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Globally, COVID-19 infections, hospitalizations and deaths are increasing in the fourth winter of the pandemic as the highly infectious and immune-resistant JN.1 variant spreads worldwide. Wherever wastewater samples are taken, the virus transmission rate is currently the highest or second highest of the entire pandemic.
This ongoing wave of mass infections underscores the utter criminality of the World Health Organization (WHO), the Biden administration, and other national health authorities, which ended their respective COVID-19 public health emergency declarations last May. These unscientific and politically motivated decisions resulted in almost all surveillance of the pandemic being lifted while masses of people were falsely misled into believing that the pandemic was over.
At two extraordinary press conferences last week, WHO officials highlighted the ongoing dangers of the pandemic while hypocritically warning the world’s population to stop taking precautions, ignoring their own guilt.
The Director General of the World Health Organization Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (center) declared the coronavirus pandemic a public health emergency of international concern in March 2020. [Photo: Fabrice Coffrini]
On Wednesday, January 10, WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said transmission of the COVID-19 virus increased worldwide in December, due to the holidays and the development of the JN.1 variant. He added :
In December, nearly 10,000 deaths from COVID-19 were reported to the WHO, and there was a 42% increase in hospitalizations and a 62% increase in intensive care unit admissions compared to November. However, the trends are [en matière de mortalité] are based on data from fewer than 50 countries, mainly Europe and America. There are certainly increases in other countries that are not reported.
Only 29 countries provide information on the number of hospital admissions and only 21 countries on intensive care admissions. Again, the reason this data is so rare is that the vast majority of countries completely dismantled their pandemic surveillance systems in response to the WHO’s end of the public health emergency last May.
Two days later, Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO technical lead for COVID-19, during another WHO press conference on its web TV dedicated to the co-spread of COVID, influenza and respiratory pathogens: “Essentially given the lifting of measures in the public sector Health and social measures and the opening of the world, these viruses, these bacteria, which move effectively from person to person by air, are taking advantage of the situation.
Van Kerkhove said access to vaccines remains a challenge in much of the world. He noted that where vaccines are available, demand and uptake are very low, raising concerns about older and more vulnerable people, including immunocompromised people and pregnant women. Then she issued a dire warning:
Today, it is important to know that the public health risk from COVID remains high worldwide. There is a pathogen circulating in every country […] Data based on cases reported to WHO is not a reliable indicator and has not been for several years. When we look at the epidemiological curve, we have the impression that the virus has disappeared, but that is not the case.
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Van Kerkhove added: “According to wastewater estimates we have received from a number of countries, the actual spread of SARS-CoV-2 is two to nineteen times higher than reported.” And the difficult thing is that the virus is constantly evolving. Although she noted that the number of deaths has decreased significantly compared to two years ago, there are still around 10,000 official COVID deaths per month.
However, Van Kerkhove said that figure represented less than a quarter of all countries reporting data and that half of the official deaths were in the United States alone, meaning it is an undercount. The massive list is simply due to a lack of reporting. She stated bluntly: “There are no deaths in countries around the world. It is not because these countries do not report deaths that there are none.”
Official figures for January are expected to rise due to heavy JN.1 traffic and the many large indoor gatherings that took place over the holidays.
Van Kerkhove acknowledged that the pandemic is not under control, noting:
On the one hand, we believe that COVID poses far too great a burden on countries, even if we see a reduction in impact, while we can prevent it through adequate testing, adequate access to and use of antivirals, adequate clinical care and medical oxygen and of course vaccination […] COVID still poses a threat to public health and poses far too great a burden even if we can prevent it.
Van Kerkhove estimates that there are currently hundreds of thousands of people hospitalized with COVID worldwide, based on the limited data available.
Van Kerkhove then acknowledged that the post-acute phase of COVID-19 infections, known as long-COVID, is significant. She said 6% to 10% of symptomatic cases can progress to a long COVID infection, potentially affecting multiple organs throughout the body and leading to debilitating conditions that can last 12 months or longer.
A simple calculation means that in the current global wave alone, tens or hundreds of millions of people will develop some level of long COVID. It is not an exaggeration to describe Long-COVID as a mass paralysis event and a pandemic within a pandemic.
Van Kerkhove then warned: “We don’t know the long-term effects of repeated infections.” […] What worries us is what we will see in five years, in ten years, in twenty years in terms of cardiac, pulmonary or neurological disorders; We do not know it. We don’t know everything about this virus. She added that the problem is significant and that research to better understand and treat long-COVID is severely underfunded.
The grim reports from these two senior WHO officials raise the question: Why are they not acting to quickly restore the public health emergency and urge all governments around the world to reimpose strict coronavirus containment measures to slow the spread of the virus ? .
It is clear that the WHO’s abrupt departure from the public health emergency last May, a week before the Biden administration took office, came under strong pressure from American imperialism, to which the WHO agreed. The reason for this was political pressure and no significant change in the threat that COVID-19 still poses to public health.
Given recent findings that Omicron’s JN.1 lineage appears to have a predilection for the lower respiratory tract and the associated risk of the virus reverting to previous, more virulent forms, it is imperative to restore the state of emergency and the To comprehensively protect the public, health programs are massively funded in all countries.
Instead, all governments around the world have imposed a brutal policy of “forever COVID”, consisting of incessant waves of infections with an extremely dangerous virus that damages not only the respiratory organs, but all organ systems of the body, and there is more and more evidence of this Long-term consequences of continuing this policy will have a significant impact on the health of the global population.
As the second part of the New Year’s Declaration 2024 World Socialist Web SiteThe only viable solution to current and future public health crises is a global elimination strategy, which has proven possible even in the face of the highly infectious Omicron variant, as demonstrated by efforts in Shanghai in spring 2023.
Point 28 of the statement states:
The continued success of COVID Zero in China has demonstrated the viability of a strategy to eliminate COVID-19, even in the least developed and most densely populated countries. At the same time, his task confirmed the impracticability of any national program in the age of imperialism. What proved unsustainable was the national framework, not the policy itself. Elimination remains both feasible and necessary, but can now only be achieved by building a mass movement fighting for the following principles:
The fight against the pandemic is a political and revolutionary matter that requires a socialist solution.
The organization of public health must be based on social needs and not corporate profits.
Private profit must be completely removed from all healthcare, pharmaceutical and insurance businesses.
Only a globally coordinated strategy can address the COVID-19 pandemic and create the conditions for the development of comprehensive strategies to prevent pathogens that can cause epidemics and pandemics. The WHO leaders’ comments confirm the conclusions reached by the WSWS in the New Year’s Statement:
Four years into the pandemic, it is abundantly clear that such a comprehensive strategy will never see the light of day in global capitalism, which subordinates all public health spending to the insatiable profit interests of a greedy financial oligarchy. The very idea that a disease must be eliminated or eradicated, a central concept of public health, has been abandoned. Only a global socialist revolution will end the pandemic and stop the descent into capitalist barbarism and World War III.
(Article published in English on January 15, 2024)
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