The cholera epidemic is spreading in Haiti following the devastation wrought by Hurricane Matthew. While the hurricane was a natural disaster, the cholera is not. It is a disaster caused by capitalist profit and the United Nations. Pharmaceutical companies were “unable” to produce enough vaccine and still make a profit. So they didn’t. Also not profitable were the building of clean water and sanitation systems to prevent the epidemic. So they weren’t built.
Six years later “… cholera is stalking the areas gutted by the hurricane, …where clean water was already hard to find, long before the storm...Without clean water or disinfectant, the people are defenseless...The toll from cholera is unknowable” (NYT, 10/15).
Despite overwhelming scientific evidence and international outrage, it was not until this past summer that the UN admitted that its troops (MINUSTAH) brought cholera to Haiti in the wake of the 2010 earthquake. It is a crime against humanity that neither the UN nor its public health arm, the World Health Organization (WHO), have taken decisive action for six years to bring relief to Haitian workers suffering and dying from this very treatable disease. Since 2010, there have been over 800,000 cases and over 10,000 deaths. Haiti now has one of the highest rates of cholera infection in the world. Before the hurricane, the WHO was reporting 770 new cases of cholera each week and now their website is reporting an even faster increase.
From 1794 to 1804 the enslaved people of Haiti rose up and succeeded in smashing the chains of slavery, thereby becoming the beacon of hope for oppressed people around the world. Ever since then, the imperialist nations have acted to punish them. The occupation of Haiti by the U.S. from 1915–1934 was particularly brutal and racist, putting the banks into receivership to the Rockefeller (now) Citibank and changing the Constitution to allow foreign ownership of property, while killing, raping, and instituting forced labor.
After the workers rose up once again to overthrow the Duvalier puppet regimes in 1986 that the U.S. had installed and supported, the imperialist powers initiated the modern era of the UN occupation. The MINUSTAH “peacekeepers” have unleashed their own terror on the Haitian working class, ensuring continued racist exploitation, and further plundering of the island’s natural resources.
Healthcare, a Profit Industry
Since 2010, the global health community demanded that the UN/WHO initiate a vaccination program in Haiti. The big pharmaceutical manufacturers were unwilling to comply. That it was not profitable to produce the vaccine stands in sharp contrast to a communist society that will exist explicitly to serve working people. Seeking profit will be a relic of the past. In its drive to serve the needs of the working class and our allies, a worker-led communist world will use science and technology to eradicate disease and its causes.
The demand to vaccinate was a small part of the more comprehensive and unfulfilled demand that the UN build adequate healthcare treatment facilities throughout the country, and most critically, install a nationwide clean water and sewage system. This would be the only effective means to stop the cholera epidemic.
Following the latest devastation by Hurricane Matthew, the WHO announced it would send 1 million vaccines to Haiti. This is much too little, much too late. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC):
Cholera vaccines...are of limited usefulness. In field trials conducted in areas with endemic cholera, vaccines have been only about 50% effective in reducing the incidence of clinical illness for 3–6 months. They do not prevent transmission of infection.
Depending on the type of vaccine used, any protection from infection, in addition to lasting only three-six months, would not be realized for 2–3 weeks. Inevitably, many more would contract the disease and die before vaccines were actually administered. Even those who get the vaccine will be exposed to risk of infection when the immunity wears off.
In the words of a man from Port Salut, desperately trying to pitch in and help feed and shelter the surviving members of his neighbor’s family, “If we survive, they will survive. If we have only one loaf of bread to eat, we will share it with them” (NYT 10/8).
PLP believes this to be the inherent communist thinking that many working class brothers and sisters aspire to around the world. It is in this spirit that we are building one mass international party that will eventually smash this global capitalist system and break the chains that bind us, once and for all. Join us.