COVID Year 3: Whose Pain? Whose Gain?
The landscape of news and decision making has been changing rapidly in light of a new variant: Omicron. What hasn’t changed is the federal motivation and protected interest: corporations and capital. To fully understand the newest round of changes, its important we look back at some of the “highlights”.
Setting the Stage
We’ll start way back in the 1980s. The haunting presence of Reaganomics led to substantial deregulation in the healthcare sector, kicking off decades of privatization. As capitalism creates winners and losers in the marketplace via competition, consolidations, merges and bankruptcy come together to form monopolistic control of a crucial system for human life. Deregulation and underinvestment, underpinned by the unscientific, unsubstantiated claim that “the market will effectively handle XYZ essential good/service”, and you have a backdrop and explanatory stage for COVID-19 to wreak absolute havoc.
Other factors that play(ed) a key role in the lack of preparedness for COVID-19 are:
- Team sport politics that mask class issues: since Bush (at least), a cultural “team sport” mentality has overtaken American politics, working to obscure and divide the working class. Oligarchs and corporate media embrace this, as it obfuscates the profit-driven policy and limits the range of debate on the federal stage. Both of the current parties consistently back imperialist and corporate interests, disagreeing on an inflammatory but often low impact policy portfolio of “culture war” issues.
- 2014 Supreme Court decision to remove campaign donation limits, effectively sealing the deal that the “democracy of the bourgeoise” would remain dominant in future elections
- 2018 disbandment of the Directorate of Global Health Security and Biodefense under Trump’s then-national security adviser John Bolton. While the decision makers point to “bloat” as the main reason behind substantial restructuring of this team, its downsizing and state of disarray going into 2020 certainly had tough to quantify repercussions. Note that this event was misreported and attributed to Trump directly, but that doesn’t change the fact that it happened.
- Cultural shift towards individualism over collectiveness: although extremely difficult to estimate impact, capitalism and neoliberalism have guided the people of America towards a toxic and blinded view of their place in society. Having consistently been coerced and forced to shape and reshape their lives on the basis of profit and productivity, without seeing but a fraction of the value of their labor returned to them, Americans have evolved into approaching societal failures through a largely individualized light that ignores systemic failures. Notions of “public good” and “collective action” have been suppressed and stamped out of the working class, manifesting most acutely during the Reagan years and afterwards.
- Wars, Imperialism and State sponsored terrorism: spending on the US military to maintain a system of global domination, paid for almost entirely by the American working class via taxes that the wealthy conveniently dodge, has whittled away on public sector spending and healthcare infrastructure in particular. Wage stagnation, underdeveloped unemployment programs, a war against homelessness, militarized police force and structural racism in the education and penal systems acted like oil to a flame when this public health crisis struck.
Strings of articles could be written in regards to the above sparsely set stage, but I believe it covers a decent gamete of environmental and societal issues that left the United States off balance from the beginning of this pandemic.
New Administration, Similar Approach, More Death
Since Biden’s election in 2020, its important to categorize and criticize his predictable and disappointing response, and to analyze who benefitted.
An important thing to keep in mind is that the US is not a broken system or set of systems: capitalism is functioning as expected without significant counterweight in the form of a global workers movement(s).
The four main areas of systematic “failure” since Biden took office:
- Vaccine patents maintained despite long term consequences
- Mask mandate removal in May 2021
- Austerity policies after final measly stimulus (less than promised)
- CDC shortening of required isolation time December 2021
As Biden entered the White House, we saw an immediate, asinine and infuriating level of hypocrisy in liberal media. Gone were the days where every action of Trump’s was hyper scrutinized and blasted on 24 media. Now, silence and complacency as Biden took actions that were indistinguishable from Trump’s in rhetoric and impact. This must be kept in mind now and throughout his presidency, and shows its hypocritical beast of a head across different policy choices: handling of Haitian immigrants, COVID response, military and police spending being just three.
Towing the corporate line (is it any wonder he was pushed to the forefront of the DNC candidates?), Biden promised as early as his presidential campaign trail to “shut the virus down, not the economy”. Meanwhile, scientists and public health officials had for months been calling for a 4–6 week actual shutdown to curtail the virus.
One of the initial failures of policy involves the pharmaceutical sector and their interests being placed over the interests of the world. To this day, vaccine patents have not been officially waved (occasionally relaxed). Biden’s “America first” approach to vaccination is both short sighted and an example of American exceptionalism at work. The US government must end vaccine hegemony via patent waivers, support manufacturing capacity in the Global South, and support vaccine delivery in-country. The rise of variants like Delta and Omicron can be pinned back to unmitigated global spread as exploited countries come up short in providing vaccines for their people, due in no small part to decades of neocolonial suppression of industrialization.
In May 2021, mask mandates were removed for the vaccinated. How this actually manifested in citizen behavior? A totally unaccountable public, many of which refused to get the vaccine, removing protections and relaxing their individual stance towards COVID. Of course people were and are fatigued, but this policy change was an abject failure, and has a huge part to play in Delta’s wave(s) of destruction and COVID-19 deaths totaling ~415,000 in 2021, more than the 352,000 in 2020. Leaving COVID decisions to a misinformed and politized public is a laughable misstep, and one that did more to boost profits and the economy than help working people.
Throughout Biden’s tenure thus far, focus has gone heavily to coercing people back to work and cutting public spending that (hardly) kept the ship afloat throughout 2020. States were allowed to withdraw early from the federal unemployment programs in June 2021, leading ironically to a $2 billion cut in household spending as consumers “tightened their belts” and faced mounting bills and debt.
In August 2021, the Supreme Court ruled “to end the temporary stay on a lower court ruling seeking to overturn the federal eviction moratorium issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). In doing so, the Supreme Court’s ruling invalidate[d] the federal eviction moratorium, eliminating vital eviction protections that have kept millions of households — predominantly people of color — stably housed”.
Additionally, Biden’s hints throughout his campaign to cancel student debt manifested in cruel austerity and a policy that equated to “kicking the can down the line”. He has continued to pause payments, most recently after months of inaction and climbing anxiety as the around 43 million borrowers faced incoming economic (re)enslavement. Decades of education privatization spurred on by predatory student loan interest rates has led to a burgeoning collective ankle weight drowning an entire generation. This in turn leads to negative pressure on wages, as the youth are put between a system that refuses to care for its poor and stagnated wages in the marketplace.
As vaccination rates flatlined over the 2021 year, pressure was pushed onto the unvaccinated in media and administration communication: a convenient scapegoat. The issue with this should be obvious: it ignores the federal government’s imperative to mitigate COVID damage and instead projects responsibility back onto the public. The public then gets sick at alarming rates and heads desperately towards a healthcare system on the brink of collapse, all the while accumulating terrifying medical debt and long COVID cases (currently a reality for almost 33% of cases).
In December 2021, as the economy struggles with rising worker frustrations, organized strikes, and over 800k deaths, the Center for Disease Control quietly updated its COVID quarantine/isolation requirements, cutting the mandated time in half to 5 days.
Here’s what the viral load of a COVID-positive patient looks like:
You can see that during the first 5 days, the viral load is closely aligned between the vaccinated and unvaccinated. Issue is, vaccinated patients are more likely to be asymptomatic, going about their daily lives uninhibited and spreading the virus like wildfire. Additionally, although viral load is certainly the worst during the first five days, it’s an unacceptable compromise to change the isolation standards. I’m going to quote Dr. Anthony Fauci at length here, and ask that you think to yourself: “Who benefits from this decision? Who will be hurt?”:
“Well, the reason is that now that we have such an overwhelming volume of cases coming in, many of which are without symptoms, there’s the danger that this is going to have a really negative impact on our ability to really get society to function properly. You’re hearing reports from cities throughout the country with substantial percentages of firefighters, policemen, people with critical jobs who are infected and required to stay home in isolation for ten days. So the CDC made a decision to balance what’s good for public health, at the same time keeping the society running. So the decision was made instead of having ten-day isolation, if you are without symptoms, namely, you feel well, that instead of being 10, you would stay for five days in isolation. And then you could go out into the community and do your job provided you very consistently wear a mask.” — Dr. Fauci on Morning in America December 30th, 2021
Conclusion
As we head into 2022, it has become more than obvious that the US one party of capital is more interested in maintaining profits than saving lives. The only way forward lies in worker solidarity and organized action against a system that provides little freedom except the live and die in a consistent state of existential and financial precarity. I’ll leave you now with two contrasting graphs that illuminate to me the key questions of this article:
Whose pain? Whose gain?
It’s difficult to map and track the series of incorrect policy and cruelty enforced upon the proletariat during this pandemic, and I apologize if this article came across as fragmented in nature. I hope to write more consistently in 2022, and organize in my area. We need better. We deserve better. And it’s definitely possible: we can look to China and other countries as models on how to handle a pandemic in a way that prioritizes life and real, actual freedom. Freedom of life, health, and economic wellbeing.
