The United States is in the midst of a major new upsurge of the COVID-19 pandemic that has already taken the lives of 624,000 people. Over the past month, daily cases have increased 250 percent, driving a rise in hospitalizations and a significant increase in the daily death rate.
The Delta (4th) wave in the United States is already showing it to be on a path to its the worst yet in major hotspots, noted Eric Topol, a professor of molecular medicine at the Scripps Research Institution.
The surge is concentrated in the poorest sections of the country, including Arkansas, Mississippi, Missouri, Florida and Nevada, where vaccination rates are lowest. In Missouri, the tenth-poorest state in the country which has one of the lowest vaccination rates, hospitals are at the highest occupancy at any point of the pandemic. We only get beds available when someone dies, which happens several times a day, Terrence Coulter, the critical-care medical director at CoxHealth, told the Atlantic.
The rise in cases is caused by the Delta variant of COVID-19, which not only spreads more rapidly, but reproduces much more aggressively inside infected people. A study published earlier this month noted that the viral load of people infected with the Delta variant was 1,000 times greater than those infected by the initial variant of the disease.
The surge in sections of the country with the lowest vaccination rates has been accompanied by a troubling growth in so-called breakthrough infections among vaccinated people. According to official figures from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 791 fully vaccinated people have died from COVID-19 in the US so far, and 5,000 have been hospitalized.
Three fully vaccinated athletes inside the Olympic village in Tokyo and one staff member tested positive over the weekend, raising the threat of new outbreaks at the worlds premier sporting event. In recent days, three fully vaccinated members of the Texas House delegation in Washington, D.C., tested positive after traveling maskless on a chartered airplane.
Moreover, less than half of the population in the US is fully vaccinated. While the media blames this fact on people who do not want to get the vaccine, the ruling class has been unwilling to organize the type of public education and mass distribution program that is required.
In recent days, it has become clear that the US government expects the upsurge that has already taken place in southern states to be merely the prelude to a new wave of the pandemic.
This is just going to spread through the population, Trumps former FDA director Scott Gottlieb told CNBC on Friday. He pointed to an internal CDC model showing an increasing epidemic, a wave of infection from this Delta variant moving through the population over the next two months.
The assumptions built into those models is no mitigation, no mandates for masks, no closures of businesses, Gottlieb added. I think thats likely to be the norm.
What Gottlieb is describing is the deliberate mass infection of the American population, allowing tens or hundreds of thousands more to die. The Trump-appointed FDA director was not describing some ideal world that would exist if the COVID-19 denier Trump was still in power, but the actual policies of the Biden administration.
On May 13, the CDC, under pressure from the Biden administration, announced that it was no longer recommending that vaccinated people wear masks, triggering the effective abandonment of all social distancing measures by businesses, states and municipalities throughout the country.
The World Socialist Web Site, in a position consistent with the World Health Organization and leading public health experts, opposed the CDCs decision, warning that it would lead to a new resurgence of the pandemic. Less than two months later, these warnings are being confirmed.
Facing the disastrous outcome of the White Houses policies, Bidens CDC Director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, was asked last week, Is there any consideration, any scenario in which you might want to reverse yourself on reopening schools?
Walensky replied, I remain emphatic that our schools need to open in the fall. They need to open for full, in-person learning. When asked again, CDC is not recommending people who are fully vaccinated wear masks? Walensky responded, We are not.
The Biden administrations open opposition to masking and the end to all social distancing measures is virtually indistinguishable from the policies of former US President Donald Trump, whose disastrous handling of the COVID-19 pandemic was a major factor in Bidens victory.
220,000 Americans dead, Biden said in his opening remarks at the second presidential debate. Anyone is responsible for that many deaths should not remain as president of the United States of America. He added, I will take care of this. I will end this.
But since Inauguration Day, a further 196,000 people have died of COVID-19. That is, almost as many Americans have died under Biden as had died when Biden proclaimed anyone responsible for such mass death had forfeited his right to be president.
The president who pledged to follow the science is rejecting the demands of scientists, discouraging mask-wearing and peddling pseudo-science that children cannot be infected with COVID-19 and that schools are not centers for the transmission of the disease.
Tens of millions of people voted for Biden in the belief that he would take the measures necessary to stop the pandemic. But these promises were empty, because Biden, like Trump, represents the interests of the financial oligarchy that has massively enriched itself as hundreds of thousands have died.
It is urgently necessary to draw the lessons of the year and a half that has elapsed since the start of the pandemic. Under the banner of herd immunity, capitalist governments throughout the world made the calculated decision to sacrifice millions of lives because saving them would have impinged on the profit interests of the financial oligarchy.
With more than four million deaths, the mass of humanity is no closer to eradicating the pandemic than it was in March. Rather, the uncontained spread of the disease has led to the development of ever-more-dangerous variants.
Stopping the pandemic requires a radically different approach. This means the closure of schools and nonessential businesses, with full compensation for all those who lose any wage or small business income. This must be combined with the allocation of vast social resources to ensure that every case of COVID-19 is meticulously tracked and that every infected person is given a safe and comfortable place to quarantinewith full financial compensationuntil they are no longer infectious.
It is a fundamental fact that, despite the unanimous consensus of scientists on the measures necessary to contain COVID-19, there is only one political party in the United States calling for the stopping of nonessential production: the Socialist Equality Party, affiliated with the International Committee of the Fourth International that publishes the World Socialist Web Site. That is because the Socialist Equality Party does not accept the economic prerogatives of the capitalist class.
If COVID-19 is to be contained, it will only be through a mass mobilization of the working class to demand urgent measures to stop the pandemic, whatever the cost to the wealth of the financial oligarchy. The ill-gotten gains made by Americas billionaires while hundreds of thousands died must be seized and used to fund the measures necessary to stop the pandemic.
As the disease rips through workplaces, workers will form rank-and-file committees to demand the closure of non-essential production and the enforcement of critical safety guidelines. Teachers must and will resist the efforts to reopen schools for in-person learning under conditions in which the pandemic is still spreading.
The inability of the capitalist system to stop the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic has made clear the incompatibility of capitalism with the social needs of society. The struggle to save human lives in the pandemic is inseparable from the struggle for socialism.
Sign up for the WSWS email newsletter
The rest is here:
Urgent action is necessary to stop the US Delta variant surge! - WSWS
- Exercise promotes a molecular profile in muscle: Research - January 21st, 2023
- Molecular Diagnostics Laboratory < Laboratory Medicine - January 4th, 2023
- Molecular cloning - Wikipedia - December 18th, 2022
- Trends in Molecular Medicine | Journal - ScienceDirect - December 10th, 2022
- Researchers from Insilico Medicine, University of Copenhagen, and University of Chicago unravel molecular secrets hidden in premature aging diseases... - December 2nd, 2022
- Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging Week: October 2-8, 2022 - October 29th, 2022
- Biochemistry & Molecular Biology | Medicine - October 29th, 2022
- Cellular and Molecular Medicine | Faculty of Medicine - October 21st, 2022
- Molecular Diagnostics > Fact Sheets > Yale Medicine - October 21st, 2022
- Expert Reviews in Molecular Medicine | Cambridge Core - October 13th, 2022
- UT Southwestern ranked top health care institution globally for published research by Nature Index - UT Southwestern - October 13th, 2022
- Common Antibiotics Are Losing Their Potency. Researchers Pinpoint Mechanism to Restore It. - NYU Langone Health - October 13th, 2022
- expert reaction to study looking at integrating human stem cell-derived brain-like tissue in the brains of newborn rats - Science Media Centre - October 13th, 2022
- HTG Provides Update on Third Quarter Progress Toward Its Transcriptome-Informed Approach to Drug Discovery - Yahoo Finance - October 13th, 2022
- UVA Discovers Key Driver of High Blood Pressure - UVA Health Newsroom - October 13th, 2022
- Postdoctoral Fellow in Lung Cancer Genomics job with NORWEGIAN UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY - NTNU | 311727 - Times Higher Education - October 13th, 2022
- Common cold may increase the risk of long Covid - Earth.com - October 13th, 2022
- Caris' Precision Oncology Alliance Welcomes The Cancer Institute at The University of Tennessee Medical Center - PR Newswire - October 13th, 2022
- Merus Announces Publication of Abstract on MCLA-129 at the 34th EORTC/NCI/AACR (ENA) Symposium on Molecular Targets and Cancer Therapeutics - Yahoo... - October 13th, 2022
- Molecular Test Could Improve Early Detection of Pancreatic Cancer - Technology Networks - October 13th, 2022
- UTSW researchers identify key player in cellular response to stress - EurekAlert - October 4th, 2022
- New Antibody Demonstrates Therapeutic Benefits Against Alzheimers - SciTechDaily - October 4th, 2022
- Mount Sinai study uncovers mechanisms of reactive oxygen species in stem cell function and inflammation prevention - EurekAlert - October 4th, 2022
- NovoPath Pushes the Limits of Laboratory Information Systems with Integrated Workflows for Genetic and Molecular Testing - PR Newswire - October 4th, 2022
- Postdoctoral Fellow in Bioinformatics job with NORWEGIAN UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY - NTNU | 311073 - Times Higher Education - October 4th, 2022
- Breast Cancer Awareness | Nick Jacobs | An unlikely partnership: The United States Army Space and Missile Defense Command and the Joyce Murtha Breast... - October 4th, 2022
- Tackling resistance to HIF2 drugs with an RNA-based therapy - UT Southwestern - October 4th, 2022
- OncoNano Medicine Announces Positive Phase 2 Data for Pegsitacianine as an adjunct to Cytoreductive Surgery of Peritoneal Carcinomatosis - Business... - October 4th, 2022
- SIMATS organizes Induction Ceremony - Afternoonnews - Afternoon News - October 4th, 2022
- ExPath Grad Student Madeline Mayday Awarded Grant from the NIDDK Cooperative Centers of Excellence in Hematology - Yale School of Medicine - September 25th, 2022
- Blood Cancer Discovery Publication Further Validates Exscientia's AI Precision Medicine Platform for Improving Patient Outcomes - Business Wire - September 25th, 2022
- New Startups Built From UC Davis Innovations Drive Solutions in Food, Health and Agriculture - University of California, Davis - September 25th, 2022
- Scientists Discover New Cancer Treatment - The Morning News - September 25th, 2022
- Rewriting the Textbook for Precision Medicine - Technology Networks - September 25th, 2022
- Biden says 'The pandemic is over,' but health experts disagree - Chief Healthcare Executive - September 25th, 2022
- Discovery Illuminates How Parkinson's Disease Spreads in The Brain - Weill Cornell Medicine Newsroom - September 25th, 2022
- AI Used to Determine Cause of Alzheimer's and Related Disorders - Inside Precision Medicine - September 25th, 2022
- Looking Ahead in the Treatment of Breast Cancer - Targeted Oncology - September 25th, 2022
- Researchers identify potential biomarker to distinguish two aggressive types of brain tumors in children - EurekAlert - September 25th, 2022
- New study reveals breakthrough infections increase immunity to COVID-19 - OHSU News - September 25th, 2022
- Coronavirus Today: Who's dying of COVID-19 now? - Los Angeles Times - September 25th, 2022
- Hoag Named Radiopharmaceutical Therapy Center of Excellence, Publishes Results of Breast and Prostate Cancer Trials - PR Newswire - September 8th, 2022
- Orbital Therapeutics Launches to Advance New Frontiers of Science with the Next Generation of Innovative RNA Medicines - Yahoo Finance - September 8th, 2022
- Scientists urged the Biden administration to launch an Operation Warp Speed to develop inhaled COVID vaccines. China beat the U.S. to the punch -... - September 8th, 2022
- Foundation Medicine to Share 14 Abstracts at the 2022 European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) Congress Demonstrating the Power of Genomic... - September 8th, 2022
- Monte Rosa Therapeutics Announces FDA Clearance of Investigational New Drug Application for MRT-2359, a GSPT1-directed Molecular Glue Degrader Phase... - September 8th, 2022
- Biden administration says the once-a-year shot phase of the COVID-19 pandemic has arrived - The Boston Globe - September 8th, 2022
- ICCBS welcomes students of MPhil and PhD Programs 2022 - The Academia Mag - September 8th, 2022
- Exciting PhD positions at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) job with EUROPEAN MOLECULAR BIOLOGY LABORATORY (EMBL) | 308114 - Times... - September 8th, 2022
- Congratulations to our NRF award winners | UCT News - University of Cape Town News - September 8th, 2022
- Patients with some forms of aggressive esophageal cancers may benefit from treatment targeting how cells self-regulate - EurekAlert - September 8th, 2022
- Molecular Medicine (M.Sc.) - Georg-August-Universitt Gttingen - August 30th, 2022
- Gradalis Announces Publication in Nature Communications Medicine Identifying Survival Predicting Biomarker in Patients with Ovarian Cancer Treated... - August 30th, 2022
- Feinstein Institutes Get $3M From Lupus Research Alliance to Study Remission and Future Therapies - Business Wire - August 30th, 2022
- Unlocking the Power of Precision Medicine the Rheumatology Example - Technology Networks - August 30th, 2022
- When to trust your covid test results and when to question them | Mint - Mint - August 30th, 2022
- Molecular Diagnostics Market Report 2022-2030: Increasing Adoption of Point-Of-Care (Poc) Testing and the Development of Novel Assays Presents... - August 30th, 2022
- Advancing Precision Oncology, Ochsner Health First to Fully Integrate with Tempus and Epic's Genomics Module - Newswise - August 30th, 2022
- Tiny, Touch-Based Sensor Could Help Patients Stay on Top of Their Medications - SciTechDaily - August 30th, 2022
- Stellar Scholars Join CLAS Faculty - UConn Today - University of Connecticut - August 30th, 2022
- COVID-19 gave new urgency to the science of restoring smell - Science News Magazine - August 30th, 2022
- Dr. Sun lab wins R01 from National Institutes of Health to study liver proteins - Wayne State University - August 22nd, 2022
- Pasithea Therapeutics to Present Results of Tolerizing Vaccine Program at Prestigious International Immunotherapy Conference - GlobeNewswire - August 22nd, 2022
- New Study Identifies How A Group Of Genes Are Linked To Behavioral Conditions - Forbes - August 22nd, 2022
- New gene variant that protects against coronary heart disease uncovered - EurekAlert - August 22nd, 2022
- How a Japanese Herbal Medicine Protects the Gut Against Inflammatory Bowel Disease - Neuroscience News - August 22nd, 2022
- Insilico Medicine presents on AI for drug discovery at 9th Annual Aging Research and Drug Discovery Conference - EurekAlert - August 22nd, 2022
- Why polio is back on the radar of Canadian health officials - Brighter World - August 22nd, 2022
- Angela DeMichele, MD, MSCE, Assesses the Value of I-SPY2 for Neoadjuvant Treatment of Early Breast Cancer - Cancer Network - August 22nd, 2022
- Exciting PhD positions at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) job with EUROPEAN MOLECULAR BIOLOGY LABORATORY (EMBL) | 304753 - Times... - August 22nd, 2022
- Sensor could help patients stay on top of their meds - EurekAlert - August 22nd, 2022
- Trivitron Healthcare launches CoE in metabolomics, genomics, newborn screening and molecular diagnostics - Express Healthcare - August 22nd, 2022
- Research Trends of Moxibustion Therapy for Pain Treatment Over the Pas | JPR - Dove Medical Press - August 22nd, 2022
- Edited Transcript of EXAI.OQ earnings conference call or presentation 18-Aug-22 12:30pm GMT - Yahoo Finance - August 22nd, 2022
- Roche launches COVID-19 test that detects and differentiates the emerging variant of interest BA.2.75 - PR Newswire - August 22nd, 2022
- Will Omicron BA.5 Be the Last of the COVID Variants? - The Epoch Times - August 22nd, 2022
- Many Paths to Failure | Harvard Medical School - Harvard Medical School - August 5th, 2022
- Mitochondrial DNA Mutations Linked to Heart Disease Risk - University of California San Diego - August 5th, 2022
- UC Davis Sets a New Record, Surpasses $1 Billion in Research Funding - University of California, Davis - August 5th, 2022
- A first update on mapping the human genetic architecture of COVID-19 - Nature.com - August 5th, 2022