A YEAR on from the first confirmed Covid-19 cases in Britain, lessons have not been learned.
The week saw Britain’s official death toll climb above 100,000, the highest in Europe and fifth-highest in the world.
January has been a month of tragedies. Despite ministers making much of marginal falls in the number of daily deaths, at 1,725 on Thursday it remains higher than the highest ever figure from 2020. We are in the midst of the deadliest wave so far.
Government — and to some extent opposition — places all its hopes in vaccine rollout, even as an ugly feud develops between Britain, the EU and manufacturers over a shortfall in available doses.
Threats from Brussels to block vaccine exports as its row with AstraZeneca intensifies echo the scramble for personal protective equipment last spring, as Italy seized shipments bound for Greece and Germany blocked one to Italy. France and Italy cry foul as they learn Moderna, too, cannot deliver the number of doses promised.
They might, of course, have more recourse to raise production themselves had the vaccine developed by Oxford University been produced on an open-licence platform as originally planned, before the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation — a major funder of Oxford’s medical research — urged it to sign an exclusive deal with AstraZeneca, giving the pharmaceutical company sole rights to produce it.
Private control and ownership of vaccine production at the height of a global pandemic typifies the elevation of profit over human life that characterises our social system.
And the Foundation is a “charity” with quite a record of flexing its financial muscle to drive a corporate agenda, promoting noble causes in the Third World such as privatising education and tying farmers into dependence on agribusiness monopolising access to patented seeds.
The tug of war between the EU and Britain over doses is especially tasteless given World Health Organisation chief Tedros Ghebreyesus’s condemnation of the “catastrophic moral failure” as vaccine stocks are snapped up in deals between big pharma and the rulers of the world’s wealthiest countries, leaving the global South in the cold.
Perhaps Britain and its EU neighbours would be less frantic about stockpiling vaccines had they taken measures to suppress the virus before mass inoculation, as “zero-Covid” countries as different as China and New Zealand have successfully done.
Britain has a twentieth of China’s population and 20 times its number of deaths: if you’re British, you’re 400 times more likely to have died of Covid-19 than if you’re Chinese. That too is a “catastrophic moral failure.”
Given the scale of the disaster, Boris Johnson’s ratings are surprisingly high, with many seeing the pandemic as an unprecedented crisis for which ministers are not to blame.
But if the failure to prepare when warned of a new virus a year ago was deeply irresponsible, the refusal to adopt strategies that have been proven to save lives in other countries is outright criminal.
The Tories are gambling that a vaccine will settle the virus (despite the many new variants and the likelihood of it continuing to mutate if poorer countries are denied vaccine access) and Britain can go “back to normal.”
“Normal” — the hollowed-out, understaffed public services, the privatised chaos of public procurement, a workforce with weak and often unenforceable labour rights too financially insecure to isolate when they fall ill — is what created this mess.
It is a dereliction of duty that a return to “normal” also seems to be the sum of the Labour front bench’s ambition, when the party demonstrated the mass appeal of socialist policies that would address these systemic problems a few short years ago with its biggest vote-share increase in seven decades.
The case for a new deal is stronger than ever. If Labour won’t voice it, trade unions can and must, taking the fight for a new settlement into every workplace.
