Health Care

By Colin Powers| – ( Inequality.org ) – As acutely as COVID-19 and related policy responses are widening inequality in the United States, the pandemic’s biased effects threaten to be even more pronounced in many parts of the global south. This certainly appears to be the case for the non-Gulf countries of the Middle East […]

Donald Trump

Other Countries get Testing, Contact Tracing and Open Economies: We get President Lysol and Malign Neglect

Tomdispatch

By Ann Jones | – ( Tomdispatch.com ) – Donald Trump is not a president. He can’t even play one on TV. He’s a corrupt and dangerous braggart with ill-concealed aspirations for a Crown and, with an election coming up, he’s been monopolizing prime time every day, spouting self-congratulation and misinformation. (No, don’t inject that […]

Epidemics

Is Big Pharma more Interested in Profiteering than Protecting us from Coronavirus?

F. Douglas Stephenson

Gainesville, Florida (Special to Informed Comment) – April 12, 1955 stands out as the brightest day in the history of vaccine development and public health when news of the discovery by Jonas Salk of a vaccine for the polio virus was made public. The most venerated medical scientist of the 20th century, Jonas Salk, M.D., […]

Epidemics

Stop Calling them Heroes if You won’t give Essential Workers Sick Leave and Health Care like Every Other Industrialized Country

Juan Cole

By Paul F. Clark | – The COVID-19 crisis has demonstrated the degree to which we depend on the work of others. This is particularly true of essential workers like truck drivers, grocery store employees and hospital nurses who are ensuring the rest of us stay safe and are able to get the supplies, food […]

Epidemics

Lockdown Singing: the Science of why Music helps us connect in Isolation

The Conversation

By David M. Greenberg and Ilanit Gordon | – “Don’t hold back, sing with all of your heart,” said our colleague Simon Baron-Cohen on a Zoom meeting the other night with his fellow band members. Simon is director of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge University by day and bass player of the blues and […]

Donald Trump

Unionize! Trump has coerced Workers at Covid-19 Hot Spot Meat Packing Plants into Front Lines

John Buell

Southwest Harbor, Me. (Special to Informed Comment) – Should we be surprised that Smithfield[s pork processing plant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota was a hotspot for the Covid19 virus? No, and here is another no brainer. There are many such hotspots among meat processing plants around the US. How we handle such facts will affect […]

Donald Trump

Like Twenty-One 9/11s: Our 2020 Pandemic is “The Trump Virus”, just as 1918’s was “Spanish Flu”

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The “Spanish Flu” did not originate in Spain, but Spain had been neutral in WW I and so the Spanish press was uncensored, since the government was not worried about public morale during hostilities. The most lurid accounts of the disease, which was unusually lethal and went on to kill […]

Donald Trump

Stop Saying more have died from Coronavirus than in Vietnam: US War Killed a Million There

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The rash of headlines blaring that the coronavirus has now killed more than died in the Vietnam War betrays an incredible amnesia and national tunnel vision that takes the breath away. Implicitly, these comparisons are with the 58,220 US military personnel who died fighting in Vietnam. But somehow the over […]

Epidemics

How the Corporate Food System Is Making the Coronavirus Crisis Worse

Foreign Policy in Focus

By Walden Bello | – ( Foreign Policy in Focus) – The global food system has been very much front and center in the COVID-19 story. Everyone, of course, is aware that hunger is closely tracking the virus as its wreaks havoc in both the global North and global South. Indeed, one can say that, […]