Tomás Mac Sheoin reviews Road to Repeal, which documents the struggle for abortion rights in Ireland, from its constitutional prohibition to the ban’s repeal in 2018. | more…
The Trump administration’s neglect and incompetence helped put half-a-million Americans in the ground, dead from COVID-19. Joe Biden was elected president in part on the promise of setting us on a science-driven course correction, but, a little more than a year later, another half-a-million Americans were killed by the virus. What happened? In The Fault in Our SARS, evolutionary epidemiologist Rob Wallace catalogs the Biden administration’s failures in controlling the outbreak. He also shows that, beyond matters of specific political persona or party, it was a decades-long structural decline associated with putting profits ahead of people that gutted U.S. public health.
COVID-19 isn’t just an American
The scientific development of humanity—that is, the ability to investigate the planet collectively, integrating reason and empirical data—allowed humans to understand the world with increasing precision and transform it powerfully. Despite this, attitudes against this knowledge have been widespread, both individually and collectively. | more…
The COVID-19 pandemic shows no signs of going away, with a new wave of SARS-CoV-2 now occurring in the form of the more readily transmittable Omicron variant. In these circumstances, the issue of vaccine imperialism, dividing the Global North and the Global South, has taken on new significance. | more…
Despite Cuba’s advantages—its free, universal public health system and its capacity for rapid scientific development, which put it at the forefront in research and vaccine production globally—it was unable to escape the pandemic’s blows. | more…
The sick and disabled need true co-conspirators who hold politicians accountable, who value the sick and disabled as expert strategists speaking to the needs of the community; who understand and amplify our urgency and our anger. We need universal, single-payer health care—comprehensive care for all, regardless of income or health status—now. | more…
A new poem by Marge Piercy. | more…
For many disabled people, the “abnormal” state of things over the last year and a half is not such an estranged discontinuity from the previous state of things. Certainly, just like everyone, pandemic life for disabled people has been exceedingly difficult, painful, oppressive, and deadly. But the “normal” of pre-pandemic life was also exceedingly difficult, painful, oppressive, and deadly. | more…
South Africa’s COVID-19 pandemic is one of racial capitalism, entangled with histories of imperial state formation, settler colonialism, and a hierarchical, global-neoliberal public policy architecture. | more…
A new poem by Marge Piercy. | more…
A new poem by Black Agenda Report poet-in-residence Raymond Nat Turner. | more…
The two Koreas—sharing a language, cultural traditions, history of imperial conquest and war, and interrupted family connections—both have mostly succeeded in controlling the pandemic, within different political-economic systems and with markedly different methods. | more…