 Hello and welcome to People's Dispatch. The number of COVID-19 cases is about to touch 3 million and the number of deaths has crossed 130,000. Many states are seeing a fresh outbreak. There are some states which are not part of the huge outbreak earlier but which are now seeing a large number of cases. And to talk more about this, we have with us Dr. Hanee Sarag of the People's Health Movement who's also with the University of Texas Medical Center. Thank you so much Dr. Hanee for talking to us. Thank you very much. I really appreciate that opportunity and thank you for reaching out to me. Yes to begin with, so we did see a huge spike in cases a couple of months ago especially there was Washington state, there was New York where the numbers were in thousands every day and at least in some of those states the number seems to have decreased. Whereas in other states like for instance right now Texas is reporting a huge number, Arizona, California continues to do so. So could you talk about how the center has kind of shifted to the United States and which are the wave epicenter so to speak? Yeah there are two issues here when we're talking about numbers. One of them is numbers right now and it's not only for the US it's all over the world are concerning the positive cases from those who are tested. So the more you have testing the more you will find cases and this applies to the US and applies anywhere else. So when you increase the magnitude of testing like what happened in New York after the surge you find lots of cases and this has been happening in different states so when they scale up the testing the number of cases started to rise significantly but also there is kind of a shift in the spread of COVID-19 in the US slowly from the east and the far west to the south somehow. So right now Texas as you said correctly Texas and Florida and Atlanta are on the rise right now and to great extent I would say yes the US is having the has the highest number of cases right now and the highest number of deaths and unfortunately this is not surprising to me because the most important here is to look at what determines the what shapes the response to the pandemic and here in the US it's basically the interest of corporates. So this is one of the major issues so if you if you compare between the response in Europe for example at least some of the European countries and the US Europe had a complete lockdown. I'm not saying that this is the solution everywhere in the world because some countries cannot afford it but Europe afforded and they could do it and this resulted in significant reduction in cases in quite a short time and a good example for that was Italy, was Spain, was Germany, France and and so on and also they had very difficult measures that are somehow against the neoliberal notions. One of them like what happened in Spain is to put all private hospitals and facilities under the management of government. So in other words you say okay guys we're not going to take the hospitals from you from the private sector but we're gonna borrow it for a while. You will unfortunately stop profiting at least for a while. This didn't happen and will not happen in the US in the very near future actually the reverse actually the opposite happened that there is a huge push to open and they use the politicians here are using the term of opening the economy as if the economy it has only one definition so this is the economy this is all what we know and we cannot think of any other way so we need to open the restaurants and we need to open the markets we need to open even the bars and beaches and so on and the idea here when the government because I strongly believe that there is a culture in the US that people at least the majority have lots of confidence in the administration even if they disagree on the general direction of administration still when they say that it's time to open and let people go to work let people go to restaurants and markets this gives a message to the public that we are on top of it and we are in control and everything is going fine which is really a very wrong message so even if they say people try to be cautious and we're mask things like that this doesn't happen when they started I'm talking about Texas when they opened and people started to go to restaurants that a trip and see in the in the restaurants we're higher than needed no masks inside and in Galveston near to where I'm living people wear in bars and place like that without any masks without physical distancing and so on so we witnessed a huge rise during the last two weeks actually the status here in Texas is not very good some hospitals in Houston specifically became overloaded and they started to transfer cases to other hospitals so we hope that we will not see what happened in New York we will not see what happened in Italy in the beginning and it's not too late to take strict measures but we need to put people's health people's lives before the profits in the in the last like 10 or 12 weeks we we had 40 million people in the US lost to the jobs because of COVID-19 while two people made 63 billion dollars added to their wealth only two people the owner of Amazon and the owner of Facebook so again not everybody is harmed by the pandemic absolutely so those people have no reason to look everything down and it's not only these I mean those people are benefiting from people go to streets or not because they work virtually but this applies to corporates all of them it's not bad for them and this is the same like when we talk about wars when we talk about conflicts it's not bad for everybody there are people who are benefiting and making more money out of people's death and ill health and so on so this is what's going on so as a follow-up question I would actually like to talk a bit about how the crisis has been addressed in the United States itself so you're part of the public people's health movement and this movement across the world has been calling for a very different and radical way of addressing the crisis a way in which the crisis is not looked as a law and order problem it's not looked as a purely scientific problem but as a community health and a public health issue where the community is involved and it is a far more political way of looking at health so has there been any signs of that being shown is in anywhere in the United States or that being talked about that being discussed etc well as I said the main determinant of the response for COVID-19 was economic and political so there was huge fear from taking stricter measures that this will affect the economy so this affected to great extent the messages that are being given to the public so this also made people more relaxed while dealing with COVID-19 the sad story that the US is able to take very strict measures because they can afford it simply we can afford it here so we're not talking about emerging economy or you know you don't know it very well established economy that can afford something like that for at least for a while but the idea is there there was a tendency to distribute the associated cost with the pandemic so we know there is associated cost with the pandemic who's going to pay it corporate state or people so and I think the administration here took a decision no we will not pay it fully we will not let corporates pay it we will distribute on people as much as possible and this includes the lives illnesses and so on and finally so from a people's health perspective what would be the essential steps that need to be taken of course the United States is not a moralistic structure there are many levels of government but in terms of very basic steps right now what would be some of the things you would suggest well there are I think there are two two big categories here one during the pandemic we need kind of social solidarity we need kind of unity and we need kind of leaderships from activists to to promote the public health values before profits and struggle against these measures from governments to stop we need to slow down the spread till we have a vaccine or a treatment and here it comes the second stage hopefully we will have a vaccine or a vaccine let's say not not not not a treatment not a completely curative treatment but most likely we're going to have a vaccine at some point maybe available early next next year so who's going to exist and this is a big the very big question as as well so the the member states of the WTO refused a very legitimate suggestion from Costa Rica to have a public patent on any curative medicine or vaccines for COVID-19 and this was refused so the refusal means no we're still putting it in the marketplace and this is this is quite scary because we may find us in a situation that those who can afford paying for the vaccine will exit and actually this happened this is happening right now when Gilead had their treatment it's the price here the the the price per course here in the US is four thousand two hundred dollars and I know that it's not much cheaper in other countries so this means that it will be affordable by the elites and this is a treatment if this applies to a vaccine I hope that it will never happen but still I think it's not going to be an easy thing and it needs a lot of struggle a lot a lot of unity a lot of very high voice from health activists to stop that and also it will need some measures from progressive governments if there are to use flexibilities of trips to have compulsory licenses if this happened if they have the capacity to produce it because that we have like five five companies in the whole world and they have capacity for mega mass production so this means it's going to be more polite when applied somehow after covid I hope that things will not return back to where they are when people can be outside and they can be together again I think this needs activists not not only health activists but in general politically active people to continue struggling for different worlds absolutely we we knew the covid-19 exposed it nickered so we know exactly what capitalism means what neoliberalism means it's very clear right now and covid-19 was all what we have right now including the climate change including the the the natural disasters the increase in in magnitude and so on this is not the loss so we need to prepare ourselves as people in this world to be able to deal with this differently and to put people's lives health and livelihoods and so on in front of profits this is a long-term struggle but I think it's it's um it's needed more than ever right now thank you so much dr. honey for talking to us thank you very much I really appreciate it that's all we have time for today keep watching people's dispatch and you