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642. Global Health Security and Pandemics: Donald Trump's response to COVID-19
- Publication Date:
- 04-2020
- Content Type:
- Video
- Institution:
- Mile End Institute, Queen Mary University of London
- Abstract:
- n this video, Professor Sophie Harman (Queen Mary University of London) and Professor Sara E. Davies (Griffith University) discuss Donald Trump's response to the Coronavirus pandemic. They note that, whilst Trump has been criticised for his actions with regard to the USA's initial response, this has not differed vastly from that of other countries, such as Indonesia and Brazil.
- Topic:
- Security, Leadership, Public Health, Pandemic, and COVID-19
- Political Geography:
- North America and United States of America
643. Global Health Security and Pandemics: COVID-19 and Gender Inequality
- Publication Date:
- 04-2020
- Content Type:
- Video
- Institution:
- Mile End Institute, Queen Mary University of London
- Abstract:
- In this episode, Professor Sophie Harman explores the gendered nature of pandemics and the extent to which the coronavirus crisis impacts on women in terms of health, but also in terms of personal and economic security.
- Topic:
- Security, Gender Issues, Public Health, Pandemic, and COVID-19
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus
644. Global Health Security and Pandemics: The Role of the WHO (World Health Organisation)
- Publication Date:
- 04-2020
- Content Type:
- Video
- Institution:
- Mile End Institute, Queen Mary University of London
- Abstract:
- In this video, Professor Sophie Harman (QMUL) discusses the role of the WHO in relation to COVID-19. She explains that the current pandemic provides an opportunity for the WHO to increase its popularity and profile, given previous criticism of its policies and actions.
- Topic:
- Security, Health, International Cooperation, World Health Organization, Pandemic, COVID-19, and WHO
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus
645. Global Health Security and Pandemics: The UK Government Response to COVID-19
- Publication Date:
- 03-2020
- Content Type:
- Video
- Institution:
- Mile End Institute, Queen Mary University of London
- Abstract:
- n this video, Dr. Jonathan Kennedy (Queen Mary University of London) discusses the response of the UK Government to the Coronavirus pandemic and what lessons can be learned from other nations, such as China and Italy.
- Topic:
- Security, Health, Governance, Leadership, Pandemic, and COVID-19
- Political Geography:
- United Kingdom and Europe
646. Global Health Security and Pandemics: Militaries and Militarism
- Publication Date:
- 03-2020
- Content Type:
- Video
- Institution:
- Mile End Institute, Queen Mary University of London
- Abstract:
- The third episode in the series with Professor Sophie Harman on global health security and pandemics will focus on the role of the military in relation to the COVID-19/coronavirus pandemic and other global health emergencies.
- Topic:
- Security, Health, Military Strategy, Pandemic, and COVID-19
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus
647. Global Health Security and Pandemics: Why didn't we know this was coming?
- Publication Date:
- 03-2020
- Content Type:
- Video
- Institution:
- Mile End Institute, Queen Mary University of London
- Abstract:
- This video is the first in a series on global health security and pandemics, presented by Professor Sophie Harman (QMUL). In this episode, she will explore whether we should have seen the current global health crisis coming
- Topic:
- Security, Health, Pandemic, COVID-19, and Health Crisis
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus
648. CoronaShock and Patriarchy
- Author:
- Eli Gomez Alcorta
- Publication Date:
- 11-2020
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
- Abstract:
- When mandatory preventative social isolation was announced in our country, only a few weeks had passed since 8 March, the date when women’s and the LGBTQIA+ movements once again put a political agenda and series of demands on the table. This agenda is linked to eliminating gender-based violence and inequality, which confront us in every aspect of life. The COVID-19 pandemic brought visibility and clarity to many of the things that feminist and socialist movements have been saying for some time. First of all, that we live in a system that has reached atrocious and unprecedented levels of inequality, exclusion, hate, and discrimination as if it were ‘normal’ or ‘natural’. It is not an exaggeration to say that if we don’t put an end to this ‘normalcy’, we will drive straight towards the destruction of the planet and of humanity. Second, on a global level, COVID-19 has also made clear the importance of the state, once again shedding light on the vitality of state intervention — not just any kind of intervention, but the intervention of a state that cares for people and health and that preserves life. The pandemic has also put care work into the spotlight like never before, shedding light on tasks that have historically been feminised, socially and economically devalued, and which have become increasingly precarious. Existing inequalities remain apparent. It is not the same to experience quarantine for those who live in houses and for those who live in shacks; for those who have work and those who do not; for those who have access to adequate infrastructure such as roads, internet, and transportation, and those who do not; those who have running water and those who do not; for women and for men; for cis women and for trans women… This inequality — which is normalised as if it were a natural phenomenon and not a political one — corresponds directly to the severity of the impact of today’s health crisis felt by different sectors of society. For women and the LGBTQIA+ community, the inequality and oppression associated with this ‘normalcy’ are reflected by the exacerbation of gender-based violence, the increase in poverty, and the increase and overload of care work. The enormous challenges that we face today are how to craft a strategy that takes the current emergency into account and that transcends it, and how to make sure that the impact of the pandemic doesn’t leave us even poorer, more subjected to violence, and more exploited. At the same time, we must work towards structural transformations that disarm relationships of power that reproduce violence and inequality. The role that we have as militants of popular feminism is central in the tasks that lie ahead of us. In our country, thousands of us have met for over thirty-four years[1] to discuss a political agenda for the women’s and feminist movement, sharing with each other and organising ourselves in various parts of the country. We have a history of labour organisation, of fighting for our rights and fighting for our work to be recognised. We see ourselves reflected in the struggle for human rights in our country, in the madres and abuelas[2] who are part of the history of our movement. In the last few years, the women’s movement has gained resounding strength. For five years, the Ni Una Menos (‘Not One Less’) movement has erupted in the streets of Argentina, putting on the agenda the urgent need of public policies to prevent gender-based violence and to provide aid to those who are subjected to such violence, demanding no nos maten más: stop killing us. With the Cambiemos (‘Let’s Change’) party in office[3] and the advance of neoliberalism, these debates of the movement lined up behind a new agenda. When there is an economic crisis, there is also a feminisation of poverty and of neoliberal policies, which hit women and the LGBTQIA+ community even harder, further exacerbating inequality. But the movement responded with organised resistance. The women’s movement led the first national women’s strike in 2016 and the massive ‘green wave’ during the debate on abortion in 2018, making it clear that the women’s and the LGBTQIA+ movement is among the most dynamic actors of our time. Standing on the shoulders of the struggles that came before us and the sisters of our Patria Grande (‘Great Homeland’)[4] and of the world, we must work to emerge from this crisis better off than we are now, to put everything up for debate, and to assure ourselves that this debate comes from a popular, progressive, and feminist consensus.
- Topic:
- Politics, Social Movement, Feminism, Pandemic, and COVID-19
- Political Geography:
- Argentina and South America
649. CoronaShock and Socialism
- Author:
- Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
- Publication Date:
- 02-2020
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
- Abstract:
- In late December 2019, the Wuhan Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in central China’s Hubei Province detected cases of pneumonia of an unknown cause. In the first few days of January 2020, Chinese authorities were regularly informing the World Health Organisation (WHO) as well as other major countries and regions with close ties to China’s mainland, such as Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan about the outbreak. On 5 January, the WHO released its first briefing on a ‘pneumonia of unknown cause’ in Wuhan. Little was known about the virus, neither how to properly understand it nor whether transmission could occur between humans. The genome sequence for the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) was published by the Global Initiative on Sharing All Influenza Data (GISAID) on 12 January. Dr. Zhong Nanshan, a leading Chinese pulmonologist who is advising the Chinese government on this pandemic, confirmed human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus on 20 January. As soon as it was clear that this virus could be transmitted between humans, the Chinese authorities acted. Wuhan, a city of 11 million people, was shut down, the scientific establishment in China – and its collaborators around the world – went to work to understand the virus and the disease (COVID-19), and medical personnel in China rushed to be trained and to help break the chain of the infection. Inside Wuhan, the neighbourhood committees, which include members of a range of other associations, Communist Party cadres, and volunteers of all kinds, hastened to assist with temperature checks, food and medicine distribution, and assistance in hospitals. After ten weeks in lockdown, Wuhan opened once more on 8 April. On 15 May, the authorities started to test all the residents of Wuhan once again in order to protect public health and to resume social and economic activities (China shared the results of this test to aid with studies on the feasibility of the herd immunity theory). On 30 January, WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declared that the outbreak constitutes a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC). From its Geneva headquarters, the WHO sent up a flare which effectively read: a highly contagious virus has been detected that requires stringent measures of tests, physical distance, and aggressive sanitation. At this point, in the aftermath of 20 January, a gulf opened between the capitalist states and the socialist states. Our analysis shows four main areas of differentiation between the socialist and capitalist approach to the virus. The socialist approach is based on: Science-based government action Public sector production of essential materials Public action mobilised to facilitate social life Internationalism In the capitalist states (such as the United States, Brazil, and India), the governments have instead operated in a hallucinatory manner, pretending that the virus is either not real or not contagious and hoping that some extraneous factor would protect their citizens from its dangers. For-profit sector firms have failed to provide the necessary equipment, while public action has been hard to galvanise in atomised societies that lack the habit of organisation and struggle. Finally, to cover up their incompetence, the ruling political class in these states has resorted to stigmatisation and jingoism, using – in this case – the lethal combination of racism and anti-communism to blame China. In this report, we look at three countries (Cuba, Venezuela, and Vietnam) as well as one state (Kerala, India) to investigate how these socialist parts of the world have been able to handle the virus more effectively.
- Topic:
- Governance, Capitalism, Pandemic, COVID-19, and Socialism
- Political Geography:
- India, Asia, Brazil, Vietnam, South America, Cuba, Caribbean, Venezuela, North America, and United States of America
650. CoronaShock and the Hybrid War Against Venezuela
- Author:
- Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
- Publication Date:
- 06-2020
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
- Abstract:
- Swiftly moves the Coronavirus and COVID-19, dashing across continents, skipping over oceans, terrifying populations in every country. The numbers of those infected continue to rise, as do the numbers of those who have died. Hands are being washed, tests are being done, physical distance is being observed. It is unclear how devastating this pandemic will be or how long it will last. On 23 March, twelve days after the World Health Organisation declared a global pandemic, the UN Secretary General António Guterres said, ‘The fury of the virus illustrates the folly of war. That is why today I am calling for an immediate global ceasefire in all corners of the world. It is time to put armed conflict on lockdown and focus together on the true fight of our lives’. Secretary General Guterres talked about silencing the guns, stopping the artillery, and ending the airstrikes. He did not refer to a specific conflict, leaving his plea to hang heavily in the air. After six weeks of deliberation and delay caused by Washington, in the first week of May, the United States government blocked a vote in the UN Security Council on a resolution that called for a global ceasefire. The United States blocked this resolution, but even this resolution did not turn its attention to the kind of war that the US is prosecuting against Cuba, Iran, and Venezuela – among others. Instead, it has imposed a hybrid war. The US military complex has advanced its hybrid war programme, which includes a range of techniques to undermine governments and political projects. These techniques include the mobilisation of US power over international institutions (such as the IMF, the World Bank, and the SWIFT wire service) in order to prevent governments from managing basic economic activity; the use of US diplomatic power to isolate governments; the use of sanctions methods to prevent private companies from doing business with certain governments; the use of information warfare to render governments and political forces to be criminals or terrorists; and so on. This powerful complex of instruments is able – in the plain light of day – to destabilise governments and to justify regime change (for more on this, see the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research dossier no. 17, Venezuela and Hybrid Wars in Latin America). During a pandemic, one would expect that all countries would collaborate in every way to mitigate the spread of the virus and its impact on human society. One would expect that a humanitarian crisis of this magnitude would provide the opportunity to end all inhumane economic sanctions and political blockades against certain countries. On 24 March, the day after UN Secretary General Guterres’s plea, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet agreed that ‘at this crucial time, both for global public health reasons, and to support the rights and lives of millions of people in these countries, sectoral sanctions should be eased or suspended. In a context of [a] global pandemic, impeding medical efforts in one country heightens the risk for all of us’. A few days later, Hilal Elver, the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food, said that she was gratified to hear both Guterres and Bachelet call for an end to the sanctions regime. The problem, she indicated, lies with Washington: ‘The US, under the current administration, is very keen to continue the sanctions. Fortunately, some other countries are not. For instance, the European Union and many of the European countries are responding positively and easing sanctions during this time of the coronavirus. They are not completely lifting sanctions but interrupting them, and there are some communications going on, but not in the US, unfortunately’. On 6 May, three other UN Special Rapporteurs – Olivier De Schutter (on extreme poverty and human rights), Léo Heller (on human rights to safe drinking water and sanitation), and Koumbou Boly Barry (on the right to education) – said that ‘in light of the coronavirus pandemic, the United States should immediately lift blanket sanctions, which are having a severe impact on the human rights of the Venezuelan people’. Nevertheless, the Trump administration has brushed aside all concern and continued with its agenda of hybrid war towards regime change.
- Topic:
- Conflict, Pandemic, COVID-19, and Hybrid Warfare
- Political Geography:
- South America, Venezuela, North America, and United States of America