With 30+ cases, the White House had more new confirmed COVID-19 cases last week than Vietnam as a whole with only 5.
With 1,100+ cases total, Vietnam with over 96 million people, managed to contain the pandemic much better than most larger & wealthier countries like the U.S.
How has the Socialist Republic of Vietnam been so successful in fighting the coronavirus? (a thread)
• Early on the government made firm decisions to prioritise & preserve the health of its people even if it would come at the cost of the economy.
• The government called for a national emergency after only the 6th case was reported & was fast in implementing social distancing, forced quarantines as well as targeted testing and tracing, with almost 185,000 free tests done so far.
• Information campaigns were started to inform the public about the pandemic, so there was clarity on what people could expect and had to do, including the wearing of face masks.
• Medical students, retired doctors & nurses were mobilized to join the fight on the frontlines.
• There is close cooperation between government, social movements & political organizations like the Ho Chi Minh Communist Youth Union, with the prime-minister calling for a "spring offensive of 2020" referring to the military offensive that defeated U.S. imperialism in 1975.
• To minimize workers & their families being affected by the lockdown, the government approved a 111.55 million dollar financial support package that includes covering all costs for workers in quarantine or who are recovering from the disease.
• To maintain food security, the government provided essential goods to neighborhoods in lockdown, installed free rice dispensing ATMs & put a halt to rice exports to other countries.
• It has donated 550,000 masks to Europe, sent 450,000 protective suits to the U.S., donated medical and testing equipment to Cambodia & Laos and testing kits to Indonesia, to show its "spirit of mutual support to partner countries."
The World Health Organization and World Economic Forum have both praised Vietnam for its comprehensive, low-cost model of disease prevention.
While the pandemic showed some rich countries acting selfishly, Vietnam demonstrated there is another cure for the pandemic: solidarity.
Watch our report on how Vietnam dealt with COVID-19:
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Depictions of historical victories over colonizers.
1: Native Hawaiians killed British colonizer Captain James Cook.
2: Hanging of French colonial soldier during the Haitian Revolution.
3: Ambon revolt of 1817 led by Kapitan Pattimura against the Dutch colonizers.
4: Philippine warriors kill Portuguese colonizer Magellan.
5: The Zulus killing the British Lieutenants Melvill and Coghill at the Battle of Isandlwana in 1879.
As Indonesian students and workers are rising up, here's a short history of the last mass uprising that took place in the fourth most populous country in the world: the one that toppled the US-backed right-wing dictator Suharto in 1998.
In 1965, General Suharto, backed by the CIA, came to power & oversaw the political genocide of up to 2 million Indonesian communists, trade unionists & other leftists, the jailing of a milllion more & destroying the largest communist movement outside of the Soviet Union & China.
Fearing a communist revolution, the US, UK and Australia supported Suharto in pushing aside the leftist nationalist Sukarno and establishing a 33-year repressive military dictatorship on the dead bodies of executed communists.
That time Malcolm X met Fidel Castro in Harlem 60 years ago on this day. (A thread)
A year after the Cuban Revolution, Castro and his delegation came to New York to attend the UN General Assembly, but the management of the Manhattan hotel the delegation booked now refused to house them after the US government already pressured other hotels to reject the Cubans.
Upon learning of their situation, Malcolm X invited them to come uptown to Harlem, to stay at the Black-owned Hotel Theresa, where Malcolm X said he would be greeted with open arms.
The reported mass hysterectomies on migrant women in an ICE detention camp in the U.S. point to a long and dark history of forced sterilizations of the oppressed and marginalized.
Here are some of the other instances white racists in the U.S. drove through genocidal policies via the reproductive organs of people of color:
- From 1930 to 1970, one-third of the women in Puerto Rico were sterilized through the programs designed by the Eugenics Board of the United States, to "catalyze economic growth" and respond to the "depression-era unemployment."