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Add an EventEnd of CDC masking guidelines aimed at “normalizing” death
End of CDC masking guidelines aimed at “normalizing” death
On Thursday, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced that it is no longer advising that individuals vaccinated against COVID-19 wear masks indoors or socially distance.
“Anyone who is fully vaccinated can participate in indoor and outdoor activities, large or small, without wearing a mask or physical distancing,” CDC Director Rochelle Walensky declared.
But with nearly two thirds of the American population not fully vaccinated, there is no effective way to determine who is vaccinated and who is not. The change in the CDC’s guidelines will mean that all people, whether vaccinated or unvaccinated, will be allowed to gather indoors, including at mass events like sporting events, without masks. The result will be a significant increase in the rate at which the disease spreads.
The CDC’s guidance is a political, not a scientific, decision. It is intended as a signal that all measures that impinge on business interests, from social distancing requirements to enhanced sanitary guidelines, are to be dropped. Factories and workplaces will be free to bunch workers up in groups, never clean surfaces or bathrooms, and send their employees into unmasked crowds.
Within 24 hours, several of the country’s largest retailers, including Walmart, Sam’s Club and Trader Joe’s, announced that they would no longer be enforcing mask mandates. More than 10 states, including Kansas and Minnesota, loosened mask restrictions in response to the CDC’s new guidelines.
The announcement came as a shock to epidemiologists. Following the release of the guidelines, the New York Times published an article entitled “Hundreds of Epidemiologists Expected Mask-Wearing in Public for at Least a Year.” In a survey of epidemiologists carried out in the month before the announcement, the Times found that “80 percent said they thought Americans would need to wear masks in public indoor places for at least another year. Just five percent said people would no longer need to wear masks indoors by this summer.”
“Unless the vaccination rates increase to 80 or 90 percent over the next few months, we should wear masks in large public indoor settings,” Vivian Towe, a program officer at the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, told the New York Times.
Commenting on the CDC proposal, Eric Feigl-Ding, Chief Health Economist for Microclinic International and senior fellow at the Federation of American Scientists, commented “KEEP WEARING THE MASK—We card-carrying epidemiologists (with formal doctorate in epidemiology) know what we are talking about.”
He added in a subsequent tweet, “you cannot distinguish who took off the mask after fully vaccinated versus who took it off / never wore it despite being not vaccinated.”
While vaccination is critical to containing and eradicating COVID-19, it is only partially effective. The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines claim to be 95 percent effective, meaning that one in twenty infections will still take place among vaccinated people.
The Johnson & Johnson vaccine is even less effective, with one study showing it was only 66 percent effective at blocking moderate to severe COVID-19. This reality was driven home when eight members of the New York Yankees baseball team and their managerial staff tested positive for COVID-19 in recent days, despite being fully vaccinated with the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.
From the beginning of the pandemic, the ruling class in the US and internationally responded by rejecting all necessary measures to save lives. The consequences have been catastrophic. The global death toll stands at more than 3.3 million. Daily new cases and daily deaths worldwide are near or at record levels.
In the United States, according to official figures, nearly 600,000 people have died from the COVID-19 pandemic. A recent study by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation estimated that the actual death toll is over 900,000—a figure greater than any war in US history.
Now, even the pretense that the disease is being combatted is being dropped. Instead of claiming to be stopping the spread of the disease, mass death from COVID-19 is being “normalized.” The pandemic will continue. New strains will spread, and workers are being told that they will simply have to accept widespread death as a fact of life.
In December 2020, when the US death toll stood at nearly 300,000, the WSWS explained:
The normalization of death arises from the decision, rooted in class interests, to treat “economic health” and “human life” as comparable phenomena, with the former prioritized over the latter. Once the legitimacy of the comparison and prioritization is accepted—as it is by the political establishment, the oligarchs and the media—mass death is viewed as unavoidable. It is from this awful calculus that the slogan emerges, “The cure can’t be worse than the disease.”
In the past five months, the death toll has doubled. A new administration has taken power, but the same policy continues. As part of this campaign, the number of daily deaths and infections in the US is not even being reported in news reports. However, the US death toll remains between 600 and 700 a day. Over 20,000 people died of COVID-19 over the past 30 days, and 868 people died of the disease on Wednesday alone. At this time last year, there were 24,000 daily new cases of COVID-19, compared to 40,000 today.
The end of mask mandates will eliminate another obstacle to the spread of COVID-19 variants, which are potentially more resistant to the immunity provided by vaccines and natural infection. Every day, more than 700,000 people around the world test positive for COVID-19, giving the virus more opportunities to mutate as it spreads. The potential risks of new variants of COVID-19 are unknowable and unknown.
The change in CDC guidelines has no scientific or public health validity. The Trump administration repeatedly pressured the CDC to falsify science to justify the administration’s goal of reopening schools and business. This reality has not changed under Biden, who has dedicated his administration to the single-minded pursuit of reopening schools, with the aim of getting the largest possible share of the population back into the labor force to swell the profits of major corporations and hold down rising demands by workers for wage increases.
Workers must not accept the CDC’s politically motivated guidance. They must demand that all those entering their workforce be masked, and that management allocate the necessary resources for the enforcement of strict hygiene protocols to stop the spread of COVID-19.
The fight for these demands is impossible within the framework of the trade unions. The same day as the CDC’s politically motivated guidance, American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten expressed her determination to break the resistance of teachers to the reopening of schools, declaring, “There is no doubt: Schools must be open. In person. Five days a week.”
Workers cannot accept that tens of thousands of people will
die every month in the United States, together with hundreds
of thousands around the world. The struggle to contain the
pandemic is inseparable from the creation of rank-and-file
committees in every workplace, and the fight to arm the
working class with a socialist perspective to overthrow the
capitalist system that subordinates the preservation of
human life to private profit.
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The World Socialist Web Site continues today with this information-- which is widely censored by people who prefer convenience and a return to an older status quo which exploding world inequality has ensured to be impossible:
Survey of epidemiologists exposes lies that children do not spread COVID-19
by Evan Blake at the World Socialist Web Site
In an article published Saturday by the New York Times, a survey of 723 epidemiologists made clear the central role that children play in spreading COVID-19. The findings contradict claims made throughout the pandemic by the entire political establishment of supposedly minimal dangers posed to children and society as a whole by the policy of reopening schools.
The report also exposes the reckless and anti-scientific decision by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), under the direction of the Biden administration, to end guidelines that call for all individuals to wear masks indoors and socially distance. A central aim of this change is to facilitate the reopening of schools for in-person learning before it is safe.
The Times article, titled “723 Epidemiologists on When and How the U.S. Can Fully Return to Normal,” begins, “Covid-19 cases are decreasing in the United States, and masks are no longer required everywhere, but the pandemic is not over—and won’t be until younger children can also be vaccinated.”
The Times writes, “Half of respondents said at least 80 percent of Americans, including children, would need to be vaccinated before it would be safe to do most activities without precautions. Though children are less likely than adults to develop severe cases of Covid-19, the scientists said their immunity was important because they could be hosts for the virus and a way for it to continue to circulate or develop new variants.”
Corinne McDaniels-Davidson, the director of the San Diego State University Institute for Public Health, told the Times, “Children cannot be left out of the equation as we reopen.” She added, “The ideas that they cannot transmit Covid or are immune from disease are pervasive among the lay public. We need education here.”
The lie that children do not readily transmit the coronavirus—disproved by multiple studies at the very beginning of the pandemic—was promoted by the Trump administration and continued under Biden. Upon his election, Biden pledged to resume in-person learning at all schools where children were still learning safely from home, with his top economic advisor Brian Deese bluntly stating that this was “so that parents … can get back to work.”
In February, Biden lied directly to a second-grade student at a CNN town hall event, stating, “Kids don’t get … COVID very often. It’s unusual for that to happen.” On April 30, he reiterated this lie in an NBC News interview, saying, “There’s not overwhelming evidence that there’s much of a transmission among these people, young people,” concluding that schools “should probably all be open.”
The Times’ survey demonstrates that the single most destructive decision that could be made in February and March was to open the schools and allow the virus to spread, which is exactly what was done. This has been a major reason that daily new cases and deaths have declined so slowly in the US. Over 30,000 people continue to become infected each day despite the fact that nearly 37 percent of the population is now fully vaccinated. Roughly 1.5 million people have been infected and 20,853 have died from COVID-19 in the past month alone. Since Biden’s inauguration, more than 175,000 people have succumbed to the virus, with the seven-day average now standing at 613 deaths each day.
The drive to reopen schools has never been based on science, but rather aimed at compelling parents to return to work in order to expand corporate profits and the stock market, which has risen astronomically during the pandemic.
A critical aspect of the Times survey of epidemiologists is their consensus on the scientific need to maintain mask-wearing and other measures to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. The article notes, “In particular, they say that masks are a norm that should continue, even if that view puts them at odds with the new CDC guidance. More than 80 percent of them say people should continue to wear masks when indoors with strangers for at least another year, and outdoors in crowds.”
In direct opposition to these experts, last Thursday the CDC encouraged vaccinated people to stop wearing masks indoors, absurdly using the “honor system” under conditions where millions of Americans deny that the virus is even real. Numerous major retailers and large businesses—including Walmart, Costco, Publix, Trader Joe’s and Starbucks—have immediately dropped their mask mandates.
On Sunday, CNN chief medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta said the CDC “made a critical error here in surprising basically everyone with a very significant change.” Gupta told CNN that when he spoke to leading CDC officials earlier last week, they had told him that indoor masking would likely be one of the last mitigation measures lifted, because “it is so effective and it’s not that hard to do in most situations—just to put a mask on.”
While the CDC claim that their decision is based on “science,” one of the studies they cite from Israel found that 14 percent of individuals who were fully vaccinated with the Pfizer vaccine had asymptomatic infections. Following the new guidelines, millions of vaccinated people could continue to unknowingly spread COVID-19.
The unexpected shift in CDC guidelines was driven by political calculations and profit interests. Underscoring the calculated character of the decision is the fact that it was announced hours after American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten gave a speech in which she declared, “There is no doubt: Schools must be open. In person. Five days a week.”
Over the past year, Weingarten and the AFT, as well as the National Education Association (NEA) and their state and local affiliates, have been the linchpin of the school reopening campaign. In February, Weingarten told the Times that she spends upwards of 15 hours each day on the phone with the White House, the CDC and local union officials, orchestrating the reopening of every major Democrat-led school district that had remained closed under Trump.
As a member of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), Weingarten is a political operative who personifies the corporatist character of all the trade unions, which over the past 40 years have been integrated with the state and serve the interests of the capitalist class. Weingarten has a base salary of roughly $500,000, which places her in the top one percent of income earners in the US.
Weingarten and the unions’ hostility to rank-and-file educators, whom they have allowed to become infected en masse over the past year, has been extended to tens of millions of children increasingly herded back into unsafe classrooms. The CDC itself has estimated that nearly 26.7 million children under 18 have been infected with COVID-19. A recent study found that roughly 10–15 percent of all infected children develop “long COVID,” meaning that up to 4 million children may already be suffering from long-term complications, the majority undoubtedly infected in reopened schools.
The pandemic is a global medical and social crisis, in which developments in any country affect all other countries. New infections are now at their high point globally, fueled by more infectious and lethal variants that can become resistant to existing vaccines. In Brazil, where the P.1 variant has decimated the country and surrounding region, one study estimates that more than 2,200 children under five have died from COVID-19.
The premature reopening of all schools and nonessential workplaces under these conditions, which can only lead to a major surge of new infections and deaths, is a monumental social crime that must be prevented. Alarm bells must be raised in every school, workplace and neighborhood, with every effort made to scientifically educate workers in order to counter the bourgeois propaganda that saturates all aspects of society.
There is enormous opposition to the ruling class response to the pandemic and the prioritization of profits over lives. To carry out a successful fightback, the working class must unify on a global scale through the development of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees, wholly independent of the corporatist trade unions and the capitalist parties. Above all, a revolutionary socialist leadership must be built to arm the working class with a Marxist understanding of society and to guide the coming struggles to a successful conclusion.
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