The Delinquent Dozen of pandemic profiteers -- A report on billionaire wealth versus community health

‘There are few stories more sordid than the surging wealth gains of the world’s billionaire class during a pandemic when so many have lost their lives, health, and livelihoods. A handful of billionaires and corporations have seen their wealth surge to record levels, in part as a result of their monopoly status and opportunism during the pandemic...

‘Meanwhile, private equity firms have bought up essential businesses in the health care, grocery, and pet care industries, only to aggressively cut costs, skimp on worker safety, and load companies up with debt to boost their own profits. Hundreds of thousands of essential workers employed by these companies have remained vulnerable and exposed. These frontline workers risk their lives every day to do the work that increases already obscene corporate wealth.

‘This report focuses on a list of 12 emblematic bad actors. We call them the Delinquent Dozen — corporations that should do significantly more to protect their workers as their owners and executives continue to reap billions.’

Read here (Inequality.org, Nov 18, 2020)

Covid-19 a ‘perfect storm’ for organ trafficking victims

‘Fewer transplants means a huge unmet demand for organs... Rising inequality pushing disadvantaged to take desperate measures... Social media facilitates trade’

Read here (SciDev, Nov 5, 2020)

Emerging humanitarian Covid-19 crisis in Sabah: Bridget Welsh & Calvin Cheng

‘Sabah’s Covid-19 situation transcends health. A crucial part of this is recognising the difficult economic circumstances on the ground. Many of these are the product of failings in policy in the past, with the crisis bringing deep vulnerabilities to the surface. Socio-economic conditions are worsening with the lockdown. Even before 2020, Sabah’s economy had been in a tight spot. The state’s relatively high reliance on commodity-related economic activity (roughly half of the Sabah economy in 2019 was derived from commodity agriculture and mining), along with a sizable tourism sector, means that a large share of Sabah’s economy is subject to the whims of the global economy.’

Read here (Malaysiakini, Oct 25, 2020)

Covid-19 has exposed the catastrophic impact of privatising vital services

‘The Covid-19 pandemic has exposed the catastrophic fallout of decades of global privatisation and market competition. When the pandemic hit, we saw hospitals being overwhelmed, caregivers forced to work with virtually no protective equipment, nursing homes turned into morgues, long queues to access tests, and schools struggling to connect with children confined to their homes. People were being urged to stay at home when many had no decent roof over their heads, no access to water and sanitation, and no social protection. 

‘For many years, vital public goods and services have been steadily outsourced to private companies. This has often resulted in inefficiency, corruption, dwindling quality, increasing costs and subsequent household debt, further marginalising poorer people and undermining the social value of basic needs like housing and water. We need a radical change in direction.’

Read here (The Guardian, Oct 19, 2020)

Pope says capitalism failed humanity during coronavirus pandemic

“The fragility of world systems in the face of the pandemic has demonstrated that not everything can be resolved by market freedom... It is imperative to have a proactive economic policy directed at ‘promoting an economy that favors productive diversity and business creativity’ and makes it possible for jobs to be created, not cut.” The pope also restated the past calls for the redistribution of wealth, saying those with much should “administer it for the good of all.” But he clarified that he was “not proposing an authoritarian and abstract universalism.”

Read here (DW, Oct 4, 2020)

Offline: Covid-19 is not a pandemic -- It is a syndemic: Richard Horton

‘The most important consequence of seeing COVID-19 as a syndemic is to underline its social origins. The vulnerability of older citizens; Black, Asian, and minority ethnic communities; and key workers who are commonly poorly paid with fewer welfare protections points to a truth so far barely acknowledged—namely, that no matter how effective a treatment or protective a vaccine, the pursuit of a purely biomedical solution to COVID-19 will fail. Unless governments devise policies and programmes to reverse profound disparities, our societies will never be truly COVID-19 secure. 

‘As Singer and colleagues wrote in 2017, “A syndemic approach provides a very different orientation to clinical medicine and public health by showing how an integrated approach to understanding and treating diseases can be far more successful than simply controlling epidemic disease or treating individual patients.” I would add one further advantage. Our societies need hope. The economic crisis that is advancing towards us will not be solved by a drug or a vaccine. Nothing less than national revival is needed. Approaching COVID-19 as a syndemic will invite a larger vision, one encompassing education, employment, housing, food, and environment. Viewing COVID-19 only as a pandemic excludes such a broader but necessary prospectus.’

Read here (The Lancet, Sept 26, 2020)

Covid-19 and health equity — Time to think big

To achieve health equity, we need to reach beyond the health care system — and think big. New social policies on a few key fronts could advance both health equity and the Covid-19 response.

• First, we propose establishing a universal food income.
• Second, we recommend reforming unemployment insurance.
• Finally, we need policies supporting investment in community development.

Read here (New England Journal of Medicine,  Sept 17, 2020)

Winners and losers of the pandemic economy

‘One could draw a few conclusions from these economic realities. For starters, the pandemic economy has accelerated the pre-pandemic trend favoring intangible-asset value creation through firms with relatively fewer employees. We can expect this trend to continue, albeit not at the heightened pandemic-induced pace. Traditional businesses will recover, but the disconnect between value creation across firms depending on intangibles per employee will persist and remain a major economic and social challenge...

‘Finally, given the outsize contribution of digital intangible assets to value creation, it is hard to see a way to reverse the trend of rising wealth inequality. Because the balance sheets of those lower down the income and wealth ladder are largely devoid of assets with high intangible and digital content, the rewards of current economic and technological dynamics will pass them by.’

Read here (Project Syndicate, August 31, 2020)

The unequal scramble for coronavirus vaccines — by the numbers

‘Wealthy countries have struck deals to buy more than two billion doses of coronavirus vaccine in a scramble that could leave limited supplies in the coming year. Meanwhile, an international effort to acquire vaccines for low- and middle-income countries is struggling to gain traction.’

Read here (Nature, August 24, 2020)

Race for virus vaccine could leave poor countries behind

‘As the race for a vaccine against the new coronavirus intensifies, rich countries are rushing to place advance orders for the inevitably limited supply to guarantee their citizens get immunised first, leaving significant questions about whether developing countries will get any vaccine before the pandemic ends.

‘Earlier this month, the United Nations, International Red Cross and Red Crescent, and others said it was a "moral imperative" that everyone have access to a "people's vaccine". But such grand declarations are unenforceable and without a detailed strategy, the allocation of vaccines could be messy.’

Read here (Aljazeera, June 18, 2020)

Scathing Covid-19 book from Lancet editor — rushed but useful

‘Since the coronavirus crisis began, Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of leading medical journal The Lancet, has been tearing across the British public sphere. Here he is on the BBC, the national broadcaster, there in the pages of The Guardian newspaper — taking the government to task for failures that have left the United Kingdom with the world’s second-highest per capita COVID-19 death toll so far (Belgium is top). Horton has never shied away from controversy (his journal published the retracted, fraudulent paper by Andrew Wakefield that alleged a non-existent link between vaccines with autism) or crusades (against the Iraq war and for political action on climate change). In coronavirus, he has found a cause that matches his energy: the Lancet journals are pumping out both the latest research and his pointed critiques of government policy; and last month, he reviewed a new book by the Slovenian Marxist philosopher Slavoj Žižek that imagines economic and social worlds after COVID-19.

‘Now Horton has a book of his own. The COVID-19 Catastrophe is a sort of history, diagnosis and prescription, in real time. It is wide ranging, querying the changing role of international cooperation and the fallout of austerity economics, and taking a deeper dive into China’s scientific and political response to the crisis than most Western media have offered. But the book returns again and again to the catastrophe in both the United Kingdom and the United States. It is haunted by the question: how did two of the richest, most powerful and most scientifically advanced countries in the world get it so wrong, and cause such ongoing pain for their citizens?’

Read here (Nature, June 18, 2020)

US in the spring of the pandemic

‘The gnawing anger beneath the pandemic is that democracy itself is being rewired in our absence. The system has failed us, the system is guaranteed to go on failing us, but while we the people are out of the picture, others are making grand, world-altering decisions. The powerful are rewriting the social contract while we watch TV and console ourselves with booze and simple chores.’

Read here (Le Monde Diplomatique, June 2020)

How coronavirus tore through Britain's ethnic minorities

‘In a report released on Tuesday, Public Health England (PHE) acknowledged the disproportionate effect the pandemic has had on Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (Bame) people, including making us more likely to become critically ill, and to die. Black people are almost four times more likely to die of Covid-19, according to the Office of National Statistics, while Asians are up to twice as likely to die.’

Read here (BBC, June 3, 2020)

The coronavirus was an emergency until Trump found out who was dying

‘This is a very old and recognizable story—political and financial elites displaying a callous disregard for the workers of any race who make their lives of comfort possible. But in America, where labor and race are so often intertwined, the racial contract has enabled the wealthy to dismiss workers as both undeserving and expendable. White Americans are also suffering, but the perception that the coronavirus is largely a black and brown problem licenses elites to dismiss its impact. In America, the racial contract has shaped the terms of class war for centuries; the COVID contract shapes it here.’

Read here (The Atlantic, May 8, 2020)

Covid-19’s race and class warfare

‘America has never been comfortable discussing the inequalities that America created, let alone addressing them. America loves a feel-good, forget-the-past-let’s-start-from-here mantra. But, this virus is exploiting these man-made inequalities and making them impossible to ignore. It is demonstrating the incalculable callousness of wealth and privilege that would willingly thrust the less well off into the most danger for a few creature comforts.’

Read here (New York Times, May 3, 2020)

Coronavirus is accelerating eight challenging mega trends

‘...be in no doubt, as the long days at home seem to pass ever so slowly: in its effect on societies, politics and the distribution of power in the world, COVID-19 is on track to be the Great Accelerator.’

1. Eurozone existential crisis: ‘To put it crudely, Italians will not work as productively as Germans, and Germans will not agree to pay off the debts of Italians.’ 
2. Trans-Pacific tensions: ‘...the process of “deglobalisation” - more of what we consume being made closer to home, even if it is more expensive - will accelerate.
3. Greater rise of the Asian tigers: ‘[Asia] was already going to account for 90 per cent of new middle-class people in the next decade. Perhaps we can revise that up to 95 per cent now.’
4. Oil price volatility: ‘Countries dependent on oil production already faced forecasts that petroleum demand would peak and fall before 2030.’ We have in recent days seen negative oil prices.
5. Politics of inequality: ‘It will push to the forefront of politics fundamental issues about the taxation of wealth, the case for basic incomes provided by governments, and the responsibility of companies for their employees.’
6. Debts: ‘Political parties will campaign for debt forgiveness and write-offs, and for the cancelling by central banks of money borrowed by governments, with inflationary consequences.’
7. Data: ‘Once we are all carrying around an app on our phones to show where we have been and who we have met, pressure will grow to use that information for other purposes.’
8. Crisis as the mother of innovation: ‘More optimistically, they have one positive companion - the massive incentive this crisis provides for innovation’

Read here (The Age, April 21, 2020)

What history can teach us about building a fairer society after coronavirus

‘In recent weeks, some people have optimistically predicted that the Covid-19 outbreak will force governments to build fairer economic systems. But the peasants’ story reminds us that change isn’t automatic, and Spain’s history shows that the bad guys can take advantage of a crisis, too. Look at the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, seizing the right to rule by decree while citing Covid-19 as his excuse.

‘There are great strategic challenges ahead. Lockdown gives workers and renters power – the government has to pay people not to work, and landlords are struggling to evict tenants or get new ones – but it will not last. While previous pandemics cut the labour force, this crisis will increase unemployment, perhaps to levels unknown for centuries, and bosses will exploit workers’ desperation so that they can keep wages low and conditions poor.’

Read here (The Guardian, April 18, 2020)

Covid-19 is an opportunity for gender equality within the workplace and at home

‘Crisis can be an opportunity for gendered change: WW1 was a watershed moment for women’s emancipation with large swathes being added to the workforce, and the creation of women’s institutes, which latterly led to women’s suffrage. We hope that covid-19 can be another such movement for greater gender-equality in the workplace. To do so we need to stop apologising for personal lives, and let’s see more children on conference calls.’

Read here (BMJ Opinion, April 15, 2020)

Covid-19: The gendered impacts of the outbreak

‘Experience from past outbreaks shows the importance of incorporating a gender analysis into preparedness and response efforts to improve the effectiveness of health interventions and promote gender and health equity goals. During the 2014–16 west African outbreak of Ebola virus disease, gendered norms meant that women were more likely to be infected by the virus, given their predominant roles as caregivers within families and as front-line health-care workers...’

Read here (The Lancet, March 6, 2020)

Economic growth is an unnecessary evil, Jacinda Ardern is right to deprioritise it

‘New guidance on policy suggests all new spending must advance one of five government priorities: improving mental health, reducing child poverty, addressing the inequalities faced by indigenous Maori and Pacific islands people, thriving in a digital age, and transitioning to a low-emission, sustainable economy.

‘Take a look at the biggest problems faced world-wide and you would be hard pushed to find examples that are more grave than the ones set out in Ardern’s provisional proposals. Rising inequality, a mental health crisis and climate change are all significant threats, but as long as other major economies prioritise economic growth over wellbeing New Zealand may become a lone wolf trapped in an increasingly hungry bear pit.’

Read here (The London Economic, May 31, 2019)