Good am David. I thought it was quite clear and implicit in what I said, that that I thought the USA administration policies have been dangerous in the “cuts”. Dangerous for USA citizens in their right to receive any health care in their home country. I did not say or imply how dangerous it was for the world. But that is pretty clear. There is a lot to say to fully address your specific question. I will however only give a very brief summary without the facts/timelines/fully references for my assertions below. In passing I would say that the WSWS has a particularly good reporting trend on healthh, and carries quite a lot of specific data. In any case - in brief:
1. The cuts across anything to do with health science research - have severely damaged potential for health of the American people inside the USA. Simply in terms of labour power to be able to deal with issues ( https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01537-1 ). But they have substantially eroded world wide efforts to contain disease threats. The attacks in specific upon the international funding for CDC and the other world aid funding for disease control have been massive. 2. The WHO have been blamed for having been slow. But this is false because they did not have the sites available to their teams to be sure of what was happening. It is perhaps true that the older USA funded and staffed system might have been perhaps 1-2 days faster. But that is the whole point - that system was pulled. This situation will recur. 3. As I wrote - I think very early on in COVID and before most left press raised due alerts ( Marxism-Leninism Currents Today; "How should Marxists view the COVID-19 Pandemic of 2019-2020? March 14, 2020 at: https://mlcurrents.net/2020/03/17/how-should-marxists-view-the-covid-19-pandemic-of-2019-2020/ ): “ #4 How did this come about? Can root causes be identified? Racist finger-pointing is abhorrent and Marxists should not indulge it. Especially since it is apparent that while food habits might be problematic for spreading zoonoses, this applies world-wide. Game delicacies in the Western society, are another potential source of zoonoses. Does anyone recall the Jacob-Creutzfeldt outbreak in the UK (which is one causal vector for dementia) owing to capitalist ‘intensive’ farming habits? Yet, the likelihood is high that vectors for this outbreak came through the pangolin market in Wuhan. More central to the question “How?” - is that there are some fundamental root causes to consider. Undoubtedly the human world has become more fraught, more crowded and ever fuller of potential for zoonoses. As pointed out by Morens et al, in the New England Journal of Medicine: “We must realize that in our crowded world of 7.8 billion people, a combination of altered human behaviors, environmental changes, and inadequate global public health mechanisms now easily turn obscure animal viruses into existential human threats. We have created a global, human- dominated ecosystem that serves as a playground for the emergence and host-switching of animal viruses, especially genetically error-prone RNA viruses, whose high mutation rates have, for millions of years, provided opportunities to switch to new hosts in new ecosystems. It took the genome of the human species 8 million years to evolve by1%. Many animal RNA viruses can evolve by more than 1% in a matter of days. It is not difficult to understand why we increasingly see the emergence of zoonotic viruses. … We have reached this point because of continuing increases in the human population, crowding, human movement, environmental alteration, and ecosystemic complexity related to human activities and creations.“ (David M. Morens, Peter Daszak, and Jeffery K. Taubenberger, ‘Escaping Pandora’s Box — Another Novel Coronavirus New England J Medicine; February 26, 2020 ). These authors also note the new(ish) diseases from varying virus bugs that have been released by human practices, including: “H5N1, H7N9 pandemic influenza viruses originally of wild waterfowl and chickens (‘bird-flu’); SARS, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS); Covid -19 (bat viruses); HIV from monkey primates; arenaviruses (Argentine and Bolivian hemorrhagic fever) and agricultural practices; Nipah virus from bats in SE Asia to pigs”. (Morens Ibid ) As Morens and co-workers point out, these infections have been in a series of waves that have hit humans. But they draw back from the abyss of naming the beast of capitalism however. Marxists and progressives have pointed out both the waves of infections, and the underlying cause for some time. For example, here is Rob Wallace in an interview with a German socialist magazine - Marx 21: “The real danger of each new outbreak is the failure –or better put—the expedient refusal to grasp that each new Covid-19 is no isolated incident. The increased occurrence of viruses is closely linked to food production and the profitability of multinational corporations. Anyone who aims to understand why viruses are becoming more dangerous must investigate the industrial model of agriculture and, more specifically, livestock production. At present, few governments, and few scientists, are prepared to do so. Quite the contrary…. When the new outbreaks spring up, governments, the media, and even most of the medical establishment are so focused on each separate emergency that they dismiss the structural causes that are driving multiple marginalized pathogens into sudden global celebrity, one after the other.” (Yaak Pabst talking with Rob Wallace; Coronavirus: “Agribusiness Would Risk Millions Of Deaths”; International; 11 March 2020; at: https://www.marx21.de/coronavirus-agribusiness-would-risk-millions-of-deaths/ ) To be unequivocally clear – it is Capital that is the driving force, as pointed out by Rob Wallace: “Capital is spearheading land grabs into the last of primary forest and smallholder-held farmland worldwide. These investments drive the deforestation and development leading to disease emergence. The functional diversity and complexity these huge tracts of land represent are being streamlined in such a way that previously boxed-in pathogens are spilling over into local livestock and human communities. In short, capital centers, places such as London, New York, and Hong Kong, should be considered our primary disease hotspots.” (Yaak Pabst talking with Rob Wallace; Coronavirus: “Agribusiness Would Risk Millions Of Deaths”; International; 11 March 2020; at: https://www.marx21.de/coronavirus-agribusiness-would-risk-millions-of-deaths/ ) -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. 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