Communist Workers Group (CWG-USA)

Correspondence to the RCIT

Hello Comrades of the RCIT, 

We just read your article about the mystification of the coronavirus.

Throughout the course of the pandemic the CDC/WHO  under the influence of the obscurantist Trump denied aerosol/airborne transmission (except for aerosol generating procedures such as BiPAP, CPAP, intubation, extubation, high flow O2, bronchoscopy).  This led to the decision not to provide respirators to medical care providers in hospitals to cover for the shortage of N95s caused by the just in time supply chain and production of those products in China.  Many providers used the KN95’s which became available but they are not respirators because they do not pass a fit test to prove their efficacy with a fit factor of 100.  Likewise,  the surgical masks are not respirators because they are not designed to stop anything more than droplets.  

Your article tells workers that they are safe around infected persons as long as the infected one sneezes into their armpit.  So you basically deny the science that the nurses in California have been fighting against the big hospital chains for over a year to recognize.  The fact is, that in California Title 8 California Code of Regulations Section 5199  recognized novel viruses as airborne transmissible, which means sneeze control does not suffice and a year later May 7, 2021 finally the CDC recognized the airborne transmission of aerosols.  Which means that droplet precautions are and have been insufficient.  You rave about the lock down left but what do you do?  You jump on the obscurantist band wagon and continue to deny the science.  The significance of your tendency has gone up in the smoke of thousands of funeral pyres like so many victims of your obscurantist bloc with MODI, TRUMP and BOLSONARO. 

What did the ILTT do?  We called for the opening of the economy under workers’ control (see “COVID-19 Pandemic and Capitalist Economic Crisis As Young Workers Reject Racism: A Class Struggle Workers Action Program”), we showed how only workers’ scrutiny of the science and the official scientific institutions of the bourgeois states are compromised and we warned the workers not to trust the obscurantists.  Now we have to warn them not to trust the RCIT which continues to deny the airborne nature of transmission while proclaiming your adherence to the latest science.   

How many dead do you think is an acceptable risk? You speak of the possible number of healthy individuals who get seriously ill (4% of the world population; that’s 280 million?!) Then you echo the right wingers who call the masses sheep when you say don’t give “total  control of your lives and health to the bourgeoisie.” This tells us you don’t understand The Communist Manifesto, which states that the proletariat only gets to reproduce itself and as wage labor is enslaved by the bourgeoisie. Has anything liberated wage labor from this enslavement? No. But such Public Health measures as have been won have been concessions to the struggle of the masses.  

Contagion and its real virulence obviates the bourgeois yapping about personal choice and vaccination as violation of individual rights. You are on the wrong side of this question socially as a class matter, as well as scientifically and statistically. Look at the class character of the new bedfellows you join in your attacks on the “lockdown left.” And even with your backpedaling on “common sense” safety precautions you still don’t understand that humanity is experiencing a once in a  century pandemic, a true concept that may perish when another pandemic comes along sooner than that as the conditions that cause them go unrecognized. This is not a flu-equivalent and not a flu season either! In New York, officials have not yet unloaded all the refrigerated victims still in storage in the semi-trailers for burial by victims’ families. 

Communist greetings, 

CWG – USA