Friday, August 7, 2020
Altered CDC guidelines provide unscientific basis for reopening schools
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/06/educ-a06.html
By Mitch Marcus
6 August 2020
Over the past week, a growing number of schools reopened across the US, despite the fact that the coronavirus pandemic is raging out of control. Already, schools in Georgia, Indiana and Mississippi have had students test positive for COVID-19, throwing reopening plans into immediate crisis and deepening community spread of the virus.
To justify their reckless moves to resume in-person instruction, school district officials are invoking the revised guidelines issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on July 23. The CDC, which had published weak, nonbinding guidelines in May, has recently bowed to political pressure from the Trump Administration and is more forcefully advocating for the reopening of schools.
The body of scientific evidence demonstrates conclusively that it is thoroughly reckless to reopen schools in the US, a fact which has not gone unnoticed by educators and families. A recent Kaiser Family Foundation Poll shows broad public support for keeping schools closed, with 71 percent of those polled feeling schools do not have adequate resources to reopen safely and 79 percent worried that teachers and staff will get sick when schools reopen.
The CDC guidelines are based on several mitigation strategies such as mask use and social distancing when “feasible, practical, acceptable, and tailored to the needs of each community.” These recommended, not required, measures will mean little in the dilapidated and overcrowded classrooms that are the norm across the US.
But even these threadbare measures were too onerous for Trump, who tweeted July 8 that the guidelines were “very tough & expensive.” Vice President Mike Pence, chair of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, added that week, “We don't want the guidance from CDC to be a reason schools don't open.” The CDC responded by dutifully publishing what is essentially a political document rationalizing the homicidal campaign to reopen schools titled, “The Importance of Reopening America’s Schools this Fall.”
The document downplays the dangers involved in reopening schools, omitting key studies that disprove their claims and instead relying on studies from early in the pandemic that have been disproven. Of the six sections of the document, only one deals with the actual relationship of COVID-19 to children, while the other five sections deal with the importance of schools to children, as if there were any doubt of that. There is no section dedicated to, and barely even a mention of, the transmissibility of COVID-19 from children to adults or from schools to the broader community.
Based on this document, one would think that children teach, feed and bus themselves to school! There is a complete omission of the presence of teachers and other school staff within the buildings and buses. The introductory paragraph states, “The best available evidence indicates if children become infected, they are far less likely to suffer severe symptoms.” This assertion is backed up by three citations, all of which are studies published in April. It is true that children appear to be less likely to suffer severe symptoms than adults, yet severe cases do exist among children.
The CDC reports that between February 1 and June 17 there were 13 deaths of children between the ages of 5 and 14. By July 15, there were 342 cases across the US of pediatric multi-system inflammatory syndrome, including six deaths. On Tuesday, it was reported that two teenagers in Florida succumbed to the virus, bringing the total number of minors killed by COVID-19 in the state to seven.
There have been multiple recent reports of the significant numbers of children who have contracted the virus: 23,000 children in Florida, 7,573 in Tennessee, 4,900 in Mississippi, and 260 campers and staff members (75 percent of attendees) at an overnight summer camp in Georgia.
In one notorious international example, in Israel the number of new cases had risen from fewer than 50 per day two months ago to more than 1,500 per day in early July, primarily attributable to school outbreaks that infected at least 1,335 students and 691 staff.
The new CDC document also asserts that the “death rates among school-aged children are much lower than among adults.” Again, lower does not mean nonexistent, and how many deaths of children is acceptable to the CDC? They state that children “account for under 7 percent of COVID-19 cases and less than 0.1 percent of COVID-19-related deaths.”
Last week, a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) concluded that the widespread closure of schools in mid-March saved the lives of at least 40,600 people over a 16-day period and prevented 1.37 million fewer infections over a 26-day period in the spring. Given that community transmission is now taking place at a far higher rate, the CDC is effectively sanctioning mass death.
Particularly pernicious is the CDC’s false comparison between the effects on children of COVID-19, the flu, and H1N1. It states that while COVID-19 has been responsible for 64 deaths, this is less than each of the last five flu seasons as well as the 358 pediatric deaths from H1N1 over an 18-month period. The implication is that the public should adopt the perspective of “herd immunity” and accept a “reasonable” amount of death akin to that produced by regular seasonal ailments.
The comparison to H1N1 does not hold water since the COVID-19 pandemic, unlike the H1N1 threat of 2009-2010, is only getting worse after only seven months in existence and the vast majority of schools have not yet reopened.
As to the seasonal flu, the reproductive rate is 1.3 while that of COVID-19 is between 2 and 2.5. This seemingly narrow disparity equates to deaths from the flu of between 20,000 to 60,000 people over the course of a year, while COVID-19 has killed over 160,000 Americans in just over seven months.
The CDC also states that “transmission among children in schools may be low” and that there have been “few reports of children being the primary source of COVID-19 transmission among family members.” The CDC cites studies from April and May to back up these assertions, ignoring a July 16 publication of the CDC’s own journal, Emerging Infectious Diseases, of a study from South Korea, the largest of its kind, which showed that children between the ages of 10 and 19 spread the virus as frequently as adults.
Since the revised guidelines were published, a series of scientific studies have exploded this claim, demonstrating that children spread the virus at an equal or greater rate than adults. The CDC has made no public statements on these studies or revised their guidelines to align with the latest science.
The rest of CDC document deals with the benefits to children in attending school, including receiving educational instruction, social and emotional skill development, safety, nutrition, and physical activity. While mentioned in the agency’s May guidelines, these factors were featured much less prominently, underscoring the political nature and hypocrisy of the revisions.
Democratic and Republican politicians alike are shedding crocodile tears at the effects of their own decades-long socially homicidal policies which have resulted in pervasive poverty, hunger and homelessness among children. They have the temerity to suggest that they suddenly care about the well-being of children so much that forcing them back to school during a raging pandemic is an act of charity, and teachers who oppose this are insensitive to the hardships endured by children outside school walls.
Last week, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci, echoed these themes when interviewed at the national convention of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT).
Fauci, in a live-streamed discussion with American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, admitted, “In many respects, unfortunately, though this may sound a little scary and harsh—I don’t mean it to be that way—is that you’re [the nation’s teachers] going to be actually part of the experiment.”
There was an immediate outpouring of opposition to Fauci’s statements within the AFT meeting itself, with one teacher commenting, “My students, families, teachers, school/district staff should never be expendable for an experiment.”
The incident was also widely denounced on social media. An elementary school music specialist commented in the Oregon for a Safe Return to Campus Facebook group, “Damn, I used to like him but I will not be an unwitting participant in an experiment.” Another responded, “EVERY teacher… SHOULD REFUSE, RESIST, and STRIKE, if necessary!”
In fact, the Declaration of Helsinki, the research ethics cornerstone document adopted in 1964 in response to the horrors of Nazi human experimentation in World War II, states, “Participation by individuals capable of giving informed consent as subjects in medical research must be voluntary [Article 25]” and is invalid if the “potential subject is in a dependent relationship with the physician or may consent under duress [Article 27].”
Neither the teachers, dependent upon their districts for their paychecks and health insurance, nor the students who are minors and incapable of giving consent, nor the parents who are threatened with poverty and homelessness if they do not go to work, can “voluntarily” participate in this experiment free from “duress.”
Teachers, parents, and all workers must take control of the situation, demanding a nationwide general strike against the homicidal drive to reopen schools. The working class must be guided by science, not Wall Street’s insatiable need for profit.
Two Florida teenagers die from COVID-19 as schools push to reopen
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/06/flod-a06.html
By Alex Johnson
6 August 2020
Two teenagers in Florida—a 16-year-old female from Miami-Dade County and a 17-year-old male from Manatee County—were added to Florida’s COVID-19 death toll on Monday, according to the Florida Department of Health.
The deaths come a month after a 9-year-old, Kimora Lynum, from Putman County became the youngest child to die from COVID-19 in Florida.
As of Monday, 38,171 people under 18 had tested positive for the virus in the state, making Florida one of the states with the largest percentage of child infections. As of this writing, 394 children are currently hospitalized from the virus.
Health records of the two teens indicate that neither was considered a travel-related case. Both children were hospitalized during their battle with the illness. The 17-year-old boy died on Sunday at Johns Hopkins All Children’s hospital in St. Petersburg. He is the first person under the age of 18 to have died from COVID-19 in Manatee County.
The 16-year-old girl died on July 29 at Nicklaus Children’s Hospital in Miami, according to the Miami-Dade County Medical Examiner Department. The young girl had two preexisting conditions, spina bifida and hydrocephalus. She died of pneumonia brought on by COVID-19, according to official reports.
The deaths of these young people come as public schools and universities in Florida and across the country are moving ahead with plans to resume in-person learning. The rise in COVID-19 fatalities and cases over the past several weeks point to the disaster that awaits millions of teachers, students and families if the back-to-school measures are allowed to be pushed through.
In an interview on CNN on Monday, Florida Education Association President Fedrick Ingram spoke about the harmful psychological effects that will undoubtedly affect children if they are permitted to enter schools where sickness and death become commonplace. He called the deaths of the two minors “tragic” and something that would be “part of what we are going to have to deal with as well when you talk about student and children’s mental health.”
America’s ruling class would like the population to believe that schools can be transformed into safe spaces for regular classroom learning in order to facilitate their homicidal back-to-work drive and force working-class parents who can’t afford to leave their children at home back to work in unsafe conditions. The official notion is that younger people are largely excluded from the virus and aren’t likely to transmit it, let alone become infected. However, a mountain of evidence dealing with the nature of coronavirus transmission reveals that this is a blatant lie.
Health experts noted back in the early stages of the pandemic that younger demographics were accounting for a sizable portion of hospitalizations.
Dr. Rochelle Walensky, chief of infectious diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital and a professor of medicine at Harvard, told reporters as far back as early April that even young patients without underlying health conditions were getting sick as the pandemic raged on. She noted that it was impossible to determine whose health would or would not deteriorate after contracting the virus. “One day they’re okay, the next day they require intubation,” she said.
One nurse at Elmhurst Hospital in New York City spoke to the WSWS in April on the conditions within the hospital. At a time when the pandemic was spiraling out of control in the state of New York, with around 30,000 daily infections being reported at its peak, observers were particularly struck by the number of young people who were checking into the hospital infected with COVID-19 and dying. Speaking of her patients, the nurse said: “I’ve never seen so many young people die. It’s terrible. We’re totally unprepared for this.”
Recent data has pointed to a drastic surge of infections among small children and adolescents throughout the course of the pandemic. The American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children’s Hospital Association released a report Monday documenting an extensive compilation of data from states on child COVID-19 cases. They found that while children represented only 8.8 percent of all cases in states reporting cases by age, over 338,982 have tested positive for COVID-19 since the onset of the pandemic. The overall rate for COVID-19 among children is 447 cases per 100,000 in the population. Moreover, 97,078 new child cases were reported from July 16 to July 30, a staggering 40 percent increase from the previous period.
Young people are increasingly catching the virus in states that are witnessing an immense surge in the pandemic. Alongside tens of thousands of child infections, Florida passed the 500,000 confirmed case mark earlier this week and saw 245 new deaths on Wednesday.
The Florida Department of Health issued a sobering data analysis last week on pediatric cases.
The data showed that from July 16 to July 24, nearly 8,000 more children have contracted the virus, which represents a 34 percent increase from the previous week. This came after another recent report showed that more children in Florida are requiring hospitalizations than ever before. Over the course of eight days, hospitalizations have increased by 23 percent, bringing the total number of children hospitalized to over 300. The percent positive rate for children also increased by 1 percentage point from the week before to 14.4 percent, while the state’s overall positivity rate is 12.6 percent.
Despite these alarming developments which are showcasing the danger of sending children back into schools, Republican Governor Ron DeSantis has continued to push a reckless reopening campaign. In a press conference with Vice President Mike Pence last Monday, he reiterated platitudes on the importance of in-person learning. “I really believe that the teachers and the administrators that are there, they serve so many functions in the lives of our kids, particularly those who come from disadvantageous backgrounds.”
DeSantis and other proponents of the back-to-school drive have consistently touted the low transmission rate among children as an excuse to send them back into classrooms. However, a study in South Korea last month has poured cold water over such claims. Researchers found that children aged between 10 and 19 can transmit COVID-19 within a household just as much as adults.
Additionally, the researchers noted that the highest COVID-19 rate for household contacts of school-age children and the lowest rates for children younger than 9 was in the middle of school closures. They highlight the fact that early school closures, which were a part of broader lockdown procedures, greatly reduced the rate of transmission among younger children. “Although the detection rate for contacts of preschool-aged children was lower, young children may show higher attack rates when the school closure ends, contributing to community transmission of Covid-19,” the study said.
For all counties suffering the most severe outbreaks of the virus in Florida, child infection rates were much higher. The test positivity rate for children in Martin County was 25.3 percent while further south in Miami-Dade County the rate was 19.6 percent.
The rise in infections among children has been evident in other states that have become hotspots for COVID-19 as well. In Texas, for example, there has been an astronomical rise in COVID-19 infections and deaths ever since it lifted lockdown measures and resumed non-essential production. Small children have not been spared from the surge and, in some cases, have tested positive at rates even higher than the elderly.
In early July, Texas Health and Human Services unveiled data showing that around 592 children at child daycare centers across the state had tested positive for COVID-19. More than 1,200 staff members in these daycare facilities have also tested positive, bringing the total to nearly 1,800 across 1,131 facilities. For the child cases, this amounts to a 759 percent increase since early June.
The evidence is overwhelmingly clear: Children are equally susceptible to catching COVID-19, have viral loads equal to or greater than adults, are more likely to be asymptomatic carriers, and transmit the virus at the highest rates of any age group. Any school that reopens will quickly become a major vector for the spread of the virus throughout that community.
The effort to reopen schools, in other words, means that we will see more and more preventable and harrowing deaths of youth, students, teachers, parents and other workers.
The past seven months have demonstrated that the fight against the pandemic depends upon the independent intervention of the working class. The Socialist Equality Party and its youth and student wing, the International Youth and Students for Social Equality, call on young people to join their teachers in opposing the homicidal back to work campaign. We urge teachers to contact us for assistance in organizing your struggle. We call on students and youth to support this struggle and join the IYSSE.
The author also recommends:
For a nationwide general strike to halt the drive to reopen schools!
[5 August 2020]
Mounting opposition by teachers against drive to reopen schools
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/06/usco-a06.html
By Benjamin Mateus
6 August 2020
There have been close to 19 million COVID-19 cases and over 710,000 deaths worldwide, with 6,589 more deaths on Wednesday.
The United States will, by all accounts, exceed 5 million cases of COVID-19 today. The drive to reopen school systems in many states will undoubtedly accelerate the pandemic even more.
One of the first schools to open was Greenfield Central Junior High School in Indiana. On the first day, the superintendent of the Greenfield-Central Community School Corporation was notified that a student who had attended classes had tested positive for the coronavirus.
In Georgia, a second grader tested positive for the coronavirus on the first day of school. The Sixes Elementary in the Cherokee County School district had to close the classroom the next day for deep cleaning, and the instructor and 20 students were quarantined at home for two weeks.
At Gwinnett County Public Schools, which serves over 180,000 students, 260 district employees were prohibited from entering their schools due to positive tests for COVID-19 or from direct exposure to someone who was infected.
According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, (AJC) “In-person training and meetings are taking place without areas being wiped down or disinfected in between, and masks aren’t being worn at all times, said several teachers who didn’t disclose their names when contacting the AJC. Others added that their school still hadn’t received hand sanitizers.”
Teachers around the US who spoke with the WSWS were outraged over the back-to school drive.
Chris, a long-time teacher in West Virginia, is currently working as a substitute and a home health care worker. He told the WSWS he would be in support of going out on strike in his role as a teacher and supports the demands laid out in the statement published on the WSWS yesterday.
“It does appear that the reopening compromised the effort to contain the virus. Here in West Virginia, the statewide date for bringing the kids back to school is September 8. Kanawha County Schools sent me a letter a couple of weeks ago giving me three choices. (1) I would not return. (2) I would return for long-term substitute positions. (3) I would be available for long-term or day to day positions. I chose (3), knowing that a lot can happen between now and then. I have multiple risk factors and am in no hurry to get back to work. My son is scheduled to start back as a TA [teacher’s assistant] at Notre Dame on Monday.”
The federal CARES relief package provided a meager $13.5 billion for K-12 education, less than one percent of the total stimulus package, despite educators indicating schools across the nation will need multiples of that sum to prepare for and retrofit dilapidated structures with proven systems to minimize the spread of the virus from class to class and person to person.
Adam Goldstein, a fifth-grade teacher in San Diego, noted that, “It’s incredible to me that the federal government would see the necessity of bailing out airlines and banks, and not see the need to do something similar for the public schools in this country.”
Louisiana currently ranks as the US state with the highest per capita rate of COVID-19 infections: 2,712 per 100,000 people. The state also ranks fifth for highest rate of per capita deaths. To date, Louisiana has recorded a total of 126,061 cases and 4,096 deaths.
Under these conditions, the Jefferson Parish School Board, representing the largest school district in the state, in the major suburbs of New Orleans, is planning to carry out a physical reopening on August 12. The district’s superintendent, Dr. James Gray, says that of the 50,000 students in the district, half have already registered for virtual learning, indicating widespread doubt by parents about the safety of sending kids back to school. Local WDSU-TV broke the news that a “handful” of teachers in the district have just tested positive for the virus.
Despite weeks of teachers rallying against the unsafe reopening of schools, teachers were forced back to the buildings on Monday, August 3 for meetings and to prepare the classrooms.
One elementary school teacher, who preferred to remain anonymous, spoke to the WSWS about the reopening. “We were told to assemble in the cafeteria, all faculty and staff. In Phase 2, the group size limit is supposed to be 25, but we had 60 people in the room,” she said.
While it was somewhat possible to remain distanced with just the staff in school, this would be impossible to do so once the students arrive. The teacher explained, “The principal even admitted that we would not be able to maintain the minimum 6-foot distance guideline.” When she set up her classroom, in which she is going to have 25 students, she tried to space out the desks, but “the spacing measured to 15 or maybe 18 inches apart.” (6 feet = 1.8 metres and 15–18 inches = 38–46 cm).
In addition to concern about her own health, having suffered from pneumonia in recent years, she worries for the students and their families. According to the “Strong Start” guideline released by the school board, students who present with fever during the morning temperature check will be sent into an isolation room with other potentially sick students. Considering that children are exposed to multiple viruses, from flu to stomach bugs, those without COVID-19 could end up in close, contained quarters with students who are infected.
When asked about the personal protective equipment that is promised in the same district-wide guideline, she said that the school has informed her that each teacher will receive “one mask, which hasn’t arrived yet. We will have hand sanitizer in the classroom and cafeteria, but no stations around the building.”
She expressed growing disgust with Governor John Bel Edwards (Democrat), who she says has “caved in to business interests and pressure from the White House, and now he’s ignoring common sense and has allowed the state to open up far too quickly.”
The current push to reopen schools on schedule, a position supported by both capitalist parties, forcing children in K-12 back to their desks amidst a raging pandemic, is based on the class logic that the extraction of surplus value from workers is paramount regardless of the consequences that come with it.
In the crudest and most malign terms, President Trump’s comments on Fox News capture the essential narrative being put forth to delude the public when he said, “This thing’s going away. It will go away like things go away, and my view is that schools should be open. If you look at children, children are almost … and I would almost say definitely immune from this disease… they just don’t have a problem… we have to open our schools.”
The comments of Dr. Robert Redfield of the CDC to the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis are simply a public health cover for the criminal policy being pursued. He said, “I don’t think I can emphasize it enough as the director for the Centers for Disease Control, the leading public health agency in the world—it is in the public health interest that these K-12 students to get the schools back open for face-to-face learning … I want these kids back in school. I want it done smartly, but I think we have to be honest that the public health and interest of the students in the nation right now is to get a quality education and face-to-face learning. We need to get on with it.”
The dishonesty behind these sentiments is appalling. “To get on with it,” there must be certain conditions met, which include a contained pandemic where transmission is halted and surveillance in place to track it. These are just the most basic measures that are woefully lacking.
The number of tests conducted daily in the United States peaked on July 24, with 929,838 new tests. On August 5, this figure had rapidly declined to 664,219 new tests, back to levels from more than a month ago. It appears that the decline in the seven-day average of new cases has correlated with less testing, which could mean that state and federal governments are following Trump’s repeated directives to test less so that the infection numbers will go down.
All these figures must be taken with caution, even skepticism, because in the middle of July the Trump administration shifted reporting of hospitalizations away from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention into the hands of the Department of Health and Human Services, where Trump political appointees hold sway.
Not only is the number of tests conducted rapidly declining, but the time to report these time-sensitive results has also been, on average, taking four or more days, making them useless for contact tracing. According to Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security, “A test result that comes back in seven or eight days is worthless for everybody—it shouldn’t be counted. It’s not a test in any kind of effective manner because it’s not actionable.”
The state of contact tracing across the nation has remained abysmal. Tracers in Arizona are unable to reach a significant number of infected individuals. Cities in Florida have given up on these programs. In New York City, tracers are complaining of paralyzed communications and difficulty training new tracers.
MEDIA COVER FOR US CLIENTS’ COVID-19 CATASTROPHES
By Lucas Koerner, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.
August 5, 2020
https://popularresistance.org/media-cover-for-us-clients-covid-19-catastrophes/
Back in March, when coronavirus cases were beginning to surge in the US and in South American allies such as Brazil and Ecuador, Washington was busy raising the alarm about the “expansion of Covid-19 pandemic in the region, if not globally, if Venezuela… fails to address it.” Venezuela was reporting under 150 cases at the time.
This scaremongering propaganda has been repeated ad nauseam by the Western media ever since.
Despite Venezuela’s comparatively low figures for deaths and infections, corporate journalists regularly smear the Maduro government’s “authoritarian” handling of the pandemic, and actively hide the impact of the criminal US sanctions against the Caribbean country.
https://popularresistance.org/media-cover-for-us-clients-covid-19-catastrophes/
Back in March, when coronavirus cases were beginning to surge in the US and in South American allies such as Brazil and Ecuador, Washington was busy raising the alarm about the “expansion of Covid-19 pandemic in the region, if not globally, if Venezuela… fails to address it.” Venezuela was reporting under 150 cases at the time.
This scaremongering propaganda has been repeated ad nauseam by the Western media ever since.
Despite Venezuela’s comparatively low figures for deaths and infections, corporate journalists regularly smear the Maduro government’s “authoritarian” handling of the pandemic, and actively hide the impact of the criminal US sanctions against the Caribbean country.
CNN (6/19/20) accuses Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro of having “made the most of the coronavirus lockdown to stamp his authority over the country’s key political institutions.”
Maduro is said to be “tighten[ing his] grip on power, helped by coronavirus lockdown” (CNN, 6/19/20), “using Covid-19 to silence his opponents even further” (Americas Quarterly, 7/21/20) and causing “hunger, infection, repression” (New Yorker, 5/29/20). The country’s healthcare system is “crippled by a broken economy overseen by an increasingly authoritarian government” (New York Times, 4/10/20; FAIR.org, 4/16/20), rendering the Covid-19 outbreak in Venezuela a “frightening prospect” (Washington Post, 3/20/20) that “poses global threat,” as Human Rights Watch’s Tamara Taraciuk Broner and John Hopkins University’s Kathleen Page (Foreign Policy, 3/12/20) put it.
Most recently, Broner and Page (Washington Post, 7/2/20) blamed the collapse of Venezuela’s healthcare sector squarely on the “irresponsible and repressive measures by the government of Nicolás Maduro,” though they speculated that “US financial and oil sanctions could indeed be exacerbating the crisis.” They declined, however, to call for lifting the illegal US embargo, which leading Venezuelan economist Francisco Rodriguez estimates is costing the country almost $17 billion a year in lost oil revenues, insisting that “pressure needs to continue.” For reference, Venezuela imported just $2.6 billion in food and medicine in 2018.
Just as the media’s recitation of evidence-free US attacks against China’s Covid-19 response has helped distract from the Trump administration’s criminal incompetence (FAIR.org, 6/21/20, 4/9/20, 3/24/20), the vilification of Venezuela dovetails with the whitewashing of right-wing US client states in the region.
Alongside Brazil, Peru, Ecuador and Chile currently lead South America in total Covid deaths per capita. However, unlike Brazil—whose far-right President Jair Bolsonaro has been exceptionalized as the posterboy of Covid-19 denialism by the same Western media that helped put him in power (FAIR.org, 4/12/20)—neighboring pro-US regimes have largely been given a pass.
While Peru, Ecuador, and Chile are, like Brazil, members of the anti-Venezuela regime-change coalition known as the Lima Group, their right-wing neoliberal leaders are celebrated in the Western press as reliable, “pro-business” technocrats, in contrast to Trump and Bolsonaro–style “authoritarian populists” and what are viewed as their left-wing Chavista counterparts (FAIR.org, 5/7/20).
Chart: COVID-19
Peru
The New York Times (6/12/20) reported that Peruvian President MartÃn “Vizcarra’s centrist government appeared well-prepared to face the pandemic,” but the “crisis has marred Peru’s veneer of economic progress.”
Despite presiding over the second-highest excess death toll per capita in the world, Peru’s right-wing Vizcarra government has received broadly sympathetic coverage from the international media. The New York Times (6/12/20) hailed President MartÃn Vizcarra as a model “centrist” technocrat who “followed the best advice when the coronavirus arrived in Peru”:
He ordered one of Latin America’s first and strictest lockdowns, and rolled out one of the region’s biggest economic aid packages to help citizens stay home.
The Times attributed Peru’s failed pandemic response to “deep-rooted inequality and graft,” but largely avoided faulting Vizcarra’s neoliberal administration.
Peruvian sociologist Anahi Durand told FAIR that the government rejected calls from the left to implement a universal basic income “that would have allowed the population to stay at home.” It opted instead for a policy of targeted aid to the poor, which has “not reached many people who need” it, the Times reported, refraining, however, from criticizing Vizcarra for the debacle.
At the same time, a small group of major firms—ranging from logging companies accused of tax evasion and fined for environmental infractions, like Maderera Bozovich, to transnational consulting giants such as Deloitte and Ernst & Young—received $2.5 billion in loans out of the government’s $7.5 billion credit package, which was funneled almost exclusively through top private banks. Neither the New York Times, nor other Western outlets like the BBC (7/9/20), Wall Street Journal (6/14/20) and Time (5/29/20), mentioned this rather crucial fact in their account of Peru’s disaster.
“The policy of the government has been to put the economy ahead of public health,” Durand concluded.
While corporate journalists are right to point the finger at Peru’s precarious informal economy and severely underfunded health system, they refuse to place any significant blame at the door of Vizcarra and the country’s “string of pro-business presidents,” whom they praise for reducing poverty (New York Times, 6/12/20).
The fact that the Andean country of nearly 33 million spends just $700 on healthcare per person, and has only two ICU beds for every 1,000 people is widely reported (Washington Post, 6/18/20; Time, 5/29/20). But this isn’t presented as evidence of neoliberal Peruvian elites’ “reckless disregard…for the life and health of…[their own] people,” which the Washington Post (7/2/20) and other newspapers regularly cite as the cause of blockaded Venezuela’s healthcare crisis. Other standards seem to apply to loyal US client states.
Ecuador
The Wall Street Journal (6/30/20) reported that after making “gruesome headlines around the world,” Ecuador’s “Guayaquil is now a success story.”
While acknowledging that the country’s business capital suffered 16,700 excess deaths—0.7% of the population, or almost three times the Covid death rate endured by New York City—the Journal carefully avoided any critical evaluation of the neoliberal LenÃn Moreno administration’s role in the catastrophe, which it chalks up to a “deadly quirk in the calendar,” “slow reaction” and “political fights.”Ecuador has received relatively scant coverage in past months, despite the South American country leading the world in excess deaths per capita. In one of the few recent pieces of in-depth reporting, the Wall Street Journal (6/30/20) narrated the “success story” of how Ecuador’s devastated city of Guayaquil “largely vanquished the new coronavirus,” in which the former and current right-wing mayors collectively in power since 2000, Jaime Nebot and Cynthia Viteri, bizarrely figure among the heroes.
The New York Times (4/23/20), for its part, appeared to renounce any pretense of journalistic inquiry, dismissing the disproportionate death toll as a “mystery” that is “impossible to explain”: “There is no obvious reason for Ecuador to be devastated far more than other countries.” What about the Moreno government’s obsession with pleasing bankers and persecuting political opponents?
Last October’s nationwide uprising (FAIR.org, 10/23/19; CounterSpin, 10/29/19) has all but vanished from Western media coverage, invoked only to smear the popular rebellion as “violent protests” where “eight people died and thousands were injured in two weeks of chaos that left Quito’s historic center looking like a war zone” (Financial Times, 6/15/20). Readers will find scarce mention in the press of Moreno’s brutal, militarized crackdown, nor of the continued imprisonment and persecution of supporters of ex-President Rafael Correa. Most recently, as Covid-19 cases spike in Quito, Moreno and his corrupt auditor general have been busy banning Correa’s political party ahead of next year’s presidential elections.
Also absent from the media narrative is any mention of the fact that the Moreno government, together with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), has pushed through savage cuts to public spending, including slashing investment in public health by 64% over the last two years. In 2019, 3,680 public health workers were laid off, equivalent to 4.5% of total Health Ministry staff. A further 2,279 of the ministry’s administrative staff, or 2.8% of total personnel, were laid off in May, following the signing of a new IMF loan, which mandated that the state reduce public spending by 6.2% of GDP through 2025.
It was this neoliberal austerity program—not vague accusations of federal government “indifference,” as reported by the Journal (6/30/20)—that back in March prompted the resignation of the Health minister, who stated that “no budget allocation has been received from the competent authority to emergency management.”
Economist Andrés Arauz, who previously served as Ecuador’s minister of Knowledge and director general of the Central Bank, commented to FAIR:
The minister complained that the Finance Ministry did not transfer a single cent for the emergency, while billions of dollars were being paid out in margin calls and speculative operations on the stock market.
Between February and April, Ecuador shelled out nearly $2.5 billion in debt payments, including hundreds of millions in margin calls on risky Wall Street loans.
Corporate outlets have all but ignored the payouts, but more egregiously, they gloss over the fact that it was Moreno’s voluntary decision to surrender national sovereignty to the IMF and Western banks, presenting him as the hapless victim of “dire economic straits” (Financial Times, 6/15/20).
Moreno had numerous available avenues for raising state revenue that he proceeded to close off. His government eliminated a pair of laws requiring windfall oil and mining revenues to be shared 50/50 between the Ecuadorian state and transnational companies, declined to renew import tariffs, and even passed a law removing a tax on the exit of dollars, as well as blocking the state from financing itself internally by borrowing within the country (Counterpunch, 11/13/18). All of these measures were aimed at enriching Moreno’s major local and foreign capitalist backers, who continue to engage in massive capital flight, to the tune of $900 million in April alone.
But this media narrative of Moreno shackled by a huge foreign debt, for which he supposedly has zero responsibility (FAIR.org, 10/23/19), is useful in justifying the kind of class warfare that the editors of the Financial Times (6/15/20) salivate for:
The president said the budget deficit would be at least $12 billion this year, about 11% of gross domestic product. To help fill the gap, his government has announced $4 billion of spending cuts, including scrapping state-owned companies, liquidating the national airline, and asking government employees and teachers to reduce their hours and pay.
Eight public firms are on the chopping block, with 3,604 workers set to lose their jobs, joining the 180,000 workers who have been laid off during the pandemic, according to official figures.
Meanwhile, facing zero international media scrutiny, Moreno has taken advantage of the current state of exception to ram through even more sweeping neoliberal measures, which had been halted by massive street protests last fall, including a labor reform undermining workers’ rights, the elimination of fuel subsidies, and modifications to the tax code previously rejected by the legislature.
Indeed, despite his bleeding of the country to the benefit of capital, Moreno’s corporate media admirers (FAIR.org, 2/4/18) will never refer to the right-wing US-friendly leader as an “authoritarian” whose “irresponsible and repressive measures” have cost thousands of lives, as Venezuela is described.
The New York Times (6/12/20) reported that Peruvian President MartÃn “Vizcarra’s centrist government appeared well-prepared to face the pandemic,” but the “crisis has marred Peru’s veneer of economic progress.”
Despite presiding over the second-highest excess death toll per capita in the world, Peru’s right-wing Vizcarra government has received broadly sympathetic coverage from the international media. The New York Times (6/12/20) hailed President MartÃn Vizcarra as a model “centrist” technocrat who “followed the best advice when the coronavirus arrived in Peru”:
He ordered one of Latin America’s first and strictest lockdowns, and rolled out one of the region’s biggest economic aid packages to help citizens stay home.
The Times attributed Peru’s failed pandemic response to “deep-rooted inequality and graft,” but largely avoided faulting Vizcarra’s neoliberal administration.
Peruvian sociologist Anahi Durand told FAIR that the government rejected calls from the left to implement a universal basic income “that would have allowed the population to stay at home.” It opted instead for a policy of targeted aid to the poor, which has “not reached many people who need” it, the Times reported, refraining, however, from criticizing Vizcarra for the debacle.
At the same time, a small group of major firms—ranging from logging companies accused of tax evasion and fined for environmental infractions, like Maderera Bozovich, to transnational consulting giants such as Deloitte and Ernst & Young—received $2.5 billion in loans out of the government’s $7.5 billion credit package, which was funneled almost exclusively through top private banks. Neither the New York Times, nor other Western outlets like the BBC (7/9/20), Wall Street Journal (6/14/20) and Time (5/29/20), mentioned this rather crucial fact in their account of Peru’s disaster.
“The policy of the government has been to put the economy ahead of public health,” Durand concluded.
While corporate journalists are right to point the finger at Peru’s precarious informal economy and severely underfunded health system, they refuse to place any significant blame at the door of Vizcarra and the country’s “string of pro-business presidents,” whom they praise for reducing poverty (New York Times, 6/12/20).
The fact that the Andean country of nearly 33 million spends just $700 on healthcare per person, and has only two ICU beds for every 1,000 people is widely reported (Washington Post, 6/18/20; Time, 5/29/20). But this isn’t presented as evidence of neoliberal Peruvian elites’ “reckless disregard…for the life and health of…[their own] people,” which the Washington Post (7/2/20) and other newspapers regularly cite as the cause of blockaded Venezuela’s healthcare crisis. Other standards seem to apply to loyal US client states.
Ecuador
The Wall Street Journal (6/30/20) reported that after making “gruesome headlines around the world,” Ecuador’s “Guayaquil is now a success story.”
While acknowledging that the country’s business capital suffered 16,700 excess deaths—0.7% of the population, or almost three times the Covid death rate endured by New York City—the Journal carefully avoided any critical evaluation of the neoliberal LenÃn Moreno administration’s role in the catastrophe, which it chalks up to a “deadly quirk in the calendar,” “slow reaction” and “political fights.”Ecuador has received relatively scant coverage in past months, despite the South American country leading the world in excess deaths per capita. In one of the few recent pieces of in-depth reporting, the Wall Street Journal (6/30/20) narrated the “success story” of how Ecuador’s devastated city of Guayaquil “largely vanquished the new coronavirus,” in which the former and current right-wing mayors collectively in power since 2000, Jaime Nebot and Cynthia Viteri, bizarrely figure among the heroes.
The New York Times (4/23/20), for its part, appeared to renounce any pretense of journalistic inquiry, dismissing the disproportionate death toll as a “mystery” that is “impossible to explain”: “There is no obvious reason for Ecuador to be devastated far more than other countries.” What about the Moreno government’s obsession with pleasing bankers and persecuting political opponents?
Last October’s nationwide uprising (FAIR.org, 10/23/19; CounterSpin, 10/29/19) has all but vanished from Western media coverage, invoked only to smear the popular rebellion as “violent protests” where “eight people died and thousands were injured in two weeks of chaos that left Quito’s historic center looking like a war zone” (Financial Times, 6/15/20). Readers will find scarce mention in the press of Moreno’s brutal, militarized crackdown, nor of the continued imprisonment and persecution of supporters of ex-President Rafael Correa. Most recently, as Covid-19 cases spike in Quito, Moreno and his corrupt auditor general have been busy banning Correa’s political party ahead of next year’s presidential elections.
Also absent from the media narrative is any mention of the fact that the Moreno government, together with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), has pushed through savage cuts to public spending, including slashing investment in public health by 64% over the last two years. In 2019, 3,680 public health workers were laid off, equivalent to 4.5% of total Health Ministry staff. A further 2,279 of the ministry’s administrative staff, or 2.8% of total personnel, were laid off in May, following the signing of a new IMF loan, which mandated that the state reduce public spending by 6.2% of GDP through 2025.
It was this neoliberal austerity program—not vague accusations of federal government “indifference,” as reported by the Journal (6/30/20)—that back in March prompted the resignation of the Health minister, who stated that “no budget allocation has been received from the competent authority to emergency management.”
Economist Andrés Arauz, who previously served as Ecuador’s minister of Knowledge and director general of the Central Bank, commented to FAIR:
The minister complained that the Finance Ministry did not transfer a single cent for the emergency, while billions of dollars were being paid out in margin calls and speculative operations on the stock market.
Between February and April, Ecuador shelled out nearly $2.5 billion in debt payments, including hundreds of millions in margin calls on risky Wall Street loans.
Corporate outlets have all but ignored the payouts, but more egregiously, they gloss over the fact that it was Moreno’s voluntary decision to surrender national sovereignty to the IMF and Western banks, presenting him as the hapless victim of “dire economic straits” (Financial Times, 6/15/20).
Moreno had numerous available avenues for raising state revenue that he proceeded to close off. His government eliminated a pair of laws requiring windfall oil and mining revenues to be shared 50/50 between the Ecuadorian state and transnational companies, declined to renew import tariffs, and even passed a law removing a tax on the exit of dollars, as well as blocking the state from financing itself internally by borrowing within the country (Counterpunch, 11/13/18). All of these measures were aimed at enriching Moreno’s major local and foreign capitalist backers, who continue to engage in massive capital flight, to the tune of $900 million in April alone.
But this media narrative of Moreno shackled by a huge foreign debt, for which he supposedly has zero responsibility (FAIR.org, 10/23/19), is useful in justifying the kind of class warfare that the editors of the Financial Times (6/15/20) salivate for:
The president said the budget deficit would be at least $12 billion this year, about 11% of gross domestic product. To help fill the gap, his government has announced $4 billion of spending cuts, including scrapping state-owned companies, liquidating the national airline, and asking government employees and teachers to reduce their hours and pay.
Eight public firms are on the chopping block, with 3,604 workers set to lose their jobs, joining the 180,000 workers who have been laid off during the pandemic, according to official figures.
Meanwhile, facing zero international media scrutiny, Moreno has taken advantage of the current state of exception to ram through even more sweeping neoliberal measures, which had been halted by massive street protests last fall, including a labor reform undermining workers’ rights, the elimination of fuel subsidies, and modifications to the tax code previously rejected by the legislature.
Indeed, despite his bleeding of the country to the benefit of capital, Moreno’s corporate media admirers (FAIR.org, 2/4/18) will never refer to the right-wing US-friendly leader as an “authoritarian” whose “irresponsible and repressive measures” have cost thousands of lives, as Venezuela is described.
Chile
After average daily Covid cases in Chile jumped from 629 per day to 6,277 per day, the Washington Post (6/23/20) reported that Chilean officials “appear to have been overconfident.”
Media particularly faulted President Sebastián Piñera for not repairing the “disconnect between government and nation” exposed by last year’s nationwide anti-neoliberal uprising, which Bloomberg (6/16/20) vilified as “massive riots…[that] turned the city center into a war zone of smashed lights, debris, burnt-out buildings and graffiti.” At the time, corporate journalists by and large looked the other way while the Chilean state arrested 11,412 people, imprisoned 2,500, tortured 1,516 and injured 3,756, including 460 shot in the eye by police, according to Chile’s National Human Rights Institute (FAIR.org, 10/23/19, 10/26/19, 11/5/19, 12/6/19).Since its emergence as a global leader in per capita Covid-19 deaths last month, Chile has received mildly critical coverage from across the media spectrum. Western outlets reproached the right-wing Piñera government for being “overconfident” (Washington Post, 6/23/20) and “out of touch” (Bloomberg, 6/16/20), based on its controversial policy of rolling quarantines and rapid reopening. Chile “failed to recognize that the affluent have maids, gardeners and cooks who might also get infected,” NPR (7/2/20) reported.
Frontline health workers reject the media’s gentle criticism of Chile’s Covid-19 response as understatements, accusing the government of Trump-style criminal negligence.
According to Dr. Roberto Bermudez, who attends Covid patients at two public hospitals in Santiago, the Piñera government has “followed the lead of the Trump administration” in manipulating statistics, refusing to implement a national quarantine and privileging corporate profits over public health.
“The strategy is very macabre. Chile allowed many people to die while trying to pursue herd immunity,” he told FAIR, referring to disgraced former Health Minister Jaime Mañalich’s comment in April that “the only way to protect ourselves is that the majority of people are infected.”
For months, Mañalich—a close friend and confidant of Piñera—doctored the country’s death figures, making public only the test-confirmed deaths, and not the considerable number of Covid-19 deaths diagnosed by doctors but with no test administered. United Nations Development Program Regional Director Luis Felipe López-Calva estimates that Chile could be under-reporting coronavirus fatalities by as much as 61%, based on excess death data compiled by the Economist.
Corporate journalists euphemistically described the government’s brazen lying to the public as “discrepancies” (NPR, 7/2/20) that caused “divisions [with] sectors of the medical community” (Guardian, 6/14/20).
They also ignored the fact that mayors and health experts across the country have been urging Piñera to declare a nationwide quarantine since the pandemic arrived in March, which was reported at the time (Reuters, 3/20/20; Newsweek, 3/23/20) but has since been erased from the media narrative. In response to the government’s stonewalling, multiple criminal lawsuits have been filed accusing Piñera and Mañalich of homicide, which has similarly gone unreported.
As in Peru and Ecuador, the press has turned a blind eye to the Piñera government’s systematic prioritization of private capital over human life. In April, the Chilean president promulgated a law authorizing employers to temporarily suspend workers’ contracts under the pretext of avoiding mass layoffs resulting from insolvency.
Over 677,000 workers have been left to scrape by on fractions of their already-meager earnings drawn from unemployment funds, while transnational conglomerates—now freed from wage obligations—pay multimillion dollar dividends to their shareholders. For instance, Latin American retail giant CENCOSUD paid investors more than $234 million between two of its subsidiaries after suspending the contracts of 7,731 workers. LATAM Airlines paid out $57 million while slashing wages in half through June, firing 4,400 workers and filing for bankruptcy in the US. Meanwhile, soup kitchens now blanket the landscape of metropolitan Santiago, configuring a new geography of hunger.
Reuters (6/12/20) romanticizes the “carefully gloved fist” of an armed force that in the past year has tortured and blinded hundreds of Chileans.
Reuters (6/12/20) could scarcely hide its infatuation with the armed forces “safeguarding the coronavirus lockdowns and curfews Chilean-style, with soldiers and police working in tandem, wielding weaponry but with a carefully gloved fist.” The wire service did not mention that these are the same soldiers and police who, however “mindful of the growing poverty and hunger…caused by the pandemic,” have maimed, murdered and tortured, not only under the state of emergency, but during last year’s uprising as well.Also missing from the headlines is any criticism of Piñera’s crusade to normalize militarized state repression, including the deployment of active-duty troops to enforce sanitary restrictions and nightly curfews decreed under a “state of catastrophe” order issued in March.
Notwithstanding Piñera’s illegal militarization of Indigenous Mapuche territory and effort to ram through parliament a new intelligence bill targeting popular movements as “internal enemies,” the pro-US leader is not accused in the Western media of “tighten[ing his] grip on power, helped by coronavirus lockdown,” or “using Covid-19 to silence his opponents even further.”
It is clear that such indictments are reserved for Official Enemies like Venezuela, China (FAIR.org, 3/6/20) and Cuba (FAIR.org, 5/31/20, 4/14/20), but never loyal US vassals.
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