the key points to make in discussing it:

Brazilians March To Demand Bolsonaro’s Impeachment

May 30, 2021 Tom Phillips, The Guardian. Resist! Bolsonaro, Brazil, COVID-19, Neoliberalism

Tens of thousands of protesters have poured on to the streets of Brazil’s largest cities to demand the impeachment of President Jair Bolsonaro over his catastrophic response to a coronavirus pandemic that has claimed nearly half a million Brazilian lives. The demonstrators turned out in more than 200 cities and towns for what is the biggest anti-Bolsonaro mobilisation since Brazil’s Covid outbreak began “Today is a decisive milestone in the battle to defeat Bolsonaro’s genocidal administration,” said Silvia de Mendonça, 55, a civil rights activist from Brazil’s Unified Black Movement as she led a column of protesters through Rio’s dilapidated city centre. Osvaldo Bazani da Silva, a 48-year-old hairdresser who lost his younger brother to Covid-19, said: “We can’t lose any more Brazilian lives. We need to hit the streets every single day until this government falls.”

Africa Needs Vaccines Now

May 29, 2021 Morgan Artyukhina, Sputnik News. Educate! Africa, COVID-19, Health Care, Vaccine

The World Health Organization (WHO) has made an urgent call for another 20 million doses of AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine to be distributed in African nations in the next six weeks, or many who have received their first dose will not get the boosted protection of a second shot.

NNU President Jean Ross, RN, at event to honor the more than 400 registered nurses who have died from the Covid-19 pandemic

Largest Nurses Union Condemns CDC Rollback On COVID Protection Guidance

May 17, 2021 National Nurses United. Educate! CDC, COVID-19, Health Care, PPE

National Nurses United (NNU), the largest union of registered nurses in the United States, today condemned new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidance stating that fully vaccinated people no longer needed to wear masks, avoid crowds or large gatherings, and no longer needed to isolate after exposure or get tested unless they develop symptoms. Nurses say that given the threat to their patients across the country, they are especially disappointed that the CDC would ease up its Covid guidance on the heels of International Nurses Day.

Restaurant Workers Protest Poor Working Conditions And Low Wages

May 13, 2021 Kiara Alfonseca, ABC News. Resist! COVID-19, Low wages, Restaurants, Worker Rights

Food service workers are putting renewed pressure on their employers for better working conditions and wages. Businesses across the country are blaming a “workforce shortage” for being understaffed or closed. But workers in the industry say poor labor practices are pushing potential employees away. “It’s stressful working for a billion-dollar company when they’re not caring for the workers,” said Ieshia Townsend, a McDonald’s employee in Chicago, Illinois. She has worked at the McDonald’s location since 2015. “Even during COVID-19, we had to literally go on strike just for masks, just for gloves, just for supplies and protection to protect the workers, which should have been set in place.” Signs have been taped to the doors, drive-thru speakers and facades of fast-food and fast-casual restaurants with descriptions of long workdays, no lunch breaks and poor pay to accommodate for the risk of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

Service Workers Aren’t Lazy — They Don’t Want To Risk Dying

May 10, 2021 Sandy Barnard, Jacobin Magazine. Educate! COVID-19, Essential workers, Low wages, Restaurants

Business owners around the country are offering up a lament: “no one wants to work.” A McDonalds franchise said they had to close because no one wants to work; North Carolina congressman David Rouzer claimed that a too-generous welfare state has turned us all lazy as he circulated photos of a shuttered fast-food restaurant supposedly closed “due to NO STAFF.” Most of these complaints seem to be coming from franchised restaurants. Why? Well, it’s not complicated. Service workers didn’t decide one day to stop working — rather huge numbers of them cannot work anymore. Because they’ve died of coronavirus. A recent study from the University of California–San Francisco looks at increased morbidity rates due to COVID, stratified by profession, from the height of the pandemic last year.

Media Ignores The Anti-Vax Movement’s White Supremacist Roots

May 10, 2021 Nora Loreto, Read Passage. Educate! Anti-vaccine, COVID-19, Media, White Supremacy

Earlier this year, CBC Marketplace journalists attended a “$623 Mastering Vaccine Info Boot Camp.” The session’s host was Sherri Tenpenny, a woman who has built an empire based on convincing others that vaccines are harmful. The participants were introduced to some techniques that have helped push COVID-19 disinformation so effectively. In their article about the experience published on March 26, Marketplace calls Tenpenny the “self-proclaimed grandmother of the anti-vaccination movement.” She is portrayed as a grifter. The series does some back-of-the-serviette math on how much she likely makes for each session — aided of course by Marketplace’s own fee — and implies that for her, this is cynical profiteering.

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