US coronavirus pandemic deaths heading towards 3,000 per day

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Chase Lawrence
7 hours ago







Coronavirus deaths in the United States are expected to surpass 3,000 per day this month, with the spread of the virus completely out of control and cases rising rapidly in the aftermath of the Thanksgiving holiday. Wednesday marked a new high with 2,831 recorded deaths, raising the seven-day average to 1,658, while hospitalizations nationwide surged past 100,000.

The case fatality for the US, according to John Hopkins University of Medicine, stands at two percent, though this is likely to rise as hospitals are overwhelmed with patients. The cumulative death toll across the country stands at nearly 280,000 as of this writing, with over 14.3 million total cases.

Speaking before the US Chamber of Commerce Foundation on Wednesday, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield ominously warned, “We really have a pandemic that is throughout the nation. … right now it is important that we recommit ourselves to this mitigation as we now begin to turn the corner with the vaccine. But the reality is December and January and February are going to be rough times. I actually believe they’re going to be the most difficult time in the public health history of this nation, largely because of the stress it’s going to put on our health care system.”

Pointing to the alarming number of deaths daily in the US, a Bloomberg opinion piece aptly titled “Covid-19 Will Soon Be Like Another 9/11 Every Day” makes the obvious connection between the death rate and the case number. “So of the 140,000 getting sick every day, eventually about 2,800 will die,” the article notes. “That’s nearly as many as on 9/11, for each day that new infections remain at about 140,000—and we’ve already been at that level for 21 days.”

The article also points to those who will experience long term and, in many cases, debilitating symptoms, stating that half or more of hospitalized cases will become long-haulers as evidenced in multiple studies, accounting for 3,300 to 15,000 people per day.

A study published in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report explains, “In a multistate telephone survey of symptomatic adults who had a positive outpatient test result for SARS-CoV-2 infection, 35% had not returned to their usual state of health when interviewed 2–3 weeks after testing. Among persons aged 18–34 years with no chronic medical conditions, one in five had not returned to their usual state of health.”

The explosion in cases is a consequence of the criminal “herd immunity” policy pursued by both Democrats and Republicans which has entailed the reopening of schools and nonessential production in order to maintain profit making and ensure a continued rise in the stock market. Both President-elect Joe Biden’s administration and President Donald Trump have repeatedly stated their commitment to oppose lockdowns to control the pandemic no matter the cost in lives.

Contradicting the severity of the virus and basic scientific facts, the CDC has decreased the recommended quarantine time to 10 days for those with symptoms, and seven days without symptoms and a negative test in order to get workers back on the job faster.

In contradiction to the politically motivated revision by the CDC, the WHO in a paper on the criteria for releasing COVID-19 patients from isolation the states that the minimum time for isolation is 13 days.

The change in the CDC’s recommendations will lead to a significant increase in cases and deaths, as employers can force infected workers back on the job and still claim to be following federal guidelines, necessarily leading to an increase in cases as asymptomatic individuals continue to spread the virus at workplaces.

In an exposure of the crass profiteering of US corporations, a recent Reuters investigation revealed that nearly half of the 140,000 ventilators in the US Strategic National Stockpile “don’t meet what medical specialists say are the minimum requirements for ventilators needed to treat Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome, the main cause of death among COVID-19 patients, according to a Reuters review of publicly available device specifications and interviews with doctors and industry executives.”

$450 million was handed over to giant corporations like GE, Ford Motor Company and others by the Department of Health and Human Services for the roughly 66,000 sub-par ventilators. These ventilators are acknowledged by health professionals, and even some of the manufacturers themselves, such as Hill-Rom Holdings Inc and ResMed Inc, to be inadequate as per WHO standards set in March for treating COVID-19.

Richard Branson, a professor at University of Cincinnati, speaking on the pNeuton ventilator that GE and Ford manufactured, told Reuters that the sub-par ventilators are “a risk because if they get something they are not expecting and it isn’t capable of meeting the patients’ needs, then that puts the patients at risk” simply stating that without the right equipment “the patient won’t survive.”

According to the investigation, of the half of ventilators considered adequate, only 10 percent are full intensive care unit type ventilators that doctors and ventilator specialists would normally use, while 40 percent are transport ventilators that are not normally used for longer periods for treating ARDS but are “considered sophisticated enough” for patients to recover.

The absolute hostility of the political establishment to any efforts to fight the spread of the virus necessitates action by the working class to stop nonessential production and close schools. This fight must necessarily be organized on a socialist basis, and be politically independent from and irreconcilably opposed to the twin parties of the US financial oligarchy, who are jointly responsible for the hundreds of thousands of deaths in the country from the pandemic. The trillions in bailouts, along with the profits raked in from the pandemic by giant corporations like Ford and General Electric must to be seized in order to pay workers to stay home until a vaccine is freely distributed and the pandemic is brought to an end.

Massive service cuts to public transit planned in Massachusetts

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Will McCalliss
7 hours ago







In early November, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) announced their plans to cut services in response to the budget deficit caused by low ridership during the coronavirus pandemic. The impacted services include local and commuter train, bus and ferry transportation, with the planned changes to be implemented in different modes of transportation at varying times in 2021. The plan will be voted on by the Fiscal and Management Control Board (FMCB) December 7.

In justifying this plan, the MBTA cited a 74 percent decrease in average daily ridership, down from 1.3 million to only 330,000. This, along with more people potentially continuing to work from home even after the pandemic, could lead to an almost $600 million deficit. The proposed service cuts would save $142 million by summer 2022.

The extent of the proposed cuts is drastic and too lengthy to enumerate fully. Among the more notable changes are:
Subway service would end at midnight as opposed to 1 a.m., and at peak times, subway arrivals would decrease in frequency by as much as 2 minutes; on average, the frequency would be cut down by 20 percent.


Buses would also stop at midnight, reduce frequency on “essential” routes by 5 percent and 20 percent on “non-essential” routes, consolidate and/or restructure 10 lines and cut 25 low-traffic routes.


Commuter rail service would only run until 9:00 p.m., cutting 544 trains a day down to 430. Weekend service would be cut entirely and up to six low-usage stations could be closed.


Ferry service would be shuttered entirely.

The impact this would have on workers is massive. Workers who rely on lines and stations being cut would have to add time to their commute to make multiple transfers and walk or drive to and from stations that are further away from their homes and jobs. Rush-hour subway and bus riders, who are often already forced to wait for multiple crowded vehicles to pass before getting on a vehicle with space, would have to wait even longer as the crowding becomes even more drastic.

Night-shift workers could be stranded after their shifts or forced to go home early and lose the extra hours’ wages. Many workers would have to resort to ride share services such as Uber, driving their transportation costs up sharply.

In the most severe cases, workers would simply be unable to commute to their jobs when they are needed and be fired. And the many people who rely on public transit for access to necessities such as groceries, childcare and health care, would all find themselves in dire straits. Those who rely on transit to be able to participate in general commerce and culture would also be cut off from fully participating in society.

These potentially disastrous cuts are justified, as always, by the lie that there is “no money” to pay for these services in one of the richest cities in America. In reality, there are more than enough resources to go around, but they are being monopolized by a tiny layer of capitalists.

Abigail Johnson, CEO of Fidelity Investments and richest person in Massachusetts, has a net worth of $15 billion. The MBTA’s deficit is 4 percent of her net worth. It is not even 1 percent of the combined net worth of the dozen richest people in the state.

Not only do these billionaires in the highest seats of power in the financial industry stockpile their wealth, but they directly profit off of the debts of the MBTA. According to an MBTA advisory board report, paying off the MBTA’s debt will cost $523.5 million, over a fifth of the MBTA’s operating costs, in just the 2021 fiscal year; $303.4 million of this vast sum is solely to pay off interest.

The city’s main transit union, the Boston Carmen’s Union (BCU), has organized only a handful of virtual and in-person rallies, the latter of which was only attended by a couple dozen people, despite the millions affected by the cuts. The BCU has spent most of its focus on promoting the election of Joe Biden and other various Democrats, officially endorsing them on their public website multiple times.

For their part, the MBTA is no less aligned with the foul politics of the Democratic Party. At recent virtual public meetings, purportedly held to hear and take commuters’ feedback “into consideration,” elected Democratic officials were first given the floor to speak. Many state Senate members bemoaned the damage the service cuts would cause to their constituents, and Congressman Stephen Lynch, after patting himself on the back for the money the MBTA received from the CARES Act 8 months ago, blamed the current lack of funds on Republicans in the US Senate for not passing the HEROES Act.

Of course, all of these Democrats knew full well the Republican Party would never pass the HEROES Act, a dead-on-arrival bill which amounted to nothing more than political theater, and none of them called for the types of mass action that would be needed to divert funds away from the wealthy and into public infrastructure.

When asked at the meetings how many MBTA workers would lose their jobs, MBTA General Manager Steve Poftak would not give a straightforward answer. Though he was certain to stress this would be done with “great reluctance,” he made it clear that job losses were on the table.

Additionally, in their definition of “essential” service, the MBTA goes out of its way to identify “communities of color” as being in critical need of transit, attempting to shift the focus away from class and towards race.

The ruling class never lets a good crisis go to waste and the pandemic is no exception. The banks’ chokehold on the dilapidated MBTA has left no money to spend on improving essential public transit infrastructure, and these cuts only accelerate the process. Cutting costs means more money can be put in the coffers of the financial elite.

The fight for public transit cannot be separated from the fight for working class power. MBTA workers and riders, united with health care professionals, must form a rank-and-file safety committee, totally independent from the trade unions and Democratic Party, to ensure the maintenance and improvement of public transit service as well as safe working and traveling conditions amid a pandemic. The funds for these initiatives will be found in the major banks, which must be expropriated and converted into public utilities.

Mobilize the working class to halt school reopenings in New York City!

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The New York City Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee
7 hours ago







The decision by New York City’s Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio to resume in-person classes for Pre-K and K-5 students on December 7 is a flagrant attack on the safety and lives of educators, parents, students and all city residents, which will only accelerate the spread of the deadly COVID-19 virus.

Coronavirus infections, hospitalizations and deaths continue to rise across the city and its surrounding areas, but the corporate and financial powers and their political servants are indifferent to the mass suffering and death that their policies have created.

Educators have suffered enormous stress, and, in many cases, are exhibiting symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder after being forced into infected buildings or compelled to teach enormous remote classes for which their students have inadequate equipment and connectivity. Health care workers are being overwhelmed, and nurses at two New York state hospitals were forced to strike this week to demand more staffing and protective equipment.

The New York City Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee calls for the broadest mobilization of educators, parents, students and the entire working class to halt the drive to reopen schools, provide all resources needed for high quality remote learning, and close all nonessential production while protecting the incomes of all affected workers.

With vaccines nearing the approval and distribution stages, all efforts must be made to protect the population and put an end to any further needless illnesses and deaths in New York, across the US and internationally.

When de Blasio rapidly switched to remote learning on November 19, only our committee warned that he would reverse course as quickly as possible. We wrote: “The New York City Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee warns that the closure of schools is a temporary maneuver, and the unions and Democratic Party will work together to ensure that schools reopen as soon as they deem it politically viable.”

The shuttering of school buildings was followed by a media frenzy denouncing the decision while propagating the unscientific claims that in-person classes are safe and school-aged children do not play a significant role in the spread of the virus. The New York Times, Washington Post and other corporate news outlets, along with such public figures as Dr. Anthony Fauci, have pushed this lie as part of a concerted effort to confuse and disorient the population.

A mass of scientific evidence from New York City and internationally clearly refutes all such fraudulent claims.

As infections increased in New York City during November, the three age groups with the highest test positivity rates were children ages 0-4 (4.7 percent), 13-17 year olds (4.3 percent), and 5-12 year olds (3.3 percent). The positivity rate among children under 18, which exceeded that of all other age groups, has clearly played a major factor in the overall rise within the city this fall, as tens of thousands of students were sent back into dilapidated school buildings.

At the time of the suspension of in-person classes, 126 New York City public school buildings, many of which house more than one school, had been forced to close due to multiple COVID-19 cases. According to the most current Department of Education data, 3,000 public school students and staff have been infected with COVID-19 since the beginning of the school year, an undeniable refutation of the claim that schools are safe havens from the virus.

Beyond New York City, a growing body of epidemiological studies demonstrates that the suspension of face-to-face schooling contributes significantly to a reduction in the spread of COVID-19 and that school-aged children can in fact transmit the virus. Related research has shown that it is impossible to safely open schools to in-person learning without the suppression of community spread.

Despite their repeated claims to the contrary, Mayor de Blasio and Governor Cuomo repudiate science, which demonstrates a correlation between in-person schooling and rising infection rates. Their herding of teachers and students back into the schools, a precondition for herding parents back to unsafe workplaces, is part of a deliberate class policy to advance the interests of Wall Street and the financial oligarchy.

The United Federation of Teachers (UFT) has played a criminal role in facilitating these policies, abandoning all previous demands related to the safety of teachers and students while echoing the fallacy that in-person schooling is safe. On Sunday, the UFT retweeted de Blasio’s reopening plan and expressed their support, writing, “The mayor’s reopening plan will enable our most vulnerable students to receive in-person instruction as early as Dec. 7.” They further claimed that the reopening will only be “in parts of the city where transmission rates remain low.”

In providing political cover for de Blasio and the Democrats, the UFT is reprising their filthy role in downplaying the threat of the virus in May, which led to an untold number of unnecessary deaths and infections and contributed to New York City becoming the epicenter of the pandemic in April and May.

De Blasio’s plan to stagger the resumption of in-person instruction by grade bands and impose full-time attendance on previously “blended” pupils is designed to undermine opposition to the unsafe reopening of schools. A forced return of K-5 teachers weakens the class unity of all teachers while the restoration of full-time, in-person instruction under conditions in which the overwhelming majority of families remain “remote” would only exacerbate class-size issues for the 25 percent of teachers currently with accommodations to work from home, pressuring them to return to buildings.

To prevent the deadly reopening of schools, everything now depends upon the building of an interconnected network of rank-and-file safety committees in every school and neighborhood across the city, completely independent of the UFT and the Democrats who are conspiring to reopen schools.

Every effort must be made to unite with nurses and health care workers, transit workers, logistics workers, and all those being forced to risk their lives and face unsafe conditions. A specific appeal should be made to nurses and frontline nurses in New York City hospitals, and the Albany Medical Center and Montefiore New Rochelle hospitals where nurses walked out this week.

The New York City Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee will do everything in our power to help organize and coordinate the independent initiative of educators, parents and students toward the aim of halting school reopenings. We categorically reject the subordination of science to the interests of the capitalist class, and in particular, the promotion of the irrational, pseudoscientific policy of developing “herd immunity” without a vaccine, which is supported by both Democrats and Republicans.

To ensure the public health and safety of educators, parents and students and the highest quality education through remote learning, we advance the following demands:

1. For a complete halt to all plans to reopen the schools! Until the population is sufficiently vaccinated, no school buildings or nonessential workplaces should be open during the pandemic.

2. The immediate provision of all resources necessary for the successful implementation of remote learning! The most advanced computers, related equipment, and high-speed internet access must be given to all teachers, school support staff, students and their families.

3. For a comprehensive plan to rapidly upgrade all public school infrastructure! Every school must have safe educational facilities, including the most modern heating and ventilation systems, and be equipped with adequate resources necessary to provide a rich, holistic learning experience for all children.

4. All workers must be provided with a comprehensive benefits package! Parents must be able to safely remain at home to care for and help educate their children for the duration of the pandemic, and all nonessential workers must be able to stay at home with economic security. Educators who require accommodations for preexisting conditions must be fully funded. These benefits must be funded through progressive taxation on the financial oligarchs of Wall Street.

5. For an extended and expanded moratorium on evictions and foreclosures! No worker should face the threat of eviction, especially during a raging pandemic.

6. For a vast expansion of health care funding and resources! Resources must be provided to increase medical staff, particularly nurses, at area hospitals to adequate levels. All health care and essential workers must be guaranteed the provision of the highest quality PPE.

7. For a freeze on college tuition and abolition of student loan debt! Free housing and meals within dormitories must also be guaranteed to all international students and others in need who wish to remain as residents of their post-secondary institutions during the period of remote instruction.

8. Full protection for undocumented workers and their children! This must include income support and free medical attention, as well as an immediate end to their persecution by federal agencies, such as the Immigration and Customs Enforcement gestapo.

We urge all education workers who agree with these demands and are committed to building a genuine opposition to the homicidal policy of unsafe school reopenings to join our committee today and fight to build rank-and-file committees at your workplace and neighborhood!

The contradictions of capitalism emerge amid the race to develop a COVID-19 vaccine

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/12/03/vacc-d03.html?pk_campaign=newsletter&pk_kwd=wsws




Benjamin Mateus
8 hours ago







A full year has passed since the SARS-CoV-2 virus first emerged in China’s Hubei province—sometime between mid-October and mid-November of 2019, according to a recent collaborative study from the University of California San Diego and the University of Arizona posted to a preprint server this week.

While the public health response to the spread of the coronavirus has shown the complete incapacity of the capitalist system to safeguard the lives and health of the people, the effort to develop a vaccine—where the drive for profit was focused—has borne fruit relatively quickly.

In part this is due to the unprecedented speed and energy that characterized the initial work of scientists to discover the genetic code of the novel virus, the necessary precondition for developing a vaccine using a biochemical process involving messenger RNA (mRNA).

By the end of December, Wuhan’s health systems had begun to identify a series of concerning pneumonia cases of an unknown cause whose clinical picture resembled viral pneumonia. On December 26, 2019, an elderly couple with high fevers and cough was admitted to a local Wuhan hospital. A chest CT scan demonstrated findings completely different from other viral types of pneumonia. Their asymptomatic son had similar findings on his chest CT. The common viral pathogens, such as influenza and syncytial virus, were ruled out on tests.

With clinical and radiological information on other recently admitted patients, Dr. Zhang Jixian, director of the department of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine at Hubei Hospital of Integrated Traditional Chinese and Western Medicine, suspected they were confronting an as of yet unidentified pathogen with epidemic potential. Because of its connection with many that were infected, the seafood market was shuttered for cleaning and disinfection on January 1.

On January 3, Professor Zhang Yongzhen of Fudan University at the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Centre received test tubes of swabs taken from some of the patients admitted in Wuhan. In less than 48 hours, he had mapped the first complete genome of the virus, now better known as SARS-CoV-2. Over the next several days, they had confirmed that the recent respiratory illnesses were caused by a novel coronavirus, sending shock waves within the small niche in the scientific community and public health departments.

Over the potential for a public health crisis from a SARS-like novel coronavirus, on January 11, Professor Yongzhen instructed his associate, Professor Edward Holmes of University of Sydney, to upload the sequence to the website Virological.org which allowed the outside world access to the complete genetic code. Interestingly, in response to his critics about a cover-up, as reported in Time, he explained that they had uploaded the genome sequence to the US National Center for Biotechnology Information on January 5 after mapping the coronavirus.

The race to develop a vaccine took on an immediate urgency over the next few weeks as news of Wuhan’s outbreak began to spread. The earliest report was provided by Dr. Anthony Fauci who had told CNN on January 20 that the National Institute of Health (NIH) was in the process of taking the first steps towards the development of a vaccine in collaboration with then relatively unknown biotech company named Moderna. Soon many large biotechnology companies and pharmaceuticals worldwide had turned their attention to making a vaccine against the coronavirus. There are, as of this writing, 13 vaccines in phase three, 17 in phase two, and 40 in phase one human trials. Numerous others remain in the preclinical phases.
Moderna, Pfizer and mRNA vaccines

Stéphane Bancel, CEO of Moderna, an American biotechnology company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, recounts to the New York Times that he was on a business trip in Switzerland when he heard of China’s epidemic. He turned to his connections at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), with whom his company had been working for years to develop a novel approach to vaccine designs.

The centuries-long history of human experiences with pandemics has frequently been catastrophic. Out of the study of many tragedies and the comprehension of the natural world, which included understanding the microscopic nature of these pathogens and the immune system’s response, has come the discovery of many lifesaving vaccines.

Still, processes that require the injection of weakened or inactivated viruses, as with smallpox, tend to be laborious, taking several years of investigation and research to realize a potential candidate. In the face of a pandemic, however, time-sensitive therapeutics becomes essential, and non-pharmaceutical interventions such as public health measures remain the mainstay in responding to these health crises.

But more recently, with advances in genetics and bioengineering, the approach to vaccine development has also undergone a paradigmatic shift that can possibly provide such treatments in real time. As described in the New York Times, “Moderna and other companies created platforms that work like the operating system on a computer, allowing researchers to quickly insert a new genetic code from a virus—like adding an app—and create a new vaccine.” This means that by providing a person with the appropriately constructed genetic material, their cells can take these “synthetic genetic codes” and translate them into harmless mimic viral proteins that will stimulate their immune system and generate antibodies to protect them against the real pathogen.

After zeroing in on the coronavirus’s spike protein for their vaccine target, Moderna had only to input the necessary genetic sequences into their computer programs. Within two days, it had designed a messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccine candidate. In 25 days, the prototype of the vaccine had been manufactured, and in just 42 days, on February 24, it had been shipped for testing.

Up to then, Moderna had never produced an approved drug or vaccine. Its finances relied solely on the potential for its genetic platform to create these therapeutics. Previous efforts to test new vaccines when the SARS, MERS, and Zika outbreaks occurred were thwarted as the threat receded too quickly for large human clinical trials to be conducted. The scale and duration of the COVID-19 pandemic, raging across densely populated regions of the world, were critical in proving that these concepts could be applied in practical terms. But, given its limited resources, Moderna’s successes over the intervening months were highly dependent on the critical collaboration with NIH investigators and funding support from the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations.

By comparison, the behemoth drug manufacturer, Pfizer, was a late starter in the vaccine race. On March 1, they were approached by their collaborative partners Dr. Ugur Sahin and Dr. Özlem Türeci. This couple owns the German biotechnology company BioNTech, which manufactures immunotherapies and messenger RNA therapeutics as means of individualized cancer treatments. However, Dr. Sahin also recognized its immense potential in vaccinating against epidemic potential pathogens. At an infectious disease conference in Berlin two years prior, he had even predicted that messenger RNA technology could rapidly develop new vaccines in the event a global pandemic was to strike.

Around the same time that Stéphane Bancel had recognized the potential opportunity the Wuhan outbreak offered, Dr. Sahin had become convinced the novel coronavirus epidemic exploding across Hubei province would materialize into a global health crisis. He told the Times, “There are not too many companies on the planet which have the capacity and the competence to do it so fast as we can do it. So, it felt not like an opportunity, but a duty to do it, because I realized we could be among the first coming up with a vaccine.”
The messenger RNA breakthrough

Both Moderna and Pfizer have banked on a genetic technology that uses synthetic messenger RNA which turns a person’s cell into a vaccine manufacturing machine producing mimic proteins. The immune system can recognize and form antibodies to protect itself against future exposure to the actual pathogen.

Briefly, one of the DNA’s primary functions, which resides in a cell’s nucleus, is to produce proteins. The appropriate portion of the DNA is unwound, and a single strand of messenger RNA is transcribed. It undergoes further processing into its mature form and is then transported to the cell’s cytoplasm, waiting to be read. Ribosomes, proteins that can decode the “message” contained in the mRNA, utilizing amino acids carried by transfer RNA (tRNA), then set to build the protein according to specification, after which they are presented to the immune system. Because the spike proteins are only one small component of the entire virus, these mimics are harmless.
mRNA Vaccine (Source: Wikipedia)

Previous vaccines have used attenuated or devitalized viruses or specific peptides and proteins derived from these pathogens to create vaccines. In contrast, mRNA vaccines use a person’s cells as manufacturing sites. This has practical importance in reducing the scale and time for developing the vaccines.

The potential for mRNA therapeutics goes beyond that of vaccines. For decades, scientists have pondered the potential role of synthetic mRNA technology in treating various diseases such as mending damaged hearts, defective enzymes that cause rare diseases, or cancers. It was back in 1990, for the first time, researchers at the University of Wisconsin working with mice injected RNA and DNA “expression vectors” into skeletal muscle that resulted in new protein expressions.

A Hungarian biochemist named Katalin Karikó decided to push the envelope in this field. Synthetic RNA is readily vulnerable to a human’s natural defenses and can elicit a massive immune response making the therapy a health hazard. After a decade’s work with multiple trials and errors, she and her collaborator at Penn, Drew Weissman, an immunologist, recognized that by modifying the mRNA’s building blocks, they could deliver it into cells without the immune system becoming alerted to these intruders and attacking them.

Though their studies went unrecognized back in 2005 by the scientific community at large, they were of immense significance that would provide a practical solution to discovering novel therapies for diseases that hitherto had no treatments. However, they did catch the attention of a select few scientists who would go on to found the biotechnology firms Moderna and BioNTech.

A meeting in 2010 between Derrick Rossi, a stem cell biologist at Harvard University, who pitched the idea behind an mRNA technological startup to Robert Langer, a well-established biomedical engineer from MIT turned entrepreneur, and Noubar Afeya, a venture capitalist, led in a matter of months to the formation of the firm Moderna. Stéphane Bancel was brought on board as CEO in 2011 to help the company build its investors’ and financiers’ ranks. Rossi left the company in 2014 over a bitter dispute over who conceptualized the far-reaching implications of this new technology.

In a similar vein, the husband-and-wife team of Dr. Sahin and Dr. Türeci were enticed by the concept of personalized immunotherapies that could teach a person’s immune cell to fight cancer cells. With financial support from German sources, BioNTech was formed with its headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts, just a few miles from Moderna.

Though both companies are using an mRNA vaccine, the vaccines’ chemical structures, how they are produced, and how they are delivered into cells are different. Both also require stringent temperature requirements due to their sensitivity to degradation. Pfizer’s needs to be stored at minus 94 degrees Fahrenheit, which makes the logistics of transporting the vaccine, storing, and administering a daunting task.

This gives an edge to Moderna’s vaccine, which requires long-term storage at only a modest minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit and can remain stable for a month at 36 degrees to 46 degrees Fahrenheit. The Moderna vaccine’s stability is attributed to its special membrane made of lipid nanoparticles (tiny oily spheres) surrounding and protecting the mRNA from degradation at higher temperatures. Both vaccines require two injections to complete the series, 21 days apart for Pfizer and 28 days for Moderna.

A week after Pfizer emerged as the first vaccine candidate to show a dramatic 90 percent efficacy against the virus in randomized phase three clinical trials, on November 16, Moderna’s much-awaited announcement on results from their interim analysis corroborated the mRNA technology as a powerful tool. Moderna initially bested Pfizer with a show of 94.5 percent until revised and updated results show the two vaccines virtually equal in efficacy.

Moderna disclosed that their data included people in high-risk groups, such as those over 65. There were 90 cases of COVID-19 in the unvaccinated group, with eleven severe cases in their interim analysis. In the five infections among those that received the vaccine, no severe symptoms developed. Pfizer’s recent updated analysis revealed that out of 170 COVID-19 infections, only eight had taken the vaccine. Additionally, in a review of 8,000 subjects, no serious safety issues were encountered; 3.8 percent had reported severe fatigue and 2 percent headaches. The transient adverse effects for Moderna’s vaccine include the report of 9.7 percent fatigue, 8.9 percent muscle pain, 5.2 percent joint pain, and 4.5 percent headaches.

Arnold Monto, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, explained, “this is higher reactogenicity than is ordinarily seen with most flu vaccines, even the high dose ones.” Vaccine experts are concerned this will have considerable impact on how these therapeutics are received by the population.

On November 20, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla announced that their vaccine had sufficient safety data and had filed an emergency use authorization (EUA) with the US Food and Drug Administration. Moderna filed for its own EUA ten days later.
From development to mass vaccination

The FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee will meet from December 8 through 10 to review the Pfizer application, and then a week later for Moderna. Decisions may be forthcoming immediately. By all accounts, both vaccines will most likely be granted approval as they both use an mRNA vector that appears to have similar safety and efficacy results.

Then follows a review by the CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices that will issue guidance on who can receive the vaccine and which groups will be prioritized. The consensus among public health experts is to allocate an initial lot of vaccines to immunize health care workers. Other groups to be given priority include the elderly and essential workers, such as police officers, who are classified as first responders.

However, the task of manufacturing, delivering, and immunizing the entire planet with the same speed with which these lifesaving treatments have been developed is, literally, unprecedented. Significantly, the Information Technology infrastructure is lacking to track who has received which vaccine and how side effects and reactions are reported. Science has been able to penetrate into nature’s most compelling secrets, but the capitalist mode of production—along with the outmoded system of nation-states—constitute the main barriers to saving millions of lives.





The executives and shareholders of the Moderna, Pfizer, BioNTech and other vaccine manufacturers will undoubtedly grow rich—and from the standpoint of the profit system, that is the only concern—but a return to normal conditions of life for the great mass of humanity remains in considerable doubt.

On May 15, the Trump administration launched Operation Warp Speed as a public-private partnership to “facilitate and accelerate the development, manufacturing, and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics.” In effect, drug companies are using public funds to ensure the profitability of their development and manufacturing, the US military has been assigned the task of wholesale distribution, from the manufacturers to the various states, and state governments will oversee the retail distribution and mass vaccination, including deciding who gets the vaccine and when. To call this arrangement a Rube Goldberg device would be to give it too much credit. It is a disaster waiting to happen.

And then there is the critical question of global distribution, particularly in poor nations which lack the health care infrastructure even to distribute childhood vaccinations that are commonplace in the advanced countries, let alone deliver two shots, weeks apart, to every single person in the country.

In a press release published on September 17, OXFAM International reported that wealthy nations representing just 13 percent of the world’s population had monopolized more than 50 percent of all future doses of COVID-19 vaccines. They warned that even if the five leading vaccines (there are presently 12 in phase three) prove successful, 61 percent of the world’s population will not see a vaccine until 2022. Currently, the WHO COVID vaccine global initiative is struggling to raise the necessary funds to distribute these vaccines to the worldwide population equitably.

Anti-Capitalist Chronicles: Science and Authority

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1MA2bcqcS8&ab_channel=DemocracyAtWork

Illinois nursing home workers strike in second week as pandemic surges: Build rank-and-file-committees to save lives

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/12/03/nhil-d03.html?pk_campaign=newsletter&pk_kwd=wsws




Jessica Goldstein, Kristina Betinis
8 hours ago







Wednesday concluded the tenth day of a statewide strike by nearly 700 Chicago-area nursing home workers at 11 of 13 facilities operated by Illinois-based Infinity Healthcare Management. On the same day, Illinois Department of Public Health reported a record 238 COVID-19 deaths, far surpassing the May record of 191 deaths. In the communities where the strikes are ongoing, solidarity with the striking workers is on display as cars honk in support of the strike as they pass the picket lines.

Certified nursing assistants (CNAs), laundry workers, dietary assistants, housekeepers and other critical workers are on strike for hazard pay, higher wages, adequate personal protective equipment (PPE) and increased staff to meet patient needs during the pandemic.

Infinity’s City View Multicare Center in Cicero is reported to have the highest number of COVID-19 cases in the state this week. The company’s Niles Nursing & Rehabilitation Center has seen the largest number of deaths from the virus.

Nursing home workers are fighting to save their lives and the lives of their patients as the coronavirus continues its rampant spread through long-term care facilities in the state. As of November 27, the Illinois Department of Public Health has reported 45,882 reported cases at long-term care facilities and 6,047 deaths, nearly half of the total deaths from the virus in the state since the beginning of the pandemic.

Workers are rightly angered that Infinity Healthcare received $12.7 million in Federal CARES Act bailout funds while it claims to have no money to meet their demands. Infinity management is offering only a $15.15 starting wage for new CNAs, a $0.25 per hour raise for those making above that, and a yearly raise of only $0.10 per hour, according to Shaba Andrich, the Service Employee International Union’s vice president for nursing homes.

The contract terms proposed by SEIU Healthcare Illinois-Indiana threaten poverty for the striking nursing home workers. Workers are currently paid about $13 per hour and are demanding raises of $2 per hour, bringing CNAs up to a starting pay of $15.50. Pay for non-CNA workers would rise to $14.50 outside of Chicago and $15 at facilities located in Chicago. These “raises” are barely above or at Chicago’s minimum wage, which is set to rise to $15 in 2021.

The deeply exploitative conditions in nursing facilities are a direct result of profit seeking in health care. Infinity, run by Moishe Gubin and Michael Blisko, manages health care facilities in Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee and Arkansas. In recent years, the Chicago Tribune investigated widespread narcotics use, patient injury and deaths in Infinity-managed facilities in Chicago and referred to its “complex ownership and management structures.” Gubin also operates a separate company, Strawberry Fields Real Estate Investment Trust, whose subsidiaries own the real estate in which Infinity operates.

In April, Illinois Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed executive orders shielding nursing homes from civil liability related to the pandemic. This has had the result of loosening restrictions and worsening conditions in the industry, protecting the most negligent operators from suit under the guise of COVID-19. Senate Republicans took up Cuomo’s order in their effort to produce federal legislation to protect business interests.

Under these conditions, SEIU’s cozy relationship with the Democratic Party stands ever more thoroughly exposed. The World Socialist Web Site warned at the beginning of the strike that the SEIU will do everything in its power to the sabotage workers’ struggles while posturing as fighting in the workers’ best interest against the corporations.

SEIU has a well-worn pattern of negotiating with management behind closed doors to push through sellout contracts, as in the strike of 4,000 service workers at University of Illinois at Chicago in early October.

SEIU has also promised nursing home workers that they will receive strike pay, according to its website. But striking nursing home workers should be wary of this promise. The strike pay which was promised to UIC service workers came with many caveats. Workers commented on the Facebook page #StrikeForOurLivesUIC after the strike with complaints that they had been denied the paltry sums from the bogus “hardship fund,” which, according to its website, provided “eligible workers” up to “a maximum of $250 per week and $550 in total or until all funds have been disbursed.” Workers could not even apply for these benefits until September 28, more than a week after the strike had begun.

After UIC services workers were forced back on the job, they complained SEIU was keeping them in the dark about the negotiated raises, retro pay and possible hazard pay as late as the second week of November. At the same time, workers reported not being allowed to stay home from work, or work from home under conditions of a surge of COVID-19 cases in Illinois and a statewide stay-at-home advisory.

The SEIU accepts the domination of the health care industry by private profit and will do nothing to make conditions safer or guarantee workers’ wages above poverty level.

SEIU Healthcare IL-IN posted a quote from Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker to its Facebook page yesterday: “There are hundreds of SEIU nursing home workers on strike who are asking for the same type of reasonable working conditions that a large number of long-term care facilities around Illinois have already agreed to in their own contracts.”

Pritzker, who is personally worth $3.4 billion, declared the demands put forth by the SEIU “reasonable” after shielding deeply corrupt and exploitative corporations like Infinity from legal liability.

The “reasonable” conditions are the poverty wages, unsafe conditions and understaffed nursing homes that workers at over 100 other long-term care facilities in Illinois risk their lives to work in. Many of these contracts were also negotiated by the SEIU, including those pushed through in May of this year after the union blocked a strike of nearly 10,000 nursing home workers at 64 facilities across the state.

SEIU is also isolating the Infinity nursing home workers from the other workers it has betrayed across the state and the country who are facing the same conditions that they fought against as a result of the union’s sellout negotiations. Just days ago, over 800 nurses walked out on strike in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Health care workers have entered into struggle in Germany, Australia, Brazil, Zimbabwe and other countries around the world who are forced to work in deadly conditions for the profit interests of the global ruling elite.

Nursing home workers should elect independent rank-and-file safety committees to raise their own demands based on what they and their patients need, not what profit-seeking business people deem “reasonable”. This requires workers to break with the politics of the SEIU and the Democratic Party.

Nursing home workers can take the lead established by auto workers and teachers in forming rank-and-file committees, independent of the SEIU, in order to wage a fight for decent pay, safe and humane working conditions, and the resources necessary to provide dignified care to the elderly and those with long-term care needs.

The SEP and WSWS will do everything possible to assist Infinity workers in the organization of rank-and-file committees and formation of connections with other sections of workers—in health care, auto manufacturing, public education, logistics and elsewhere—to launch a common struggle for workers’ rights. We urge nursing home workers to contact us today.

Nurses union in Upstate New York ends strikes as COVID-19 hospitalizations surpass 100,000 for first time

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/12/03/newy-d03.html?pk_campaign=newsletter&pk_kwd=wsws




Jerry White
8 hours ago







Strikes by thousands of nurses in Upstate New York against inadequate safety measures and low wages were ended yesterday by the New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA). Also on Wednesday, US hospitalizations surpassed 100,000 for the first time, and health officials expect the winter months to bring even higher numbers.

Nearly 2,000 nurses at the Albany Medical Center in the state capital launched a 24-hour strike and are now being locked out by hospital management. Another 200 nurses at the Montefiore New Rochelle Hospital in Westchester County, an early hotspot of the virus just north of New York City, conducted a two-day strike.

In both cases, nurses demanded adequate staffing levels, more supplies of reliable personal protective equipment and improved wages, benefits and working conditions. The union, however, ended both strikes without achieving any of the nurses’ demands.

This is not due to any lack of militancy or popular support. On the contrary, the strikes generated widespread sympathy. The nurses who went on strike at two New York state hospitals Tuesday gave voice to the anger of millions of health care workers across the country and internationally who are battling unsafe working conditions in hospitals that are once again being overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients.

Strikes by US health care workers are part of a wave of struggles spanning almost every continent. Hundreds of health care workers in Chile took to the streets last Saturday to demand an improvement in working conditions and salaries as COVID-19 cases continued to surge across the Latin American country.

Messages on social media expressed solidarity and the striving of health care workers to unify in a joint struggle. “Nurses have to fight for the patients and themselves, because at the end of the day the hospital or institution does not care for the patients or the nurses,” one nurse commented.

Another said, “Keep up the great work and stay united. This is key not only for us as nurses, but more importantly for our patients. We are the eyes and ears for every single patient. … the world is watching and you’re standing up for every nurse, patient across this world. Let’s go.”

“Nurses in every state should have gone on strike at the beginning when it was obvious the toll this would have taken on the entire health care spectrum,” another nurse said.

The New York state strikes are part of the growing resistance of health care workers worldwide. On Wednesday, nurses at Keck Hospital of USC (University of Southern California) held a protest to denounce management’s efforts to prevent healthcare workers with symptoms of COVID-19 from staying home. Seven hundred workers in the Chicago area are in the second week of their strike to demand improved wages and PPE at 11 nursing homes owned by Infinity Healthcare Management. Other potential nurses strikes are brewing in California, Illinois, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and West Virginia, according to alerts on the website of the strikebreaking firm US Nursing Corporation.

After joining NYSNA in 2018, nurses at Albany Medical Center have not been able to get a contract after 18 months of negotiations. Management’s last offer, rejected by nurses, would do nothing to address chronic staffing shortages and only provide a 1.25 percent annual pay increase, plus a system of merit pay.

Albany Med President and CEO Dennis McKenna have arrogantly claimed that only a “vocal minority” of nurses wanted to strike and have hypocritically declared that “a strike in the middle of a pandemic for baseless reasons is totally irresponsible.”

Management at Montefiore New Rochelle has been just as intransigent. Although the Montefiore Health System (MHS), one of the nation's largest, has received at least $38 million in government bailout money, it has rejected nurses’ demands, and like Albany Med, hired strikebreakers to replace striking nurses.

The NYSNA, which was given seats on the COVID-19 task forces set up by Governor Andrew Cuomo and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, has isolated these struggles, forcing nurses to take on powerful corporate interests and the state’s Democratic Party political establishment on their own.

Before the pandemic, in April 2019, the union called off an impending strike by 10,000 nurses of three health systems in New York City—Mount Sinai, Montefiore and New York-Presbyterian—and agreed to a deal with three percent wage increases and the same vague promises to hire more nurses, which are routinely ignored by management.

Rather than conducting a real fight to mobilize health care workers, including the 42,000 members of NYSNA and far broader sections of the working class to win the nurses’ demands, NYNSA President Judy Sheridan-Gonzalez, who works closely with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), has claimed that safe staffing levels can be won through appealing to Governor Andrew Cuomo and other Democrats in the state legislature, as well as the courts.

But Biden, Cuomo and the Democrats, no less than Trump and the Republicans, are beholden to the giant health care monopolies. In late March, both parties handed over $175 billion to the largest health care systems, as part of the bipartisan CARES Act.

The state’s Health Department recently released its “safe staffing” study, which found that hiring enough nurses to significantly lower nurse-to-patient ratios at hospitals and nursing homes was not economically feasible. As Politico reported, “The Cuomo administration report, which was released Aug. 14, determined the state would need to hire 70,000 more nurses and other caregivers at an annual cost of $3.7 to $4.7 billion to reach the ratios nurses were looking for—a cost the state deemed prohibitive in a defeat for the nurses.” A series of lawsuits by NYNSA against two hospitals and the state over staffing levels were also thrown out of court.

New York State is home to 118 billionaires, according to Americans for Tax Fairness, with a combined net worth of more than $600 billion. The higher end of the state’s cost estimate is only six percent of the $77.3 billion increase in New York billionaires’ combined wealth during the first three months of the pandemic. Nationwide, while 280,000 people have died, including nearly 1,700 frontline health care workers, the billionaire investors who control the health care industry have made out like bandits during the pandemic, getting $150 billion richer.

A recent report in Newsweek noted, “Healthcare billionaires have seen their wealth soar since the coronavirus swept the globe. Billionaires in the healthcare space bumped up their wealth by 36.3 percent between April 7 and July 31, from a total of $402.3 billion to $548 billion, according to a new report by wealth managers UBS and professional services firm PricewaterhouseCoopers.

“The near-$150 billion premium came as demands for key vaccines, medical equipment and treatments increased, with health services across the world left reeling due to ballooning case numbers.”

The fight to protect health care workers and to attain the resources necessary to battle the pandemic requires building new organizations of struggle, which are independent of the unions, which are tied to the corporate-controlled parties and accept without question the whole system of for-profit medicine. In every hospital, nursing home and health care facility, workers need to form rank-and-file committees to enforce health and safety and mobilize broader sections of the working class in a common fight for the reallocation of resources to fight the pandemic, train and hire hundreds of thousands of nurses and to provide free and high quality health care for all.

At the same time, nonessential production must be shut down, with full compensation to all affected workers and small business owners, in order to prevent any unnecessary infections and deaths before vaccines are available to everybody and the virus can be contained and finally eradicated. To fight for this, the working class has to wage a political struggle against both corporate-controlled parties based on a socialist program, including the transformation of the giant hospital and health care chains and the pharmaceutical and medical device corporations into public utilities as part of a system of socialized medicine.