Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières
The Covid-19 pandemic has generated interlocking crises at multiple levels. ESSF is providing thematic and geographic coverage in English and French.
View all articles using keyword Coronavirus/Covid-19 (EN). To display English and French articles, use Coronavirus / Covid-19 (EN, FR).
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Early morning on May 18, Moderna, a biotechnology company, revealed the preliminary findings for the much anticipated phase I trial of an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine. The information sent Moderna’s stock soaring by more than 20% and helped fuel a rally on Wall Street.
Although there was an (...)
The patient arrives in the emergency department breathing three to four times faster than normal — a physiologic response to the lungs’ inability to transmit sufficient oxygen to the body. It creates a sensation one might feel if they were drowning. She looks scared. Desperate. I introduce myself (...)
“Capitalism is not only an unsustainable system: it is a destructive one, leading the planet, and therefore humanity, to a catastrophe without precedent in history.” elyazmalari.com: Many years ago in the ecosocialist manifest, you pointed out that countless points of resistance emerged (...)
Virologist Peter Piot, director of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, fell ill with COVID-19 in mid-March. He spent a week in a hospital and has been recovering at his home in London since. Climbing a flight of stairs still leaves him breathless.
“You live in a routine from (...)
Exclusive: only one species is responsible for coronavirus – humans – say world’s leading wildlife experts.
The coronavirus pandemic is likely to be followed by even more deadly and destructive disease outbreaks unless their root cause – the rampant destruction of the natural world – is rapidly (...)
Late on 24 March, Ireland’s Health Minister Simon Harris announced “For the duration of this crisis the State will take control of all private hospital facilities and manage all of the resources for the common benefit of all of our people. There can be no room for public versus private when it (...)
Never has the global economy faced such a thorough challenge from a virus. Previous epidemics scythed through populations and ravaged livelihoods, but they remained contained on a regional scale or, where global, impacted the world economy less precipitously. Noteworthy too is the fact that (...)
Countries that are actively working to contain coronavirus are buying themselves time to deal with its uncertain outcomes.
As Sars-CoV-2 has spread across the world, some countries have reacted with alarm and thorough preparations, given their previous experiences with Mers or Sars. In these (...)
The following statement, signed by 170 academics from eight universities in the Netherlands, has been widely reported in the Dutch press, becoming a focus for discussion on how to avoid repeating past mistakes when in planning for the future.
Covid-19 has shaken the world. It has already led (...)
This statement was issued by the Executive Bureau of the Fourth International on 16 April 2020.
1 ► We are in a crisis full of dangers, a crisis of capitalist civilization, the most serious since the world wars of the twentieth century. We are combatting the coronavirus pandemic, which affects (...)
For the billions of people now living under some form of stay-at-home or lockdown orders, experts from the World Health Organization have new guidance: We should be ready to “change our behaviors for the foreseeable future,” they say, as the agency updates its advice on when to lift COVID-19 (...)
Note: the notes below were prepared for presentations on webinars that I spoke at in the past two weeks; they are compiled from various print and informant sources.
Click here for all ESSF coverage of the Coronavirus pandemic General Context
In a BBC programme in 2014, Dr. Larry Brilliant, (...)
On Monday March 29th, General Electric factory workers staged a protest against the thousands of layoffs announced by the company’s management, demanding the reconversion of production and asking a simple question: “If GE trusts us to build, maintain, and test engines which go on a variety of (...)
Capitalism has accelerated the transmission of diseases. Historically, most epidemics have spread geographically through two common forms of human long-distance movement: trade and war. The timing, however, changed dramatically with the rise of capitalism.
In the Middle Ages, it took a decade (...)
While frantically reading news about COVID-19, I wonder why the voices of social scientists and even public health specialists seem so subdued. Clearly, they have a contribution to make in the fight against the coronavirus based on their disciplinary core principles and what has been learned (...)
The Covid-19 pandemic continues to spread rapidly around the world and remains out of control – other than in those countries, led by China, that had (crucially) moved early and decisively to control it, and had prepared for such a situation in advance. The biggest governmental failures, on the (...)
• This is the first in an in-depth series exploring the effectiveness of different strategies to contain the coronavirus spread in communities across the world
• In this instalment, we look at masks. To urge citizens to wear or not to wear is a question that has vexed many governments
To mask (...)
THESIS 1 CAPITALISM PRIORITIZES PROFIT-MAKING OVER LIFE-MAKING: WE WANT TO REVERSE IT
This pandemic, and the ruling class response to it, offers a clear and tragic illustration of the idea at the heart of Social Reproduction Theory: that life-making bows to the requirements of profit-making. (...)
The coronavirus crisis has made clear that care and life-making work are the essential work of society.
The coronavirus pandemic has shown many of us, with brutal clarity, just how quickly society can change, and what we can—and cannot—live without. It turns out that large parts of a capitalist (...)
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