 So believe it or not, it has been more than a year since the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic and finally, things are starting to get a little bit better. We're starting to finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. Both cases and deaths are down substantially and 12% of Americans have now been fully vaccinated with 20% getting at least one of the doses from either Pfizer or Moderna. We just had the FDA approve Johnson & Johnson single shot vaccination, which is both safe and effective, and Joe Biden ordered 100 million additional doses. So it seems as if we're starting to get to a place where we can resume normal life, pre-pandemic life in America and throughout the world. The issue, however, is that a lot of folks, not just the American population, but political leaders are already pretending as if the pandemic is over. But if we don't see the writing on the wall, if we don't look at the warnings that are right in front of us, we could very easily find ourselves in another COVID-19 surge and right back to square one. Currently Europe is experiencing another wave of COVID-19, which has led to more lockdowns in Italy and calls for more lockdowns in France, although the French Prime Minister has resisted calls from health experts to impose new restrictions. And in the United States, Joe Biden's White House is anticipating another wave of COVID-19, and they're currently racing to vaccinate as many Americans as possible as new, more easily transmissible variants are beginning to spread and pop up across the world. Meanwhile, since cases are down, however, Republican governors have already preemptively declared victory in the fight against COVID-19 and in Texas and Mississippi. They've even lifted their mask mandates. I mean, the bare minimum. They won't even allow for that. And it's not just Republican governors who are acting irresponsibly. Democratic governors are following Joe Biden's lead as well. And you have some like Oregon's Kate Brown already deciding that it is time to reopen schools and she just signed an executive order, which mandates in-person learning fully resumed by April 19th, April 19th. It doesn't matter if we're in a fourth wave by then. It doesn't necessarily matter if there's some new variant that's more easily transmissible, that becomes the dominant strain in the U.S., we're just going to reopen by April 19th because I say so. And she's following Joe Biden's lead because as you all know, he just passed his $1.9 trillion COVID relief package and there's more than $100 billion in funding to safely reopen schools. The issue, however, is that it's no longer the case that we're trying to reopen schools by following the science or basing the decision to reopen schools and fully resume in-person learning on whether or not we can do that safely. We're just like doing it because that's exactly what is demanded of our system. Like, you have to understand that we live in a dystopian, late-stage capitalist society and if we do not resume business as usual, then the system suffers. And there's a reason why Biden all of a sudden sounds a little bit different. He's saying things that he wasn't necessarily willing to say on the campaign trail and all of this is laid out in a really long but excellent article by Walker Bragman of The Daily Poster. And he explains, the country's approach to the pandemic has been one of suppression over elimination of acceptable losses and acceptable spread. While other countries have been able to better control the spread of the virus through ambitious zero COVID strategies, the United States has never once seriously considered far-reaching responses like a national lockdown or a universal basic income that would allow people to shelter in place. For both Donald Trump and now Biden, the political risks of such moves were too great despite the arguments of scientific experts and the pleas of many of those on the front lines. Biden promised to be a different kind of president, one who will let the facts dictate policy rather than the other way around. In August, Biden told ABC, I would be prepared to do whatever it takes to save lives because we cannot get the country moving until we control the virus. I would shut it down, Biden said. I would listen to the scientists. But after the election, Biden and company changed their tune. On November 19th, Biden told reporters that there was no circumstance which I can see that would require a total national lockdown. I think that would be counterproductive, he said. In December, Biden announced that his key COVID priorities for his first 100 days in office included school reopenings. Today, he is still actively moving forward on that plan. Now let's just pause there for a moment and reflect on why he's doing this. I think it's pretty obvious. If we do not resume business as usual, that's bad for capitalism. Capitalism requires that everything in our country functions as normally as possible, even during a pandemic. Otherwise, profits and growth might be stunted, even if it's a detriment to our health as human beings. And I mean, COVID is just a microcosm of a broader issue, of a broader theme that happens with crises and capitalism. I mean, think about, we're literally killing our planet. We're killing off the only habitable planet, because if we were to stop doing what we're doing currently, then that would be so disruptive to global economic capitalism that alone, that short term loss to profits and growth is worse than long term death and destruction that might come about because of global climate change. So our political leaders around the globe have collectively decided, inadvertently or unwittingly, or sometimes directly, that they would rather just try to manage climate crises than take action right now to stop the crisis in the future. And we're seeing that same exact decision making processes play out. But when it comes to COVID-19, I think there was a solution that could have stopped this from becoming a pandemic. But we never opted for that solution. We never opted to pay people to stay home. And now we're trying to resume business as usual as quickly as possible when the science does not, in fact, dictate that reopening schools is what we should be doing. Now, having said that, that doesn't mean that I'm necessarily displeased with Joe Biden's handling of the pandemic, because thus far, he is doing a much better job than Donald Trump. He surpassed his goal of 100 million vaccinations within his first 100 days. And that is something that he should be applauded for. He has ramped up vaccinations and that is really good. But when it comes to the issue of reopening schools, this is where I've had a lot of disagreements with him. And this next portion of the article from Walker Braggman really explains why reopening schools right now, it's absolutely reckless and irresponsible. For Dr. Deep Thai Gretasani, the push to reopen schools is alarming. A clinical epidemiologist and senior lecturer at Queen Mary University of London, specializing in machine learning in genomic and clinical prediction, she has found herself waging a Twitter war on misinformation surrounding school reopenings. Very early on in the pandemic, at least in the Western world or in Europe and the United States, this sort of narrative was built that children were somehow exceptional or unique and that they were less susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 infection and less likely to transmit Gretasani tells the Daily Poster. And this narrative very quickly got entrenched in political decision-making as well as in the scientific community, despite having very little evidence behind it. Gretasani explains that many of the studies cited as evidence that children are not major spreaders of the virus relied on symptom-based testing. Children, Gretasani explains, are not likely to be symptomatic. When you do symptom-based testing in a household, you could very often pick up adults who were infected actually from children but classify them as the index case who brought infection to the household because the actual index case, who was the child, was silent, she says. Similarly, transmission to children is being missed if you base testing on symptoms. Indeed, a study from January funded by Austria's Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research noted the failure of several previous studies to take into account asymptomatic spread by children and other flaws. Gretasani told the Daily Poster that new evidence actually suggests that children are more likely to spread the virus to households than adults. Such was the finding of a study from the Office of National Statistics in England published in late December. Researchers found that young people ages 12 to 16 were seven times as likely as those older than 17 to be the first case in their household. They also found that children ages two to 16 were twice as likely as those over the age of 17 to spread the virus to family members. Another ONS study released last month found that teachers were at high risk ranking fourth among the 25 professions surveyed. The ONS studies are part of a growing body of research suggesting that reopening schools spread the virus. A Princeton study from September, which surveyed more than half a million people in India, found that children and young adults made up one third of COVID cases and were especially key to transmitting the virus. Similarly, a study released the month before in the Journal of Pediatrics found that children could be super spreaders even without displaying symptoms of COVID due to the amount of the virus in their systems. Meanwhile, the evidence on school closures cutting the spread of COVID is mounting too. A study from October based on data gathered from 131 countries found that school closures could reduce viral transmission by 15%. The next month, another study which looked at a number of mitigation strategies found that closing educational facilities ranked as the second most effective measure. Research studies aren't the only evidence that students are fueling the virus where schools are open, COVID is spreading. In the UK, where Girdasani is based, cases are surging among children ages five to 15 while dropping among other demographics. On February 21st, Democratic Iowa State Senator Rob Hogg tweeted that roughly 3,000 children had contracted COVID-19 since Republican Governor Kim Reynolds reopened schools with no restrictions in late January. A week earlier, public health officials in Onondaga County, New York where schools are open warned that they were seeing a rash of new cases among children around 50 to 60 per week, likely due to the prevalence of the new UK COVID variant. When you look at global evidence, school closures emerge as one of the most important and most effective interventions in reducing the spread of the pandemic, Girdasani says. So the conclusion I think is obvious. To reopen schools to just impose an arbitrary date and say that schools have to be reopened within 100 days or by April 19th, this is not a decision that is grounded in science. It's a decision that is being made because it is the most politically expedient decision that is being made in service of our late stage capitalist economic system. And people are going to die because of this. And that's not to say that you can't try to make sure that we reopen as safely as possible because that's why Joe Biden included funding for schools to reopen. But the goal in and of itself should not be to just reopen for the sake of reopening. The goal should be to do what is necessary to stop the spread of the virus. And from the very beginning, we could have contained the virus if we just did one simple thing. We paid people to stay home. We are the richest country on the planet. We can afford to pay people to stay home. Subscribers of Modern Monetary Theory, individuals such as Stephanie Kelton know firsthand that any excuses that we've made are complete horseshit. If you're suggesting that we can't afford to pay people $2,000 to $3,000 per month to stay home, that is completely a fabrication. If we paid people to stay home, that is exactly how we could have saved thousands if not hundreds of thousands of lives. And back in the Trump era, his administration was literally just hoping that Americans would grow numb to COVID-19 deaths. And now that we are more than 500,000 deaths into this pandemic, I think it's safe to say, unfortunately that most people have just grown numb to it. And because the American people has demonstrated that they are willing to grow numb to crises like this, our public officials now know that we can probably adapt to any crisis. Global pandemic, man, we can just kind of resume business as usual to an extent and people will just eventually become accustomed to it. Global climate change, I mean, wars over water, yeah, they're gonna happen, but so long as our citizens aren't directly fighting in those wars over water themselves, they'll probably just kind of forget about it and resume what is the new normal to them. So I want you to think about this story in two different ways. The first way is obviously, I need you to acknowledge that Joe Biden is being reckless here. And this decision to arbitrarily reopen schools just so he can brag about it and so that way the economy can function more smoothly so parents can go to work and send their children to school. I mean, schools were never fully closed. Distance learning, online learning, that is a form of education and it may not be ideal, but it will suffice during a pandemic when there are lives at stake, when teachers who are paid starvation wages don't have to risk their lives. Like, isn't that preferable? Well, of course not because we live in a late stage capitalist society. So we do what capitalism dictates, we do. And that's the second way that I want you to think about this. I want you to reexamine this system of capitalism and that might make some people feel uncomfortable, particularly in my older viewers who kind of grew up during the Cold War and were basically trained to never question capitalism. But I need you to acknowledge that if we do not kill capitalism, if we don't kill it first, capitalism is going to kill us. And when I say us, I don't just mean lots and lots of human beings on this planet. I'm talking about other species on this planet. We're currently possibly witnessing another mass extinction. There's evidence that we're undergoing a mass extinction currently because of climate change and we're doing nothing about it because we can't disrupt the capitalist status quo because the economic system that we designed requires that we prioritize profits and growth over our own lives. That's insane. That is insane. We created this economic system. So very clearly there's a better way. We can change the system that we as human beings created. So think about this, not just in terms of like the way that the United States is reacting to COVID-19, the way that Joe Biden is irresponsibly reopening schools. But think about the bigger picture. Think about the way that capitalism has set us up for failure and disaster and extinction quite literally.