The political conclusions that must be drawn from the ruling class policy of “Forever COVID”

Today’s demonstration for Long COVID Awareness Day in Washington D.C. is being held with the aim of “raising awareness” about the ongoing pandemic and, in particular, the reality of Long COVID. The very fact that such a demonstration is necessary speaks to the colossal criminality of the ruling class and its two political parties, along with the capitalist media, which treat the pandemic as a thing of the past.

The global population has been subjected to unending lies, gaslighting and propaganda. Official policy has devolved into simply ignoring, denying and falsifying the reality of the pandemic, no matter the consequences.

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This position was summed up by US President Joe Biden in his State of the Union address earlier this month, when he declared that “the pandemic no longer controls our lives.” In fact, more than 1,000 Americans are dying every week, and over 20 million suffer from the effects of Long COVID.

What Biden really means is that the ruling elite has ended all measures aimed at preserving public health. It has normalized mass death and debilitation and adopted a policy of “forever COVID.” The virus is being given free rein to infect billions of people each year, debilitating and killing millions, and creating optimal conditions for unchecked viral evolution.

The COVID-19 pandemic, now in its fifth year, has had a colossal impact on all of society. In total, there are over 28 million cumulative excess deaths worldwide, including over 1.4 million in the US alone, the overwhelming majority directly attributable to COVID-19.

The pandemic has also produced the greatest scale of debilitation in human history. Hundreds of millions of people globally suffer from Long COVID, which can impact virtually every organ in the body. Moreover, multiple studies have shown that one’s risk of developing Long COVID is compounded with each reinfection.

The response of the ruling class to the emergence of the pandemic was dictated by the raw calculus of capitalist profiteering: Better that a million people die than a billion dollars be lost on the stock markets. Once the CARES Act and other bailouts of the banks were secured in March-April 2020, the attitude of the ruling class turned ever more openly to a policy of mass infection.

Britain’s then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson summed up this homicidal outlook when he stated that COVID-19 was “just nature’s way of dealing with old people.” In the US, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman coined the phrase, “the cure cannot be worse than the disease,” which soon became Donald Trump’s mantra for his back-to-work, anti-lockdown propaganda.

In the subsequent years, under Trump and Biden, all public health measures were systematically eliminated. In September 2022, Biden declared that “the pandemic is over,” and last May the World Health Organization, the Biden administration and other national health agencies formally ended their COVID-19 public health emergency (PHE) declarations.

Alongside the efforts to normalize the pandemic, there is now an escalating campaign to discourage and even prohibit masking. Earlier this month, Biden’s CDC, prostrating itself before the needs of Corporate America, adopted new guidelines that encourage companies to demand that workers who are still infected with the virus return to work.

The adoption of “forever COVID” has been accompanied by the promotion of outright eugenicist conceptions and a deliberate campaign to lower life expectancy. As far as the ruling class is concerned, the premature death of the elderly and disabled is a positive good, as it means reducing spending on healthcare, with the “savings” going to the escalation of war and bailouts for the rich.

The colossal toll on human life and well-being from the pandemic was not inevitable. Basic public health measures, aided by advances in technology, could have been and still can be implemented to eliminate SARS-CoV-2 and other viruses globally.

The longstanding success with Zero-COVID in China proved the viability of an elimination strategy towards COVID-19. At the same time, its ultimate demise reaffirmed the unviability of any nationally-based program in response to what is inherently a global problem.

What has blocked a scientific response to the pandemic, one that prioritizes public health, is the structure of capitalist society and the class interests of the ruling elite. This is why the fight against the pandemic is fundamentally a political question.

All appeals to the ruling class and its political parties, Democratic and Republican, are hopeless diversions. Their response to the pandemic is no more a mistake than their support for genocide in Gaza and the escalation of a global war that threatens nuclear annihilation.

The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) and our election campaign insist that elimination remains both viable and necessary. We advance a globally-coordinated elimination strategy, in which the entire world’s population acts in solidarity and with a collective determination to enforce a broad-based public health program.

Such a strategy includes mass testing, contact tracing, the safe isolation and treatment of all infected patients, the universal use of high-quality masks and the renovation of all public buildings to provide clean indoor air through HEPA filters and the safe implementation of Far-UVC devices. There must be a vast expansion in funding for Long COVID research and a systematic program of scientific education.

After four years of the pandemic, however, it is abundantly clear that such a strategy will never arise under world capitalism, which subordinates all public health spending to the insatiable profit interests of a money-mad financial oligarchy. It can only be implemented through a turn to the working class and the building of a mass movement fighting to restructure society on the basis of social need, not private profit.

Only the SEP is fighting for this strategy, and we encourage all those who recognize the ongoing dangers of the pandemic to join and support our election campaign.