Six months ago, President Biden ended the pandemic state of emergency and declared COVID over. From the way government officials and the media are – or more accurately, aren’t – talking about the pandemic, it might seem one has no choice but to believe that Biden was right.
Except that the pandemic is not over. By what metric was Biden measuring? Hospitalizations? Deaths? For the week ending September 16, the U.S. had >20,000 covid hospitalizations and >1500 covid deaths (over half the deaths on 9/11). These are both likely significant underestimates due to inadequate case testing, counting, and reporting across the capitalist world. Indeed, these inadequacies are often exacerbated by active suppression – for example, in the UK, an email was recently leaked in which hospital workers were directed by hospital administration not to test for COVID if presenting with symptoms, because it might result in workers “remaining home longer.”
Certainly Biden’s declaration wasn’t based on heartening new evidence about disability from long COVID, which, contrary to popular media coverage, scientific studies have consistently shown is both common (at a well-established incidence rate of at least 10% for each case of COVID) and debilitating (a recent study showed that many people with long COVID report a worse quality of life than people with Stage IV lung cancer). And recent data suggests that long COVID may even be more common in vaccinated people who had mild cases and were infected since the emergence of Omicron.
So why Biden’s declaration, and why aren’t we hearing about any of this?
The start of the COVID pandemic brought both a clarifying look at the failures of capitalism and a hint at how things could be different. From very early in the pandemic, we have known what interventions would be effective, and could even end the pandemic altogether: distribution and mandating of effective masks, contact tracing to understand disease spread, and quarantines in the case of actual or suspected COVID cases with guaranteed paid time off. Some countries, in particular China and other countries that have previously had to manage epidemics, implemented some or all of these interventions from the very start of the pandemic.
Unfortunately, many of these measures require political will and a government willing to intervene for people’s wellbeing; we have neither in the United States, where institutions are utterly at the command of capital and ordinary people are deservedly skeptical of those institutions. To instate these measures adequately would necessitate the nationalization of key industries, the complete transformation of our tattered welfare state (both of which we call for in the DSA national platform), and a willingness to take bold action to stop right-wing misinformation. These propositions would be utterly unthinkable to America’s capitalists, who fought tooth and nail the meager stimulus checks, rent forgiveness, and brief extension of unemployment benefits, all of which were simply too inconvenient and unprofitable to keep up.
This is the root of the current messaging and media strategy. If it’s unprofitable and inconvenient for capital to actually address and stop the pandemic, then it becomes necessary to convince people to live with it – to continue working and spending, to keep the ever-important economy chugging along, with no regard for the number of lives sacrificed at its altar.
Despite posturing as “pro-science” while Trump was in charge of managing the pandemic, the Democrats have quickly adopted a stance of soft pandemic denialism that does nothing to substantively address, or even really acknowledge, the issue. Rather than acknowledge that adequate pandemic precautions are only possible at a societal level and act accordingly, they tell the working class that they may keep themselves safe as a matter of personal choice. This is reminiscent of the Democrats’ soft climate denialism, in which they adopt rhetoric that climate change is real while catastrophically failing to acknowledge the gravity of the situation or the radical measures necessary to adequately address it, instead shifting the burden of responsibility to people’s individual choices to recycle or bike to work.
It’s no coincidence that we have one of the highest death rates of any country in the world, at 3,331 deaths per million people for the entire pandemic – a death rate of 0.33% of the entire population. By contrast, China, a country both larger and more densely populated than the U.S., has a death rate of 85 deaths per million. Of course, COVID deaths in the U.S. are not evenly distributed throughout the population. Like many other societal inequities, COVID and its outcomes disproportionately affect poor people, people of color (especially Black, indigenous, and Latino people), people with disabilities, and other marginalized people.
In DSA, we recognize both the social inequities revealed by the pandemic and the new world it reveals and necessitates. We also recognize that we cannot follow in the footsteps of the Republicans or the Democrats, both of whom have communicated clearly that under capitalism, human life has no value except that which it is able to produce for the ruling class. We are fighting for a radically transformed world in which profits don’t necessitate the unchecked spread of a pandemic, and we must reflect that world, to the greatest degree possible, in how we organize now.
To that end, NC Triangle DSA has written and passed a resolution creating a pandemic policy that uses layers of protection – including mandated masking, air filtration, testing, vaccinations, case reporting, and staying home when sick – to keep our events as COVID safe as possible. We welcome all the most vulnerable at our meetings, and we want you to know that we will help keep you safe. We are fighting for a world where all of us can be safe, healthy, and liberated – but to do that, we must build a mass movement. Join us in our fight for a better world!