The inevitable has finally come to pass. The covid virus has been building up force for two years now as governments refused to respond properly to it. What has been predicted for that long is now happening.
This Omicron wave, and likely even more virulent waves following on it, will be far more devastating than what we have already seen. This is just starting and we have just been through the preliminaries. Entire countries, their economies and societies, are going to collapse.
Here is how we got to this point. The Covid virus should not have been difficult to control when it first appeared. The Omicron variant should still be possible to eradicate with text book public health measures.
The problem has been the powerful forces in the world which do not want such measures to be applied. Many commentators describe these forces as ‘capitalism’, as though it were a single, monolithic entity. It goes deeper than just the productive systems, and needs to be reduced to the worldwide prevalence of ‘oligarchy’; government in the interests of a ruling elite.
Capitalist oligarchies dominate the globe and resolve into two broad categories, financial and industrial, with very different motives and ways of operating. There is a third force in play, best described as civil society; the structures which maintain civilization in the interest of humankind. Understanding the interplay of these forces is essential to understanding why the pandemic response is playing out as it is.
Industrial capitalists get their money from the margin between the cost of producing things and their selling prices. Financial capitalists make money out of loaning money and owning assets, but also by controlling some lucrative sectors of the economy such as what is called the medical industrial complex or ‘big pharma’.
These two factions have very different responses to covid based on these partly conflicting interests. People who look at the economy superficially see that profits of corporations have risen greatly during the last two years of the pandemic. The real effects have been much more nuanced.
The pandemic has apparently been great for financial capitalists. However, most of their gains have been speculative and acquisitive. It has also been good for some industrial interests, mostly in what is called the ‘technology sector’. These include online retail, cable services, and other internet services.
The industrial capitalists in most ‘western’ countries had been doing poorly before the pandemic, which has made things worse for them. Their decline has not been so severe as to negate the rise of financial capital, so it looks like the capitalists overall have all been doing okay. In everything to do with the physical economy, with making, moving and selling products, the pandemic has caused difficulties.
People have noticed this in their lives. It is getting harder to find and buy things. Prices have begun to inflate. There is talk about ‘supply chain’ problems, which generally means either transportation problems or a restriction of supply.
Industrial capitalists generally see humans as expendable and interchangeable. The more extreme ones see the pandemic as a culling of the unfit; the disabled and elderly. Such people are not bothered by a collapse of the health care system; they would like to see these systems eliminated and health care made exclusively for the wealthy.
Industrial capitalists tend to be annoyed by such things as closing public schools. This causes parents to stay home and care for their kids instead of going to work for capitalists. Generally, industrial capitalists would like to eliminate public education, because it is public.
Like any oligarchy, the industrialists use propaganda and political networks to promote their interests as they see them. The industrialists invented the modern version of libertarianism, the ideology that government is in the way of personal ‘liberty’ and should be minimized. All these right wing political groups did not arise spontaneously; they are funded and organized to serve power.
Soon after covid emerged, libertarian action groups developed the ‘Great Barrington Declaration’, a manifesto and attack plan against any attempt to deal with the pandemic. The virus should just run through the population so that everyone would get it and develop immunity. This ‘herd immunity’ idea has no scientific basis and comes from people with no understanding of infectious diseases or epidemiology.
The problems which the Libertarian/ industrialist factions in western societies have with any response to the covid pandemic are this; that it could partly reverse their campaign to reduce and eliminate public health care funding. Also, that it could further reduce the profitability of their holdings as social needs take priority and takes a bigger share of total wealth. Also, and very concerning to them, is that it helps to reestablish in people’s minds the idea of community, that government exists to meet human need.
This is what is behind the antimask, antivax, ‘force it open’ agitation. It is behind the online harassment of qualified people giving good advice to the public about personal protection. It is behind all the sparsely staffed riots, the harassment of health care workers and sites, over a claimed interference with ‘rights’, and the attempt to make it seem like these ideas have real support.
Financial capitalists have different motives and ideas than this. They control most medical services from the World Health Organization down to the hospital wards. The pandemic has been a wonderful money maker for vaccine producers, so of course they do not want it to stop.
The financialists are thus behind the ‘vaccines only’ approach. A big reason for the very slow vaccine rollout in most of the world is their need to eliminate all competing vaccine producers and to protect their patents. While pretending to strongly promote public health measures, the financialist networks set them up to fail.
This is done by promoting performative measures such as surface cleaning, social distancing, and travel bans, which are useless. They approve things like lockdowns but make sure they are ineffective. Their most famous stunt has been to deny that covid is transmitted through the air and to try to suppress the use of appropriate masks by health care workers and the public.
Despite all this, Covid was in retreat in most of the world by the summer of 2021. Generally, it was not vaccines that did it, but proper health measures promoted by competent health professionals working for the public interest. In a few places, countries which had the virus well under control experienced some sort of coup and threw away all health measures, with the inevitable result.
However, we ran out of time. As predicted, the virus has mutated into something much more potent. In part two I will discuss what will happen next.