28th April 2021

The Draghi government's policy does not protect social health

         According to the Draghi government, the ongoing vaccination campaign will eradicate the Covid-19 pandemic. That will not be the case. Assuming and not granted that Covid-19 was born spontaneously, its spread is linked on causes related to the functioning of the current society, which the available vaccines can silence only temporarily and only partially, but not remove. After having denied it last year, Draghi himself had to admit a few weeks ago that the pandemic is not a simple natural process, like rain: he said that the number of infections and deaths in Italy was also weighed down by the "unpreparedness" and "delays" of the health system.

        But are "delays" and "unpreparedness" the result of chance, or are they a consequence of precise economic and political choices?

        Let's quickly retrace the news of the last year.

1) In February-March 2020, the political forces both of the current government and of the current opposition opposed the social health protection measures. Only later they approved those measures, under the strength of the situation and under the pressure of some mobilizations of workers. For weeks they said that wearing a mask was useless, that the disease was a common influence, that everything could continue as before...

2) In Spring 2020, the same political actors, in league with the management of the World Health Organization, covered up the documents on the failure of the Italian health system to prepare for the event of an epidemic. This unpreparedness was the result of the health policy (based on privatization, regionalization and cutting of territorial and preventive medicine) carried out for over 30 years by the governments both of center-right and center-left, especially by the Lombardy Region led by the right parties “Lega Nord” of Matteo Salvini and “Forza Italia”.

3) In Spring 2020, the health intervention of government and regions left elderly infected people at home with no assistance, or catapulted them into hospitals short of beds, or abandoned them in nursing homes, favoring the aggravation of infections and the death of tens of thousands of people. At the same time, the various Berlusconi, Boris Johnson and Trump received prompt and expensive care, decisive for their survival!

4) During the Summer of 2020, the political forces, the institutional summits, the government's scientific advisers gave the understanding that the alarm was over and did almost nothing to introduce minimum containment measures, such as the enhancement and sanitization of public transport, the decrease of pupils by class, the strengthening of territorial health structures, the development of effective tracking , the effective ventilation of workplaces and indoor places, the experimentation of early home care systems of people infected with Covid-19. And so... in Autumn the pandemic came back.

5) At the same time in other capitalist countries (China, Japan, Vietnam, South Korea), the experience gained during the last twenty years with covid epidemics (those epidemics that the Italian pandemic plan overlooked), the wise respect by the entire population for some hygiene and prophylaxis measures (including conscientious use of the mask) and in some cases (Vietnam) the existence of basic health care have drastically reduced the number of infections and deaths. With 125 million people (twice as many as Italy) Japan recorded 10 thousand covid-19 deaths. With one billion and 400 million people, China has recorded no more deaths than Japan. With over 90 million people, Vietnam has recorded fewer than 100 deaths! In South Korea, 50 million people, not even 2000 deaths in a year... And all this without the intervention of vaccines!

On the other hand, in the United States there were 570 thousand deaths out of 320 million people! Italy is at 130,000!

Why is it that the so well-informed media in the West are not reporting on the policy of containing the epidemic in the four Asian countries mentioned? At the same time, emerging countries like Bolsonaro's Brazil and Modi's India – which policies are similar to those of western governments - are mowed down by the epidemic. Is it just a coincidence?

6) When the Conte and Draghi governments realized that their "calculated risk" was endangering the production (read: exploitation) machine from which the bourgeois class profits, then they focused on the “best” solution from the capitalistic point of view: the vaccine. That is the most convenient remedy for capitalism, because it tries to buffer the emergency by leaving unchanged the near and remote causes that have favored the spread of the disease, which are linked, in addition to "unpreparedness" and "delays", to structural factors that have undermined the health of workers since before Covid-19: the polluted air of large cities, obesity, circulatory diseases, the way in which the capitalist machine organizes agricultural production and the transport system etc.

7) It has been occurring with Covid disease what already occurs with other diseases typical of capitalist society. Let us take the joint pain suffered by so many workers as a result of their efforts in the workplace and insufficient rest. How are they treated? By changing the living and working conditions that are at the root of this? No: by pushing to take painkillers, to silence the symptom and continue to endure the (inhuman) life ever! To the great delight of the multinational drug companies and the governments that support them. And with heavy "adverse reactions", as the massacre caused in the United States by the continuous consumption of painkillers says: 68 thousand deaths in 2018 alone!

The health treatment given by capitalism to workers is similar to that (equally inhumane) applied in intensive animal farms (among other things one of the causes of environmental poisoning that favored Covid-19): it periodically fills them with antibiotics and other medicines to prevent them from getting sick and to make them gain weight, crammed into cages and fences, in honor of god's profit. Last week, Pfizer's chief repeated that the inoculation of the Pfizer-BionTech anti-covid vaccine to humans will have to be repeated every year...

        All this shows enough that Draghi has not arrived to heal the troubles of previous governments.

His government, as well as the forces of international capital supporting him, are in fact the real, hidden, responsible for the epidemic. Draghi was for years an executive of Goldman Sachs and of the ECB, two of the financial institutions that dictated to Western governments the policies that also gave rise to the "delays" and "unpreparedness" now admitted by Draghi himself, as does the crocodile, as a cause of the epidemic.

        Actually, this government is tasked with applying the most cost-effective recipe in order to silence the public health problems that emerged with the epidemic and, at the same time, to use the health emergency to accelerate the digital restructuring of factories and offices (the so-called ecological transition) aimed to strengthening exploitation on workers.

        The lack of mobilization and discussion among workers was one of the causes that allowed the government, local institutions and the great international capitalist powers to carry on this criminal policy. This has helped to create such a disastrous situation in Europe that it can also be used instrumentally to legitimize the mass use (to the satisfaction of Big Pharma) of poorly tested vaccines, the potential effects of which are not known, in the short and long term.

         28th April 2021