The front-page lead article in Tuesday’s New York Times declares that chances are “fading” for a bipartisan investigation into the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Comparing the pandemic to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the article laments the failure of the US political system to investigate and draw the lessons of a catastrophe that has killed hundreds of times more Americans than 9/11.
Legislation introduced in the Senate to establish a bipartisan commission modeled on the one established after 9/11 is languishing. Senate Democratic Majority Leader Charles Schumer has not called the bill up, the legislation has not even been introduced in the House of Representatives, and the Biden White House opposes it without saying so publicly.
The Times does not ask why this is the case, but clearly no section of the US ruling elite wants an honest accounting of the circumstances and political decisions that allowed millions to die around the world, including 1.1 million in the United States. The Democrats do not want such an investigation because, for all their fulminations about Trump’s anti-scientific antics—promoting fake cures and even the injection of bleach—more people have died of COVID-19 while Biden occupied the White House.
Nor does the leading US newspaper want a real probe into the issues raised by the greatest public health crisis in more than a century. That is shown by its invocation of the 9/11 commission as the model to be followed. That panel, consisting of tried and tested defenders of American capitalism, covered up the role of US intelligence agencies and key US client states such as Saudi Arabia. It was a whitewash, not a genuine exposure.
And if such a COVID-19 commission were to be convened, it would undoubtedly be used to promote the conspiracy theory that SARS-CoV-2 was created in a Chinese laboratory and released inadvertently or deliberately. The Republican Party has already made clear that when it takes control of the House of Representatives in January, such an “investigation” will be one of the first actions it carries out, a provocation aligned with the Biden administration’s confrontational policy towards Beijing and US preparations for war.
The Times article poses a series of questions which a bipartisan commission should answer, ranging from the detection of pathogens, inadequate data collection, problems in the supply of masks and other public health necessities, the impact of school lockdowns and the spread of misinformation about the virus and vaccines. It poses, without suggesting any answer, what it admits is “a pressing question: Why does the United States have a higher death rate from COVID-19 than other wealthy nations?”
But notably, the newspaper does not raise the most important question: What were the political considerations that drove the response of the Trump and Biden administrations to the pandemic? Why was public health subordinated to financial interests?
Wall Street and corporate America demanded that production resume after the initial shutdowns forced by workers’ resistance to being infected with a deadly virus that was spreading rapidly throughout factories, offices and schools. This back-to-work and back-to-school campaign was pioneered by the Times itself, with its leading columnist, Thomas Friedman, advancing the slogan, “The cure can’t be worse than the disease.”
The Times account is riddled with distortions. The biggest one, taking its lead from the Biden administration, is the claim that the pandemic is over. “The United States is climbing out” of the crisis, it writes, although the death toll is rising rapidly as the third winter of the pandemic approaches. From a “low” point of 300 per day—a death toll equivalent to 9/11 every 10 days—COVID-19 deaths have risen to more than 500 a day since Thanksgiving, and hit 1,000 at least one day last week, according to Johns Hopkins University.
Even these harrowing figures are known to be gross underestimates, since many states have stopped keeping track of the toll of COVID-19 in terms of infections, hospitalizations and deaths or do not report figures regularly to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The Times article claims that time is running out on the possibility of an inquiry, suggesting it would soon become impossible to investigate because “the pandemic is already almost three years old. Important facts may be lost with the passage of time.”
The US ruling elite’s deliberate slaughter of more than a million Americans in the pandemic is apparently the only crime for which the statute of limitations can be invoked while the crime is still going on!
Just over one year ago, the World Socialist Web Site initiated a campaign for a Global Workers’ Inquest into the COVID-19 Pandemic. The call for the establishment of this inquiry was published on the eve of the emergence of the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2, which proved to be the most infectious and immune-evasive manifestation of the pandemic. It killed at least 1.5 million people worldwide and more than 300,000 in the United States, despite the widespread availability of vaccines and therapeutics.
The WSWS wrote at the time:
Drawing upon the research of scientists, the knowledge of public health experts and the real-world experience of working people and students, the Inquest will investigate and document the disastrous response of governments, corporations and the media to the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. It will seek to expose the political and economic forces and interests that drove the policies that allowed the uncontrolled transmission of the virus and its development into a catastrophic pandemic that has killed millions worldwide.
The Global Workers’ Inquest built on the foundation established by two global webinars on COVID-19 convened by the WSWS, with the participation of many scientists, including leading epidemiologists who opposed the “herd immunity” and “mitigation” approaches to the virus and advocated a policy of elimination and eradication of the virus. These webinars elaborated the following strategy as the basis for the fight to end the pandemic:
The target of SARS-CoV-2—the virus that causes COVID-19—is not individuals but entire societies. The virus’s mode of transmission is directed toward achieving mass infection. SARS-CoV-2 has evolved biologically to strike billions and, in so doing, kill millions.
Therefore, the only effective strategy is one based on a globally coordinated campaign aimed at the elimination of the virus on every continent, in every region and in every country. There is no effective national solution to this pandemic. Humanity—people of all races, ethnicities and nationalities—must confront and overcome this challenge through a vast collective and truly selfless global effort.
The policies pursued by virtually all governments since the outbreak of the pandemic must be repudiated. The subordination of that which should be the unquestioned priority of social policy—the protection of human life—to the interests of corporate profit and private wealth accumulation cannot be allowed to continue.
The initiative to bring about a decisive turn to a strategy directed toward global elimination must come from a socially conscious movement of millions of people.
This global movement must draw upon scientific research. The persecution of scientists—many of whom labor under threats to their livelihoods and even their lives—must be ended. The global elimination of the virus requires the closest working alliance between the working class—the great mass of society—and the scientific community.
The Global Workers’ Inquest is the only genuine investigation into the global crime committed by capitalist governments in every country, who have abandoned any effort to protect the population from SARS-CoV-2 and allowed the virus to run wild and mutate into new and ever more dangerous and infectious forms. We have taken testimony from scientists, doctors and other health workers, and from working people who have either suffered from coronavirus and Long COVID, or experienced its impact on their co-workers and families. The WSWS has posted interviews in both text and video format for the education of the working class and youth.
The work of the inquiry goes on, and we urge our readers and supporters to assist in this campaign by filling out the form below.