THE SECRET - GOVERNORS TOLD COVID WOULD GET 'MUCH WORSE' - BUT WHERE WAS THE ORANGE BABOON? GETTING HIS HAIR FIXED!

US governors told in February that pandemic would get “much worse,” but did not alert public

28 September 2020

In a secret Feb. 9 meeting, 25 US governors were told by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Robert Redfield, “The coronavirus outbreak is going to get much, much worse before it gets better,” even as those same governors publicly downplayed the pandemic.

The report of the meeting was detailed in Bob Woodward’s recently published book, Rage. Woodward made headlines earlier this month when he published transcripts of Trump admitting that he sought to downplay the pandemic in the eyes of the public.

But no attention has been given in the media to the growing evidence, including in Woodward’s book, that Trump’s cover-up involved not just the White House, but both houses of Congress and a wide range of government officials.

Panelists facing the governors at the NGA meeting on February 9

Woodward says the briefing included National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIH) Director Dr. Anthony Fauci, Redfield and “other members of the Coronavirus Task Force” who all “took their seats at a table in a large conference room in Washington” that was attended by “over 25 state governors.”

“The coronavirus outbreak is going to get much, much worse before it gets better, Redfield warned. We have not even seen the beginning of the worst, Redfield said, letting his words sink in. There is no reason to believe that what’s happening in China is not going to happen here, he said. There were nearly 40,000 cases in China then, with more than 800 deaths, barely five weeks after announcing the first cases. I agree completely, Fauci told the governors. This is very serious business. You need to be prepared for problems in your cities and your states. Fauci could see the alarm on the governors’ faces. ‘I think we scared the shit out of them,’ Fauci said after the meeting.”

Although the author of Rage does not name the other officials on the panel, a Health and Human Services (HHS) press release—which reports the briefing without mentioning Redfield’s warning—says that they were Acting Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Ken Cuccinelli, HHS Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response Robert Kadlec and CDC Deputy Director for Infectious Diseases Jay Butler.

While there is no published list of state governors in attendance at this special session—the agenda for the three-day conference at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center and Marriott Marquis hotel does not include the coronavirus briefing—a partial list can be assembled from those speaking on the second day of the NGA winter meeting.

The NGA attendees listed as speakers on Feb. 9 were New York Democratic Governor Mario Cuomo, Maine Democratic Governor Janet Mills, North Dakota Republican Governor Doug Burgum, California Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom, Arkansas Republican Governor Asa Hutchinson, Iowa Republican Governor Kim Reynolds, Arizona Republican Governor Doug Ducey, Kentucky Democratic Governor Laura Kelly, Montana Democratic Governor Steve Bullock and Colorado Democratic Governor Jared Polis.

Panelists at the February 9 coronavirus presentation to the NGA

Not one of the governors among the group of more than 25 who sat through the presentation in Washington D.C. on Feb. 9 reported to news media or to the public that Redfield and Fauci told them, “we have not seen the beginning of the worst” and that “there is no reason to believe that what’s happening in China is not going to happen here.”

Instead, the NGS meeting was followed by a campaign of silence, misinformation and lies spearheaded by the White House and President Trump. On Feb. 9, there were a total of 12 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the US and the primary concern of the entire ruling establishment was not the dangerous and deadly threat to public health posed by the pandemic but making sure that the truth about it did not get out.

Additionally, the corporate media—which has focused exclusively on Woodward’s interview with President Trump—has not reported on this revelation of bipartisan cooperation with the White House in hiding from the public what the top public health experts were saying in the earliest days of the pandemic, information that could have saved tens or hundreds of thousands of lives.

As Woodward points out in Rage, “The official press release from the Department of Health and Human Services describing the [NGA] meeting read: ‘The panel reiterated that while this is a serious public health matter, the risk to the American public remains low at this time, and that the federal government will continue working in close coordination with state and local governments to keep it that way.’”

It is now established fact that the complicity of the governors in this conspiracy enabled President Trump to lie to the public about the coronavirus with impunity in the ensuing critical days. Within 30 days, the number of cases in the US rose to 1,263 with 28 deaths, and within 60 days, the number of cases in the US was at 500,000 with 16,690 deaths.

As Woodward explains, “The next day, President Trump said publicly three times—once at the White House, once on TV and once at a New Hampshire rally—that the virus would go away on its own. ‘When it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away,’ he said at the packed rally. ‘I think it’s going to work out good. We only have 11 cases and they’re all getting better.’”

The world has reached the grim milestone of one million COVID-19 deaths

By Benjamin Mateus
28 September 2020

According to the Worldometer coronavirus dashboard, the number of COVID-19 deaths globally surpassed 1 million on Sunday morning, US Eastern Time. The Johns Hopkins dashboard, more commonly cited in the American media, puts the figure over 995,000, and by all accounts, will register one million deaths today.

This massive tragedy is an indictment of the ruling classes which have allowed such misery to rain on the working class populations who have suffered the brunt of this pandemic.

A healthcare worker pushes the body of a man who died of COVID-19 to the spot where his family will wait for a funeral home to take him away, outside the General Hospital in La Paz, Bolivia, Thursday, July 23, 2020. (AP Photo/Juan Karita)

The United States, with 209,361 deaths, leads every other nation in this horrific category. Brazil takes second place with 141,503 deaths, followed by India, with 95,162 deaths, and Mexico, with 76,243 deaths.

Right-wing authoritarian rulers in the first three countries, Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro and Narendra Modi, and the “left” populist demagogue Andrés Manuel López Obrador, in the fourth, have embraced identical policies of letting the infection rip through the population without serious resistance. These four horsemen of death account for half the world’s total.

Mexico has consistently averaged close to 500 deaths daily, and by all experts, the official reports have been gross underestimates. Earlier this month, the government shamefully announced they had run out of death certificates. By Aug. 1, the official death count was 69,095 though the government had announced excess deaths at 122,765.

Graph of monthly global deaths. Credit: wsws.org

As Figure 1 demonstrates, daily global deaths have remained nearly stable since peaking in April. The column for September marked in yellow is a projection that the last four days will see, on average, about 5,300 deaths per day using the latest seven-day average estimate. By all accounts, the limited response and measures that have been employed throughout the pandemic have only stabilized the impact of the virus around the world. However, as winter approaches for the far more populous northern hemisphere, case numbers and deaths are expected to begin climbing again.

To the figure of one million officially killed by COVID-19 must be added hundreds of thousands who have perished with the cause of death signed off by the medical examiners or health authorities as unknown, or cardiopulmonary or organ failure, concealing the true impact of the pandemic from family members and the public at large.

Excess death in the United States. Credit: Our World in Data

According to the Economist, between March and August, all-cause mortality data for western Europe, some Latin American countries, the United States, Russia and South Africa from March to August showed 900,000 excess deaths. However, only 580,000 fatalities were attributed to COVID-19. This suggests that the real number of fatalities due to COVID-19 is 55 percent higher than the tallies maintained by Worldometer and Johns Hopkins, which are based on official death reports.

the Economist also remarks that the US death toll may be underestimated by 30 percent, placing the actual figure closer to 300,000. By their estimates, the real global death toll due to the pandemic may be closer to two million.

Some of these excess deaths are a byproduct of the social impact of the pandemic rather than the virus itself. The social crisis surrounding lockdowns and financial hardships have led people to avoid seeking medical attention for health issues out of legitimate fear of contracting the coronavirus.

Tom Inglesby, director of the Center for Health Security at Johns Hopkins University, told the Wall Street Journal, “For a long period of time there was a pretty dramatic drop-off in ER visits, elective-surgery screenings, things that Americans do all the time to keep themselves healthy.”

Weekly estimates for deaths due to heart attacks, Alzheimer’s and dementia, diabetes and strokes consistently have been above the baseline in the months from March to August. According to data from Boston University, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the University of Pennsylvania, 20 percent of excess deaths were linked to other factors than COVID-19, with poor communities hit worst.

Providing context for the magnitude of this preventable tragedy, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention registered 2,813,503 deaths in 2017. The “normal” death toll in 2020 would have been roughly similar. This means that COVID-19 has already accounted for a nearly ten percent increase in US deaths this year, with several months still left to go.

Homeless encampment in Buenos Aires. Credit: Ronaldo Schemidt.

The one million COVID-19 deaths worldwide is more than the 690,000 people who succumbed to AIDS-related illnesses in 2019, according to World Health Organization figures. In 2016, malaria, which afflicted 216 million people, led to 445,000 deaths. In 2018, tuberculosis killed 1.5 million people.

The economic impact from the pandemic falls hardest on the poorest people, with the closure of schools leading to setbacks in education gains, a halt in critical vaccination programs and lessened access to health care and pharmaceuticals. This means that the impact of the pandemic will continue to ripple across the globe for many years after it subsides or a vaccine is found.

The World Bank predicts that the number of impoverished people who live on less than two dollars a day will climb from 70 to 100 million this year. In July, Oxfam wrote in a media brief that by the end of the year, 12,000 people per day could die from hunger linked to COVID-19, more than the number dying now from the disease itself.

Oxfam wrote, “The pandemic is the final straw for millions of people already struggling with the impacts of conflict, climate change, inequality, and a broken food system that has impoverished millions of food producers and workers. Meanwhile, those at the top are continuing to make a profit: eight of the biggest food and drink companies paid out over $18 billion to shareholders since January, even as the pandemic was spreading across the globe.”

In 2019, over 821 million people were categorized as food insecure, with approximately 149 million suffering from “crisis-level hunger or worse.” The World Food Program estimates that the number will rise to 270 million by year’s end, an increase of 82 percent.

The critical question that remains is to what extent has the globe acquired sufficient immunity that most of the population is protected from the transmission of the virus. In a cross-sectional study published in the Lancet on Friday on the prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in a large nationwide sample of patients on dialysis found that less than ten percent of the US adult population had been exposed and developed an immune response.

An estimate on 279 serological surveys conducted across 19 countries found that approximately 500 to 730 million people worldwide, or 6.4 to 9.3 percent of the total, have been infected.

Critical also in this global equation is vaccine development against SARS-CoV-2 and access to these potentially life-saving measures. Should these trials for the vaccines be conducted ethically and appropriately, by all accounts, the necessary data will not be available until the spring or summer of next year. Additionally, the manufacturing and distribution of vaccines will most likely be used as a political ploy to force lopsided trade deals and financial traps.

The death of these million-plus people is a clear indication that the financial oligarchs and the capitalist mode of production have abdicated any responsibility for their criminal response to the pandemic. By any measure, the pandemic still has much fuel to burn through, and only the working class has a vital interest in putting this fire out immediately. Only they have the capacity to prevent this further loss of life.

 

Mexican medical workers, facing highest death toll in the world, protest layoffs and lack of protective gear

By Andrea Lobo
8 September 2020

Amnesty International reported last week that Mexico has the highest number of confirmed COVID-19 deaths among medical personnel of any country in the world. As of September 4, a total of 1,410 health care workers have died from the virus and 104,590 have tested positive. These figures are a damning indictment of the criminal response to the pandemic by the government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

The United States, Britain, and Brazil follow in the list of COVID-19 fatalities among medical workers, with 1,077, 649 and 634, respectively.

In Mexico, the health care sector constitutes about 2 percent of the total COVID-19 deaths and 17 percent of the cases, demonstrating in part a massive gap in testing for COVID-19 between medical professionals and the population in general. The government claims, however, to have tested only 283,000 medical workers, or one-third of the total, throughout the pandemic.

Mexican health care workers protesting against COVID-19 deaths (Credit: Facebook)

Numerous strikes, roadblocks and protests among nurses, doctors and other staff at hospitals have taken place since March, demanding above all personal protective equipment. The response by officials, as demonstrated by the appalling numbers of dead and infected, has been wholly inadequate.

Hospital administrators have been recorded telling workers that there is simply no equipment available, while the federal government has expressly dismissed their demands claiming that public medical workers who took leave got infected at similar rates. Many, however, kept working in the private sector, where they have also become infected in high numbers.

During a press conference last Thursday, José Luis Alomía, general director of epidemiology, had no response to the Amnesty International report, claiming that the government has taken all necessary measures to protect health care workers and adding evasively, “The comparison between countries on this matter is not viable since each one has its own model.”

Amid generalized outrage, the government has instead turned to firing workers who express opposition. In one of the numerous reports of firings, Expansión reported the case of Cristian Javier Erosa, who delivered food at a hospital in Quintana Roo. He was fired after “I demanded a written order that I had to enter the COVID area because they were not providing me with adequate protective gear.”

The trade unions have not only refused to wage any struggle to protect the lives of medical workers, but played a crucial role in the suppression of discontent.

A doctor in Mexico City wrote on September 5 that, “At the General Hospital in Mexico, the union encouraged [personnel on leave] not to come back throughout August, and did nothing to provide protective equipment or to replace temporarily the personnel on leave.”

At the demonstration, Rafael Soto Cruz, a nurse and spokesperson for the UNTS, exposed that he was fired for demanding PPE on the pretext that he “usurped the trade union’s functions.” He denounced trade union officials for “identifying the union dissidents and beginning to harass them, sanction them and fire them,” as cited by Infobae.Several groups with thousands of Mexican health care workers have been formed on social media to organize outside of the corrupt union bureaucracy. One of them, United Health Care Workers (UNTS), led a protest on September 1 in Mexico City that involved hundreds of employees from hospitals, along with workers from the Metro, the state company Liconsa, the Fire Department and the Mail Office.

The UNTS released a statement on September 5 declaring, “Those unions that should have spoken out to defend workers did the abominable job of hiding the dead, silencing the voices making denunciations; there is no one more responsible than these parasites for being first in deaths globally.”

While being denied proper protective equipment, medical workers are faced with the overwhelming of hospitals by the raging pandemic. The World Health Organization warned Mexico specifically on July 10 that its reopening would “accelerate infections and possibly collapse the health care systems,” COVID-19 deaths have doubled since, to over 68,000.

Nonetheless, the López Obrador government continued its murderous reopening of factories in major but nonessential sectors such as auto, auto parts and electronics, caving to pressure by the Trump administration and North American transnationals. The other factor exacerbating the pandemic is the refusal by the ruling class to provide any aid to those laid off and those who depend upon the informal sector for their income.

This has forced a majority of Mexico’s impoverished workforce, which depends on informal street sales and services, to risk infection to earn a living. Within Mexico City, the three municipalities with greatest infections have among the highest numbers of people living in poverty. While outside of Mexico City, the next five states with the highest COVID-19 cases have higher informality rates than the national average, from 54 percent in Guanajuato to 71 percent in Puebla.

Meanwhile, Forbes Mexico reported last month that the country has 33 oligarchs with fortunes of more than $500 million. Last year, there were 3,790 people in Mexico with more than $30 million in net worth, among 8,040 in total across Latin America and the Caribbean, according to the Wealth X report.

Even more wealth, which is all generated by the working class, has ended in the coffers of the financial oligarchies in the United States and Europe through the imperialist exploitation of the country’s cheap labor and natural resources.

Experts have made clear that containing the pandemic requires shutting down non-essential sectors, providing income for those suspended or laid off, appropriate staffing and protective equipment for medical and other essential workers, and expanding tests and contact tracing.

The response by the López Obrador government, however, has been driven not by an interest to protect the population, but by the capitalist imperatives of resuming the stream of profits for corporations and not impinging on the wealth of the super-rich.

It has slashed ministerial operating budgets by 75 percent during the pandemic, even affecting health care. The Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS), which manages most hospitals and clinics, has seen its expenditures fall 22 percent during the first six months of this year compared to 2019.

This has involved layoffs of doctors during the pandemic. On August 31, 50 doctors at rural hospitals in Chiapas were informed that they had been fired by the state government controlled by AMLO’s Morena party.

Any “wealth surcharge” in Latin America, wrote the Financial Times recently, would result in “capital flight” by foreign investors. Viridiana Ríos of the Wilson Center indicated to the newspaper that, regarding Mexico, “discussion has been stifled by the leftist president Andrés Manuel López Obrador. … The political elites came to power under the umbrella of the economic elites and as a result have not been able to charge them enough tax.”

At his morning press conference Last Wednesday, López Obrador again rejected any increase in taxes on the wealthy in response to the crisis.

As in every other country, the response of the government to the pandemic has underscored the incompatibility between capitalism and the social needs of the working class, including free and quality health care.

The Morena administration’s indifference to the massive COVID-19 death toll among medical and other workers demonstrates that the only progressive response to the pandemic is the overthrow of capitalism and the taking of power by the working class to reorganize society on a socialist basis in Mexico and internationally.