Science and Technology

The digital, Covid and new ways of living

The 2021 edition of the Socialist Register is entitled “Beyond Digital Capitalism — New Ways of Living”. It’s about how an increasingly digitalised capitalism works and alternatives across a wide range of human activities. Why digital capitalism? Firstly, because of the increasingly central role of the tech sector in the economy, seen through both a growing economic dominance of monopolies based on digital platforms and the increased use of digitised forms of production, distribution and exchange. The top four largest tech companies — Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook — now account for 20...

Thoughts on the vaccine news

There’s a tiny spark of optimism in the gloom of this November lockdown. On Monday, Pfizer and BioNTech announced, to everyone’s surprise, interim analysis showing their vaccine candidate for Covid-19 may have up to 90% efficacy in preventing symptomatic cases of Covid-19 in participants who received two doses three weeks apart. That was based on analysis of 94 confirmed cases of Covid-19 in a trial expected to enrol 44,000 people across the globe. Experts were cautioning that initial Covid-19 vaccine efficacy could be much lower. The US Food and Drug Association had set its bar for approval...

Pandemics and the drives of capital

With SARS-Cov-2 after H5N1 (or avian influenza), SARS, MERS, swine flu, Ebola, and Zika, we are living in an age of pandemics. A widening circuit of agricultural production, consumption and exchange is pushing deeper into forests and back out into cities. Host species that historically would have been confined to deep forests are now transported to peri-urban regions with high concentrations of human bodies. Traversing a globally integrated air traffic network, pathogens previously not on the global stage are being brought to it. The context of Ebola and other diseases emerging in and from...

Covid-19: what do we know?

George Davey Smith, professor of Clinical Epidemiology at Bristol University, spoke to Martin Thomas from Solidarity . Click here to view the video interview online : this is a tidied-up transcript. What do we know about how and where the virus is transmitted? All of this sort of knowledge is provisional and it's not incredibly well defined. But there are some things that are pretty clear. Indoor transmission on average is higher than outdoors. It is known that the virus survives longer at low temperatures, and also at very low humidity or very high humidity. Cold, dry places or cold, very wet...

The history of anti-vaxxism

In recent weeks there have been protests denying that Covid-19 is a problem. Many of these people are also against vaccinations. Why? Nowadays, vaccinations are very safe. Like all medications they do have side effects, but the chances of a vaccine causing significant harm are many times smaller than the harm that would be caused by the disease that they are vaccinating against. Yet some parents do not vaccinate their children because of a belief that they cause harm. In 1998 Andrew Wakefield published falsified research claiming there was a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. His...

An antidote on the internet

The ideas that socialists try to communicate are often complex. They don't always fit on a placard. As Marxists, we base ideas are based on reality, on things that we know about the world around us. Knowledge comes from scientific enquiry — systematic gathering and analysis of evidence about the world around us. Covid-19 presented a challenge to rational thinkers everywhere. Action was needed, but no-one knew very much about the virus. When I, as a nurse, first had patients who had the illness, I did what I always do when coming across something new. I tried to find sources of information. I...

Conspiracy theorists out again on 19 September

Saturday 19 September is due to see another anti-mask, anti-lockdown, anti-vaccination demonstration in Trafalgar Square. MC’d by currently suspended nurse Kate Shemirani, a host of conspiracy theorists and “medics” of dubious qualifications and views will take the stage to denounce “enforced vaccination”, to call Covid-19 a hoax, or to blame it on 5G. They will be joined Jon Wedger, “police whistleblower” into “elite paedophile rings”. The “medics” include an osteopath, a holistic and homeopathic dentist, a lecturer in mental-health nursing, a “nutrition and wellness doctor”, and more than...

When "free thought" turns against science

Over the months there have been a number of anti-mask demonstrations, most of them fairly small, and certainly well on the fringes of public opinion about the Covid-19 pandemic. On 29 August that shifted up a notch. A number of larger demonstrations were held in Europe. In London, several thousand of people, at least, crowded into Trafalgar Square to hear speakers including David Icke and Piers Corbyn. As Levente Zékány reported in Solidarity 561 there is a crossover between these demos and the wider-ranging QAnon and “Save our Children” demonstrations. Within the milieu are people committed...

Twenty per cent think virus is a hoax

An Oxford University study conducted in May found that around 20% of adults in England may believe in conspiracy theories about the coronavirus pandemic. In a study of 2,500 adults — weighted by income, region, age and gender — people were asked about the extent to which they agreed with a series of statements about coronavirus. (For more, see the Oxford University site here .) Alarmingly, 60% of respondents said they believed the government was misleading the public about the cause of the virus and 40% believe that there is an attempt to use the virus to control the population. The most...

New Covid plans

Doctors and scientists want a shift in virus-control policy. An open letter to all the political parties, on 23 June, by leading medical figures, called for an urgent effort to map new policies because "the available evidence indicates that local flare-ups are increasingly likely and a second wave a real risk".

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