As the Covid-19 pandemic spreads to hundreds of thousands of workers in more than 160 countries or territories and counting, the world seems filled with uncertainty. But one thing is for sure: This crisis dramatically exposes the utter inability of capitalism to meet the needs of the international working class. In their callous negligence in mishandling Covid-19, the rulers are telling us—again—how little they value workers’ lives under the profit system.
For the capitalist bosses, Covid-19 is both a challenge to their system and an opportunity to experiment and impose more intensive fascism. For the working class and Progressive Labor Party, it is also a challenge and opportunity. We will need to learn how to operate in new ways, and it won’t be easy. But if we succeed, we can show workers how a healthier society could be run in the interests of our class. Only a communist revolution can stamp out capitalism, the deadliest pandemic of all time.
The China model: open fascism
In Wuhan, China, the early epicenter of the crisis, the Chinese ruling class responded at first with denial and repression. Their openly fascist state muzzled doctors who tried to warn the world of what was coming. Then it put 45 million people on lockdown, turned countless Chinese workers away from over-burdened, under-supplied hospitals, and left them to die at home without care (Reuters.com, 2/13).
When you contrast the policies of today’s Chinese bosses with the communist health care system built by Chinese workers after the 1949 revolution, the choice is clear. The Chinese communists’ monumental public health campaigns, led by the revolutionary “barefoot doctors,” treated curable diseases and eliminated others entirely. In just ten years, they doubled workers’ life expectancy and halved infant mortality, the greatest public health gains in the history of humanity!
As the Covid-19 spreads around the globe, other countries are following in China’s fascist footsteps. South Korea, with the second most confirmed cases in Asia, instituted a massive testing program—by itself an essential tool for containing an epidemic. But as people tested positive, the government used a new law allowing it to track “CCTV footage, GPS tracking data from phones and cars, credit card transactions, immigration entry information, and other personal details” of anyone infected (Reuters.com). The South Korean bosses are exploiting Covid-19 to escalate surveillance and tighten control over workers, measures that will outlive the pandemic.
In New Rochelle, NY, Governor Andrew Cuomo, a liberal Democrat, created a one-mile-radius “containment zone” and deployed the National Guard to police it (NPR.org, 3/10). On March 13, President Donald Trump declared a “national emergency” under federal laws that allow him to “seize property, organize and control the means of production, seize commodities, assign military forces abroad, institute martial law, seize and control all transportation and communication, regulate the operation of private enterprise, restrict travel, and, in a variety of ways, control the lives of United States citizens” (Congressional Research Service Report). This is the beating heart of fascism.
The Italy model: infrastructure collapse
As Italy has gone from a few hundred confirmed cases of Covid-19 to more than 30,000 in barely three weeks, its healthcare system is overwhelmed. The Italian bosses have responded with new guidelines for triage, “The criteria for access to intensive therapy in cases of emergency must include age of less than 80 or a score on the Charlson comorbidity Index of less than 5” (The Telegraph, 3/14). In other words, doctors will determine who deserves a life-saving ventilator and who does not. (The Atlantic, 3/11). The Nazis’ Third Reich had a similar stance on health care.
The worldwide scarcity of intensive care beds and resources is no surprise. In 2015, a New York State Health Department task force estimated that “a severe 6-week outbreak” would result in 89,610 patients in acute respiratory distress “and there will not be enough ventilators in the State to meet the demand” (health.ny.gov). The bosses knew the next pandemic was coming, but spare inventory is a drain on profits. Hospital “efficiency” is profitable; excess capacity is not. In the U.S., the richest nation in the world, there are only 2.8 hospital beds per thousand people—fewer than in South Korea (12.3), China (4.3), or Italy (3.2) (NYT, 3/14). In New York City, home to Wall Street and its tens of billions of dollars in annual profits, more than 20 hospitals have closed since 2000 because of “financial pressures” (nbcnewyork.com, 8/6/13). Some have been replaced by luxury condo buildings. As always, the bosses put money over people.
In the absence of adequate health care, or even minimal numbers of tests, the capitalists are promoting “social distancing,” shutting down public spaces (including schools), and self-quarantining at the first sign of sickness. While these may be sound recommendations from a public health perspective, they make survival nearly impossible for workers who don’t have paid sick leave or options for child care. Those hit hardest by capitalism’s racist inequalities—Black, Latin, immigrant, the homeless and the uninsured workers—are also the most vulnerable to the coronavirus and the least equipped to adjust to the “new normal.” We must continue to wage struggles to help these workers and their families stay safe, healthy, and fed.
Fight the bosses, not each other
One historical aspect of fascism and the drive toward inter-imperialist war is the pitting of workers against each other. With Covid-19, egged on by racist talk of “the Chinese virus” by Trump and his flunkies, some workers have been led to look suspiciously at anyone who sneezes, especially if they appear to be of Asian descent. In addition, short-term shortages of supplies have created frenzies of unnecessary hoarding. When workers are isolated and afraid, they are more susceptible to the contagion of the bosses’ rotten ideas: selfishness, individualism, competition.
But let’s be clear: Our real enemy is capitalism. In every disaster, “natural” or otherwise, from Haiti to New Orleans to Puerto Rico, workers have chosen the right side and defended their class. In this urgent time, PLP will continue to work within our mass organizations and stand for worker unity and class consciousness over fear and hysteria. Where public schools are closed, we can run Freedom Schools. We can organize food drives and fight for the homeless and undocumented. We can show the working class that we can run society!
As the U.S. ruling class tries to infect us with racist fear-mongering, communists in PLP must respond to fight the root causes of this pandemic: the blood-sucking bosses and their diseased system. Today we have an opportunity to demonstrate how communism is the only solution for our class. Make the fight against the coronavirus a fight against capitalism! Join Progressive Labor Party!

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Fascists divided in crisis: Trump vs. Biden

As the Covid-19 crisis intensifies, the capitalist ruling class has been rocked by division and instability. Worldwide oil prices and demand are at record lows (NYT, 3/4). The world’s stock markets, from New York to London to Shanghai, are crashing as well. In the U.S., the Donald Trump administration has been a disaster of anti-scientific incompetence. Two years ago, it dismantled the federal pandemic response team. More recently, by failing to make widespread coronavirus testing quickly available, the government has been instrumental in causing a broader outbreak.
Rulers not immune to splits
It’s clear by now that an isolationist, Fortress America approach—the agenda favored by the domestic Small Fascists behind Trump—doesn’t work against a virus. But it’s also important to point out that today’s public health crisis was created by the liberal finance capitalists, the same Big Fascists who are hoping to capitalize on the pandemic to win back the presidency and their control over the state apparatus in November.
It’s no accident that the U.S. government’s first significant action on Covid-19 was to pump 1.5 trillion into short-term lending markets, to keep finance capital afloat. That figure dwarfed the initial emergency “relief” bill rammed through by Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, an insulting measure that offered paid sick leave to only 20 percent of workers (New York Times, 3/14). The bosses will put the greed of capitalism before the needs of the working class every time—even more so when their profits are threatened.
The liberal Democrats’ pathetic response to the Covid-19 echoes their decades of criminal disinvestment in workers’ health. Consider the record of Joe Biden the bank and credit card industry stooge who is now the heavy frontrunner for the Democrats’ presidential nomination. Beginning in the 1980s, whenever he wasn’t pushing for racist mass incarceration, then-Senator Biden led the charge for cutbacks to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid (theintercept.com, 1/13). He consistently endangered the same groups now most at risk in the current pandemic: the elderly, the disabled, and low-income families and individuals. He backed the Ronald Reagan budget cuts that “cut federal medical aid to more than a fifth of the American population” and gave states the freedom to eliminate medical care entirely for the working class(Washington Post, 8/21/81).
In 1987, in the runup to his first presidential campaign, Biden supported an amendment to list HIV among “the list of dangerous infectious diseases that would prevent immigration to this country” (thedailybeast.com, 3/13).
Obama and Biden, a toxic duo
In his current cynical campaign for Black votes, Biden’s main claim to credibility is his eight years as Barack Obama’s vice president. But when it comes to public health, Obama’s legacy is an anti-worker debacle. In 2015, the “change we need” president called for an 8 percent, $50 million cut to the program that “helps uninsured families receive vaccines and funds the government’s response to disease outbreaks that stem from lack of immunizations”(theatlantic.com, 2/2/15).In total, Obama proposed $399 billion in cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and other federal health programs, including home health services. As the New York Times (2/2/15) noted:
In addition, Mr. Obama’s budget would reduce scheduled Medicare payments to teaching hospitals, hundreds of small rural hospitals, nursing homes and health maintenance organizations that care for older Americans and people with disabilities.
The Obama-Biden centerpiece legislation, the Affordable Care Act, left more than 25 million people uninsured and tens of millions more underinsured, with high premiums and prohibitively high co-payments and deductibles: “Of the 194 million U.S. adults ages 19 to 64 in 2018, an estimated 87 million, or 45 percent, were inadequately insured” (commonwealthfund.org, 2/7/19). Even with a free Covid-19 test, a hospital stay for pneumonia can cost an uninsured worker “between $75,000 and $100,000 for 10 days” (cnbc.com, 3/10). When adequate care equates to bankruptcy, is it any wonder that many workers are reluctant to get treatment?
As Biden’s record shows, the liberal bosses are indeed the main danger.

Students confront sickly inequality
The Coronovirus has swept the world and left no one unchanged in its path.We know that those most attacked by capitalism (Black, Latin, undocumented, low wage workers), will also be hit hardest in times of crisis. My friends, coworkers, and I knew that we would need to be ready to fight for our class, the working class.
It was announced Thursday afternoon that schools would remain open but would be getting a deep cleaning every day by custodial staff. According to the principal of the school where I work, the four Latin women who clean our building every day were being required to do at least twice the work with no extra help and no extra pay. Well the Social Justice Club (SJC) would not stand for this.
A group of 10 students confronted the principal and demanded that either more workers be hired to cover the extra hours, or the women be paid overtime. The principal of course said she wanted this too but it was out of her hands. The students did not let this slide. They met and came up with two possible solutions. First, they wanted to start a petition to circulate around our school and the whole charter network with the demands given to the principal. Second, they wanted to organize teams of students and staff to keep schools clean.
The work we have been doing in the SJC all year has led to this. We have discussed exploitation and super-exploitation and how to struggle around these issues. Students have confronted the principal on other issues, so the fear of fighting back has subsided. The members of the club are well respected on campus for speaking up and fighting for everyone.
The students were quick to respond to this attack, but the upcoming period will be challenging. The next day, it was announced that schools would be closing for at least four weeks. The hourly wageworkers on our campus of course will take the biggest hit. While I am in communication with members of the SJC about this issue and others plaguing our community with this new reality, parents are understandably scared and are putting a lot of restrictions on their children’s movements and activities. Although we likely won’t be able to meet in person, I will continue to communicate with members to keep the idea of fighting for our class in the forefront of their minds.
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A ride against racism
I’m a high schooler in New York City, and commuting by train is a part of my everyday life as it is for many New Yorkers. One morning not long ago, I was rushing to get to school and the trains were running pretty slow, so platforms were jam packed with riders waiting for the train. As the train pulled into the station, I started pacing really fast up and down the platform, to try to land a car with empty seats. Luckily I saw one and I hopped on.       
Upon sitting down, I realized that the left and right rows of the train car were piled up with passengers. All the rows in the center aisles were empty except where I and another woman were sitting. People were voluntarily standing up even though there was a whole row of empty seats across from me, and more empty seats next to us. I looked around and realized that people were crowding on the other ends of the cart, with only and an elderly Asian woman and myself sitting. Suddenly this hit me like a wave, I realized people were scared to ride the train next to an Asian woman wearing a surgical mask.
Reality kicked in. I saw this as a clear example of how the media and news outlets build racism by continuing to associate Asians with the Coronavirus. This media is fueling racist lies that feed into our daily interactions with other people, and work to divide us from each other. I believe racism is something that we need to work on dismantling instead of feeding into it. We can start by taking small steps to reject racist ideas that we see in the media. Whether it’s sitting next to an Asian person on the train to challenge racist Covid-19 myths, or calling people out on a racist joke, even if they claim they weren’t serious, these small acts can help contribute to the active fight against racism in our world.
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Fascist liberals turn their backs on the working class
Over the last week the response to COVID-19 has grown from warnings to full blown shutdowns. With work from home mandates, the closure of the hospitality industry and public schools, and a near total shut down of New York and other cities across the country, workers have been left to fend for themselves and each other.
As the ruling class continues to fight with one another and display a total lack of regard for worker’s lives, millions of our brothers and sisters are sitting at home isolated and afraid.
It is our responsibility as a party and as fellow workers to support one another now. Politicians and city officials will not step up for us. Not even fake socialist Bernie Sanders.
In an effort to help with crisis relief I wrote to the NYC leadership of the Bernie Sanders campaign and people I had met who are close to the campaign to try and organize a food drive for workers who are in total isolation, cannot afford to stockpile groceries, or who have lost their source of income due to closures.
And what did I receive? Not a single response.
This is a campaign that has touted its support for the working class and makes calls for healthcare for all. But faced with a true crisis, in the eye of an emergency, they’ve turned their backs on the working class.
Today I received an email calling for workers to sign a petition to “…make sure that Bernie wins the Empire State…” The working class needs food, shelter, and support right now but all the campaign is focused on is continuing election efforts.
The NYC Food Bank is still accepting donations and will arrange for pick-ups of donations over 100lbs. Workers need to support each other right now. Organize with fellow residents in your buildings, call neighborhood friends, and ensure that we keep each other healthy, safe, and connected during these unprecedented times.    

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CUNY workers prescribe fightback

The Covid-19 pandemic has shown in stark terms that capitalism cannot provide the health and safety of workers—and it has also shown that the administration of the largest city university system in the country, the City University of New York (CUNY), cannot keep the campus workers and students safe either. There is little to no plan to deal with the pandemic. There have been vague and misleading communications, contradictory statements from various levels of administration, and a complete and racist disregard for some of the most exploited workers in the system.
As usual, it is some of the lowest paid, disproportionately Black and Latin faculty, who are under the greatest threat. The part-time faculty has been asked to “make the sacrifice” and become skilled at online learning in a few days. On some campuses, part timers are being asked to “create a log” of all the work they do while on other campus. For these part-timers, who only get paid for their time in the classroom and office hours, this amounts to mountains of additional unpaid work.
On many campuses, our union chapter and rank-and-file teachers and staff stepped forward with solutions—how to keep the food pantry open, secure laptops, reach out to student organizations, and publicize services in the community. But, just like after 2017 Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, this leadership is given by the working class, not any administrators or coordinators. Administrators are scrambling to “retrain faculty” at the 11th hour, with no regard to what the impact will be on our students.
Members of Progressive Labor Party have discussed this capitalist-bred pandemic with students. Our students—experts in capitalist exploitation and oppression—exposed the inequality between the closing of private universities and the open CUNY schools. This sends the message that our lives really don’t matter under this capitalism system. We also read and discussed the previous CHALLENGE editorial (2/19) on the coronavirus.
Those of us in the universities and colleges must make every effort to stay in touch with our students, unite with them as they deal with everything from unemployment, substandard housing, racist medical care, the kind of twilight zone they are entering into in terms of their education. PLP is not needed to expose the horrors of capitalist health care and education—but workers and students do need a communist party to plant the seeds of a new world, where workers can run society and be healthy.
Join PLP and help lead the fight!

CALIFORNIA, March 12—Today 60 students and their teachers walked out of their classes, assembled and marched to the main office with signs and chants. The students and teachers defied racist, and sexist administration stooges sent to stop them. The student marchers were refusing to take their state ELPAC tests on filthy and possibly Covid-19 contaminated computers that are shared daily with hundreds of students and go uncleaned for months.
The horrid conditions in the building and the administration’s disregard for the safety of the students point out once again that capitalism can never serve the needs of the working class. We need leaders and an education that serve the interests of our class. That will only come through the fight for workers power and communist revolution.
Filthy conditions put students and workers at risk
After marching in front of the office, carrying signs in English and Spanish that said, “clean or close the school”, “Do we matter?” a student said, “We should go in and demand answers!” Most of the crowd then filled the tiny front entryway (a student commented that it was cleaner than the rest of the school) and demanded answers to their questions about the filthy, neglected and virtual death trap the district stooges have been running despite the international coronavirus pandemic.
The school has been neglected by the district and left in deplorable conditions for at least the last 40 years since it became the most diverse and low-income school in the area. Students, spoke in Spanish and English, “Why are you keeping us in school without cleaning the classrooms, desks, computers and without reliable open and clean restrooms (any number are locked on a given day), soap and paper towels? When will you close school? Don’t you understand the impact of this deadly pandemic?”
The administration, in demeaning and patronizing tones had no information, then denigrated the students by saying that they had little to worry about and to just use hand sanitizer. Apparently, the school and district leadership despite weeks of international news, had absolutely no plan, well not for us anyway, to be healthy or successful.
They repeatedly said our district had no cases of Covid-19, seemingly unaware that a majority of Bay Area families commute all around for work. The students shot back that the school didn’t have soap or sanitizer. One of the administrators then told them, “If you’re so worried, your parents can keep you home.” Most of the students live with parents or other family or friends who work and can’t easily keep them home. The administration, mostly to clear the office so they could enjoy their oasis, said they would answer all the questions in a special meeting in the library after lunch. No one else was invited and no announcement was made.
Students and staff unite and fight back
The meeting was a classic attempt to contain the students’ and staffs’ rage. Two Black Administrators spoke, one, a surly teacher/athletic director (a close friend of the racist principal), made a 20 minute speech dismissing protests and blaming outside agitators then claimed saving JROTC for our campus was awesome. The other Black administrator, the so-called equity ambassador, droned on about how the military was a great option for Black and Latin working-class students.
The Administrator charged with facilitating the meeting shut down the teachers who spoke up several times but allowed the other administrators to speak freely. Despite the ruse of the meeting, the fed-up students spoke openly about the closed filthy restrooms, rats (some teachers have taken to using their own traps) and roaches and lack of activities on campus. When one student pointed out several shelves being empty in the library, a supportive teacher spoke up about slave owners banning reading.
After the meeting, students knew that their families and fellow students would need to keep speaking up, acting up and fight back against the racist, sexist administrators who run the schools and push working class students into low wage jobs or the military.
The teachers who supported these students were already in the administration’s sights for speaking up about the treacherous conditions. They immediately joined this spontaneous upspring while others who were asked were hesitant. What greater work than to free ourselves of the daily abusive, mind numbing, soul crushing, life-threatening conditions of schools under capitalism. Until the working-class takes over society to serve the international working class, schools will remain concentration camps serving the ruling class. The racist principal and his district serving minions will one day have to explain their terrible role in keeping our community devastated. Until then, these petty tools of the bosses will keep teaching the lesson that our high school is a testing/training and experimenting prison for the racist, sexist ruling class.
Students, staff, alumni and community will continue to meet, talk and brainstorm plans and actions to fightback against school misleaders who have helped create the most disgusting conditions we’ve seen in years.

Under capitalism, pandemics are treated like they are as natural and inevitable as bacteria and viruses. As the current Covid-19 pandemic shows, however, nature may create the viruses and the bacteria that lead to infection but it’s capitalism that creates the disasters, worsened by the very racism and sexism this system relies on.
Pandemics in particular, like capitalism and class society itself, are neither natural nor inevitable. They are creations of class society and wars of conquest. Another world is possible, a world without imperialist war and the misery of treatable diseases. The working class’s first attempts at holding state power in the Soviet Union and China were accompanied by the first attempts to eradicate pandemics and disease forever. The revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party fights to inherit this legacy, learning from the mistakes of socialism to smash the disease of capitalism with communism once and for all.
Disease: created by nature, spread by class society
Disease has been a part of life since the origins of life approximately four billion years ago, the era of the first cells and the first viruses (see box). Fossil evidence indicates that under primitive communism, everywhere humans (and Neanderthals) lived, we struggled against disease in our attempts to preserve life. In an age where primitive religions served as primitive science to answer questions about nature, it’s likely during this age our primitive communist ancestors developed an extensive practical knowledge of plants as medicine and transmitted this knowledge orally for generations.
We do know that medical knowledge, like the sciences of math and astronomy, was separated from the masses with the rise of slave-based class societies in ancient Mesopotamia, then Egypt, India and China. The famous ancient Greek philosopher Plato issued dire warnings to fellow nobles against scientific education, and with the separation into slaves and rulers and the advent of writing, scientific knowledge was limited to priesthoods and shrouded in religious mysticism and ritual. Meanwhile, these agricultural-based slave societies recorded the first mass outbreaks of diseases from the animals being domesticated, such as malaria, influenza, tuberculosis, and others.
Pandemics: created by class society
The world’s first eyewitness account of a pandemic comes from 430 BCE, when Greek city-states and slave societies Athens and Sparta waged war in what’s known as the Peloponnesian War. Spartan armies surrounded Athens, forcing masses of Athenian farmers into the city, tripling the population almost overnight with underfed and homeless refugees. Deadly plague outbreaks (possibly an ebolavirus) had recently affected cities across the Mediterranean, but each outbreak had been contained.
In Athens, however, once a supply ship introduced the plague, in a matter of days more than two-thirds of the population died and society collapsed. While it continued under Rome as a small city, Athens did not recover a major population until after World War II. This plague is the origin of the word “pandemic,” from the Greek words pan demos: literally meaning “all of the people.”
Following the rise of the Roman Empire, wars both brought contact with and directly created conditions for the spread of pandemics known as the Antonine (165 CE) and Justinian (541 CE) Plagues.
African slavery and leprosy
The rise of feudalism brought on the pandemic of Hansen’s Disease (“leprosy”) in Europe through growing capitalist trade routes. Most importantly, through the growing slave trade connecting Africa with Spain, Portugal and later London with the West Indies (BBC, 5/13/05). As the leading researcher in that article concluded, “colonialism was extremely bad for parts of the world in terms of human health.”
Capitalists: real carriers of disease
One of the most devastating pandemics is known as the Black Death. The highly lethal bubonic plague (spread by bacteria-carrying rats and fleas) is believed to have first arrived to Europe during the Roman era, but it was feudalism that set the stage for disaster.
The infamous merchant capitalists of the Italian city-state of Genoa first brought the bubonic plague to Europe through the Silk Road trade routes in 1347. Half of Europe’s peasantry died, and feudal power weakened. Surviving peasants organized and rebelled against their lords in the English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, inspiring two centuries of European peasant uprisings. For the next several centuries as capitalism expanded and overthrew feudalism, bubonic plague outbreaks continued to kill. In 1855, British imperialist-controlled mining towns in Yunnan, China, became disease reservoirs for the Third Plague Pandemic, killing two million workers in China and, spreading on British East India Company trade routes from Hong Kong to Mumbai, killing 12.5 million workers in India.
Masses of miners responded to plague-ridden working conditions with revolt. They formed the backbone of the massive religious/ pre-communist Taiping Rebellion, a rebellion that inspired masses to become communists in China one generation later.
In India, especially in cities like Pune, British soldiers were sent (instead of doctors) to invade homes and steal possessions while internally deporting workers into “anti-plague” concentration camps. Officers performed public strip searches and physical “examinations” of women, leading to the assassination of the top British officer in Poona and fanning flames of outrage and rebellion into other cities.
Contagion meets communists
Based on 5,000-year-old Bronze Age skeletons, epidemiologists believe that the bubonic plague originated in or around Central Asia, in today’s Russia. In 1917 Russia, before the Bolshevik revolution, the conditions of the working class and peasantry were desperate. World War I and famine led to millions of deaths and social dislocation – perfect conditions for outbreaks like cholera or especially typhus, spread by lice among soldiers.
Following the revolution, first workers’ state to seize and hold power was created in the wreck of imperialist war. With the looming threat of 14 imperialist powers invading to crush the young workers’ state, healthcare was immediately declared free for the first time in history and the working class mobilized to combat capitalist-created diseases as well as capitalist-created imperialist war.
With five million dead in World War I, imperialist intervention in the Bolshevik Revolution murdered another eight million workers. Many of these were due to typhus outbreaks spread by lice. When typhus cases peaked at 25-30 million (out of a population of 91 million) after the communists defeated the imperialists in 1922, communist leader Vladimir Lenin summarized the new situation: “Either the lice will defeat socialism, or socialism will defeat the lice”.

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Science: Bacteria vs viruses
Bacteria are living single-celled organisms that formed more recently, around 2.7 billion years ago. Many bacteria are beneficial to humans, and in our intestines bacterial colonies are essential to digesting food. We harness other bacteria to create foods like cheese, yogurt and beer. But when certain bacteria infect us, their metabolic waste products overwhelm our immune systems and lead to disease.
Viruses are very complex, nonliving molecules consisting of RNA or DNA strands surrounded by a protein layer. Viruses “invade” or infect living cells of organisms to replicate themselves and multiply. In organisms like plants, animals and humans, these infections lead to disease. The origins of viruses, while uncertain, date back at least to the rise of cellular life, approximately four billion years ago and about 750 million years after our planet’s formation. While bacteria were first discovered in 1676, viruses are much smaller and only hypothesized to exist until proven in the 1930s.
Before the surprise “giant virus” discovery in 2018, known as Tupanvirus, models suggested that viruses co-evolved with cells, originating as independent strands of DNA (plasmids) or proteins capable of self-replication. These models are challenged by the Tupanvirus however, suggesting even earlier pre-cellular origins.
Rhinoviruses are a nickname for a group of viruses most commonly encountered by humans, producing what we all know as the so-called common cold. Coronaviruses (including SARS and COVID-19) are named for a group of viruses with surface protein spikes shaped like a “corona” (Latin for crown) when seen under an electron microscope, which can lead to respiratory disease. Still others, like the paramyxovirus, are responsible for diseases like the measles.
In late 2019, a measles outbreak began in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) that has killed more than 5,000 working class children under the age of five and infected 250,000 more. This death toll has surpassed a simultaneous ebolavirus or “Ebola” outbreak in the DRC that began in 2018. Detection and treatment was prevented by the more than 70 U.S. and Chinese- imperialist backed armies currently fighting in the outbreak zones to control the DRC’s natural resources.
As of today, the DRC measles outbreak is still the largest and most severe disease outbreak in the world.