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Join our coalition to oppose unsafe Covid policy and beat the pandemic

We now need to combine our strengths, and mobilise the zero-Covid campaign into an unstoppable force, writes ROY WILKES

THE real birthplace of Covid-19 was not the wet market of Wuhan or the bat caves of the hinterland, nor was it a test tube in a Chinese virology lab.  

Covid-19 was born in the financial centres of London, Amsterdam, New York and Hong Kong.  

Finance capital’s insatiable drive for infinite accumulation is also driving the ecological degradations that are causing the pandemics: the interminable expansion of fossil fuel production; the continuous expropriation of subsistence farmers in the global South and their displacement by corporate agribusiness and factory farming; the persistent deforestation and commodification of nature. 

It is the fatal combination of all of these that is exposing us, repeatedly and at a terrifying rate, to so many dangerous new pathogens. Covid-19 isn’t the first pandemic this century, and it certainly won’t be the last.  

We need to connect the dots. It is exactly the same force — finance capital — that is behind the creeping privatisation and underfunding of our health services. 

And the rule of finance capital ensures that vaccination — a technical solution that can be commodified — is promoted and propagandised as the only way out of this crisis.  

Furthermore,  it is our government’s servility to finance capital that explains its seemingly irrational response to the pandemic. 

The Johnson government is unwilling to interrupt the circulation of capital even for the few short weeks it would take to drive transmission close to zero.  

They are happy to rack up the huge state debts that their containment strategy entails because they know (or think) that they can offload those debts onto us through endless austerity.

So the cause of Covid-19 is the very same social force that prevents us from protecting ourselves from Covid-19.  

And it is the very same force that will try to make us pay the price for it in the decades to come.

Of course the vaccine is to be welcomed. Its rollout is a huge credit to the NHS, and demonstrates the immense advantage of local public-sector delivery over the corporate test and trace that delivered nothing but world-beating incompetence last summer. 

But the technical solution of the vaccine has to be part of a broader social solution to this crisis.  

The vaccine must form part of an elimination strategy, it cannot replace an elimination strategy. Relying on vaccination alone is exceedingly dangerous.  

The vaccines currently protect against most strains, but they don’t offer full protection against all the variants, the South African one in particular.  

Particularly worrying is the new recombinant that emerged earlier this year, a variant that combines the highly transmissible English variant with the antibody-resistant Californian variant.  

And what about the next variant? Or the one after that? Or the thousandth variant? To allow the virus to circulate freely, as Johnson intends, is to invite further mutations.  

It is negligent towards not only our own citizens, but the rest of the world as well.  

The British government’s next move is to reopen the schools on March 8. 

That is a reckless and irresponsible plan. Schools are among the main vectors of transmission. They should remain closed until transmission is low enough for a rebuilt, locally based system of find, test, trace, isolate and support to keep transmission moving down towards zero. 

Not only that, but other Covid-unsafe workplaces should close as well, and should remain closed until they are safe, both for the people who work in them and for the wider community.  

We in the zero-Covid movement are often caricatured as advocating permanent lockdown.  

Nothing could be further from the truth. An effective lockdown would be a short lockdown.  

Then we could all have the social freedoms that have long been enjoyed in New Zealand, Vietnam, Taiwan and elsewhere.  

It is the failed containment strategy, and the associated reliance on vaccines as the silver bullet, that has delivered endless and repeated lockdowns and horrific death tolls.  

So of course, we know what the government should do about Covid-19.  

And we know why it isn’t doing those things. But the key question is — what are we going to do, as ordinary working people? Where is our agency in all this?

The answer to that is absolutely clear. We need to build a mass movement to fight back, in the workplaces and on the streets.  

The only way we can get the changes we need is to build an unstoppable movement that can force the changes we need. 

That’s why Zero Covid, the campaign to beat the pandemic, is calling a day of action on Saturday March 13 to protest against this recklessness, and to make a loud and visible statement of mass opposition to the government’s failed Covid-19 strategy.  

And we aim, through such action, to boost the confidence of workers to do what the NEU did in January and say No to workplaces that are unsafe; unsafe not only for the people who work in them, but also for the wider community. 

This day of action will include safe, fully masked, socially distanced and risk-assessed outdoor protests. 

And we always include a simultaneous online rally, so that those at the highest risk of Covid-19, and particularly disabled people, can take a full and active part while remaining indoors.  

Since our last day of action in December, there has been an important new development in the zero-Covid movement: the Zero Covid Coalition has been formed, an initiative that we fully support and are proud to be a part of.  

We now need to combine our strengths, and mobilise this coalition into an unstoppable force. 

Johnson says that in order to make possible the reopening of schools, other restrictions must remain in place.  

It would be totally unacceptable for those “other restrictions” to include a continued ban on political protest.  

Schools and other indoor workplaces are transmission belts for Covid-19. Fully masked, socially distanced, risk-assessed outdoor protests, most emphatically are not.  

To continue to ban such protests would be a cynical and authoritarian manoeuvre thinly disguised as a public health measure. 

Of course the far-right anti-lockdown protests were unsafe. But they were not masked nor were they socially distanced, and they were certainly not risk assessed.  

It would be absolutely right to insist on a requirement for proper risk assessment of responsible protest action, which was the situation we had before January. 

It would be wholly wrong to impose a blanket ban.

The TUC has found that 20 per cent of workers who could work from home are being forced to go into enclosed workplaces.  

Not a single employer has been fined for this outrage. Not a single one. Yet ordinary people are being fined day in day out for minor infringements that are far less risky.  

This is the double standard we face. Capital gets a free ride; ordinary working people pay the price. 

We need to be prepared to robustly challenge and resist any such repressive order.   

We urge Labour MPs to expose and resist in Parliament any cynical manoeuvres by the government along those lines. 

If politicians are allowed to assemble in Parliament, then ordinary people have an inalienable right to assemble, albeit safely, outdoors. 

There is a worrying authoritarianism about this government, as shown for example by their description of Extinction Rebellion as “extremist.”  

We must guard our civil rights with care. The stakes couldn’t be higher. We need to steel ourselves for the battles ahead.  

The government must be forced to reinstate the exemption for political protests that it removed in January. 

Assuming that is done, on Saturday March 13 we will be taking to the streets to protest against this government’s criminally negligent Covid-19 strategy.  

Join us, via our website zerocovid.uk.

Roy Wilkes is chair of the Zero Covid UK steering committee.

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