China’s second wave of COVID infections, deaths, Long COVID, and government lies: Conclusion
This is the fourth and final part of a four-part series. Read Part 1 here, Part 2 here and Part 3 here.
Criminal silence from the corporate media and pseudo-left
The mass suffering and deaths from China’s second COVID-19 wave have been met with virtually complete silence in the corporate media internationally. Even in the regional press in China and throughout East Asia, outside of a handful of local media outlets reporting on Dr. Zhong Nanshan’s projection of 65 million weekly infections by the end of June, there has been no coverage of this catastrophe.
The South China Morning Post published two brief reports in June that simply repeated the official monthly figures from the Chinese CDC, which vastly underestimated the number of COVID-19 cases and deaths. These articles also parroted the lies and deliberate misinformation from health care officials downplaying the scope and impact of the current wave.
One of the only recent articles on COVID-19 in China by the Western corporate media was published on June 6 in the Washington Post titled “China abandoned ‘zero covid.’ But some don’t want to leave it behind.” The article maligns China’s Zero-COVID policy and people who continue to adhere to strict measures to protect themselves, while drastically minimizing the impact of China’s second COVID-19 wave, as well as its first. Nowhere do the words “death” or “Long COVID” even appear.
The Post interviews a handful of people, whom they refer to as “zero covid holdouts,” including Gugu, who “wears a face mask outside.” While noting that Gugu has diabetes and high blood pressure, so she “felt safe under zero covid,” the Post slanders this policy that once protected people with underlying conditions like Gugu as “China’s notoriously strict approach to keeping the virus out.”
Another person interviewed in the same article, Lin Yiwu, is concerned about the consequences of multiple reinfections, which will be hard to avoid under current circumstances. He said, “If possible, avoid catching it at all. Delay—the later you get it the better. And as much as possible, reduce the number of times you catch it. Delay, reduce and avoid.”
Lin is part of an online community formed by like-minded people where they share “tips on how to build an air purifier at home or what face masks are more breathable.”
The Washington Post attempts to present these people who remain careful about COVID-19 as crazy and refers to them as “evidence of the long shadow that the zero-covid approach still casts on China.” However, this vilification cannot cover up the existing and growing social concerns over the prospect of unending waves of the pandemic.
Even more damning than the silence of the corporate media is that of the international pseudo-left organizations, which claim to be socialist or in some cases even Trotskyist. Not a word has been said about the deepening social disaster in China by any of these political tendencies, all of which had advocated for the lifting of Zero-COVID.
These include but are not limited to Socialist Alternative, La Izquierda Diario, the International Marxist Tendency, International Viewpoint, Socialist Appeal, Committee for a Workers’ International and Jacobin. A browse through these organizations’ websites reveals that most of their coverage on the COVID-19 pandemic stopped altogether in January.
For over two years prior to the lifting of Zero-COVID in China, virtually every pseudo-left tendency continuously denounced the Zero-COVID policy as “draconian” and demanded that it be lifted immediately. In late November 2022, these tendencies hailed the “white paper” protests, a series of small, choreographed anti-Zero-COVID protests at universities and cities across China, which were seized upon by the CCP to fully scrap Zero-COVID on December 7, 2022.
Now that China has joined the rest of the world in the horrific “forever COVID” policy of repeated waves of mass infection, death and debilitation, all these pseudo-left tendencies have gone silent about their complicity in this public health disaster.
The real political orientation of the pseudo-left stands thoroughly exposed. In no way do they speak for or represent the interests of the working class. Rather, they give voice to the individualist and self-centered politics of the affluent middle class, who largely view anti-COVID public health measures as interruptions to their lifestyles.
Conclusion
Contrary to the depictions of Zero-COVID as oppressive and widely resented, it was understood within broad sections of the Chinese population that these measures, despite their inconvenience and sometimes bureaucratic excesses, were necessary to protect their health and lives. In a poll conducted just prior to the lifting of Zero-COVID in China, only 11.9 percent of the population supported “large-scale adjustment” to the policy.
Even today, when almost all public health measures have been revoked, a section of the population that sees the real danger of the virus and used to actively support Zero-COVID measures still strives to protect themselves through strict infection control measures. They are joined by millions of people globally who continue to shield themselves from COVID-19 to the greatest extent possible through indoor masking in public places, limiting social contact, testing and other measures.
At the same time, the individual struggles of these “Zero-COVID holdouts” underscore the impossibility of combating a global pandemic on an individual basis without any public health infrastructure or global coordination. Fundamentally, the pandemic can only be stopped through the building of a mass movement of the international working class, in unity with principled scientists, fighting for a global elimination strategy.
The necessity for this strategy was underscored in a significant interview conducted by the World Socialist Web Site last week with COVID-19 researcher Arijit Chakravarty, whose team at Fractal Therapeutics has produced among the most far-sighted and critical papers throughout the pandemic.
n the interview, Chakravarty warned of the immense dangers of letting COVID-19 spread completely unchecked, which increases the likelihood that a far more dangerous variant will evolve. He stated:
I can’t predict the outcome of the next wave. I can’t predict the outcome of the next five waves. But, at the rate that we are going, a prediction can be made with a high degree of certainty that something bad will happen sooner than later along these lines. Keep this pandemic running for another five years, and you’ll face a debacle on a scale that you haven’t yet seen. That’s a given.
Commenting on the ending of the Public Health Emergency declaration by the World Health Organization last month and the false claims that “the pandemic is over”—which he characterized as “Orwellian Newspeak”—Chakravarty said that global society now has nothing in place to protect against a more dangerous variant. He stressed:
In that kind of reactive strategy what will happen is billions will be infected before we realize something is wrong. And that’s too late to do anything about it. So not only is the pandemic very much not over, but by creating the impression that the pandemic is over in the face of rampant viral spread and continuing rapid viral evolution, we are essentially sticking our chin out and asking the virus to do its worst.
Chakravarty is one of the best-informed scientists on the pandemic, and his warnings must be heeded. The complete scrapping of Zero-COVID in China and global adoption of a “forever COVID” policy are only accelerating the process of viral evolution. The coronavirus now has a home among 8 billion people throughout the world in which it will continue to mutate and evolve.
The experience of the COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically altered global society, exacerbating the preexisting contradictions of world capitalism and exposing the bankruptcy of this social system in the eyes of masses of workers. It has accelerated the eruption of a new imperialist redivision of the world through the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine, while at the same time propelling the working class into struggle on every continent.
The same process is now taking place in Chinese society, which confronts the horrific reality of perpetual waves of mass infection, death and Long COVID and the growing threat of military conflict with US imperialism. It is essential that the Chinese working class orient to its international brothers and sisters and initiate a global struggle to stop the pandemic, as well as the escalating danger of a nuclear World War III, climate change and other existential threats confronting mankind.
This requires world socialist revolution, which only the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), the genuine Trotskyist movement, is fighting for. From the beginning of the pandemic, the ICFI is the only political party in the world which defended China’s Zero-COVID policy and fought for the international working class to expand this comprehensive public health strategy to every corner of the globe. It is essential for the Chinese working class to draw the necessary conclusions from the experiences of the past six months and take up the fight to build a Chinese section of the ICFI.
Study finds that COVID-19 could cause brain cells to fuse, leading to permanent damage
A new study published last week in Science Advances develops the understanding of the effects of COVID-19 and other viruses on the brain. The findings are believed to help explain “brain fog”—one of the most common Long COVID symptoms which can involve headaches, difficulty concentrating, forgetfulness and other symptoms—as well as other neurological manifestations, such as the loss of taste or smell, and potentially death.
Long COVID advocates often note that “brain fog” is simply a euphemism for brain damage, and the findings of this study underscore this point. Published shortly after the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Biden administration in the US formally ended their declarations of public health emergency due to COVID-19, the study reaffirms that these decisions were premature and unscientific. The coronavirus continues to spread unchecked throughout the world, killing thousands and damaging the brains and other organs of an untold number of people each day.
Conducted by a collaborative of researchers at Macquarie University, Sydney, and the University of Queensland in Brisbane, both in Australia, along with the University of Helsinki, Finland, the study found that when brain cells (neurons and glia) are infected by SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, the cell membrane is altered, causing the cells to fuse together. The result is that the fused neurons, which transmit information by generating electrical impulses, either cease to fire or fire simultaneously, likely with unintended consequences.
The lead author of the study, Massimo Hilliard, draws an analogy with the effect of fusing household circuitry controlling lights in different rooms. The messages that these neurons normally transmit become either scrambled or cut off, potentially wreaking havoc with a whole range of bodily functions.
The research involved the use of brain organoids, which are accumulations of brain cells grown in vitro (i.e., artificially in the lab from human stem cells). These provide a simulation of conditions in the brain.
The study examined the process by which specialized molecules, known as fusogens, which are associated with the viral spike (S) protein, are used by the virus to penetrate cells, enabling the virus to hijack the cell’s machinery to produce more viruses which then spread to adjacent cells.
Understanding of that basic mechanism of viral infection was already known. What is new is the observation that in infected cells the fusogens alter the cell’s membrane, which then causes separate cells, both neurons and non-neurons known as glia, which provide structural support to the neurons, to fuse together. They also found that dendrites and axons, components of neurons involved in cell-cell communication, can be sites of cellular fusion.
The study found that 90 percent of the fused cells do not die but “resulted in synchronized neuronal activity,” while in the remaining 10 percent of fused cells, “neuronal activity completely stopped.”
The authors write, “Our results indicate that viral infections, driving the expression of viral fusogens, can initiate the irreversible fusion of brain cells, causing alteration in neuronal communication and revealing a possible pathomechanism of neuronal malfunction caused by infection.” They add, “The impact on neuronal fusion will depend on the viral load in the brain and the specific areas infected.”
The study authors further propose that the intracellular environments created by masses of fused cells might allow viral replication in an environment shielded from a body’s immune system. In effect, this could produce a reservoir for repeated bouts of disease as the replicating viruses periodically emerge from their sanctuaries, even without exposure to an external source of infection. This has implications for the course of other neurological diseases as well, such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and multiple sclerosis.
An article on the study published in Science reports that similar fused cell masses, known as syncytia, have previously been observed in other organs of patients with COVID-19, such as the lungs. Examination of the brains of human patients who have died of COVID-19 for the presence of syncytia, has yet to be reported.
The real-world implications of this study and many others done on the neurological impacts of COVID-19 are staggering. The damage to brain cells shown in the study is irreversible. Repeated bouts of COVID-19 are likely to compound the effect, leading to progressive neurological decline in individuals who are repeatedly reinfected, not to mention effects on other organ systems.
The horrifying results of this study were shared widely by scientists and anti-COVID advocates on Twitter. Dr. Eric Topol of the Scripps Institute, who has done important research on Long COVID, shared an image from the study with the comment, “Not a pretty picture.”
Another widely shared post from anti-COVID activist @1goodtern embedded a video interview with study co-author Dr. Yazi Ke of Macquarie University. Commenting on the fact that COVID-19 has caused millions of individuals to lose the sense of taste and smell, Dr. Ke states, “I would imagine that the virus is causing, wreaking havoc in these brain areas.”
Asked whether she believes that the neurological damage caused by COVID-19 is permanent, Dr. Ke replies, “Knowing what I know, I would say that it’s quite permanent. And over time, I can imagine that these large structures of cells actually eventually might die because they don’t get to do what they’re supposed to do.”
Millions losing Medicaid coverage, other benefits, after Biden-Republican deals
Some 1.5 million people have been cut off Medicaid coverage over the past month, according to reports by the Associated Press and the Kaiser Family Foundation. These cuts, which are expected to swell and impact a staggering 8–24 million people, are a direct consequence of the Biden administration’s agreement with congressional Republicans last December on a budget deal that protected military spending but opened the way to massive cuts in social spending.
Millions more will lose eligibility for other social benefits as a result of Biden’s decision to end the public health emergency declaration for COVID-19. Biden allowed the PHE declaration to expire on May 11, although the pandemic continues to rage, concealed by the refusal of federal and state authorities to collect data on the impact of COVID-19 on the population. As a result, social benefits linked to the emergency declaration have expired.
Other social benefits are scheduled to expire throughout the summer. By mid-August, students with college student loan debt must begin making repayments that were suspended for the duration of the official COVID emergency. Biden’s executive action to forgive a portion of this debt, a separate measure, is currently before the Supreme Court and could be overturned by the end of this month.
Still more benefits will expire at the end of the current fiscal year, on September 30.
The summer months will thus bring a tidal wave of human suffering that hits not only the poorest sections of the population, but broad sections of young people and virtually the entire working class. This is under conditions where inflation and wage suppression, with the assistance of the unions, have steadily driven down the real incomes of working class families.
The crisis for Medicaid recipients is the most immediate. Throughout the pandemic, in return for stepped-up federal aid, state governments were barred from disenrolling Medicaid recipients except in cases of voluntary withdrawal, a move out of state, or death. With the end of the emergency, many states have begun to aggressively disqualify Medicaid recipients, a campaign pursued with special fervor by right-wing Republican state governments in Arkansas, Indiana, Utah and other states in the South and Great Plains.
Analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF), a health policy organization, shows that at least 1.349 million Medicaid recipients have been disenrolled as of June 20, 2023, based on the most current data from 22 states. Overall, 35 percent of people with a completed renewal were disenrolled, while 65 percent had their coverage renewed.
KFF places the number of people losing coverage at a low estimate of 8 million, a mid-range estimate of 17 million, and a high estimate of 24 million. Such calculations are difficult as states are not required to provide detailed figures on Medicaid disenrollment to the federal government.
According to publicly available reports and data obtained by the Associated Press, about 1.5 million people have already lost their Medicaid coverage in more than two dozen states that began the disenrollment process in April or May. For people whose cases were decided in May, half or more were dropped from coverage in Florida, Arkansas, Idaho, Kansas, Nevada, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Utah and West Virginia.
Florida leads the way, with nearly 303,000 people losing their Medicaid benefits, according to the KFF Medicaid Enrollment and Unwinding Tracker. Sixty-five percent of enrollees lost their coverage for “procedural” reasons, while 35 percent lost coverage due to ineligibility, the most common reason being their income was too high.
Florida is one of 10 states that have not expanded Medicaid under provisions of the Affordable Care Act, which expanded coverage under the program for nearly all adults with incomes up to 138 percent of the Federal Poverty Level. The abysmally low threshold for Medicaid in 2023 is $14,580 annual income for a single adult, $30,000 for a family of four and $50,560 for a family of eight.
In Arkansas, about 140,000 people have been deemed ineligible for Medicaid coverage since April. The largest number to lose coverage in May were enrolled in ARHOME, the state’s Medicaid expansion program, followed by ARKids A, which serves children from the state’s lowest-income families.
The immediate cause for most losing their coverage in what is being dubbed the “Medicaid unwinding” is the bureaucratic systems in place for people to “reenroll” in Medicaid due to the ending of the PHE.
Many people who have already lost or will lose coverage have been dropped because of “technicalities”—they haven’t returned the paperwork, they omitted required documents, their paperwork was sent to the wrong address, they received paperwork in a language they don’t understand. State agencies tasked with reviewing reenrollment are understaffed; personnel are poorly trained. Many people facing disenrollment are not even aware that they are being dropped from coverage.
In Utah, nearly 56 percent of people were dropped from Medicaid in early reviews. In New Hampshire, 44 percent received cancellation letters within the first two months. In its first month of reviews, South Dakota ended coverage for 10 percent of all Medicaid and CHIP (Children’s Health Insurance Program) enrollees.
Miriam Harmatz, founder of the Florida Health Justice Project, told KFF Health News that some cancellation notices in the state are vague and could violate due process rules. She also said state officials have sent cancellation letters to clients with disabled children who most likely still qualify for coverage.
The bureaucratic nightmare for those seeking reenrollment is indeed real. However, as with all matters related to the COVID-19 pandemic under both the Trump and Biden administrations, the mass disenrollment is not fundamentally a result of “red tape,” but rather a deliberate policy aimed at making working people pay with their health and lives while corporations continue to amass profits and the ruling class pursues its military aims.
Medicaid was founded in 1965 as part of the Johnson administration’s “War on Poverty,” the last gasp of social reformism in the United States. The program is jointly funded by the federal government and the states, with the states primarily responsible for its management.
Under the PHE established on January 31, 2020, states were required to maintain “continuous enrollment” of Medicaid beneficiaries in return for a 6.2 percentage increase in federal spending for the program. Under the omnibus spending bill passed by Congress in December 2022, states were allowed to resume coverage terminations effective April 1, 2023.
Florida leads the way, with nearly 303,000 people losing their Medicaid benefits, according to the KFF Medicaid Enrollment and Unwinding Tracker. Sixty-five percent of enrollees lost their coverage for “procedural” reasons, while 35 percent lost coverage due to ineligibility, the most common reason being their income was too high.
Florida is one of 10 states that have not expanded Medicaid under provisions of the Affordable Care Act, which expanded coverage under the program for nearly all adults with incomes up to 138 percent of the Federal Poverty Level. The abysmally low threshold for Medicaid in 2023 is $14,580 annual income for a single adult, $30,000 for a family of four and $50,560 for a family of eight.
In Arkansas, about 140,000 people have been deemed ineligible for Medicaid coverage since April. The largest number to lose coverage in May were enrolled in ARHOME, the state’s Medicaid expansion program, followed by ARKids A, which serves children from the state’s lowest-income families.
The immediate cause for most losing their coverage in what is being dubbed the “Medicaid unwinding” is the bureaucratic systems in place for people to “reenroll” in Medicaid due to the ending of the PHE.
Many people who have already lost or will lose coverage have been dropped because of “technicalities”—they haven’t returned the paperwork, they omitted required documents, their paperwork was sent to the wrong address, they received paperwork in a language they don’t understand. State agencies tasked with reviewing reenrollment are understaffed; personnel are poorly trained. Many people facing disenrollment are not even aware that they are being dropped from coverage.
In Utah, nearly 56 percent of people were dropped from Medicaid in early reviews. In New Hampshire, 44 percent received cancellation letters within the first two months. In its first month of reviews, South Dakota ended coverage for 10 percent of all Medicaid and CHIP (Children’s Health Insurance Program) enrollees.
Miriam Harmatz, founder of the Florida Health Justice Project, told KFF Health News that some cancellation notices in the state are vague and could violate due process rules. She also said state officials have sent cancellation letters to clients with disabled children who most likely still qualify for coverage.
The bureaucratic nightmare for those seeking reenrollment is indeed real. However, as with all matters related to the COVID-19 pandemic under both the Trump and Biden administrations, the mass disenrollment is not fundamentally a result of “red tape,” but rather a deliberate policy aimed at making working people pay with their health and lives while corporations continue to amass profits and the ruling class pursues its military aims.
Medicaid was founded in 1965 as part of the Johnson administration’s “War on Poverty,” the last gasp of social reformism in the United States. The program is jointly funded by the federal government and the states, with the states primarily responsible for its management.
Under the PHE established on January 31, 2020, states were required to maintain “continuous enrollment” of Medicaid beneficiaries in return for a 6.2 percentage increase in federal spending for the program. Under the omnibus spending bill passed by Congress in December 2022, states were allowed to resume coverage terminations effective April 1, 2023.
As of February 2023, more than 93 million people—nearly 28 percent of the US population—were enrolled in Medicaid or CHIP. The latter provides low-cost health coverage for children in families deemed to earn too much to qualify for Medicaid. Children accounted for more than 46 percent of Medicaid and CHIP enrollment. Between March 2020 and April 2023, more than 23 million recipients were added to the Medicaid rolls.
Justifying disenrolling Medicaid recipients, Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders wrote in an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal that “thousands of Arkansans who ordinarily wouldn’t qualify for Medicaid are taking resources from those who need that safety net.” She claimed that “those who lose Medicaid coverage can get health insurance through their jobs or the [Affordable Care Act] health care marketplace.”
The reality is different for the millions who now stand to lose their Medicaid coverage. Between February 2020 and March 2023, the official uninsured rate dropped to its lowest level on record, in early 2022. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the uninsured rate among those under 65 is projected to rise from 8.3 percent today to 9.3 percent next year, likely an underestimate.
Arkansas resident Janette Hall told CNN that she was initially told she would lose her Medicaid because she made too much money. She then realized that it must be because she began collecting Social Security at age 62 to add to her earnings as a cook for a nonprofit group.
Hall suffers from serious foot issues but said she cannot afford the $78 monthly premium she was quoted. She said she’ll focus on home remedies to keep her feet from getting infected while she searches for affordable coverage, but for now, “I’m going to be in that camp of people who aren’t going to be going to the doctor. That’s what you do when you don’t want to get that bill coming to you.”
The great “unwinding” of Medicaid is of a piece with the targeting of the Social Security retirement program and the Medicare program for deep cuts and ultimate privatization or elimination. The omnibus budget bill passed by Congress and endorsed by President Biden in December raised military spending by $76 billion, or roughly 10 percent, to a record $858 billion.
But as the WSWS has noted, “The proportion of the budget devoted to activities which could conceivably benefit working people is well under 20 percent.” In addition to allowing states to begin kicking people off Medicaid, the Democrats dropped a proposal that would have restored the child tax credit to the levels that prevailed in 2020-21 as part of pandemic relief.
Despite the Biden administration’s insistence that the pandemic is over, it continues to sicken and kill. Official figures place the US death toll at more than 1.1 million and millions the world over suffer from debilitating Long COVID. The ruling class has ended the collection of data on the disease, ended all mitigation measures, and refuses to promote and fund any technologies to protect workers on the job or students and teachers in schools.
Similarly, millions face destitution through being cut off from Medicaid and food stamp benefits, even as rents, mortgage rates and prices for basic necessities rise—and cuts in real wages are imposed on those who are working.
The health care system in America, which places workers and their families at the mercy of private health care chains, drugmakers and insurance companies, is subordinated to private profit. Within this framework, health care, a basic human right, is denied to millions. Genuine socialized medicine must be fought for by the working class as part of a socialist program that ends the domination of the capitalist market over the health and lives of the population.
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