Mike Davis on COVID-19: The monster is finally at the door / Impact on the global poor / Capitalism vs human survival
NB: Mike Davis is the author of Late Victorian Holocausts, a detailed analysis of the 19th century drought and famine that took millions of lives of the poor in India and China DS
A better world needs better economics
neoliberal economics is more ideology than science. Its devotees assume a world that exists only in the believer’s minds. Its assumptions blind its followers to the systemic failure of an economy that is destroying Earth’s capacity to support life while forcing most of the world’s people into an increasingly difficult daily struggle to fulfill their basic needs. The resulting social breakdown drives violence and support for authoritarian leaders.
Second, like annual influenzas, this virus is mutating as it courses through populations with different age compositions and acquired immunities. The variety that Americans are most likely to get is already slightly different from that of the original outbreak in Wuhan. Further mutation could be trivial or could alter the current distribution of virulence which ascends with age, with babies and small children showing scant risk of serious infection while octogenarians face mortal danger from viral pneumonia.
Third, even if the
virus remains stable and little mutated, its impact on under-65 age cohorts can
differ radically in poor countries and amongst high poverty groups. Consider
the global experience of the Spanish flu in 1918-19 which is estimated to have
killed 1 to 2 per cent of humanity. In contrast to the corona virus, it was
most deadly to young adults and this has often been explained as a result of
their relatively stronger immune systems which overreacted to infection by
unleashing deadly ‘cytokine storms’ against lung cells.
But universal coverage is only a first step. It’s disappointing, to say the least, that in the primary debates neither Sanders or Warren has highlighted Big Pharma’s abdication of the research and development of new antibiotics and antivirals. Of the 18 largest pharmaceutical companies, 15 have totally abandoned the field. Heart medicines, addictive tranquilizers and treatments for male impotence are profit leaders, not the defenses against hospital infections, emergent diseases and traditional tropical killers. A universal vaccine for influenza – that is to say, a vaccine that targets the immutable parts of the virus’s surface proteins – has been a possibility for decades but never a profitable priority.
see also
Book
review: Late Victorian Holocausts - the famines that fed the empire
The current pandemic expands the argument: capitalist globalization now appears to be biologically unsustainable in the absence of a truly international public health infra-structure. But such an infrastructure will never exist until peoples’ movements break the power of Big Pharma and for-profit healthcare.
The original H1N1 found a favored niche in army camps and battlefield trenches where it scythed down young soldiers down by the tens of thousands. The collapse of the great German spring offensive of 1918 has been attributed to the fact that the Allies, in contrast to their enemy, could replenish their sick armies with newly arrived American troops....
It is rarely appreciated, however, that fully 60 per cent of global mortality occurred in western India where grain exports to Britain and brutal requisitioning practices coincided with a major drought. Resultant food shortages drove millions of poor people to the edge of starvation. They became victims of a sinister synergy between malnutrition, which suppressed their immune response to infection, and rampant bacterial & viral pneumonia.
March 12,
2020 - Source: Links
International Journal of Socialist Renewal COVID-19 is
finally the monster at the door. Researchers are working night and day to
characterize the outbreak but they are faced with three huge challenges. First the continuing
shortage or unavailability of test kits has vanquished all hope of containment.
Moreover it is preventing accurate estimates of key parameters such as
reproduction rate, size of infected population and number of benign infections.
The result is a chaos of numbers. There is, however,
more reliable data on the virus’s impact on certain groups in a few countries.
It is very scary. Italy and Britain, for example, are reporting a much higher
death rate among those over 65. The ‘corona flu’ that Trump waves off is an
unprecedented danger to geriatric populations, with a potential death toll in
the millions.
neoliberal economics is more ideology than science. Its devotees assume a world that exists only in the believer’s minds. Its assumptions blind its followers to the systemic failure of an economy that is destroying Earth’s capacity to support life while forcing most of the world’s people into an increasingly difficult daily struggle to fulfill their basic needs. The resulting social breakdown drives violence and support for authoritarian leaders.
Second, like annual influenzas, this virus is mutating as it courses through populations with different age compositions and acquired immunities. The variety that Americans are most likely to get is already slightly different from that of the original outbreak in Wuhan. Further mutation could be trivial or could alter the current distribution of virulence which ascends with age, with babies and small children showing scant risk of serious infection while octogenarians face mortal danger from viral pneumonia.
The original H1N1
notoriously found a favored niche in army camps and battlefield trenches where
it scythed down young soldiers down by the tens of thousands. The collapse of
the great German spring offensive of 1918, and thus the outcome of the war, has
been attributed to the fact that the Allies, in contrast to their enemy, could
replenish their sick armies with newly arrived American troops.
It is rarely
appreciated, however, that fully 60 per cent of global mortality occurred in
western India where grain exports to Britain and brutal requisitioning
practices coincided with a major drought. Resultant food shortages drove
millions of poor people to the edge of starvation. They became victims of a
sinister synergy between malnutrition, which suppressed their immune response
to infection, and rampant bacterial and viral pneumonia. In another case,
British-occupied Iran, several years of drought, cholera, and food shortages,
followed by a widespread malaria outbreak, preconditioned the death of an
estimated fifth of the population.
This history –
especially the unknown consequences of interactions with malnutrition and
existing infections - should warn us that COVID-19 might take a different and
more deadly path in the slums of Africa and South Asia. The danger to the
global poor has been almost totally ignored by journalists and Western
governments. The only published piece that I’ve seen claims that because the
urban population of West Africa is the world’s youngest, the pandemic should
have only a mild impact. In light of the 1918 experience, this is a foolish
extrapolation. No one knows what will happen over the coming weeks in Lagos,
Nairobi, Karachi, or Kolkata. The only certainty is that rich countries and
rich classes will focus on saving themselves to the exclusion of international
solidarity and medical aid. Walls not vaccines: could there be a more evil
template for the future?
A year from now we may
look back in admiration at China’s success in containing the pandemic but in
horror at the USA’s failure. (I’m making the heroic assumption that China’s
declaration of rapidly declining transmission is more or less accurate.) The
inability of our institutions to keep Pandora’s Box closed, of course, is
hardly a surprise. Since 2000 we’ve repeatedly seen breakdowns in frontline
healthcare.
The 2018 flu season,
for instance, overwhelmed hospitals across the country, exposing the shocking
shortage of hospital beds after twenty years of profit-driven cutbacks of
in-patient capacity (the industry’s version of just-in-time inventory
management). Private and charity hospital closures and nursing shortages,
likewise enforced by market logic, have devastated health services in poorer
communities and rural areas, transferring the burden to underfunded public
hospitals and VA facilities. ER conditions in such institutions are already
unable to cope with seasonal infections, so how will they cope with an imminent
overload of critical cases?
We are in the early
stages of a medical Katrina. Despite years of warnings about avian flu and
other pandemics, inventories of basic emergency equipment such as respirators
aren’t sufficient to deal with the expected flood of critical cases. Militant
nurses unions in California and other states are making sure that we all
understand the grave dangers created by inadequate stockpiles of essential protective
supplies like N95 face masks. Even more vulnerable because invisible are the
hundreds of thousands of low-wage and overworked homecare workers and nursing
home staff.
The nursing home and
assisted care industry which warehouses 2.5 million elderly Americans – most of
them on Medicare - has long been a national scandal. According to the New York
Times, an incredible 380,000 nursing home patients die every year from facilities’
neglect of basic infection control procedures. Many homes – particularly in
Southern states - find it cheaper to pay fines for sanitary violations than to
hire additional staff and provide them with proper training. Now, as the
Seattle example warns, dozens, perhaps hundreds more nursing homes will become
coronavirus hotspots and their minimum-wage employees will rationally choose to
protect their own families by staying home. In such a case the system could
collapse and we shouldn’t expect the National Guard to empty bedpans.
The outbreak has
instantly exposed the stark class divide in healthcare: those with good health
plans who can also work or teach from home are comfortably isolated provided
they follow prudent safeguards. Public employees and other groups of unionized
workers with decent coverage will have to make difficult choices between income
and protection. Meanwhile millions of low wage service workers, farm employees,
uncovered contingent workers, the unemployed and the homeless will be thrown to
the wolves. Even if Washington ultimately resolves the testing fiasco and
provides adequate numbers of kits, the uninsured will still have to pay doctors
or hospitals for administrating the tests. Overall family medical bills will
soar at the same time that millions of workers are losing their jobs and their
employer-provided insurance. Could there possibly be a stronger, more urgent
case in favor of Medicare for All?
But universal coverage is only a first step. It’s disappointing, to say the least, that in the primary debates neither Sanders or Warren has highlighted Big Pharma’s abdication of the research and development of new antibiotics and antivirals. Of the 18 largest pharmaceutical companies, 15 have totally abandoned the field. Heart medicines, addictive tranquilizers and treatments for male impotence are profit leaders, not the defenses against hospital infections, emergent diseases and traditional tropical killers. A universal vaccine for influenza – that is to say, a vaccine that targets the immutable parts of the virus’s surface proteins – has been a possibility for decades but never a profitable priority.
As the antibiotic
revolution is rolled back, old diseases will reappear alongside novel
infections and hospitals will become charnel houses. Even Trump can
opportunistically rail against absurd prescription costs, but we need a bolder
vision that looks to break up the drug monopolies and provide for the public
production of lifeline medicines. (This used to be the case: during World War
Two, the Army enlisted Jonas Salk and other researchers to develop the first
flu vaccine.) As I wrote fifteen years ago in my book The Monster at Our Door –
The Global Threat of Avian Flu:
Access to lifeline
medicines, including vaccines, antibiotics, and antivirals, should be a human
right, universally available at no cost. If markets can’t provide incentives to
cheaply produce such drugs, then governments and non-profits should take
responsibility for their manufacture and distribution. The survival of the poor
must at all times be accounted a higher priority than the profits of Big
Pharma.
The current pandemic
expands the argument: capitalist globalization now appears to be biologically
unsustainable in the absence of a truly international public health
infrastructure. But such an infrastructure will never exist until peoples’
movements break the power of Big Pharma and for-profit healthcare.
see also
