Lee Humber

Which Country Has the World’s Best Health Care? Ezekiel Emanuel Hatchet Book Group, New York £23

From the very beginning of this pandemic, the Socialist Review has been very clear that the fatal nature of the Covid-19 virus is not primarily due to the nature of the virus itself, but from the global social contexts it continues to impact upon.

It’s all about “The Great Reset”. In a few months’ time, in the wake of a year of pandemic and lockdowns,
world leaders will meet at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland to, as organisers put it, “integrate all stakeholders of global society into a community of common interest, purpose and action”.

Is there anyone left in Britain, apart from that tiny, tiny minority of individuals with a vested financial interest, who thinks that entrusting to private health capital Britain’s response to the pandemic was ever a good idea? The British Medical Association certainly don’t. Their report published mid-September, The Role of Private Outsourcing in the Covid 19 Response, is an expose and utter condemnation of how contracting out virtually every aspect of pandemic-related services has been an utter and complete disaster.

In his short, fascinating and hugely influential book Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher talks, amongst a great many other things, about education. He says, “Education, far from being in some ivory tower safely inured from the ‘real world’, is the engine room of the reproduction of social reality, directly confronting the inconsistencies of the capitalist social field.”

The Swine Flu epidemic of 2009, and the Ebola crisis still active in West Africa after nearly seven years, both attest to the problems and unknowns regarding vaccine development and deployment. With Swine Flu, not only were supplies of the vaccine extremely limited, there were a range of short- and longer-term side effects causing, in some cases, years of suffering. These included arthritis, fibromyalgia, lymphadenopathy, rashes, photosensitive rashes, to name but a few.

There are organic links between the global anti-racist rebellion and the Covid-19 pandemic. As Socialist Review has repeatedly shown, there is a clear class nature to how the virus affects global populations. Poorer communities, many with underlying health conditions socially determined by what Engels called the slow ‘social murder’ implicit to capitalism, have suffered by far the worst consequences.

Despite the intense hype throughout May, a Covid-19 vaccine is no silver bullet. Nor is it close at hand. At the very best, vaccines can play a part in integrated public health strategies to trace, contain and halt the spread of infectious diseases. However, in Britain, the US and most of the rest of the world the search for a vaccine has taken centre-stage to the exclusion of all other considerations.

At the beginning of April, Queen Elizabeth II told a television audience: “Together we are tackling this disease, and I want to reassure you that if we remain united and resolute, then we will overcome it.” Her appearance was filmed by a single cameraman encased in body-covering protective clothing. No shortage of PPE here.

Compare this with a care home for older people in Liverpool run by Future Care Capital, a care provider increasingly reliant on venture capital.

The struggle between an abstracted version of nature and science is not what determines the health of global populations and it never has been. The nature we have is the one which has developed in its relationship with global capitalism. The threats nature now poses result from the multi-faceted failure of that relationship —the metabolic rift—which the current pandemic illustrates by its global attack on our health.