Thread by @vijayprashad

(Thread) The capitalist states (USA, UK, Brazil, India) are not going to get out of the pandemic soon. Their problem is that they gutted their public health systems and have no public sector facility to run testing, tracing, and isolation.

This not my opinion. @rajshah - president of @RockefellerFdn - says that the problem for the US is that it relies upon 'monopoly companies' that 'don't have enough capacity in their central processing systems for the volumes that are necessary right now'. He means Quest & LabCorp

These are indeed 'monopoly companies' & they are run on the profit motive, which means that they are just-in-time processing labs that do not have any 'capacity' ever to do more than normal lab work; anything more than that is inefficient for them.

These labs, @rajshah says, cannot get the tests in under 7 or 14 days. 'With the 7-day lead time you basically aren't testing at all; it's the structural equivalent of zero tests'. That means the US is essentially doing NO testing. This is from the former administrator of @USAID.

Trump's former chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, said recently, 'my son was tested recently; we had to wait 5 to 7 days for results'. 'That is simply inexcusable at this point in the pandemic'.

Well, @realDonaldTrump meanwhile said that in the US testing 'is so massive and so good'. Really? Not according to @rajshah and Mick Mulvaney. Nor according to @Nonstopdoc - research director of the Program of Global Public Policy at Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Bourdeaux and her co-authors write, 'We can't allow the delays at Quest and LabCorp to mark the start of a downward spiral'. Well, that is already in evidence. Likely, more people will die of COVID-19 in Florida (21 million) than in of all of China (1.4 billion).

Only one answer to this nightmare. Scrap the profit-sector, the private-sector, in the entirety of health care. There needs to be universal public-sector health care globally. There is no other alternative. Look away from your navel and look to the socialist countries.

Look to Laos, Vietnam: no COVID-19 deaths, even though they share long borders with China. Read our @tri_continental newsletter: thetricontinental.org/newsletterissu….

You must read this essay from @subindennis of @tri_continental on the need for a public sector, and the proof of this pandemic, peoplesdispatch.org/2020/04/13/cov….

Frankly, I'd like to just repeat this thread - like a broken tube light; I'd like to keep retweeting it, and retweeting it, and screaming from the mountain top: YOU ARE BEING KILLED NOT BY THE VIRUS ALONE BUT BY CAPITALISM.