Communism will resolve difference between Science and Politics here ♦ Communists fight for the Collective Good here ♦ Discussion About COVID Vaccine here ♦
Florida, USA—Waiting in line for the COVID vaccine
Communism will resolve the contradiction between science and capitalism by abolishing capitalism
USA, January 3— “After I got Covid-19 symptoms and tested positive, I participated in a monoclonal antibody therapy trial,” reported a comrade. “Driving home, a Red Flag reader called with holiday greetings and condolences for Comrade Zipho. He was surprised to hear I was sick because he follows a conspiracy theorist who says the pandemic is a hoax. I want our party to fight for a scientific and materialist approach to Covid-19 vaccines and treatments,” she concluded.
Many workers profoundly and correctly distrust capitalists and their governments. This can create suspicion of vaccines and treatments that could save lives now– if capitalism’s anarchic production for profit didn’t stand in the way.
The US capitalist media admit that the vaccine rollout is utterly chaotic due to almost no preparation. Unmentioned is that this was the result of a strategy to break the whole public sector, including health agencies.
A friend who calls herself “a scientist who cares about people” expects “plenty of surprises, because no one has had more than a year to study this.” She worries about long-term effects of Covid-19. But she also notes “how fast everyone mobilized to learn about this, so we know much more about it after these short twelve months than for any previous ‘new’ viral disease ever.”
Workers’ power, mobilized massively through communist collectives worldwide, could do far better at learning about, preventing and managing pandemic disease. Communism will resolve the contradiction between science and capitalism by abolishing capitalism itself. Public health, including scientific work, will be a mass activity in the service of the masses.
In capitalism, the most oppressed workers everywhere are the last in line for anything possibly useful to them. The World Health Organization predicts that most people in the world won’t get vaccines until 2023 or later. Even the New York Times decries the racist injustice of a factory in South Africa where workers will produce vaccines only for export, with maybe a few doses reserved for the South African ruling elite.
Racism runs through the history of US and global medicine. (see Red Flag v. 11 #9) Right now, the age adjusted Covid death rates for Black, Indigenous and Latinx people in the US are over 2½ times those for white people.
When racism pervades every aspect of life, why should any of us trust the authorities? When the cops who murdered Tamir Rice walk free? When a Black physician dies of Covid-19 after insisting to her doctors that she isn’t getting appropriate care? When imprisoned women asylum-seekers discover they’ve been sterilized without their consent?
But we can’t trust all those anti-vaccine rumors either. Some come from small capitalists promoting profitable but ineffective remedies. More dangerously, anti-Vaxxers are merging with fascist conspiracy theorists.
For example, QAnon and Alex Jones circulated a thoroughly debunked rumor that vaccines make women infertile. Some folks believe the completely false rumor that vaccines contain microchips for the rulers to track us. These rumor-mongers may be the “enemy of our enemy” but they are surely not our friends.
Our Party and Red Flag readers have a huge responsibility to make our literature into the source of information and analysis that the masses can rely on.
A friend guessed that the bosses want the virus, or maybe vaccines, to kill us off. A comrade agreed that the capitalist rulers don’t care if a lot of people die –of starvation or preventable disease or in their wars.
But the pandemic is tanking their crisis-ridden economy. Capitalists everywhere need enough healthy workers and soldiers to protect their power and produce the goods and services they sell to realize their profits. They need us. We don’t need them.
“Covid vaccines will make tons of money for the pharmaceutical industry,” said a comrade. “I don’t trust them.”
Nobody should trust the capitalists or their governments. Even when they say they’re for distributing vaccines based on medical need rather than ability to pay. Their entire profit system of production and distribution contradicts that.
Only communism – not even socialism—operates on the principle “from each according to ability and commitment, to each according to need.”
One third of our global family lacks clean water. The capitalist solution is to fund vaccines while privatizing water supplies. The communist solution would be to mobilize masses to provide everyone with clean water. For everyone to learn, do and practice the science that will help keep us healthy.
That would mean collective planning to produce and distribute Covid-19 vaccine everywhere it’s needed. And training masses of people to educate and vaccinate everyone – fast.
The food most of us can afford is not healthy. The air we breathe and the water we drink are not clean. The work we do – when we have jobs– is often stressful, dangerous, and not even useful to the working class. The bosses exploit us and profit off us at every turn. The same is true for health care, even where it is “socialized.”
These are not reasons to stop eating, drinking, breathing, and working. Nor to refuse Covid-19 vaccines that health-care workers expect will save lives. They are reasons to join the International Communist Workers’ Party to fight for and build the communist future masses everywhere need.
Communists Fight for the Collective Good
Vaccines don’t save lives,” declared a Yale epidemiologist. “Vaccination programs save lives.” And he has the scientific data to prove it.
The most important aspect of the vaccine issue is what the capitalists underplay and call “distribution.” We call it mobilizing masses. That’s the key to Public Health that communism can provide.
The US capitalists’ vaccination program is more than chaotic. It is based on racism, individualism, profits, to beat the international competition and unscientific favoritism towards capitalists and their administrators. When a New Jersey hospital worker comrade went to get her shot, she saw 600 suits in the front of the line.
It turns out they were all businesspersons that ran the hospital. Some were from a huge medical group that plans to gobble up the hospital. They had all been “working” remotely since the pandemic started.
A private panel at the Centers for Disease Control recommended priorities for vaccination. They were not going to include any older adults until someone noticed that it would look bad. It’s all about their profits and international rivalry.
A medical worker comrade in Texas said that if you wanted to distribute vaccines efficiently, you would give it first to those over 65 worldwide and essential workers (not Boeing workers!) who must work in physical spaces to provide the necessities of life. And you would mobilize masses to spread out the work and give them some relief.
When the pandemic first hit, a group of Boeing workers read two articles on the 1918 flu pandemic in Seattle. One article blamed the spread on the lack of discipline among the workers. The other blamed the capitalists and their individualist culture.
The New Jersey comrade convinced her co-workers to get the vaccine by arguing that you get it, not for yourself, but the good of the people around you: to create collective immunity. The bosses derisively call it “herd” immunity.
Her co-workers didn’t trust Big Pharma and the political climate either. But the communist idea of the good-for-all won the day. She reported it was easier to deal with other objections once she put the argument in that context. Fighting for the collective good is a powerful argument for our goal of communism.
In short, communist politics is primary. The communist ability to mobilizes masses will free science from capitalism and advance public health in ways the capitalists can’t.
—Seattle (US) Comrade
Collective Discussions About Covid-19 Vaccines
- How do the vaccines work? Can they give you Covid?
The Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTec vaccines use mRNA. It encodes instructions for cells to manufacture a “spike” protein like the one coronavirus uses to enter your cells. Your body then learns to make antibodies to that “spike” that prevent coronavirus from replicating and making you sick. The mRNA vaccines cannot morph into viruses. However, it’s too soon to say how long protection lasts.
The AstraZeneca-Oxford, Johnson & Johnson and Russia’s Sputnik 5 vaccines use adapted, non-replicating versions of a common-cold virus. They contain genetic materials of the spike protein but not of SARS-Covid-2. They cannot give you Covid. After vaccination, cells produce the spike protein, stimulating the immune system to attack the virus.
The Chinese Sinopharm and the Indian Bharat Biotech vaccines use inactivated disease viruses to strongly stimulate the body’s immune response. This is the technology used for Hepatitis A, Flu, Polio and Rabies shots. If the SARS-Covid-2 virus is carefully and thoroughly inactivated, it will not make you sick. But can the masses trust these companies and their governments to be careful enough?
Other vaccines (MMR, smallpox, chickenpox, yellow fever) use a weakened form of the disease-causing virus to create a strong, long-lasting immune response. Some people get a mild case of the disease. No current Covid-19 vaccines use this technique.
- What about side effects?
Seventy thousand volunteers tested the mRNA vaccines. Many experienced short-term minor effects (a day of low-grade fevers, muscle aches and fatigue, headaches). A very few had dangerous allergic reactions, but these are rare and treatable. Once tens of millions have been vaccinated, we’ll see rarer side effects. There are of course no data yet on long-term effects, but the risk is much less than that from Covid-19.
- How could the vaccines be developed so fast without dangerously cutting corners?
Trump’s self-promoting noise about “warp speed” vaccines makes it understandable that many would fear political interference. However, the real question is why the capitalist pharmaceutical industry usually takes so long to develop a vaccine. Some reasons:
*It can cost $$billions to get a vaccine from a lab into full-scale use. Very few vaccine candidates end up getting licensed. So pharmaceutical companies usually wait longer before conducting expensive clinical trials. Communism will eliminate this problem. In this case, governments and NGOs fronted the money, cushioning the pharmaceutical companies from loss and guaranteeing their profits.
*It usually takes longer to recruit willing vaccine test subjects than it did during the pandemic. In communism, we’ll be able to trust our comrades who do science, and a fundamentally collective society will encourage us to take risks for the common good.
*Capitalist bureaucracies are unnecessarily slow with regulatory paperwork—as many of us know from getting drivers’ licenses or visas. Partly, that’s because everyone understands that profit-hungry companies are likely to cut corners and cheat. Partly it’s because the technical workers tasked with verifying safety are enmeshed in the capitalist state. Communism will solve both problems.
With the Covid-19 vaccines, a great deal of previous work developed the mRNA and common-cold-virus techniques. For example, mRNA vaccines had already showed strong immunity in animal studies with influenza, Zika and rabies viruses. Also, mRNA cancer vaccines have been used in many human clinical trials. And mRNA vaccines bypassed the time-consuming work of growing and isolating viruses in quantity.
Many scientific, technical and production workers put in lots of overtime. But all standard vaccine-testing procedures were in place. Nothing was rushed to make Trump look good.
- Why do I hear about health care workers refusing the vaccine?
According to a Kaiser Family Foundation study (December 2020) about 3 out of 10 (29%) of workers in a health care delivery setting said they probably or definitely would not take the vaccine. About 7 out of 10 were looking forward to taking it, about the same as the general population. That is, more than twice as many health care workers want the vaccine as don’t want it.
Why are we hearing more about the ones who refuse? And why don’t we hear more about the people who want it but can’t get it? These are political questions about the capitalist media.
These discussions will continue. We are trying collectively to learn how to deal with this process while fighting to destroy capitalism.
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