WHILE FILTHY CAPITALISTS PROMOTE ANTI-CHINA COVID CONSPIRACY THEORIES
WE STAND WITH ESSENTIAL WORKERS & OUR VULNERABLE COMMUNITIES
Don’t Believe
the Far Right’s Deadly Lies
22 Nov 2021: An independent analysis that we have performed on NSW deaths from the Delta strain has shown that vaccine recipients have died 69% less often from COVID than the unvaccinated population. Our analysis is enough to make two crucial conclusions. Firstly, it confirms that vaccination is an absolutely essential and crucial tool for defeating the pandemic. However, the results of the analysis also show that vaccination is not a magic bullet either. It does not provide 100% protection to all recipients. Therefore, more people will die from the disease and the hospital system could in the future become overwhelmed if other measures are not employed in addition to the extension of the vaccination program.
Our analysis was performed using data publicly released by the NSW Department of Health. The Delta outbreak, which began in Sydney’s wealthy Eastern suburbs, first hit NSW on June 16 and took its first life on July 11. Since then the NSW government has reported 555 COVID deaths up until November 13, the last day that total figures are available up to. Of these people who tragically died, 398 people were considered unvaccinated, 79 deaths were of fully vaccinated people and the remainder of the people who passed away were either partially vaccinated or, in a smaller number of cases, their vaccine status could not be determined. To determine vaccine efficacy, we need to first normalise the data for the rate of vaccination when the deaths occurred. That is to account for the reality that earlier in the outbreak when the number of fully vaccinated people was low relative to the number of completely unvaccinated people, one expected, regardless of the efficacy of the vaccines, that the number of deaths from fully vaccinated people to be low given that such a small proportion of the population were then vaccinated. However, in more recent weeks, as the number of fully vaccinated people outnumbers the unvaccinated population, the percentage of deaths from fully vaccinated people would be expected to grow by the sheer weight of their higher proportion in the community. Our analysis accounts for these biases by relating the deaths in any given week to the corresponding vaccination rates.
Note that when we analysed the deaths of fully vaccinated and unvaccinated people each reporting week of the NSW Department of Health, we needed to relate them to the published rates of two dose recipients and no dose recipients respectively 25 days and 32 days prior to the middle of the week that the deaths were reported. This is firstly because, in the classification system used by the NSW Department of Health, a person is considered effectively unvaccinated (“no doses”) unless they received a vaccine jab at least 21 days before becoming exposed to the virus and considered not fully vaccinated unless they receive their second dose at least 14 days before becoming exposed; and secondly, because during this latest outbreak the median period from exposure to death is 11 days. That means that a COVID infected person who passes away on, say, September 22 would have on average been exposed to the virus on September 11 and, thus, would be considered completely unvaccinated according to the NSW Department of Health unless they received their first dose 21 days before that exposure, that is by August 21 and would not be considered fully vaccinated unless they received their second dose by 28 August.
The truth is that the calculation that vaccine recipients in NSW have died 69% less often from the Delta strain than the unvaccinated is most probably an underestimate of true vaccine protection against death. This is because in the earlier period of this outbreak, before the rate of vaccinations reached high levels, a disproportionately high percentage of vaccine recipients were the elderly and those with pre-existing medical conditions. Yet this is precisely the section of the community most vulnerable to dying from COVID. Therefore, when comparing the number of deaths from those who were vaccinated against those who were unvaccinated, the deaths of the vaccinated were artificially skewed upwards due to the then age bias in the vaccinated community. However, as more of the adult population has been vaccinated that age bias has disappeared and we get a clearer sense of the true efficacy of the vaccines. Thus, over the last 8 weeks that we examined, we found that those who are vaccinated have on average died 88% less often from COVID than the unvaccinated. Going forward, this will be about the level of protection that vaccines give against COVID death – unless a new variant emerges that has greater resistance against the vaccines.
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The first conclusion that we should draw from our analysis is that COVID vaccination saves lives. It is especially effective in protecting the lives of younger and middle-aged people. Therefore, we strongly urge all our readers to get vaccinated. This is not only a responsibility to oneself but a collective duty. By reducing hospitalisations, vaccination reduces saturation of hospitals thereby enabling a higher proportion of the sickest COVID patients to be treated in hospital and fewer other ill people to be knocked back from admission due to hospitals being filled up with COVID patients. Those far-right groups and hard right politicians like Craig Kelly that are spreading anti-vax conspiracy theories – although not necessarily the many decent people believing these theories – are doing a great deal of harm. They are effectively causing people to die who would otherwise be alive.
Photo credit: Kate Geraghty
Of course, among those who are genuinely suspicious of the vaccines and lockdowns – as opposed to the violent white supremacists and other right-wing extremists exploiting such sentiments – part of their attitude comes from very understandable distrust of government and the ruling elite. After all, why wouldn’t the masses be distrustful? Governments are notorious for trying every means possible to reduce payments to the poor while they splash tens of billions of dollars through Jobkeeper to super-rich business owners like Gerry Harvey. Meanwhile, over the last few months, the heavily working class, Asian, African and Middle Eastern communities in Sydney’s southwest have been subjected to discrimination and vilification by the NSW government, police and media over the Delta outbreak. Last month, Gladys Berejiklian became the third NSW leader in less than thirty years who has had to resign over a corruption cloud. And that is just the tip of the iceberg! In this capitalist society, mainstream politicians – whether from Liberal, Labor or the minor parties – are corrupt, even when measured against their own rules. They hand out public money to their rich mates, they enrich themselves by taking bribes from developers, they branch stack their own parties and they favour their own voting base in dispensing government grants – from sports rorts to carpark porks to discriminatory dispensation of regional infrastructure grants.
The most oppressed in society have additional reasons to distrust ruling elites. Unemployed workers most frequent experience with government institutions and their contactors is to be bullied about why they have supposedly “not looked hard enough” for non-existent jobs. They see these agencies as gangs for kicking people when they are down. State officials try to claw back every cent they can from welfare recipients and then program their Robodebt machines to do so even more rapaciously. Meanwhile, most Aboriginal people have great reasons to be suspicious of government initiatives. Black people face racist oppression from state organs every day. Aboriginal people remember too how their ancestors were deliberately infected with smallpox and how they were hideously used as guinea pigs in medical and chemical experiments – including being subjected to atomic bomb tests in South Australia’s Maralinga in the 1950s and 1960s. That is why anti-Vax groups have managed to engender much vaccine hesitancy amongst Aboriginal people. This is only being countered thanks to the dedication of Aboriginal community activists and black-led social organisations.
So some of the oppressed masses are saying to themselves: How can we trust the government and the ruling elites when they talk about vaccines? Why should we follow their rules? These healthy “anti-establishment” feelings get manipulated by sinister right-wing forces. Those who are socially isolated, either because they are middle aged single people and/or because they are unemployed or self-employed people who work alone, are especially vulnerable to anti-Vax/anti-lockdown conspiracies. For without being able to test their ideas in discussions with co-workers and friends, they can be swayed by dubious internet and social media postings, which in their isolation can be their main form of “contact” with other people.
To not be manipulated by sinister forces it is important to understand why governments, politicians and upper-level state officials lie. Sure, they are self-seekers, but the main reason for their dishonesty is because of the contradiction between their claim to “serve all the people” and the reality that in capitalist societies the state machine exists to serve the exclusive interests of the capitalist exploiting class over the interests of the working class masses. Ruling class politicians do look after themselves but they mainly exist to look after the interests of the big business owners. Indeed, there are some ruling class politicians that are personally honest but are still the most intransigent and destructive enforcers of the interests of the capitalist class. Thus, the ultimate oppressors and exploiters are not the politicians or the state officials but the actual capitalists. Capitalist governments and bureaucracies are also the enemy of the working class masses but they are only the enemy because they enforce the interests of the capitalist exploiters over the masses. We must always keep this basic truth in mind when we analyse any government measures that restrict social freedom. Ruling class politicians and bureaucrats mainly do not seek power for power’s sake but rather to be able to better protect the super-profits of the capitalist business owners from the rest of society. Of course, there is no shortage of mainstream politicians who get off on their own power and status. However, when any of their plans to increase their authority happen to clash with the interests of the big business bigwigs on important questions, events inevitably show that it is the latter who are the real masters and the former who are merely their barking dogs. In 2020 and 2021, this means that capitalist governments would never hurt the profits of their big business-owning masters through imposing lockdowns unless there was actually a real epidemic crisis involved. Moreover, the fact that we are now re-opening in NSW and will in the future fully re-open will blow to smithereens the far-right conspiracy theory that COVID was merely a hoax – or at least greatly exaggerated – and designed to enable governments (“led by Communist China” no less) to take away people’s freedoms.
If we understand that the overwhelming reason why capitalist governments and officials lie and seek greater powers is to enforce capitalist interests against those of the toiling classes, we will realise that on issues that affect all classes and therefore also affect the wealthy corporate elite that they are committed to serving, the capitalist politicians and bureaucrats can sometimes tell the truth to some degree. Today – when they say that COVID is a real threat and that vaccination is important – happens to be one of those times. Similarly, there are times when they make rules that do not have a class bias one way or the other but merely ensure the smooth running of their society. These include traffic light laws, restrictions on fire-use during bushfire season and pandemic social-distancing regulations. The laws and regulations that we Marxists are opposed to – and there are a lot of such rules – are those laws and regulations that are used to enforce the exploitation of the working class and the poor and which are used to facilitate the suppression of other oppressed groups including Aboriginal people, other people of colour, women and LGBTQI people. However, other laws we do accept despite our opposition to who is making them. We do not think, for example, that residents in a bloc of apartments have a “right” to disturb their neighbours by using noisy power tools at two o’clock in the morning even though the regime that instituted these noise regulations is a corrupt capitalist regime. Thinking workers instinctively understand all this. Such workers would not want a work colleague to drive a crane without a license, for example, because such behavior could get themselves or their co-workers killed. Moreover, even under capitalism, some rules have actually been won through struggle by the workers movement. These especially include health and safety practices at work. Class conscious workers would be furious with a co-worker who broke one of these rules – for example by working at height without a harness. This is not only because such a person would be putting themselves and their co-workers at risk but because they would be undermining workplace safety practices for all. Many a capitalist boss would love to see a worker violating a workplace safety rule – even though bosses sometimes pretend to be opposed to such behavior to cover themselves – because it sets a precedent to enable the rule to be undermined. In the minds of many bosses, workers who follow health and safety rules are “wasting time” and “harming productivity”. After all, for the capitalist exploiters, workers’ lives come a distant second to profits. Thus, a proud trade unionist would only have scorn for a worker who proclaims that “it is his/her right to choose to work at heights without a safety harness if he/she so chooses.”
The extreme individualism of the “It is my right to refuse vaccines, not wear a mask and disobey social distancing rules”-movement is completely counterposed to the collectivist spirit that the socialist and, indeed, the trade union movement is based on. Politically aware wage workers know that our class has only been able to win gains through collective action and through, when necessary, enforcing that collectivity. Imagine trying to win a strike if workers think that they have an individual “right” to cross a picket line and go to work if they “so choose.” Therefore, the main base for the most hardened anti-Vax/anti-lockdown/anti-masking activists is not amongst wage workers and certainly not amongst class conscious workers. Instead, the movement is mostly based upon smaller-scale capitalist exploiters and amongst some of the self-employed (as well as unfortunately also amongst unemployed workers) – that is, amongst some pub and restaurant owners, self employed tradies, owner truck drivers, farmers and so on. Their “it is my right to refuse vaccines, not wear a mask and disobey social distancing rules”-sentiments reflect the same attitude that some of these social layers have when they insist that they ought to have the freedom” to bully and underpay their apprentices and hired helpers or to start loudly hammering away at five thirty in the morning when doing a maintenance job inside an apartment block. Their rage at all laws obstructing their ability to maximise profits (whether it be minimum wage laws, workplace health and safety laws or environmental and noise regulations) – a rage that becomes all the more fanatical given both the cruel blows to their profitability landed by the current crisis and the necessarily precarious nature of small-scale enterprise at all times – becomes transferred onto the various rules and mandates arising from the pandemic. And for many particular small businessmen and self-employed tradies, the lockdown measures have actually been very directly harming their profitability.
In summary, as much as the microbusiness and self-employed sections of the masses do not come under the sway of the community-minded working class, they exude a selfish individualism that flows from both the hustler spirit of small enterprise owners and from their position in the economic structure – the position of (thinking) that they are their “own masters.” In the end, of course, small business owners and the self-employed are firmly under the thumb of the banks, the big commercial landlords, the corporate suppliers and the top-level contractors. These small-scale capitalist exploiters on the one hand and petit bourgeois layers on the other can only escape the domination of the big capitalist forces to the degree that the working class lands blows against the latter. To the extent that they do not align themselves with the working class, squeezed as they are by the big capitalist giants and battered by the decay of the capitalist order, the rage of the embittered self employed in times of crisis will end up being directed by the far-right into the service of the big end of town. And so it is with the anti-vaccine mandate/anti-lockdown movement. For make no mistake about it: the movement that the Far Right have whipped up – although they have drawn some decent people into it unlike their stock-in-trade race-hate mobilisations – is serving the big end of town. Their attack on the Melbourne offices of one of our unions – the CFMEU – can only serve the union-busting big capitalists. More generally, the Far Right, through inciting opposition to social-distancing measures and grotesquely downplaying the dangers posed by COVID, is proving itself to be the shock troops of the capitalist business owners who want to pressure society into a reckless form of re-opening that would enable them to have their profits flowing again at full throttle as soon as possible. That is why, although they were not necessarily enthusiastic about the anti-Vax aspect of the demonstrations, sections of the capitalist-serving federal government struggled to contain their glee at the anti-CFMEU and anti-lockdown actions. And you can bet that the new, even more right-wing, Donald Trump-supporting NSW premier, Dominic Perrottet – who has already shown his willingness to ride roughshod over medical advice warning him about the dangers of a recklessly performed reopening – was secretly pleased too!
Photo credit: William West/AFP
At the same time, although Australia’s capitalist governments have been sanctimoniously deriding those who refuse to be vaccinated, we should understand that they are indirectly as responsible for residual vaccine hesitancy and anti-masking/anti-social distancing sentiment as the Far Right. For they have deceived the masses so often, over so many issues and over so many years that many people simply do not believe them in the rare cases that they are actually telling the truth. Over the vaccines, they are like the boy who cried wolf too often when the real wolf arrives!
Genuine pro-working class, “anti-establishment” sentiment would not be directed against vaccination or remaining social distancing measures but against the racist and anti-working class vilification of the people of colour communities in southwestern and western Sydney during the Delta outbreak. It would take aim at the Morrison government for throwing $27 billion of public money – in the form of JobKeeper payments – to the owners of businesses that maintained or increased their sales. As for vaccines, what we should be furious about is not vaccine mandates but the fact that the greedy capitalist drug corporations and the governments that serve them have failed to provide adequate vaccines to poorer and low income countries. This is not only grossly unfair and murderously cruel but it means that COVID will remain in the world for longer and new variants will emerge; both of which will lead to more deaths and further delay in humanity’s return to pre-COVID “normality.” Today, it is mainly only China and her drug companies, in particular her socialistic, state-owned pharmaceutical giant, Sinopharm, that has been providing large amounts of vaccine aid to poor and developing countries. Meanwhile, the Western drug companies like Pfizer and Moderna have seized on the desperation of the world’s people to charge a fortune for their COVID vaccines. The right-wing Liberal government has hidden the cost to the public budget that it is paying for each vaccine. But we know that Moderna is charging the European Union a whopping $A35 a dose. We should be outraged at how much these capitalist drug corporations have been ripping off the world’s people!
Fears about Astrazeneca
Our analysis of the effectiveness of vaccines in NSW did not compare the efficacy between the Astrazeneca and the Pfizer vaccines. We were not able to do this because the NSW government does not provide enough open source data to enable this. The Pfizer vaccine that has been the mainstay of the vaccination program here is safe. This approved vaccine, like all medicines, produces side effects in a small proportion of cases. However, the benefits far outweigh the risks. No one has ever died from a reaction to this vaccine in Australia and already thousands of lives have been saved. There is, however, understandable fear about the Astrazeneca vaccine which in rare cases causes deadly blood clots in recipients. So far, nine people in Australia have died from blood clots or low platelet count caused by Astrazeneca vaccinations (https://www.tga.gov.au/periodic/covid-19-vaccine-weekly-safety-report-07-10-2021). However, due to improved detection and treatment methods, the proportion of deaths caused by Astrazeneca in Australia is considerably lower than abroad where several countries have either suspended use of the vaccine or restricted its use to the elderly. Norway and Denmark have outright stopped using Astrazeneca and many states in Canada have also suspended use of this vaccine. More recently, Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland suspended use of the Moderna vaccine for people under the age of 30 due to a rare cardio-vascular side-effect amongst a small proportion of young recipients.
Research has shown that deaths from Astrazeneca-caused blood clots are slightly higher among younger and middle-aged people than those over the age of 60. This, combined with the lower propensity to die from COVID for the under 60, prompted the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (ATAGI) to recommend that the federal government suspend use of Astrazeneca for the under 60s. For the over 60s, ATAGI explained that any risk of death from the vaccine is far outweighed by the lives it saves by preventing COVID fatalities. The government initially heeded the ATAGI recommendation and suspended use of Astrazeneca for the under 60s. However, later, prime minister Scott Morrison put blatant pressure on ATAGI to make a new “recommendation.” ATAGI buckled to this political pressure and then “recommended’ that Astrazeneca be allowed to be administered to the under 60s provided people have sought prior advice from their doctor.
Morrison wanted to have Astrazeneca more widely used to cover for his government’s earlier failure to provide adequate stocks of other vaccines. Secondly, because Astrazeneca is being produced by a local corporation, CSL (a corporation whose CEO, Paul Perrault, received a total remuneration package last year of a staggering $40 million!) and because the government here serves the Australian capitalist exploiters, the government wants more of the CSL-manufactured vaccine sold. Thirdly, the Australian, British and U.S. governments hope to send Astrazeneca to the developing world as part of vaccine diplomacy. As many of the ex-colonial countries in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, Asia and the Pacific are moving closer to the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) because of the fairer way that the PRC treats these countries in comparison with the imperialist powers, the U.S., Australian and British imperialists are doing everything possible to undermine socialistic China’s vaccine support to these countries. Thus hoping that “Third World” countries will accept Astrazeneca rather than the popular Chinese-produced Sinopharm and Sinovac vaccines, the Morrison government does not want Astrazeneca’s reputation to be further damaged by being prohibited from general use in Australia.
However, for those here worried about getting Astrazeneca, there is now enough of the Pfizer to go around. So book your Pfizer doses if you are not already vaccinated!
Imperialist Anti-Vax Campaign Against Chinese Vaccines Exposed
The analysis of the effectiveness of the American and British-Australian produced vaccines used here shows that while these vaccines are extremely helpful they provide far from 100% protection from death – especially to the elderly and those with underlying conditions. This then makes a mockery of the efforts of the U.S. and Australian ruling classes and their media to slander the efficacy of Chinese-made vaccines on the grounds that they have failed to provide 100% protection. Take, for example, a story broadcast by the Australian regime-owned broadcaster, the ABC, on 5 July. The piece claimed that the Chinese-made vaccine, Sinovac, was giving inadequate protection against the Delta strain and suggested that Australia ship Astrazeneca vaccines to Indonesia instead. The “report” even deliberately implied, quite stupidly, that the supposed lack of efficacy of the Sinovac vaccine was responsible for Indonesia’s then surge in cases. However, at the time of the ABC piece, just a tiny 5.1% people of Indonesia’s people had received two doses of this vaccine!
The ABC then chose quite craftily not to do a follow-up story to examine if their projections made in July – actually their hopes – that the Chinese vaccine would prove ineffective came true. The ABC decided not to run such a follow-up story because they would have had to have reported that far from “Indonesia reassessing vaccine strategy over Sinovac concerns” that they had claimed, the Indonesian ministry of health released the results of a study that showed that the Sinovac vaccine reduced deaths by 95%. That compares favourably with the 88% reduction in deaths of the vaccines used here over the last eight weeks.
That the ABC did not run a follow-up story to their initial anti-Vax campaign against Chinese-made vaccines is indeed consistent with the favorite strategy of all Australian mainstream media when “reporting” issues connected with China. Run sensational stories predicting Communist China-created doom – whether it be conspiracy theories about Chinese vaccines, reports of fresh COVID outbreaks within China or, most hilariously, imminent PRC “economic collapse” – and then don’t run any follow-up stories that would prove how ridiculous their initial stories had been. Or put another way: throw mud, then stop throwing mud when it would be obvious to all that this is precisely what you have been doing but make sure you don’t do anything to wipe off the mud that you had earlier thrown so that most of it still sticks in the minds of an unsuspecting public.
Indeed, if the ABC did run a follow up story on the use of Chinese vaccines in Indonesia, they would have had to report that since Indonesia’s innoculation with the Sinovac vaccine soared from late July, COVID deaths per day have plummeted there. Today, Indonesia’s COVID deaths are more than sixty times less than when the ABC ran their July 5 story! Of course, one cannot be certain that the increased uptake of Chinese vaccines is the sole cause for the dramatic plunge in Indonesia’s Delta deaths. However, even more ridiculous was the ABC’s claim that the supposed ineffectiveness of the Sinovac vaccine was the cause of Indonesia’s then surge in COVID deaths. Indeed, if one wanted to make propaganda against Western vaccines using the same twisted “logic” used by the ABC, one would claim that the surge in Australia’s Delta deaths over the last few months is a result of the “ineffectiveness” of American and British-Australian manufactured vaccines! Fortunately, China’s state-owned media outlets have been far more responsible than their Australian counterparts and have refrained from going down that destructive path.
If the ABC really wanted to examine how effective Chinese vaccines are they would look at China itself. There, 75% of the country’s entire population (not just of those over 16) has been vaccinated. And to date the country has had not one single death from the Delta strain! The Australian government and big business owned media will not report that because the Australian capitalist ruling class – alongside their American and British counterparts – are in an intense Cold War against the PRC. The reason for the conflict is simple. Although socialistic rule in China is as yet incomplete and is deformed and fragile, China remains a workers state whose key sectors are dominated by the socialistic, collective property forms created by her 1949 anti-capitalist revolution. In the end what the Cold War is about is the hostility of capitalism towards socialism. It is the international reflection of the enmity between the capitalist bosses and the workers that they exploit. And just as the capitalist business owners here are not going to let a pandemic get in the way of their class war against working class people, so these same capitalists in the international arena are not about to let scientific fact or the need for international cooperation to defeat the pandemic impede their Cold War against the PRC workers state.
Indeed, so willing are the Australian imperialists to hack down COVID alleviation efforts if they get in the way of their anti-communist Cold War that, several months ago, they even obstructed efforts by the Papua New Guinea people to acquire Chinese-made vaccines. For this purpose, the Australian regime utilized Australian bureaucrats and “advisers” that are impregnated colonial-style within the highest levels of the PNG state apparatus. Moreover, the racist imperialist regime even threatened PNG officials that if they welcome Chinese made vaccines, Australia would cease investments in PNG road projects. The particular vaccine that the Australian regime sought to impede PNG from receiving was the vaccine made by China’s Sinopharm. Australian officials insisted that PNG use the Astrazeneca vaccines that Australia was “offering”. However, the WHO assessed the Astrazeneca product to have an efficacy against symptomatic COVID infection of 63% as against the 79% efficacy that it found for the Sinopharm vaccine (note that both these figures are for vaccine efficacy against symptomatic infection rather than against deaths – both these vaccines have a much higher efficacy in reducing deaths). Furthermore, a study conducted in South Africa found the Astrazeneca vaccine provided inadequate protection against COVID variants. As a result, South Africa cancelled use of that vaccine and instead moved their program to using China’s Sinovac, Pfizer and other vaccines. Moreover, because the PRC made the strategic decision to focus its initial COVID vaccine research on using the tried and tested inactivated vaccine method, rather than the more experimental technology used for the Astrazeneca vaccine, the Sinopharm vaccine has proven to be extremely safe. Not one single person has died as a result of side effects from the Sinopharm vaccine from the billions of doses administered. By contrast the Astrazeneca vaccine, which Canberra once suspended the use of for those under 60, is especially fraught for use in PNG given the latter’s young population. PNG’s average life expectancy is 64.5 years and so the overwhelming majority of her people are under the age of 60. Moreover, given the current backward state of PNG’s health system, a much higher proportion of those who develop blood clots and low platelet counts there after receiving the Astrazeneca vaccine would perish than have done so in Australia.
If the Australian rulers really wanted to help the people of PNG they would be giving the PNG people Pfizer doses rather than dumping on their neo-colonial subjects the vaccine that most Australian young and middle-aged people, when given a choice of vaccine product, have chosen to reject. They certainly would not be endangering thousands of lives in PNG by obstructing vaccination with safe, effective Chinese made vaccines. Then again we should not be surprised by such behavior. By their plan to get nuclear submarines from the U.S. and Britain and their project to buy expensive long-range missiles, Australia’s capitalist rulers are showing their willingness to help kill millions in distant wars in order to crush socialistic states – just like they did in Vietnam and during the earlier 1950-53 Korean War.
There is another atrocious aspect of the campaign to sabotage China’s vaccine cooperation with ex-colonial countries. That is, by spreading anti-Vax lies about Chinese-made vaccines, the Australian ruling class is inevitably feeding into the broader anti-Vax “narrative”. It is telling that the most rabid opponents of the PRC workers state in the Australian parliament – including the likes of Craig Kelly, Matt Canavan and George Christensen – are simultaneously the most sinister promoters of far-right, anti-Vax and anti-lockdown agendas. The slander against Chinese-made vaccines by the more “respectable” wing of the ruling class is but a more urbane and sophisticated version of the rants of the likes of Craig Kelly and other pro-Trump, far-right forces. These more “respectable” rulers thus have little authority to then attack the lies promoted by Craig Kelly and other far-right anti-vaccine figures.
The same goes for the Morrison government, the mainstream media and Joe Biden’s despicable resuscitation of the loony, Trump-era conspiracy theory that COVID leaked out of a Chinese lab. By promoting such a long-discredited conspiracy theory they are inevitably invoking in the minds of some the possibility that other COVID conspiracies could in fact be true – including the ridiculous one that COVID is either not real or greatly exaggerated. In summary, through their willingness to use blatant disinformation and anti-scientific conspiracy theories to attack socialistic China over COVID and over COVID vaccines, the capitalist media and all the pro-capitalist parties in the U.S. and Australia – from the U.S. Republicans and Democrats to Australia’s Liberals, Nationals, ALP and Greens – have much responsibility for indirectly giving credence to the more general COVID conspiracies – like the anti-Vax and anti-masking ones.
Vaccines are Vital – But Not Enough by Themselves
The most important practical conclusion of our analysis of vaccine effectiveness in NSW is that the vaccines are in themselves not enough to stop large numbers of COVID deaths. They are, of course, an indispensable tool that must be utilised to the full. However, especially the elderly and those with compromised immunities will not be safe until at least such time that they receive booster shots; and probably not fully safe until COVID is suppressed throughout the planet. What all this means is that as Australia fully opens up from social distancing restrictions, if other measures are not simultaneously taken to contain outbreaks, not only will some of the millions of people not vaccinated die but a percentage of the fully vaccinated will also die.
What is to be done then? After more than three and a half months of a very strict lockdown most people in Sydney understandably want the greater freedoms recently granted. Workers who were stood down or who lost their jobs during lockdown are desperate to work again. Yes, but there is a way we can fully open up without an explosion in COVID cases in subsequent weeks. We need to look to the measures that the PRC has used to successfully contain the Delta strain. Those measures have involved far more sparing use of city-wide, long-lasting lockdowns than has been the case in Australia. Yet, even during a recently suppressed mini outbreak, China, with its gigantic population, had been averaging just 60 cases per day. That is in per capita terms the equivalent of having just one case per day in a country the population of Australia’s! China’s method involves, alongside mass vaccination, huge universal testing of people in cities that have outbreaks, rigorous dispensation of PPE for health and aged care workers and provision of hospital care to all COVID cases. Yet the PRC has only been able to pull off these measures because of the ability to pool and direct resources provided by her socialistic system of public ownership of key banks, infrastructure construction firms and manufacturers. Every day that this pandemic passes, the need to have here such a system based on collective ownership and state planning becomes ever more urgent. On the way to winning such a socialist system, let us fight for the implementation of whatever state planning and control measures are needed right now to respond to the pandemic. Let us prevent thousands more of us from perishing! It is frontline workers who are at highest risk from dying of COVID. Don’t let the relentless drive for profits of capitalist business owners cause more tragedies for frontline workers and their families! And let us ensure that COVID does not grow so rampant that we end up being thrown back into yet another debilitating lockdown!
