Delta variant surge explodes claims that the pandemic is over in the US
For months, the Biden administration, the media and major US corporations have promoted the fiction that the COVID-19 pandemic is all but over.
Last month, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reversed its guidance on mask-wearing, urging vaccinated people to stop wearing masks and socially distancing in crowded areas. Biden claimed vaccinated Americans had reached the “finish line” in the pandemic, encouraging the public to “take your mask off, you’ve earned the right.”
“America is headed into a summer dramatically different from last year,” the White House wrote earlier this month. “A summer of freedom. A summer of joy. A summer of reunions and celebrations.”
But the absurd pretext that the pandemic is over, even as over 300 people continue to die every day in the United States and as the disease continues to surge throughout the globe, was exploded Monday when Los Angeles County—the most populous county in the US—issued a recommendation that residents disregard the CDC order on mask-wearing and social distancing and take health measures recommended by scientists.
“Until we better understand how and to who[m] the Delta variant is spreading, everyone should focus on maximum protection,” the county health department said.
The move by Los Angeles County came after the World Health Organization (WHO) repeated its calls that vaccinated people should continue to wear masks in public, openly clashing with the Biden administration.
“Vaccines alone will not stop the community transmission, and we need to ensure that people follow public health measures,” WHO Assistant Director-General Mariângela Simão said at a press briefing Friday.
Last year, the Trump administration justified its promotion of “herd immunity” policies, including the premature reopening of businesses and schools, by falsely claiming that the pandemic was over. Trump’s priorities were to get workers back into the factories and students back into the schools in order to pump up the stock market.
Biden has continued to enact the same set of priorities, for the same reasons. He has demanded the resumption of 100 percent in-person instruction and denied OSHA pandemic protections to nearly all workplaces, while falsely claiming that children are not vulnerable to COVID-19 and that schools are not major centers of the disease.
Over the past week, it has become clear that the world is in the grips of a third wave of COVID-19, caused by a new Delta variant of the disease first discovered in India.
In individual countries, the new variant has caused surges in new cases and deaths. In the UK, the variant is behind an eightfold increase in cases in just the past six weeks. In Russia, the number of daily deaths has surged to the highest level ever, while in South Africa, the number of daily new cases is approaching a record.
These outbreaks in individual countries are producing a global resurgence of the disease, with the seven-day average of new cases around the world increasing 4 percent over the past week.
Scientists and public health experts are sounding the alarm, demanding that governments reverse their efforts to dismantle remaining safety protocols to stop the spread of the disease.
“It is the most hypertransmissible, contagious version of the virus we’ve seen to date, for sure—it’s a superspreader strain if there ever was one,” Eric Topol, a professor of molecular medicine at the Scripps Research Institution, told Scientific American. “We’ve been warned three times by the UK,” Topol added, referring to previous surges in early 2020 and last winter. “This time is the third warning.”
Studies have shown that the Delta variant is twice as infectious as the original version of COVID-19 and 40 to 60 percent more transmissible than the Alpha variant first identified in the UK.
In response to the latest warnings by the WHO, the Biden administration is doubling down on its anti-scientific position on masking. In the words of the New York Times, “A CDC spokesman pointed to the existing guidance and gave no indication it would change.”
On Tuesday, US automakers and the United Auto Workers announced an agreement to end the wearing of masks at US factories, turning these crowded indoor spaces into hotbeds for the transmission of COVID-19 and endangering the lives of workers and their families.
The same brutal intransigence prevails around the world. On Monday, Sajid Javid, the new UK health secretary, declared the public must “learn to live” with COVID-19, announcing that the country would fully abandon health restrictions within three weeks.
Over 600,000 people are dead in the United States, and nearly 1.1 million have died in Europe as a result of the policy outlined by Javid. While an initial round of lockdowns suppressed transmission of the virus in the fall of last year, the ending of restrictions and reopening of production—combined with the emergence of the so-called Alpha variant—led to a new global surge.
The roll-out of vaccinations has contributed to a reduction of global cases but only to levels seen during the worst part of the first wave of the pandemic in the fall of 2020. Epidemiologists are now warning that the world’s population, which is still largely unvaccinated, must prepare for a new global resurgence of the pandemic.
Scientific American concluded that, despite the warnings of scientists: “It is unrealistic to expect that US leaders will reimpose a lockdown or other restrictions.” But what “US leaders” are willing to do cannot be the starting point when millions of lives are in danger.
The pseudo-scientific policy of “herd immunity” that guided the response of the US, UK, Swedish and other governments has proven to be a monumental crime. Its proponents claimed that the more the disease spread, the better the population’s natural immunity would be at suppressing the disease. The exact opposite has happened: the more the disease has spread, the better it has become at evading not only natural immunity, but the immunity offered by vaccinations.
By abandoning public health measures, keeping vaccines out of the hands of poor countries and allowing the virus to spread unchecked, politicians in the US and around the world have not only allowed millions of people to die, but they have undermined the efficacy of vaccinations, one of the best tools for the eradication of the disease.
This insanity must stop! Humanity cannot stand by as the deaths pile up! Emergency action is necessary, regardless of the economic cost to the capitalist class, to eradicate COVID-19 once and for all!
As the pandemic surges throughout the globe, workers will enter into struggle to demand the implementation of vital public safety measures at workplaces and the closure of nonessential production. To coordinate these struggles, the International Committee of the Fourth International calls for workers to form rank-and-file safety committees as part of the struggle to build the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees.
The necessary measures to stop the pandemic must be paid for through a frontal assault on the wealth of the capitalist oligarchy. In 2020, the number of ultrahigh net worth individuals (UHNWI), those with a net worth above $50 million, surged by nearly 25 percent, while hundreds of thousands of people died and millions were thrown out of work.
The struggle to stop the pandemic is inseparable from the struggle to break the stranglehold of this financial oligarchy over social and economic life by replacing capitalism with socialism.
Biden Has Earned 11 Pinocchios From Fact-Checkers During Coronavirus Crisis
Presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden has been dinged several times by fact-checkers over claims he has made during the coronavirus crisis, including a total of 11 "Pinocchios" from the Washington Post.
Over the course of three weeks between March 13 and April 3, Biden was fact-checked five separate times for making false or misleading claims concerning the Trump administration's handling of the pandemic.
A Washington Post fact check on March 13 awarded Biden four Pinocchios, the fact-checker's most severe rating, for two manipulated videos the Biden campaign circulated.
The first video claimed to show Trump at a Feb. 28 rally saying Democrats were turning the coronavirus into "their new hoax" after they failed to bring Trump down through impeachment. Biden's video was edited to make it appear that Trump was calling the coronavirus a hoax. Trump, however, was referring to the Democrats' attempts to blame him for the virus, not the virus itself.
The second Biden campaign video showed Trump saying the phrase "the American Dream is dead," which the Post found was taken out of context and missing the second part of Trump's statement where he promised to "bring it back bigger and better and stronger than ever before."
Another Post fact check on March 24 gave the campaign four Pinocchios after adviser Ron Klain accused Trump of silencing Dr. Nancy Messonnier of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
"The president and the White House sent a clear message to scientists in the government—there would be a price for speaking out and speaking up," he said in a campaign video released on March 21.
Messonnier continued to hold routine phone briefings with reporters in the weeks after she raised the alarm about the virus at a press conference with Trump.
Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler wrote that Klain's framing was "simply wrong." Messonnier's alarming rhetoric did irritate Trump, but the idea that she was silenced was a "false narrative," Kessler added.
At a CNN town hall on March 27, Biden repeated an earlier claim that Trump had eliminated the White House pandemic office. He also claimed Trump made "no effort" to put any pressure on Chinese president Xi Jinping and reduced the CDC's staff in China prior to the outbreak. Biden added he called for China to admit medical experts from the United States when the outbreak in China was still in its early stages.
The Post‘s fact check gave Biden three Pinocchios due to his imprecise language. The Trump administration sought access for CDC experts, and the administration told the Post that Trump offered to send experts to China to help with the outbreak. Biden also did not specifically call for experts to be sent until late February.
Those weren't the only times Biden has
been fact-checked for rhetoric during the
crisis.
On March 15, during the Democratic presidential debate, Biden falsely claimed that Trump refused coronavirus testing kits from the World Health Organization. The kits were never offered in the first place. PolitiFact rated his statement "Mostly False." CNN, after initially deeming his statement factual, retracted its rating after a report by the Washington Free Beacon.
On March 19, Biden first tweeted that Trump "eliminated" the pandemic response team. The Washington Post fact check found this claim "overstated" due to the fact that the global health directorate was folded into another office under the guidance of former national security adviser John Bolton. Citing "dueling narratives," however, it didn't give a rating to Biden's claim.
Biden Targets Guns, Blames Pandemic for Homicide Crisis
Biden gun crime plan comes as U.S. cities face more than 20-year high in homicides
President Joe Biden announced a sprawling plan to address violent gun crime, implicitly blaming the effects of the coronavirus pandemic and a lack of strict gun laws for the nation’s skyrocketing homicide rate.
In response to a more than 20-year high in homicides nationwide, the Biden administration pledged to target "illegal gun trafficking across state lines." Biden’s plan also calls for sweeping gun control legislation and a repeal of liability shields for gun manufacturers. Although he stopped short of targeting policies that may have caused the rise in violence since 2019—which has affected virtually every city in the country—Biden mentioned "the secondary consequences of the pandemic and the proliferation of illegal guns" as effects correlated with the "increased violence over the past year and a half."
The plan comes as Democratic mayors and left-wing prosecutors from around the country struggle with soaring murders and shootings, which critics say are a result of radical policies meant to overhaul the criminal justice system in favor of lighter sentences, less policing, and the elimination of cash bail.
Contrary to the assertions of many within the Democratic Party, Biden’s plan promotes the effectiveness of law enforcement in curbing crime. Biden boasts of how federal agencies like the ATF, FBI, and U.S. Marshals Service have been "conducting fugitive sweeps throughout the country focused on individuals subject to state or local warrants for homicide, aggravated assault with a firearm, aggravated robbery, robbery with a firearm, rape, or aggravated sexual assault."
The fact sheet makes no mention of the nationwide effort by Democrats to slash the budgets of local police departments.
Biden’s proposal, which the president is expected to address this afternoon, was met with Republican opposition. Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) dismissed it as "more gun control," and Sen. Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) said the plan was nothing more than an effort to create a "national gun registry."
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