We Must Unite to Defeat the Covid-19 Delta Variant
- Fight for Vaccine & Mask Mandates
- Make Vaccines, Tests, and Masks Available for All
- Fight for Paid Leave for Vaccination and Quarantines
- Fight for Secure Housing, Jobs, and Childcare
- Resume and Broaden Unemployment Insurance
- Fight Racism in Health Care, Give Medical Oversight to Communities of Color
On August 6, the Louisiana Department of Health reported that 3,000 children had tested positive for Covid-19 in just four days. Some are critically ill. Hospitals are beyond capacity. Shortages of hospital staff, ambulances, and EMTs are causing health care to be rationed. Patients are being held in ambulances as they wait hours for beds to open up in hospital hallways. Every day, dozens die from Covid-19 in Louisiana.
Insurance companies have raked in billions in pandemic profits. Meanwhile, the U.S.’s health care system ranks last among economically developed countries. By every measure of care, the for-profit system is failing.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, profit-making corporations have received trillions of dollars in bailouts from federal and state agencies, especially through the Federal Reserve Bank. Billionaires have increased their wealth by $1.8 trillion. Feeling secure in their guarded estates and pampered with the best healthcare money can buy, the ultra-rich and their government lackeys have decided to let people die. They are using the cut off of unemployment and other benefits to create even more desperate workers so bosses can drive down wages. Evictions and an end to food stamp supplements are planned for the fall.
Real Public Safety Means Protection from the Virus and Its Effects
While we’ve been dealing with record unemployment, evictions, and hunger, the racist Louisiana legislature handed over millions of 2020 CARES Act dollars to prisons and sheriff’s departments. The Biden administration redirected $350 billion in 2021 Covid-19 relief money to cops. Mayor Cantrell wants to give tens of millions in Covid-19 relief dollars to build up the police and jails. We say use this Covid-19 relief money for sick and quarantine pay and for back rent. Real public safety means protection from the virus and its effects. Economic and social desperation drives crime. Fund people’s needs, especially the youth, not cops and jails.
National Security Means Protection from Covid-19, Secure Housing, Food, Wages and Healthcare, Not War
A recent study showed that just $21.3 billion would wipe out the debts of the roughly 6.4 million households currently behind on rent. That’s less than the extra $25 billion in tax-payer dollars that the Senate Armed Services Committee voted to add to the already record-level U.S. war budget. Now there’s an effort to sneak in an extra $50 billion in war spending through the infrastructure bill. This would be enough to cover sick and quarantine pay for every worker. The money is there when it comes to bombing working people around the world. The money is there for the profit-making war corporations who elect congress. But when it comes to meeting people’s needs, we’re left to choke on pennies.
Workers Must Advance Our Own Demands in the Battle Against Covid-19
Workers must lead the way in the fight for public health protections. This means fighting for universal vaccine mandates. Smallpox vaccines stopped a virus that claimed 500 million lives. We need to respond to Covid-19 with social solidarity, not with the selfishness being preached by corporate bosses and the politicians in their pockets.
Covid-19 has killed 11,260 people in Louisiana and hospitalized tens of thousands more. The good news is that the Covid-19 vaccines are very effective preventing serious illness and death. The unvaccinated make up more than 90% of people hospitalized for Covid-19.
Vaccines and masks help prevent the spread of Covid-19. Mandating these measures is essential to protecting our communities, but we should also demand:
- High quality masks, free and available for all. Shields for workers in contact with the public.
- Fun masks for all children in all schools. Parents refusing to wear masks or refusing masks for their children are endangering their children and should be provided health education and counseling.
- Every worker must be guaranteed paid time off to get vaccinated and paid time after as needed.
- Every worker and every caregiver must be guaranteed paid quarantine time with food delivered.
- Rent should be covered, and all back rent should be cancelled for affected households.
- Vaccines should not be made for profit. Vaccines should be equitably distributed around the world. Vaccine technology should be a public good for all.
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Demand the Right to Survive, Not the Right to Infect
The right wing is claiming that individual and states’ rights to reject vaccinations and other protections trump the right to be safe from the virus. This phony defense of personal ‘liberty’ is used to justify right-to-work laws, and all kinds of discrimination. Union rights, the right to vote or work in a safe environment or live free of racism—the right-wing has fought to to deny all of these by empowering business or government with the right to fire, discriminate, and exploit.
Right-winger Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry is criminally misusing his office to campaign against Covid-19 protections, including the use of vaccines and masks. He is building a racist, pro-death movement. An attorney general is not authorized to create policy. He is using the office to rally a right-wing following as he begins to campaign for governor. He is the successor to David Duke and must be stopped.
Landry says only local areas can decide on masks. But Landry opposes the right of cities across Louisiana to raise the minimum wage, sick pay for all, workers safety laws, and anti-racist education in the schools. This flunky of the rich lives off kickbacks from his oil company friends, opposes Medicaid, food stamps, civil rights, worker safety laws, raising the minimum wage, or doing anything to address climate change. He ought to be charged for mass murder and thrown into jail alongside Texas governor Abbott and Florida governor DeSantis.
Use Science to Serve the People
Heath care in the U.S. is bound up with racism and discrimination against low-income people. This cannot be ignored or dismissed. We cannot fight to change that by playing into right-wing ideas. The racist idea that Black people were inherently more susceptible to Covid-19 had to be fought to show that the real issue was lack of access to healthcare, good jobs, adequate housing, etc. The renowned Black scholar W.E.B. Du Bois fought against the phony “science” used to justify racist oppression of Black people. But he implored workers and Black people not to discard science but fight to have it benefit the people, especially the Black community.
Many people of color have reason to distrust the racist and anti-poor U.S. healthcare system. A statewide body of doctors, medical staff, and health professionals of color should be convened immediately to counsel and help people decide to vaccinate. This body should be given authority and funding to ensure that other safety measures are also put into effect. Special effort is required to guarantee that people of color are getting adequate access to vaccines, masks, income, housing, medical care, and sick pay.
It is time for leaders in unions and other workers to put life into the slogan “an injury to one is an injury to all” and show solidarity to demand a science-based pandemic response that protects humanity. This means masking and vaccine mandates, paid sick leave, cash assistance, freedom for all non-violent prisoners, and programs to ensure needs such as housing, food, childcare, healthcare, and education are guaranteed for all.