Article by Joe Gallagher and Arianna Introna, published by Prometheus, which discusses the concept of ‘targeted social murder’ in the UK, including in the context of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. Excerpt below.

Excerpt:

The forgotten pandemic

The final example of expanded social murder in the UK is the SARS-CoV-2 (i.e. the virus that causes the disease COVID-19) pandemic, still ongoing today despite its widely confabulated ending in 2021 or 2022. Although the World Health Organisation (WHO) continue to acknowledge the persistence of the pandemic,³⁰ their decision to end the Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) phase of the pandemic on 5 May 2023 appears to have been reinterpreted in popular culture as the end of the pandemic itself. This date even appears to have been retconned in the UK to match the Conservative government’s proclamation of “Freedom Day” on 19 July 2021, something which was at the time widely acknowledged as a deceitful abdication of public health policy by the state in favour of economic profit. The misconception of the pandemic having ended is so widespread in fact that it bears stating the obvious here: pandemics do not just end overnight. We have been in a global cholera pandemic since 1961, a HIV/AIDS pandemic since 1981, and arguably still remain in a pandemic of the 1918 (“Spanish”) flu.³¹

The primary purpose of ending the PHEIC was to permit state abandonment of public health response; furlough pay, vaccination programmes, testing programmes, sick leave, remote work, and accompanying reductions in consumption, travel, and spending were all an unacceptable cost to the capitalist economy, with UK government spending alone on pandemic measures alleged to have cost up to £410bn. The premature termination of the PHEIC is perhaps unsurprising when considering the WHO is a specialised agency of the United Nations and as such exists first and foremost as a tool of capitalist and imperialist exploitation as much as any other institution.

A brief reminder of the brazen social murder conducted in the UK during the opening year of the pandemic: 31% of all patients admitted during the first wave of the pandemic had a Do Not Attempt Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (DNAR) order placed on them³² – which cannot be overruled nor legally requires the consent of the patient or family; consequently, many thousands of disabled people died from being denied care.³³ Mortality rates of disabled patients were much higher than non-disabled patients – ten to twenty times higher for patients with Down’s Syndrome³⁴ – as were those for patients of all non-white ethnicities compared to white patients, with Black patients in particular experiencing a mortality rate three times higher.³⁵ Over 35,000 care home residents were confirmed as dying from COVID-19 by May 2020, allegedly due to care homes being under pressure to receive infectious patients being discharged from hospitals; outbreaks in care homes continued like wildfire since and still persist today.

Despite capital’s unqualified success of inculcating a widespread disavowal of the pandemic, in the real world the SARS-CoV-2 virus is more omnipresent than ever. The Economist estimated in September 2023 that the true death toll so far was around 30 million, four times higher than the official death toll at that time of 7 million.³⁶ Wastewater testing in the USA estimates there has not been a single day since 2021 with fewer than 100,000 cases³⁷ – despite former Chief Medical Advisor Anthony Fauci suggesting in 2021 that a reasonable level of infections required to abandon mitigations would be 10,000 cases per day.³⁸ Meanwhile in the UK, the NHS stopped routinely testing patients for COVID-19 in August 2022³⁹ and population statistics on infection were abandoned with the “pausing” of the ONS COVID-19 Infection Survey in April 2023.⁴⁰ When US President Trump infamously announced in June 2020: “If we stop testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any”,⁴¹ it was rightly pointed out at the time as a preposterous tautology – yet that has been precisely the UK’s pandemic strategy for nearly four years already.

A key driver of persistent infection in our community – aside from under-ventilated schools, workplaces, and public buildings⁴² – is the spread of disease in medical facilities, due in large part to the lack of appropriate PPE worn by healthcare workers who therefore form major nodes in chains of transmission. On 13 March 2020, policymakers made the decision to downgrade Covid from being a High Consequence Infectious Disease (HCID) – something an anonymous member of ACDP later stated was “pragmatic” due to an insufficient number of FFP3 respirators in the NHS stockpile.⁴³ Around this time the WHO also started to push the fabrication that the virus was spread through contact (i.e. the fomite route) as opposed to being predominantly (>99%) airborne, despite scientific publications and public messaging from the original SARS outbreak in 2003 clearly demonstrating that the SARS virus was known to be airborne.⁴⁴ Every scientist who testified in the UK COVID-19 Inquiry has since confirmed SARS-2-CoV is airborne⁴⁵ – yet still no official policies of respiratory infection control exist in health or social care facilities, with far less effective surgical masks (essentially just a sneeze guard) being worn sometimes. This is an act of medical violence which is known to further maim and kill patients: NHS England no longer even collects statistics on COVID-19 infection but NHS Wales data shows that 74% of inpatient COVID-19 cases are acquired in the hospital⁴⁶ and the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows that 10–20% of patients subjected to nosocomial COVID-19 infection will die.⁴⁷

Just like any other disease, death is not the only outcome either. COVID-19 is a systemic vascular disease which can cause multi-organ dysfunction (lungs, heart, brain, kidneys, liver, pancreas, eyes, reproductive system, etc.⁴⁸) as well as immune dysregulation which increases susceptibility to other infections for at least 18 months.⁴⁹ The effects of widespread infection can manifest at the population level as other diseases become more prevalent and poor outcomes become more common; e.g. the number of deaths per year from respiratory disease has almost doubled in the last 5 years in the UK (“post-pandemic”) vs the period 2010–2019.⁵⁰ Latest estimates suggest 5-10% of SARS-CoV-2 infections cause Long Covid, a catch-all for a wide range of chronic conditions which can affect almost every organ in the body – but perhaps is most destructive when causing myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), a complex and multisystemic chronic condition which can leave people entirely bedbound, yet is critically underdiagnosed, undertreated, and underfunded. Chloé, an epistemologist with severe ME, describes it as a “controversialised illness“, something “not so much ‘medically unexplained’ as it is rendered medically unintelligible”⁵¹; in other words it would threaten capital if medicine were to truly recognise the illness and its cause rather than simply decrying those affected by it as “lazy”, “malingerers”, etc. Long Covid intersects especially with our focuses on pandemic denial, healthcare cuts, medical violence, and attempted legalisation of assisted suicide because many ME patients are forced into “choosing” assisted suicide. It bears reminding that SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is still in its infancy and despite 487,000 scientific studies to date,⁵² we still only know anything about what happens during the first 6–7 years of infection. For context (and without seeking to draw any etiological comparisons), it takes 11 years on average for an untreated HIV infection to develop into AIDS – a fact only recognised in 1983, likely over half a century after the first humans were infected with the virus.