COVID’s Harsh Lesson:

All Human Life Has Equal Value

We are now entering the third year of COVID. More Americans died from the virus in 2021 than in 2020, even though we have vaccines, science and common sense. This did not have to happen.

COVID has many lessons to teach. In so many ways it is forcing Americans to confront the dark history of this country. Omicron’s lesson is both harsh and unprecedented. For the first time, Americans are realizing that their own individual health, and that of their families depends on… the health of people in Africa and their families!

This latest variant appeared in Africa in early November; by Christmas, it was the dominant variant in the United States. Recognizing our global interconnections can no longer be avoided. Good luck with that historical white supremacy that preaches that colored people have no rights that white people must respect. Yet this blatant racism is fundamental to how the US approaches COVID and public health.

Currently, the US government hoards vaccines and refuses to force Big Pharma to share the recipe for vaccines with the rest of the world. In Africa, only about 10% of the people have received at least one dose, and these of course are the rich and powerful. That means that hundreds of millions of people in Africa, and billions around the world, are forced to be the reservoir in which the virus keeps mutating.

Well, said the virus, we told you so. Viruses multiply thousands of times fasters than human beings. This is their great strength. Each new generation has new mutations, most of which have no effect. However, the super-rapid rate of reproduction means new COVID variants constantly appear. Vaccinating the world costs less than the billions Jeff Bezos has made just since the pandemic began. It could be also achieved by a one-time 10% cut in the US trillion-dollar military budget.

The government refuses to take such steps, choosing instead to let corporations profit from massive human death. And, we are supposed to cheer Jeff Bezos riding into space in a private rocket, as thousands more sicken, since it seems his life is worth more than ours.

The government is unnecessarily giving the virus opportunities billions of opportunities to mutate. Official US policies, both under Trump and Biden, allow COVID to infect billions, so it is constantly adapting and evolving. COVID certainly has shown that it has the capacity to

transform itself into something far, far more deadly than we have seen so far.

While so far, the virus is less of a danger to children, there is no guarantee that the next variant will not specifically target this fertile ground for reproduction. Evolution doesn’t stop, but the conditions for its volatility can certainly be suppressed. But capitalism simply can’t do it.

Infectious diseases are always tangled up with social inequalities that breed disease. They are both a result of poverty and a consequence of poverty. We see both sides with COVID.

But capitalism is based in markets which are designed to be unequal. There is no private profit to be made unless people are excluded. The more exclusive, the higher the price. The higher the price, the greater the private profit. But the private control and replacement of public health b by the market makes us sick.

As the pandemic erupted in March, 2020, what was needed was a federally centralized and coordinated comprehensive plan to employ well-understood public health measures like masking, distancing, testing, and tracing. Countries that did this (these were all countries with guaranteed public health care) have had relatively few deaths. President Donald Trump instead put the market in charge. The results were predictable.

Dr Deborah Brix, who supposedly lead the pandemic response, got all juiced about “unleashing the power of the private sector” to end the pandemic. Corporations were not ready to address the collective need. They could not meet the need for medical equipment, tests, trained personnel, etc. Yet the federal government left the distribution of tests to the market anyway which produced huge backlogs and forced states to out-bid each other for scarce resources, which drove prices through the ceiling. Public health was turned into commodities.

People were forced to continue working, with essential workers forced to make a choice between the health of their family vs making an income. Europe, on the other hand, paid everyone some 75% of their wages to stay home. Except for Britain and Sweden, governments used their powers to compel the far more rapid production of everything public health workers needed to fight the virus. Britain and Sweden have the highest percent of deaths in Europe.

Free market chaos can never the serve public good nor public health. The result was America once again lead the world, this time with over a million deaths, including those which were never counted due to lack of medical infrastructure. This is figured to be about 300,000 deaths.

Fraudulent tests flooded the market, some with less than 20% accuracy. Two billion dollars were lavished on corporations that had never even been involved in testing before. Testing was individualized by take-home tests that could never produce the aggregate data the public needs to understand the ebb and flow of the pandemic. New billionaires popped up overnight. The federal government immediately bailed out corporations and the financial market with some $5 trillion, though the needs of people were virtually ignored. Profits were socialized. No market was in play.

Yet for people, the ruling class crows that markets are the most efficient way to bring the right goods to the right people in the right time. That is certainly not our experience with COVID. The market, by definition, is driven by and feeds off inequality. This is the foundation of our racial capitalism. No one has to decree that African-Americans should die from COVID at three times the rate of Anglo-Americans. This is just the famous “hidden hand of the market” at work.

Those who reject the necessity of public health are really proposing that individual measures against the disease are better and more important than collective measures taken at the public level. Individual solutions trump the collective approach. Yet controlling infectious diseases through private choice simply cannot work.

The game is rigged to avoid discussion of the public option. There is no social responsibility. Everyone has the equal right to buy health care as a commodity, whether or not they can actually afford it. Otherwise, it is denied. The atomized individual in the marketplace can only succeed if they are wealthy. However, viruses are the most democratic things in the world. They don’t care about the market.

This notion of privatized health justifies the abdication of the responsibility by government as it turns over ever more power to private profit-making companies. It’s all private individual responsibility. Our common basic needs together as human beings means nothing. You are on your own.

The health and safety of the public is an absolutely necessary public good that must be addressed as such. Government is responsible at all levels to determine and coordinate our individual behavior in order to suppress the disease. But government is controlled by a ruling class where private profit determines everything, a government that refuses to eliminate market incentives and therefore will never adequately handle COVID.

We can’t live like this – a world where the public doesn’t have control of infectious disease. That such a world is not sustainable is now evident. The control of public resources by private property is screwing up COVID precisely at the moment when humanity should be uniting to work together to mitigate Global Warming. Private corporations block the public solution here as well, claiming they have a right to own the petroleum and produce as much as they like.

Billionaire Charles Koch massively invested to fight public health measures during the pandemic, including mask and vaccine mandates, contact tracing, and lockdowns. Fascist groups that tout corporations over the public interest began to mobilize, including the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), dark money Donors Trust, the Hoover Institution, and Hillsdale College. This concerted effort politicized a war against public health.

Across the country, government proclaims that individual solutions are only solutions. Florida Governor, Ron DeSantis signed legislation in Spring 2020 banning vaccine mandates statewide.

Texas Governor, Greg Abbott, lifted his state’s mask mandate and COVID business restrictions in March 2021. The next month, he declared Texas could be close to herd immunity. Then he issued an executive order banning mask mandates.

The results were predictable. Florida and Texas reopened very quickly and then accounted for one-third of all U.S. COVID deaths this past summer. And, of course, the highest rates of death were among the poor, essential workers, African-Americans, Latin Americans, and Native Americans, which make up a disproportional section of these sectors.

None of this had to happen.

When the pandemic first appeared, the popular view was… we are all in this together. People commonly embraced the notion that “I wear my mask to protect you.” Since then, fascists have succeeded in convincing a large section of the population that wearing a mask to stop COVID is an attack on their personal freedom and that their personal freedom to infect you outweighs your personal freedom not to be infected.

The fascist attack on public health was and is designed to maintain corporate profit at the expense of human life. This corporate-bankrolled campaign has continued to supplant public health experts, hijack the governmental response to the pandemic, and fuel mobs of anti-maskers.

Sherrilyn Ifill, the former Director-Council of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund accurately criticized the abandonment of the public:

“What we’re seeing in our country today: the rhetoric, the hate, the ignorance, the coarseness, the vulgarity, the cruelty, the greed, the fear is the result of decades of poor citizenship development. It is a reflection of the fully privatized notion of citizenship, a feral conflict for the scraps left by oligarchs.”

Our common health is a public good that must be controlled by the public. This requires us to understand that even individual health is a public good. We cannot get beyond the crises we face without operating on this premise.

So the historic moment comes around once again. Americans will live out the crippling legacy of slavery, over and over again, until we root it out of every institution and abolish the corporations that continue to make private profit from it.

When Americans grasp that protecting human life universally is essential to protecting it everywhere, they can no longer avoid the fundamental premise of communism: that the value of all human life is exactly the same.

Once again, it’s all of us or none of us.

Steven Miller

December 26, 2021