The escalating horrors emerging from the war in Ukraine have put the danger of nuclear energy back in the spotlight. Days after Russia’s invasion, President Vladimir Putin said in a military address he was “ordering the defence minister and chief of the general staff to switch the Russian army’s deterrent forces [i.e. nuclear weapons] on to a high alert mode of combat stand-by duty”. And now Russian forces have gained control of two Ukrainian nuclear power plants: Europe’s largest, Zaporizhzhia, as well as the decommissioned Chernobyl plant, the site of the world’s worst nuclear accident in 1986.
Today’s nuclear plants have inbuilt safety mechanisms aimed at averting disaster in many situations. But there is no guarantee they can withstand the chaos of a modern war zone, the contingencies of which are difficult to anticipate. Already, the electricity to the Chernobyl site has been cut off, which is needed to cool the spent nuclear fuel that is stored there and lines of communication have been lost to Zaporizhzhia. There is also the risk that other nuclear reactors—Ukraine has 15 in total—could be caught in crossfire. All these scenarios open up the potential for nuclear disasters. Ongoing loss of cooling systems could result in radiation leaks, or, as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has warned, “the end of Europe” if there is an explosion.
But despite the clear danger nuclear energy poses, many governments want to expand the industry, arguing that it provides much-needed “clean” energy. In Australia, National Party Senator Matt Canavan and former prime minister Tony Abbot want the coalition to lead a charge for the development of a national nuclear power industry—currently prohibited under Australian law—as a strategy to achieve Australia’s net-zero emissions targets. Similarly, US President Joe Biden’s 2021 infrastructure bill included US$6 billion for existing nuclear plants and advanced nuclear technology development, justified on the basis of reducing carbon emissions. 
Similar arguments about nuclear technology have been made by some on the left. The then-editor of US socialist magazine Jacobin, Bashkar Sunkara, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jun/21/fight-climate-crisis-clean-energy-nuclear-power">wrote in the Guardian last year</a> that nuclear power was key to decarbonising society. Sunkara also argued that we must let go of “paranoia” about nuclear’s dangerous past, insisting that it is now safer and that there is no necessary connection between nuclear power and nuclear weapons. The decision to go nuclear is, apparently, one of pragmatism: If our options are between fossil fuel-driven climate catastrophe and switching to nuclear power, what choice is there?
But modern nuclear energy production is neither safe nor green. The impact of the industry on water supplies—which will be under greater pressure in a warming world—is just one example. The industry’s key resource is uranium, the mining of which requires a lot of water and contaminates it in the process. A <a href="https://www.foe.org.au/uranium_in_australian_drinking_water_snapshot?fbclid=IwAR1ybA8kfyyTq0ia0DJGEXYSV_pgAEHY8SH8pVrI_mLEWCI2ncc7Q53t3Dw">2021 report </a>from Friends of the Earth documented unsafe levels of uranium in groundwater samples across remote Western Australia, Northern Territory and Queensland, impacting mostly Aboriginal communities. In 2011, a tsunami struck Japan’s Fukushima power plant, resulting in nuclear meltdowns, hydrogen explosions and water contaminated with radioactive isotypes flooding into the Pacific Ocean.
And to argue that we can separate nuclear power from nuclear weapons is to ignore that nuclear power is an invention of war. The Manhattan Project, a top-secret US operation initiated during World War II, used breakthroughs from physicists at the University of Chicago to build the world’s first industrial nuclear reactors and weapons—the latter tested in New Mexico in 1945 and then used in the bombing of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki later that year.
This catastrophic event prompted a nuclear arms race that has led to a situation today in which, according to the Federation of American Scientists, nine countries possess a total of 12,700 nuclear warheads between them. The public has always been assured that this situation creates a mutual deterrent for nations ever to use these monstrous weapons. But as we enter a new period of imperial conflict, where seizing nuclear reactors is part of military strategy and credible threats are being made about nuclear strikes, this argument seems more and more preposterous.
Nuclear technology can play a role in helping to win wars, and from that has followed the rationale for a nuclear energy industry. This is not the first time that energy production has followed this trajectory. Fossil fuel-derived energy was not a military invention, but wars played an essential role in the establishment of a fossil fuel-addicted economy. Britain converted all its battleships to petroleum to help fight World War I. The resources used to manufacture and power such machines had to go somewhere when the war was over—and so mass car production, chemical and synthetic material industries powered by oil followed in the 1930s. World War II then required further expansion of fossil fuel-aided technology and production, which were inherited by industrial agriculture and the plastics industry.
To argue that nuclear power represents the best of a lot of bad choices is to accept the unacceptable realities of capitalism. With all the resources available to us, humans are surely capable of finding ways to generate energy that are safe and sustainable. For anyone looking for solutions to the crises we face today, the task is not to pick from the terrible options that are compatible with capitalism, but to help fight for a society without wars and the destructive technologies they require, without the competition for profit that causes them, and without the constant threat of physical and environmental annihilation hanging over our heads.

Roxanne Kelly

Ukraine invasion shows danger of nuclear power

“You’ve often heard us say”, Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews told the media at one of his regular press conferences on the COVID-19 situation on 5 October 2021, “that no-one wants to get this”. On that day Will Smith, a 24-year-old former athlete, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/video/2021/oct/06/long-covid-is-real-former-athlete-warns-about-debilitating-battle-after-coronavirus-video">was brought out to speak</a>. Will caught COVID-19 in March 2020 but was still feeling the effects of the virus more than a year later—describing days when he couldn’t get out of bed, months when he could barely walk around the block and cycles of symptom improvement, then relapse.
Will’s story was intended as a warning not to be complacent about contracting the disease: that “no-one wants to get this” because anyone—even young, fit and healthy people who initially experience only “mild” symptoms—could suffer serious long-term consequences, and that, therefore, we all need to play our part in stopping the spread.
Will was experiencing <a href="https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/345824/WHO-2019-nCoV-Post-COVID-19-condition-Clinical-case-definition-2021.1-eng.pdf">post-COVID-19 condition</a>—commonly known as long COVID—a post-viral syndrome in which symptoms persist long after the initial COVID-19 infection. Common symptoms include fatigue, muscle weakness, breathlessness, heart palpitations, digestive issues, mental illness and memory loss. It can last only two months for some, while others show little recovery more than a year later. It can be so debilitating that some “long haulers” can no longer work or take care of themselves.
One particularly severe case was documented <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/12/long-covid-wife-suicide-give-others-hope">in a recent account in the Guardian</a> by Nick Güthe, whose wife committed suicide after battling long COVID for over a year following a “mostly asymptomatic coronavirus infection”. “Three weeks before she died”, Güthe wrote, “we were already terrified that she would die—not by her own hand, but from a stroke or a heart attack. She said her heart would often race out of control for no reason, and she was ahead of scientists in understanding that this virus also infects the brain.
“Heidi also suffered from ongoing gastrointestinal issues, exhaustion from just walking up a single flight of stairs, extreme body aches, brain fog and a host of other ailments ... Watching long COVID systematically take her apart, organ system by organ system, was the most terrifying deterioration of a human being I have ever witnessed.”
Research is only beginning to understand this new medical syndrome. There are difficulties involved even in estimating the overall prevalence of long COVID among those who contract the disease. Depending on the definition of the syndrome, the methodology adopted and the cohort considered, studies report that anywhere from 9 to 81 percent of those infected will go on to suffer long COVID.
While the syndrome is more common in older people and those who experienced severe symptoms, no-one is immune. A <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01433-3">Norwegian study</a> of people who had COVID-19 illness not requiring hospitalisation found 55 percent had long COVID symptoms six months later. For study participants between 16 and 30 years old, it was 52 percent. For children, studies suggest <a href="https://www.aamc.org/news-insights/scary-and-confusing-when-kids-suffer-long-covid-19">around 10 percent</a> will experience long COVID.
While evidence to date suggests that vaccination can reduce the risk of long COVID, it’s no silver bullet. A study <a href="https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(21)00460-6/fulltext">published in the medical journal </a><a href="https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(21)00460-6/fulltext">Lancet</a> in September 2021 found patients who contracted COVID after being vaccinated were only around 50 percent less likely to develop the condition. So if countries with high vaccination rates fail to control the spread of the virus, they will still end up with masses of long haulers. The UK is a prime example of this. <a href="https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/conditionsanddiseases/articles/coronaviruscovid19/latestinsights">The UK Office for National Statistics</a> reported on 6 January that 1.3 million people in the UK were suffering from long COVID. 
For many long COVID sufferers, organ damage is a likely contributor to their symptoms. Medical imaging done following COVID-19 infections has revealed patients with <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8674935/">scarred lungs</a> and <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8589042/">brains </a><a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8589042/">that</a> have reduced in size in several regions. Recent evidence suggests the <a href="https://assets.researchsquare.com/files/rs-1139035/v1_covered.pdf?c=1640020576">virus can persist in the body months after initial infection</a>, which may be the cause of ongoing symptoms in some long haulers. In others, COVID-19 infection appears to trigger autoimmunity—in which the body’s immune defences start to attack it.
Very little is known so far about effective treatments, although long COVID clinics are now opening in many countries to help rehabilitate patients and manage their symptoms. Just like the rest of the health system during the pandemic, however, these clinics are overwhelmed. Half of people in the UK attempting to access long COVID clinics have had to <a href="https://inews.co.uk/news/nhs-figures-reveal-a-huge-shortfall-in-long-covid-treatment-1310377?ito=twitter_share_article-top-1310377?ito=twitter_share_article-top">wait at least 10 weeks</a> for their first appointment. 
The research on long COVID to date makes it clear we should do all we can to protect people from COVID-19 infection. However, this is no longer Australia’s approach. In the space of a few short months, we’ve gone from “no-one wants to get this” to, in effect, “everyone is going to get this, and you should all stop complaining and accept it”. Queensland’s chief health officer, John Gerrard, went so far as to argue, in late December, that mass infection wasn’t just inevitable, “it is necessary”. Many others have argued along the same lines.
Does the fact that the Omicron variant may cause less severe illness overall compared to Delta reduce the risk of long COVID? Scott Morrison, Daniel Andrews, NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet and all the other leaders in politics and business who have more or less happily abandoned any attempt to control the spread of the disease would like us to believe it does. The truth, however, is that it’s too soon to know. Whatever the case, the huge number of people being infected means that many thousands of Australians will be left suffering from this horrible condition in the months and years ahead.
Our leaders have decided “the economy” has suffered too much from the pandemic, so for any suffering that remains, our bodies must take as much of this burden as possible. We are sleepwalking into a long COVID catastrophe.

Australia is sleepwalking into a long COVID catastrophe

Nijeer Parks knows all too well about the injustices committed by police in the United States. In February 2019, the then 31-year-old Black man from New Jersey had a warrant out for his arrest. His alleged crime: stealing snacks from a hotel gift store and fleeing when confronted by police. Upon hearing about the warrant, Parks went to the police station to (he thought) quickly remedy what was a clear case of mistaken identity. At the time of the alleged crime he was 30 miles away, sending money to his partner at a Western Union. 
Upon reaching the station however, Parks had no opportunity to demonstrate his innocence. He was handcuffed and thrown into the county prison, where he stayed for 10 days before being granted bail. The prosecutor in the case sought a 20-year sentence—taking into account prior drug convictions and trumped-up charges including shoplifting, resisting arrest and aggravated assault. Taking a plea deal, he was told, would only reduce the sentence to six years. Parks and his partner used all their savings to fight the charges, and fortunately the case was dropped in November 2019, after it became clear the police had no real evidence to back up their charges. 
 It’s disgraceful enough that anyone could be imprisoned for days just for being accused of a petty crime. But Parks’ case had an additional morbid twist: the decision to arrest him was based solely on the workings of a (faulty) computer algorithm. An image from a fake driver’s licence taken from the suspect at the gift store was scanned by facial recognition software, and it identified Parks as a match. This was the only evidence used for the arrest, which is ridiculous when you compare pictures of Parks and the real suspect, showing few similarities apart from them both being Black and having a beard. And this case is far from unique. Parks is one of at least three Black men in the US who have been wrongly arrested after being identified by facial recognition technology.
Today big tech is just as important for policing operations as the companies that manufacture their weapons, with artificial intelligence (AI) being used by police around the world to streamline criminal investigations, engage in mass surveillance, and, supposedly, predict and stop crimes before they occur. 
As with the use of AI <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/algorithms-war-military-plan-artificial-intelligence">in the military</a> and <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/algorithms-exploitation-class-struggle-age-artificial-intelligence">workplaces like Amazon</a>, the kind of AI used by police doesn’t actually involve genuinely intelligent machines. Instead, what AI can achieve for policing is the integration and analysis of huge amounts of data—piecing it together like a puzzle to help direct law enforcement operations. The concerning thing for ordinary people is where this data comes from: the many “digital traces” we all leave behind minute by minute, hour by hour as we go about our daily lives. Thanks to a rapidly growing <a href="https://www.knowledge-sourcing.com/report/global-data-broker-market#:~:text=The%20global%20data%20broker%20market,US$345.153%20billion%20in%202026.">data brokering industry estimated, in 2019</a>, to be worth US$232 billion, our electronic data is mined without our knowledge, packaged and sold to the highest bidder. Police are one of the industry’s main clients.
One of the industry’s major players is facial recognition company <a href="https://www.clearview.ai/">Clearview AI</a>. The New York-based company has harvested, without permission, more than 3 billion pictures from Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube and Facebook. The company’s algorithms match photos from this database to images loaded by clients into their facial recognition software. A <a href="https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/facial-recognition-local-police-clearview-ai-table">report published in Buzzfeed News</a> found that employees from more than 1,100 US police departments have used Clearview AI. And the technology isn’t just restricted to the US. Here in Australia, although police have previously denied using the technology, <a href="https://www.zdnet.com/article/data-breach-exposes-clearview-ai-client-list/">a leaked list of Clearview AI customers</a> revealed that the Australian Federal Police, as well as state police in Victoria, Queensland and South Australia, have trialled the company’s technology in recent years. 
Other AI companies gain access to much more than just our social media profiles. Palantir, a company that was set up with funding from the US Central Intelligence Agency, <a href="https://theintercept.com/2017/02/22/how-peter-thiels-palantir-helped-the-nsa-spy-on-the-whole-world/">is an example</a>. The company was named, ominously, after the powerful <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palant%C3%ADr">palantíri seeing stones</a> from The Lord of the Rings and, since its founding in 2003, has been known mostly for assisting with surveillance operations for the US military. It is widely credited (although this hasn’t been officially confirmed) with tracking down Osama Bin Laden.
In more recent times, Palantir has expanded its client base well beyond the military, and chief among them are the police. The company’s software allows cops to connect data from multiple sources to determine relationships between different individuals, locations and objects. Crime data from police can be combined with anything from birth and death data, phone records, automatic licence plate readings and social media posts to stitch together an intricate social web, showing police who is a relative of whom, who is dating whom, the physical and personal details of these individuals as well as what phones and cars they are using. 
In her 2020 book Predict and Surveil: Data, Discretion, and the Future of Policing, Sarah Brayne examines the use of AI by the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). She finds that the programs used by police can swiftly produce a list of crime suspects even from the vaguest starting information. A Palantir engineer Brayne interviewed presents her with a hypothetical robbery scenario in which the suspect is “male, average build” with a “black 4-door sedan”, and demonstrates how these scanty details, when entered into the company’s software, generate a list of 13 “matches” with corresponding driver’s license numbers within the space of a minute.
Another disturbing technological frontier is the use of “predictive policing”—algorithms that supposedly can help avert future crimes. AI is very far from achieving the <a href="https://minorityreport.fandom.com/wiki/Precogs">“Precog” type visions</a> of the future seen in the film Minority Report. However, its use in this area is highly problematic nonetheless. Police use predictive policing algorithms to attribute a score or rating to individuals that—based on a range of data points—are claimed to indicate their likelihood of committing future crimes. These scores are then used by police to direct where they put their resources.
This technology isn’t new. A 2014 report from <a href="https://www.policeforum.org/assets/docs/Free_Online_Documents/Leadership/future%20trends%20in%20policing%202014.pdf">the Police Executive Research Forum</a> showed that 38 percent of US police departments surveyed were using some form of predictive policing technology. In her book Brayne examined the LAPD’s Operation LASER (short for “Los Angeles Strategic Extraction and Restoration”), which was launched in 2011. The operation involved the use of Palantir software to generate crime “hot spot maps” and “chronic offender bulletins” (which look like wanted posters for individuals the software has deemed likely to commit ongoing crime), which are given to police for use on their regular patrols. 
In Australia, the New South Wales Police’s Suspect Target Management Plan (STMP) has existed in different incarnations since 1999. The STMP assigns risk scores to people with prior convictions to identify who should be subjected to ongoing surveillance. Victoria Police <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/nov/23/victoria-police-refuses-to-reveal-how-many-young-people-tracked-using-secretive-data-tool?CMP=share_btn_tw">trialled a predictive policing algorithm</a> targeting youth from 2016 to 2018, but have refused to provide any details about the program.
Some have argued that the use of AI technology could be beneficial in policing, possibly helping to reform the criminal justice system. A <a href="https://obamawhitehouse.archives.govhttps://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/2016_0504_data_discrimination.pdf">2016 report by the Obama administration</a>, for instance, claimed, “When designed and deployed carefully, data-based methodologies can help law enforcement make decisions based on factors and variables that empirically correlate with risk, rather than on flawed human instincts and prejudices”. Accounts of how these technologies work in practice, however, show there is nothing objective or unbiased about them. If anything, the use of computer algorithms to guide police appears only to entrench and exacerbate existing biased policing practices. 
This is in part due to weaknesses of the technology itself. The case of Nijeer Parks is just the tip of the iceberg. When the American Civil Liberties Union <a href="https://www.aclu.org/blog/privacy-technology/surveillance-technologies/amazons-face-recognition-falsely-matched-28">ran its</a> own test of Amazon’s facial recognition software Rekognition, images of 28 members of the US Congress were falsely matched with photos from a police mugshot database. And just like a racist cop, these algorithms are more likely to get it wrong for certain people already disproportionately targeted by law enforcement. A 2019 <a href="https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2019/12/nist-study-evaluates-effects-race-age-sex-face-recognition-software">study by the National Institute of Standards and Technology</a>—which tested the accuracy of 189 facial recognition algorithms—showed that, depending on the specific algorithm, they were between 10 and 100 times more likely to spit out a false positive match for Asian and African American faces compared to whites.
The predictive policing programs show similar biases. The LAPD’s Operation LASER provides a clear example. According to Sarah Brayne’s research, the scoring system used to produce their chronic offender bulletins lets existing police biases in at the ground floor. Offenders are identified by the system in part based on previous criminal convictions and in part on how many times they have been stopped by police. So someone who the police have—for whatever reason—been harassing, will be identified by the system as a likely future offender, warranting yet more harassment.
 Reports on other predictive policing programs show the targeting of communities already subjected to ongoing police harassment and violence. A 2017 <a href="https://piac.asn.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/17.10.25-YJC-STMP-Report.pdf">Youth Justice Coalition</a> report on STMP in New South Wales, for instance, found 44 percent of those targeted by the program were Aboriginal people, many of whom had no prior convictions. The report details the experience of a young Aboriginal man identified as James. Despite having no prior convictions in the state, James was listed by the program as being a likely offender. Following this, he was stopped by police on a monthly basis, and in one incident was capsicum sprayed after questioning officers as to why they were stopping him. 
The AI technologies used by police are now also being rolled out to enhance surveillance by other repressive state agencies. Palantir has expanded into immigration, with one of its more recently acquired clients being the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE). The use of Palantir’s technologies to spy on undocumented immigrants has led to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/04/palantir-ipo-ice-immigration-trump-administration">some of the biggest ICE raids in the country’s history</a>. This includes raids on a series of chicken-processing plants in Mississippi in 2019, in which 680 people were arrested.
The clear evidence that these technologies offer no solution to the entrenched racism and other problems in policing has resulted in some resistance to the use of AI programs. The LAPD had to abandon Operation LASER in 2019 after ongoing pressure from <a href="https://stoplapdspying.org/">Stop LAPD Spying Coalition</a> activists. In recent years <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/22/17492106/amazon-ice-facial-recognition-internal-letter-protest">workers at Amazon, Microsoft and Google</a> have demanded the companies stop supplying AI to the police, ICE and the military. And students at the University of California Berkeley <a href="https://www.dailycal.org/2019/09/24/under-pressure-palantir-cancels-uc-berkeley-information-session/">stoppe</a>d Palantir from coming on to their campus to hold recruiting sessions.
These activists are right to resist the use of AI technology by the police and other repressive agencies. Policing is rotten because it is an essential part of a rotten capitalist system—which uses the ongoing surveillance and repression of the working class and poor communities to ensure that the rich stay rich. AI in policing can only contribute to, not solve, the injustices of modern policing. It doesn’t matter whether a cop is armed with a gun or with a computer, we have to take a stand against them all.

Algorithms of injustice: Artificial intelligence in policing and surveillance

The COVID-19 pandemic has put healthcare around the world in the spotlight. In Australia, it has revealed a system breaking at the seams. Our hospitals were shown to have no surge capacity to accommodate an anticipated influx of intensive care patients, no stockpiles of personal protective equipment for carers and no effective strategy to protect front-line healthcare workers from contracting the virus. Without the lockdowns that kept COVID-19 cases low, Australia’s health system could easily have been plunged into a situation of outright collapse like we’ve seen in countries such as Italy, India and Brazil.
The failure of Australia’s healthcare system isn’t just in being ill prepared for pandemics. In a 9 June <a href="https://www.ama.com.au/media/dr-omar-khorshid-national-press-club-amas-vision-australias-health">speech</a> at the National Press Club, Australian Medical Association (AMA) President Dr Omar Khorshid described every part of the system as in crisis. He said that waiting times in our hospital emergency departments are the longest they’ve been since 2013, and ambulances are rushing patients to hospital only to have them wait for hours outside the doors. He spoke of the failures of primary healthcare services (the GPs, pharmacists and so on that are usually people’s first contact point with the health system), which are contributing to billions being spent in hospitals to treat patients with preventable conditions.
Khorshid warned that “avoidable deaths will result” from the strains the system is operating under. “Avoidable deaths have resulted. This is not new. But it’s worse now than it’s been in a long, long time.”
Australia’s system is supposed to among the world’s poster children of universal healthcare, yet the situation Khorshid and others have described sounds more like what one would expect from healthcare in the United States. Australia’s system is, for now, very different from the costly, mostly privatised US model. If we’re not careful though, our system could easily morph into something similar. Many Australian politicians and healthcare bosses look at the US model with admiration, tempted by the immense profits being made. They have an interest in allowing our public system to degrade.
It’s a development we should fight to avoid. According to a <a href="https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2009/09/new-study-finds-45000-deaths-annually-linked-to-lack-of-health-coverage/">2009 study</a> published in the American Journal of Public Health, an estimated 45,000 Americans die each year due to a lack of health insurance. The US healthcare system, we should remember, is the one that produced the kind of horror stories featured in Michael Moore’s 2007 film Sicko, such as the man who—after a sawing accident—chose to re-attach his ring finger but not his middle finger because the surgery for the middle finger was US$60,000, while the ring finger was only $12,000. 
When Australia’s most recent public health insurance scheme, Medicare, was introduced in 1984, then Prime Minister Bob Hawke proclaimed, “No Australian need now fear that treatment of sickness will have crippling financial consequences”. However, Medicare has never been funded enough to achieve that. Indexation of the scheme hasn’t matched the rising costs of health services, and both sides of the political aisle have dug into Medicare funds when they wanted to find savings at budget time. In 2013 Labor froze Medicare rebate increases altogether. This was supposed to be a temporary measure, but it was continued by the Coalition following its election in 2014. 
The long-term underfunding of Medicare has meant basic medical services that many could once access for free now come with significant <a href="https://www.health.gov.au/health-topics/private-health-insurance/what-private-health-insurance-covers/out-of-pocket-costs">out</a>-<a href="https://www.health.gov.au/health-topics/private-health-insurance/what-private-health-insurance-covers/out-of-pocket-costs">of</a>-<a href="https://www.health.gov.au/health-topics/private-health-insurance/what-private-health-insurance-covers/out-of-pocket-costs">pocket costs</a>. According to the 2020 General Practice: Health of the Nation <a href="https://www.racgp.org.au/health-of-the-nation/health-of-the-nation">report</a> by the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, the average cost for a standard GP consultation is now twice that of the Medicare rebate. Doctors are increasingly unwilling to bulk bill—the same report found that only four out of ten GPs bulk bill at least 75 percent of their patients. 
The impact of these out-of-pocket costs was highlighted in a December 2020 <a href="https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/abs/10.1377/hlthaff.2020.01566?journalCode=hlthaff&amp;fbclid=IwAR0tDOo3SNtZawd-7ENiRK9pvXZi2jP255AOY0eNRdtBvWnO4ypDYjI4tPc">study</a> published in Health Affairs. It found that 21 percent of Australian adults had recently skipped basic medical care, tests or filling their prescription medication because they couldn’t afford it. 
The situation with funding for our public hospitals is similarly dire. Funding increases in recent decades haven’t been anywhere near adequate to keep up with a growing and ageing population. The AMA’s <a href="https://www.ama.com.au/articles/ama-public-hospital-report-card-2020">Public Hospital Report Card 2020</a> found that public hospital beds per 1,000 people over 65 decreased from around 20 in 2008 to 16 in 2018. The report also showed that the average waiting time for elective surgery is now around 41 days—eight days longer than a decade ago. 
More telling than the statistics, the stories emerging from hospitals demonstrate the horrifying impact of underfunding. In emergency departments, understaffing, a lack of beds and the associated long waiting times are costing lives—such as that of <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/should-not-happen-any-child-was-deadly-hospital-crisis">7-</a>year<a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/should-not-happen-any-child-was-deadly-hospital-crisis">-</a>old Aishwarya Aswath, who died at Perth Children’s Hospital on 10 April. Aishwayra's mother tried desperately to get someone to treat her daughter for over two hours while in the emergency waiting area. She died 15 minutes after she was finally seen by a doctor.
Other departments are also stretched. Sarah,* a social worker at one of Victoria’s major public hospitals, described the situation in the maternity department:
“We are constantly out of beds in the birth centre. Women are giving birth in emergency or the car park. Women are being told to come to hospital and get induced for a high-risk pregnancy, only to wait three days in another ward. Midwives are burnt out and leaving the industry in droves, while the rest are left to do double shifts. In that environment, you simply can't provide people with the level of care they need.”
Marlon,* a nurse in a psychiatric ward, painted a similar picture. “Understaffing creates the most cruel conditions” for patients, he said. “The last few years have seen clinical psychologists, social workers and occupational therapists disappear from our ward. My patients have been admitted involuntarily because they apparently can’t make decisions to help themselves, but our hospitals don’t have the resources to properly help them either.”
Australia’s politicians have been happy to scrimp on spending on the public system, but they’ve meanwhile been handing increasing amounts to the private healthcare industry. Medicare was never intended to replace private health insurance completely. In 1996, the year the Liberal government under John Howard was elected, membership rates for private health insurance were still at 34 percent. This, however, was a marked decline from 48 percent in 1985, and Howard introduced the Medicare Levy Surcharge and subsidies in an attempt to reverse the trend. Today, these initiatives equate to the federal government handing over a staggering $11 billion of taxpayer funds a year to private health insurers.
The current private insurance model in Australia isn’t as bad as its US counterpart, but it does share some features. Insurance premiums are rising rapidly, and the growing complexity of insurance plans highlights the basic irrationality (and inhumanity) of for-profit healthcare. 
Navigating the 31 plans offered by Medibank Private in Victoria, for example, requires difficult decisions on how to balance affordability with the worth of particular body parts. The basic plans suffice only if you want coverage for car crashes, having your appendix out or getting a hernia. Five more dollars a week will cover more organs, but not your heart—that requires the “silver” plan. Having a baby requires “gold” coverage, starting at a minimum of $43.18 a week. And then there are extra fees on top of that for services such as dental—because according to the private health industry, having teeth is an optional luxury. 
There has been some debate in recent years about whether the current private insurance model will remain viable. Rising premiums and inadequate services have turned many people off. The take-up of private health insurance is declining once again. Much to the displeasure of the insurance bosses, it’s young people who are ditching their insurance—leaving an increasingly older customer base who are more likely to access the services they’re paying for. And the industry received another blow in 2020, when elective surgeries were cancelled under COVID-19 restrictions. 
These factors have hurt the profits of private health insurers. Medibank, for example, reported a 28 percent decrease in net profits for the 2020 fiscal year. However, claims that the industry is facing a “death spiral”—as a <a href="https://grattan.edu.au/report/stopping-the-death-spiral/">recent report</a> from the Grattan Institute put it—are premature. Even after Medibank’s terrible year in 2020, the company recorded a profit of $315.6 million. Bupa—another major private insurer—had a profit of $211 million. These companies are far from being at death’s door. Their concern is merely that they’re not making the kind of excessive profits that insurers enjoy in places like the US.
The insurers are doing what they can to rectify this. Private Healthcare Australia—an industry lobby group—has been calling on the government to give tax breaks to employers who take out private health insurance for their workers, similar to the workplace insurance schemes that are common in the US. Proposals like this are likely to get a sympathetic hearing in parliament. Minister for Health Greg Hunt used part of his 2002 maiden <a href="https://www.greghunt.com.au/about-greg/maiden-speech/">speech</a> to advocate “employer incentives for the inclusion of healthcare in workplace arrangements”, as the key element in the “next expansion in private health coverage” in Australia.
This would be a horrible development for workers and the poor. It would provide a further boost to the private system at the cost of public healthcare. It would, if taken to the extremes that we see in the US today, prevent many unemployed or underemployed workers from accessing decent healthcare. And even for those lucky to gain insurance via their employer, we can be sure that bosses will find a way for premiums to be taken out of workers’ wages.
Some private insurers are also moving towards the “managed care” model used in the US—in which insurance companies contract specific healthcare providers to deliver services to their members. In August 2020 Medibank bought a 49 percent stake in East Sydney Private Hospital. Then in January, the company bought Myhealth, a chain of 80 shopping centre GP practices across three Australian states. These arrangements allow insurers to control the types of services offered by the providers their members are directed to access. For example, Medibank's <a href="https://www.medibank.com.au/livebetter/newsroom/post/medibank-announces-investment-in-east-sydney-private-hospital">media release</a> announcing the East Sydney Private Hospital deal says the company will use its investment to expand a “short stay model of care”.
These changes won’t transform our system into an Americanised version overnight, but any step in that direction should be aggressively opposed. Nothing good can come from private health companies having more control over health services and pushing our health system further towards the for-profit model. If we’re going to fix the crisis in Australia’s health system, sending the private industry into a real death spiral would be a good start. The billions of dollars currently handed over to the industry each year could be used to build a genuinely universal and adequately resourced public health system instead.
 
*Names have been changed.

The crisis of Australia’s healthcare system 

Amazon’s latest employee wellness initiative—the installation of “AmaZen mindful practice rooms” in its warehouses—could easily have been something from the Netflix sci-fi series Black Mirror. It has exactly the balance of the familiar (anyone who has been subject to faddish “employee wellness” programs will recognise the grift) and the sinister (in the “mindful practice room”, can anyone hear you scream?). 
Perhaps, however, the concept is too lame. The plot lines of Black Mirror generally involve the use of new technologies for dystopian ends. An AmaZen booth is the kind of thing you might get if you asked a group of year nine science students to build a Black Mirror-like dystopian technology out of materials gathered from hard rubbish.
The rooms, which aren’t much bigger than a coffin, are equipped with a swivel chair and pictures of clouds pasted to the ceiling. Inside, employees can watch short positive affirmation and guided meditation videos. 
The introduction of the AmaZen booths is part of Amazon’s broader <a href="https://press.aboutamazon.com/news-releases/news-release-details/body-mechanics-mindfulness-amazon-launches-employee-designed?ots=1&amp;slotNum=0&amp;imprToken=e2bcf86e-210f-d040-ac9&amp;tag=curbedcom06-20&amp;linkCode=w50">WorkingWell program</a>. Other program absurdities include “Wellness Zones”, areas in warehouses set aside for workers to do stretches, and “Mindful Moments”, hourly prompts from the workstation surveillance technology directing employees through breathing exercises and mental reflections.
Unsurprisingly, there has been a backlash. Amazon quickly pulled its promotional video from Twitter after replies pointing out that the booths looked like “cry closets” or “tiny capitalism panic rooms”. More generally, Amazon’s attempted rebranding as a wellness employer isn’t convincing anyone. After all, the company puts so much pressure on employees that some reportedly <a href="https://theintercept.com/2021/03/25/amazon-drivers-pee-bottles-union/">resort to pissing in bottles</a> in an effort to meet stringent productivity quotas.
Amazon is not the only business to introduce bullshit “employee wellness” schemes. Corporate wellness initiatives have boomed in the last decade, particularly in white-collar workplaces. A 2018 US National Business Group on Health survey of 163 companies found that 52 percent offered some form of mindfulness training to employees, up from 36 percent the year before. 
Not all such initiatives are as sinister as Amazon’s “cry closets”. They range from bog-standard one day “mindfulness and resilience” professional development programs to much more elaborate affairs. 
Intel’s <a href="mailto:Awake@Intel">Awake@Intel</a> program, for example, offers employees the chance to participate in a ten-week mindfulness and meditation course that promises a “better self at work and beyond”. A <a href="https://blogs.intel.com/jobs/2018/05/learning-mindfulness-for-a-better-self/#gs.2y9wlk">post</a> on the “WeAreIntel” blog, written by Intel’s content marketing manager, effused that the mindfulness it teaches “not only helps to manage stress, but also to develop laser-like focus for efficiency and productivity inside and outside of the company”.
Google’s Search Inside Yourself program—created in 2007 by company engineer Chade-Meng Tan—has since been spun off into an independent <a href="https://siyli.org/">Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute (SIYLI)</a>. SIYLI offers “transformational experiences backed by world experts in neuroscience, mindfulness and emotional intelligence” and boasts clients in more than 50 countries.
What all such programs have in common, beneath the warm and fuzzy rhetoric, is the promise of improved health and wellbeing, not for employees, but for business bottom lines. For example, take SIYLI’s account of the positive impact of mindfulness training at German multinational software company SAP: 
“For starters, the training has boosted employee engagement and reduced absenteeism. According to SAP’s calculations, a 1 percentage point increase in employee engagement corresponds to anywhere from 50 to 60 million euros in operating profit. At the same time, a 1 percentage point increase in its business health culture index can boost profits by 85 to 95 million euros. Another quantifiable result: SAP’s strong first-quarter results for 2018 and its steadily rising performance in the New York Stock Exchange, especially in recent years.”
There may of course be marginal benefits for workers taking part in these programs. Having a break from the daily grind, even if it’s just to undertake bullshit mindfulness exercises, can help reduce stress temporarily. But corporate mindfulness offers no solutions to the main sources of working-class stress: job insecurity, low wages and being worked like a machine. In fact, the mindfulness industry is designed to prevent these issues being addressed.
Instead of correctly placing the blame for bad working conditions on the bosses, corporate mindfulness teaches us that stress is a product of inadequate mental resilience. With mindfulness (so the theory goes), we can take these stressful thoughts, place them on an imaginary leaf, and send them floating down a calm, trickling stream. After unburdening ourselves from our own minds, we can get back to working harder than ever. 
In the case of Amazon, the launch of the WorkingWell program couldn’t be more transparently associated with concerns about workplace organising. Over the last few years, there have been staff walkouts at Amazon facilities in the US, the UK and Europe during the annual Prime Day sales event. In March, up to 75 percent of Amazon’s logistics workers in Italy <a href="https://jacobinmag.com/2021/03/italy-nationwide-amazon-strike-march-22">went on strike</a>. There was also an attempt by Amazon workers in Bessemer, Alabama, to unionise. 
Unlike corporate mindfulness training, workplace organising has tangible benefits that go well beyond a momentary reduction in stress. This was illustrated in the aftermath of the vote in Bessemer, when Amazon worker and union activist Jennifer Bates gave a speech that, despite her disappointment at the lost vote, exuded the kind of joy, confidence and determination that could never be achieved through guided meditation.
“Victory will come. Not just here in Birmingham or Bessemer, but around this nation”, Bates said. “The fire has started. Burn, let it burn!” And she is right: the fire started in Bessemer is spreading, with union activists now <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jun/04/amazon-workers-staten-island-christian-smalls">targeting</a> another major Amazon warehouse in New York. As these workers get organised, in addition to winning better wages and conditions, some might find inner peace by taking to one of the AmaZen booths with a sledgehammer. Namaste.

Amazon's Zen booths bullshit

The rapid development of vaccines against COVID-19 should be a positive, life-saving development. Happening at a speed many in the medical field would have previously thought impossible, these vaccines provide a glimmer of hope that an end to this once-in-a-century pandemic is possible.
But instead of national governments and pharmaceutical companies cooperating to vaccinate the world’s population as quickly as possible, other priorities are informing the distribution of vaccines.
For the governments of wealthy nations, vaccines represent a solution to their own criminal negligence. In much of the UK, Europe and the US, politicians refused or resisted locking down their economies long enough to eliminate community transmission and save lives, preferring to protect profits. The death toll in these countries continues to rise as the virus spreads out of control, as does the economic cost. Rapid mass vaccination is now widely seen as the only viable solution to this disaster, and governments in these countries are willing to fight each other to be first in the supply queue.
 Such competition has characterised the vaccine development right from the beginning. When Oxford University started searching for a pharmaceutical company to manufacture its vaccine candidate, it initially struck a deal with the US company Merck. However, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/jan/29/we-had-to-go-it-alone-how-the-uk-got-ahead-in-the-covid-vaccine-race">the deal collapsed</a> when Merck refused to guarantee to prioritise supply to the UK. Oxford ended up partnering with AstraZeneca. AstraZeneca doesn’t actually specialise in vaccines, but when the UK government offered up-front funding to secure 100 million doses and allow AstraZeneca to build its first virus-manufacturing facility, the company was willing to expand its clinical portfolio and promise that UK citizens would be first in line for the jab.
However, AstraZeneca’s favouritism has angered the EU. The EU has forked out the significant sum of<a href="https://apnews.com/article/europe-europe-coronavirus-pandemic-coronavirus-vaccine-ba107e05dec2653f91555ff88033ade9"> €336 million in a deal</a> with the company to secure vaccine supplies. But in late January, delays in production resulted in AstraZeneca cutting supply to the EU by close to 75 percent, while supplies to the UK were unaffected. The EU retaliated by passing a <a href="https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-imposes-export-controls-on-rich-nations-from-saturday/">regulation</a> blocking COVID-19 vaccine exports to 100 countries, including the UK. This is not an isolated incident—last May, the drug company Sanofi found itself in a <a href="https://www.france24.com/en/20200514-france-says-unacceptable-for-sanofi-to-give-coronavirus-vaccine-to-us-first">tug</a><a href="https://www.france24.com/en/20200514-france-says-unacceptable-for-sanofi-to-give-coronavirus-vaccine-to-us-first"> </a>of <a href="https://www.france24.com/en/20200514-france-says-unacceptable-for-sanofi-to-give-coronavirus-vaccine-to-us-first">war between the USA and France</a> over its vaccine candidate.
But these spats amongst wealthy countries are only one part of the problem, and are likely to abate once production increases. A <a href="https://www.eiu.com/n/85-poor-countries-will-not-have-access-to-coronavirus-vaccines/">report</a> from the Intelligence Unit at the Economist predicts that most of Europe, the UK and US will have widespread vaccination coverage by the end of 2021, with the remainder of the advanced economies likely to have coverage by mid-2022.
For the countries that cannot afford to pay, it is a different story. “[W]idespread vaccination coverage will not be achieved before 2023, if it happens at all” is the likely scenario for developing countries, according to the report.
This is because COVID-19 vaccines, and the companies competing to make them, are not charitable endeavours. The aim is to make money by selling to those who can pay. The vaccine industry pre-COVID was already estimated to be worth US$35 billion, and it will get a welcome boost from COVID-19. Pfizer alone is expected to make US$<a href="https://www.ft.com/content/0f1ab138-401d-40ff-824f-f6879704f10e">15 billion </a>this year from its vaccine. To maximise these profits, supplies will go to the highest bidders.
There have been attempts to counter this inhuman market logic. India and South Africa, for example, <a href="https://inthesetimes.com/article/world-trade-organization-trump-biden-vaccine-apartheid-covid-intellectual-property-patent">proposed</a> that the World Trade Organization remove intellectual property protections on leading vaccine candidates so that poorer countries could manufacture their own supplies. Unsurprisingly, the proposal was blocked by the US, UK and EU.
Another attempt is the creation of <a href="https://www.who.int/initiatives/act-accelerator/covax">COVAX</a>, a collaborative initiative led by the World Health Organization. The aim is to eliminate competition around vaccine distribution through the collective procurement of vaccines via negotiation with manufacturers, and equal distribution of supplies to participating COVAX countries. Donations and contributions from the wealthier countries are meant to subsidise the vaccine supply for countries that cannot afford to pay.
About 145 countries are currently participating in COVAX. However, many of the wealthier participating countries have also made private deals with vaccine manufacturers. This will in turn affect the supply available to COVAX. The initiative has a 2021 goal of distributing enough vaccines for 20 percent of the population in participating countries. But its latest <a href="https://www.who.int/publications/m/item/the-covax-facility-interim-distribution-of-forecast">report</a> forecasts that, if all goes to plan, COVAX will distribute enough jabs to vaccinate only 3.3 percent of participating populations during the first half of 2021.
And even if it does eventually reach 20 percent coverage, COVAX currently has no plans to go beyond that goal. How nations depending on this initiative are supposed to vaccinate the remainder of their population is anyone’s guess.
This continues a pattern of health inequality in capitalist society. People living in developing countries suffer from countless illnesses that can easily be prevented and treated elsewhere. Sometimes the developed world has a charitable moment with medicines, but it usually comes years or decades after these medicines have become readily available in the developed world and have already made their manufacturers a fortune. Such were the experiences of the efforts to eradicate polio and distribution of the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic vaccine and HIV antivirals.
Despite much lofty talk about saving lives, COVID-19 vaccines are commodities just like any other. With 2 million people already killed by the pandemic and many more under threat, the inhuman, profit-obsessed market will continue to decide who lives and who dies.

In this system, a vaccine is just a commodity

We have been constantly told during the COVID-19 pandemic that we must follow the advice of the experts. As health experts are guided by what we believe to be objective data and science, many feel no need, or don’t feel confident to be critical of expert opinion. For the most part, this is a good thing. But what happens when different groups of experts have wildly divergent views? 
Such is the case with expert advice on the best ways to deal with COVID-19 pandemic. In the early months of the pandemic, some health advisors—<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/17/swedens-covid-19-strategist-under-fire-over-herd-immunity-emails">such as Sweden’s chief epidemiologist Anders Tegnell</a>—championed herd immunity, while those in Australia and New Zealand advocated for widespread restrictions to suppress transmission. Individual health experts have, in addition, been inconsistent in their advice. Victoria’s Chief Health Officer, Brett Sutton, for example, has shifted his opinion around masks, the safety of schools and who should be tested on what sometimes feels like a weekly basis. Clearly, there is more to expert opinion than the objective truth, and we must consider the influence that capitalist ideology has in shaping the advice health experts are providing about COVID-19.
<a href="https://gbdeclaration.org/">The Great Barrington Declaration</a> is one of the most recent cases that has provoked major controversy among health experts. Authored by three professors in infectious disease and epidemiology from Harvard, Stanford and Oxford universities, the Declaration claims that lockdowns are devastating for public health and proposes an alternative “focused protection” strategy. 
The strategy is based on evidence that the risk of dying from COVID-19 differs significantly by age, and therefore proposes that younger, less vulnerable people, should resume life as normal, while older, more vulnerable people continue to isolate. As younger people are infected with the virus, so the theory goes, the population will eventually develop herd immunity to protect more vulnerable elderly people.
The Declaration appears to have gained a reasonable amount of support since its publication on 5 October, reporting signatures from over 11,000 scientists, 31,000 medical practitioners and 569,000 “concerned citizens” globally. Even some sections of the left seem open to the strategy it outlines, with US publication Jacobin, for instance, running an interview with one of its authors, Dr Martin Kulldorff, where he was able to pitch his <a href="https://jacobinmag.com/2020/09/covid-19-pandemic-economy-us-response-inequality">“radically different approach to the pandemic”</a>. 
Other health experts, however, have strongly disputed the Declaration’s claims. Shortly after the publication of the Declaration in October, 31 health experts published a <a href="https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)32153-X/fulltext">response</a> in the prestigious medical journal the Lancet. These authors voiced concern that the herd immunity strategy outlined in the Declaration represents “a dangerous fallacy unsupported by scientific evidence”. They argue that there is no evidence herd immunity is achievable through natural infection and that “uncontrolled transmission in younger people risks significant morbidity and mortality across the whole population”. Instead, they insist that governments should continue to implement measures that control community transmission of COVID-19 until we have effective vaccines and therapeutics. 
The response highlights that there is nothing “radically different” about the strategy outlined in the Declaration. It proposes the controversial herd immunity approach, re-branded. We can look at the UK as a most recent example of how this strategy unfolds. The UK until recently implemented <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/guidance-on-shielding-and-protecting-extremely-vulnerable-persons-from-covid-19">“shielding”</a> for vulnerable populations, ordering them to isolate during periods of high virus transmission while the remainder of the population was less restricted. The UK is now recording over 20,000 COVID-19 cases per day, hundreds of daily fatalities, <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-11-01/coronavirus-england-imposes-month-long-lockdown-cases-1-million/12836296">and is about to enter a second lockdown to slow transmission</a>. This suggests the ability to both clearly identify and protect vulnerable people during periods of high virus transmission in the population is pure fantasy. 
Some may still want to argue that a focused protection strategy could be more effectively implemented than what was attempted in the UK. However, the evidence that this will result in herd immunity doesn’t exist. The authors of the declaration <a href="https://gbdeclaration.org/frequently-asked-questions/">admit</a> they don’t know what percentage of the population needs to be infected with the virus to achieve herd immunity, so how can they insist that infection of young and healthy people will be sufficient to protect the population? Secondly, <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-020-00813-8">emerging data </a>indicates that immunity from natural infection with COVID-19 can decrease over time, and there have been several cases of reinfection with the virus, bringing into question whether herd immunity can be achieved without a vaccine.
 Finally, the Declaration ignores the health outcomes of survivors of COVID-19, which raises more concerns. The <a href="https://www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m3026">list of potential complications</a> that can occur in patients (including young people) who have recovered from COVID-19 continues to grow, including chronic fatigue like-illness, heart problems and lung damage. And because this virus is quite new we won’t know for many years what the long term effects on health will be. 
There appears to be a strong scientific case, then, against the proposals put forward in the Declaration. However, relying on the scientific evidence alone to pick a side has its limitations. You enter into what appears to be a perpetual debate. Just like many scientific debates, both sides continue to claim apparently “objective” evidence for their strategies, pick apart the other side’s arguments and identify holes in their evidence. 
Both sides insist their strategy is in the best interests of public health. In the case of the authors of the Declaration, this centres on the consequences, for public health, of extended lockdowns. For the authors of the response in the Lancet, the argument is that a herd immunity strategy will have vastly greater public health consequences. And even if we believe the scientific evidence against the Declaration is stronger, this doesn’t address why the authors of the Declaration got their conclusions so wrong. To fully understand this, we need additional ways to judge the arguments being made. 
It’s here that we must look at the role that capitalist ideology inevitably plays. Science doesn’t exist in an apolitical vacuum. Scientific data may be objective, but there is a lot of space for subjectivity in how the data is interpreted and presented. This use of science is shaped, just as much as any other aspect of human endeavour, by the ideological currents that dominate the capitalist society we live in. 
You don’t have to scratch the surface too deeply to see that the Declaration was a politically motivated, right-wing manoeuvre. The location for writing it, and the resources required to publicise it, were provided by the American Institute of Economic Research, a right-wing libertarian think tank that has published constant propaganda about the negative effects of lockdowns on the economy. One of Declaration’s authors, Dr Jay Bhattacharya, is a close colleague of Dr Scott Atlas, the lunatic pandemic health advisor to US president Donald Trump. The Declaration has become a key feature of Dr Atlas’s <a href="https://twitter.com/SWAtlasHoover?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor">Twitter frenzies</a> labelled with hashtags #LockdownsKill and #TruthPrevails, and is being used to justify Trump’s criminal approach to the pandemic that has long prioritised opening up the economy over people’s lives. 
This gets to the heart of what is wrong with the Declaration: its purpose is to disguise a health strategy for capitalism as a strategy for public health. 
The fact that there are some health experts prepared to advocate a pandemic strategy that is being used to put capitalist profits above human lives shouldn’t surprise us. The world of science, just as much as any other part of society, is powerfully shaped by the interests of big business. The priorities of capitalism dictate what ideas are researched and funded, and which results and conclusions are publicised. This will inevitably result in the promotion of scientists and experts who are most accepting of the limitations of capitalism and develop ideas that align with those that the run the system. 
In our assessment of expert opinion, we would do well to always keep this dynamic in mind. A rigorous assessment of expert advice and scientific claims must include a political assessment of how science is being used and who stands to benefit from it.

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The crisis of Australia’s healthcare system

Amazon's Zen booths bullshit

In this system, a vaccine is just a commodity

‘The Great Barrington Declaration’: ideology and expertise under capitalism

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