As the number of total recorded deaths from the novel coronavirus also known as COVID-19 slides past the 3 million marker worldwide, we here at Mutable thought we would give you a showcase of some of the manifestoes that have resulted. Due to space restrictions, we have chosen to on occasion present abridged versions or excerpts with links to the original. If you’re wondering how we organized them, they are listed from most manifesto to least manifesto. Although we tried to be as inclusive as possible, there were one or two “manifestoes” that were just TOO academic to truly be understood as manifestoes, or posing ideas (such as that COVID-19 is a hoax) which we felt we could not in good conscience reproduce.
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A Manifesto of Sorts for Covid-19
[This manifesto from the author, activist, and political theorist Zillah Eisenstein appeared on the NYU Press web site a year ago, in March 2020. You can see the original here.]
“We can rise together against COVID19 and make a better world”
A few thoughts to share:
COVID19 like most disease is democratic—it can affect anyone, although with differing options to respond to it. The world, including the US is not democratic. This does not bode well. But we can move forward because simple individualism contradicts the interdependency of this COVID crisis. “We” all suffer when one person circulates with symptoms—and we will flourish if we accept responsibility to isolate/distance and protect one another.
But more is needed as well—a damping down of greed in all its forms. Nationalize and globalize the market/s. Produce and supply what is needed to treat COVID patients while controlling costs. Profits from COVID19 are forbidden.
This virus is as political as it is medical. It is terrorizing us all with the despotism of Trump, Bolsonaro, Modi and their likes. But, I keep trying to calm myself because there is another way.
I am trying to breathe and think radically and imaginatively in COVID19 times. My beloved doctor daughter and her medical friends—nurses, aides, and janitors—that she works alongside are fighting for everyone’s life and their own without the systems they and we need.
In the last many decades while the planet’s environment has been assaulted by neo-liberal capitalist policies, we have seen our pharmaceuticals sky-rocket in price, hospitals close, access to mental health care disappear, nurses down-sized, and, while the perfect storm was brewing for COVID19.
There is more violence of every sort, more exploitation, more oppression, more suffering and more pain that has accompanied the rule by the 1percent. Everything has changed, and not for the better, for the 99.
Nothing works as well as it did before this moment. I refuse to open one more phone call with: how are you? Do you mean how are you in the age of Covid19? So I now ask instead: what are you feeling? what are you thinking? This seems more honest. And it is time for honesty and truth.
It is shocking how COVID19 has exposed every type of oppressive/exploitative condition/relation. The view is unbelievable. Domestic violence is embedded in economic/sexual racism. Every inequity explodes and festers in the virus. Nothing remains contained as this catastrophe blasts forward. My hope is those of us who survive can rebuild the planet with a fabulous liberatory justice carved from this new reckoning.
These truths, as they are exposed become the scaffolding out of which we must build what comes next. Let us hire everyone who has lost a job to fulfill the needs in a nationalized framework: to feed, and clothe, and care for each other—re-purpose existing vacant housing or build shelters that allow distancing; food centers; medical facilities, etc. Use these needs that must be met to define the new COVID economy. Instead of a carceral mentality of punishment let us carve new social relations of trust and reparation.
Public health must become the top priority because it is an inclusionary/inclusive commitment in this time. There must be economic relief to people, rather than the corporations. Workers and their communities and families must be the priority. Care-work, mainly done by women, especially women of color, must be reorganized and prioritized for the health of the planet.
Sexual and racial and gender violence must be eliminated. An anti-racist feminist socialist democracy must be reinvented. This is crucial to the public health.
Covid19 is about living and dying, and challenging moments in-between. It is not helpful to say 80 percent of people will be fine. Nor enabling to say it effects old people the most, or people with pre-existing factors, or young people are at risk the least.
Care about yourself and everyone similarly, but also make a triage ordering given the paucity of readiness we are at. Again, honesty and truth will get us through this. Did I say I will follow the guidelines and if I develop symptoms I will take care to protect the person I live with as well as I can, and try to make it through, but will not go to a hospital for crisis care and/or a ventilator.
We need to be careful to focus on the group, the community, the planet and not just ourselves because in doing so everyone will be in a better position to make it through this plague. In the US we are already over-determined by individualism and self-care so make sure when you are protecting yourself do not overdue the “self” part. It won’t help, because we truly are in this together, even if the poorest suffer the most unforgivingly.
Our planet and its entire people—no exceptions—are sick and crying. Bodies are our truth tellers; especially the most at risk ones.
Always trust when your or another’s “body” knows and speak pain. Bodies do not lie. (People can…)
COVID19 is a moment of singularity—nothing before it remains as it was, and what comes next must recognize this. Old ways must be changed. And we must immerse ourselves in this liberatory process immediately.
The old western/liberal/bourgeois dilemma of individual rights vs. the community (collective) is eviscerated. Socialism wins: the community must “trump” the individual or millions will die, and maybe you, me, us. Taking care of the community–social distancing–is the same as taking care of you.
We are told to shelter in place, to stay away from others, to be in our homes. But, the truth is: many people do not have houses or homes; it is hard to distance if you are houseless/homeless; it is hard to shelter in place if you are abused within those 4 walls; it is hard to stay home if you are expected at work, and need your wages to survive and there is no sick pay.
The sites and people that too many were allowed to ignore before cannot be ignored now. Prisons, shelters, homeless/houseless encampments, detention centers are breeding grounds for the disease without “distancing” and protections. Even our hospitals and ER rooms that have been “dumping grounds” for the uninsured and un-doctored are in full crisis view now.
Almost half-a-century of down-sizing access to the poorest and most vulnerable through a racist/misogynist neo-liberalism has left the racist, sexist, class system of inequality fully exposed. And, because COVID19 exposes that the vulnerability of one, is a vulnerability for all—maybe we can reconstruct ourselves making sure that the poorest and the most in need are always in view.
Neo-liberalism is often misunderstood as fundamentally an economic redress for too much/many regulations. But it was as much an attack on the civil-rights and women’s movements gains toward equality. Neo-liberals argued that the US suffered from “too much equality”. We can see what the redress has created: a more unrelenting and unequal racial and gender and economic system, one that cannot manage a health crisis. It is time that we get this right: a new socialism of caring that is intimately anti-racist and feminist.
Meanwhile, I helped organize an action in Ithaca, New York, where I live, to open windows and bang our pots in CAMARADERIE with ourselves and Italy and Spain and India and Nigeria and the rest of the planet on Thursday evenings at 6. We will bang pots and make noise with others to say: we are distanced but not alone; distanced but together.
And I wrote last night to my daughter Sarah: “Life most of the time just happens. How we make it matter is how we confront it and mold it into something better. I love you and expect you to make it better.”
#COVID19Camaraderie
#COVID19NewWorld
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COVID-19 Global Solidarity Manifesto
[This manifesto was created as a petition by Peter K. on diy.rootsaction.org, and is reproduced here unchanged.]
The COVID-19 crisis has revealed the urgency of changing global structures of inequity and violence. We, people around the world, will seize this historical moment. We are building solidarity at every level: local, national, global. Despite the need to physically distance, we are building mutual aid groups, community networks, and social movements. We declare this manifesto today to offer a vision of the world we are building, the world we are demanding, the world we will achieve.
1. We demand strong, universal health care systems and health care as a basic right for all humans.
2. We demand an immediate global ceasefire in all conflicts and an end to the disease of war. We demand that every nation move at least half its military spending to provide health care, housing, childcare, nutrition, education, Internet access, and other social needs so we can truly protect people’s physical, psychological, and economic security, including through the closure of foreign military bases, the cessation of military exercises, and the abolition of nuclear weapons.
3. We demand that unsustainable capitalist economies, based on the fantasy of endless growth, be replaced with cooperatively based economies of care, where human life, biodiversity, and our natural resources are conserved and a universal basic income is guaranteed so that governments can work together to combat the existential threat of climate change.
4. We demand an immediate lifting of all sanctions targeting entire nations, which are impoverishing vulnerable populations and killing people by blocking access to medicines and medical supplies.
5. We demand that all workers be protected against COVID-19 and have their long-term occupational health, economic, and labor rights guaranteed.
6. We demand the full protection of all people, especially the most vulnerable, including women and other victims of intimate partner violence and child abuse, the elderly, the impoverished, prisoners and detainees, refugees and other displaced peoples, migrants regardless of immigration status, the homeless, LGBTQIA+ individuals, racial/ethnic minorities, indigenous peoples, and those disability or ability challenged, among others.
7. We demand that wealthy nations live up to their responsibility to provide medical aid (including through the World Health Organization) and debt relief to save lives in countries without strong public health systems because of long histories of colonialism, neocolonialism, and other exploitation, foreign and domestic.
8. We demand that governments and corporations respect privacy and not exploit the pandemic to expand repressive measures such as surveillance, detention without trial, and restrictions on basic human rights to assembly, free expression, self-determination, and the vote.
9. We demand that when governments implement economic stimulus programs and re-open their economies they prioritize the needs of people over the interests of corporate, financial, and political elites.
In a world where the gap between rich and poor is obscene, with the world’s richest 1% having more than twice the wealth of 6.9 billion people, a fundamental redistribution of wealth and power globally and within nations is imperative. Every human being must have the opportunity to live a healthy, creative, and fulfilling life, free of the ravages of poverty, exploitation, and domination.
Why is this important?
A group of around 50 people from more than 12 countries drafted the Manifesto in recent weeks. Many prominent people are supporting it. People in general are more awake to the absurdity of a planet in which the richest 8 people have more wealth than the poorest 3.8 billion than ever before as this pandemic spreads. We are circulating this widely in multiple languages to help frame the debate and actions moving forward, raising global demands that address the inequity resulting from decades of neoliberal economic policies and rampant and unbridled militarism.
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Essentialist Manifesto
[The intro and one “explanatory” paragraph were excised from this manifesto by Middletown, CT, resident, Eric W. Kuhn.]
Human lives are more important than money.
Human lives require food, shelter, and medical care, and transportation as required to meet those essential needs. In time of crisis, i.e. the ongoing loss of huge numbers of human lives, these essential needs are the only things society and government should focus on.
Human lives are more important than jobs. Since “the economy” is nothing more than an agglomeration of jobs, human lives are more important than “the economy.”
The U.S. is well-positioned to generate food, shelter, medical care, and the transportation needed to access these essentials. The U.S. is also well-positioned to pay for them, to the extent that individuals are unable. We spend huge sums on inessential and even contraindicated items– tens of billions to bail airlines out, for instance. If we take an essentialist approach, there is an enormous amount of money that could be re-directed.
Also, the U.S. is well positioned to simply create money out of thin air; we do it with some regularity. We did it to bail out Wall Street and the auto industry and we can do it to keep people safe and fed at home in time of high-mortality crisis. Money is something of an abstraction, after all, whereas the difference between a person and a corpse is real and irreversible.
Plainly, our society/government does not recognize the current pandemic as anything that calls for an essentialist approach. The way we’re approaching it, the essential thing is apparently “the economy.” We fret about restaurants closing as if people would starve if they had to cook their own food. Meantime, some people may actually starve, or almost starve, because they don’t have food to cook or a place to cook it, and the government/society is busy protecting jobs rather than human beings.
Perhaps the national calculus would be different if the demographic hardest hit by the coronavirus was well-to-do people who work in government. Be that as it may, it would be a good thing if people tried to open their minds to the possibility that at some point we will really have to focus on the true essentials– the biological necessities of human life– and let the rest of it go if we are to avoid something truly catastrophic.
COVID-19 has already killed one American in a thousand; the plague killed about one in three in Europe. I wonder what the fraction is that would make us consider an essentialist approach.
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From doctors as patients: a manifesto for tackling persisting symptoms of covid-19
[This manifesto was a collaborative effort between 22 doctors, originally published in the letters section of thebmj.com. Footnotes have been excised to save space and confusion. You can view the original document here.]
We write as a group of doctors affected by persisting symptoms of suspected or confirmed covid-19. We aim to share our insights from both personal experience of the illness and our perspective as physicians.
Tackling this problem will involve collaboration between politicians, healthcare services, public health professionals, scientists, and society. We call for the following principles to be used so that the best possible outcomes can be achieved for all people affected by persisting symptoms of covid-19.
Research and surveillance—persisting symptoms of covid-19 should be dealt with using a scientific methodology and without bias. People experiencing them should be counted.
The effects of the virus should be studied in the way that any other disease would be, with thorough attention paid to epidemiology, pathophysiology, and management. “We still know very little about covid-19, but we do know that we cannot fight what we do not measure.” Research and surveillance need to capture the full spectrum of disease, including in those not admitted to hospital and not tested, to build an accurate picture of covid-19 phenotypes. We need a clear definition for recovery from covid-19. While further evidence is awaited, clinicians should “be open about uncertainty and transparent in the ways in which we acknowledge the limitations of the imperfect data we have no choice but to use.” We argue that this means accepting an emerging picture that prolonged symptoms are having a substantial impact on a significant minority of people and acknowledging that death is not the only outcome to measure. We argue that further research into chronic covid-19 symptoms is essential. Failure to understand the underlying biological mechanisms causing these persisting symptoms risks missing opportunities to identify risk factors, prevent chronicity, and find treatment approaches for people affected now and in the future.
Clinical services—services need to be timely, tailored to individuals’ presentations, and involve investigating and treating pathology, as well as the functional recovery of individuals.
Many patients who may, under normal circumstances, have been admitted to hospital instead managed their extremely difficult symptoms at home during this crisis. We should not assume that pathology is different between patients who were admitted to hospital and those who were not. Before any active rehabilitation can start, organic pathology needs to be detected and managed with appropriate investigations. A rehabilitation prescription can then be made for the individual. As Lynne Turner-Stokes, consultant in rehabilitation medicine, warned in a recent Royal Society of Medicine webinar, “Before we get people exercising, it’s important to be sure that it’s going to be safe. We need proper evaluation of cardiac and respiratory function, and we need to take things slowly and in a paced measure.” A recent study in JAMA of 100 patients (67 of whom had not been admitted to hospital) undergoing cardiac MRI after covid-19 found “cardiac involvement in 78 patients (78%) and ongoing myocardial inflammation in 60 patients (60%).” The authors say that participants “with mostly home based recovery had frequent cardiac inflammatory involvement, which was similar to the hospitalised subgroup with regards to severity and extent.”
The establishment of one-stop clinics will allow pattern recognition and expertise to develop among clinicians identifying and managing sequelae of covid-19. These clinics should reflect the multisystem nature of covid-19 and involve multidisciplinary teams with access to relevant investigations to detect known complications of covid-19 as indicated after clinical review. A reliance on “one size fits all” online rehabilitation services risks serious harm to patients if pathology goes undetected and is a missed opportunity for clinicians to develop their experience with the sequelae of this virus that is set to be an ongoing presence in our clinical practice. Where current guidance has been issued, such as the statement from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence cautioning against graded exercise therapy in the context of covid-19, it should be communicated quickly to clinicians on the front line.
Patient involvement—patients must be involved in the commissioning of clinical services and the design of research studies.
“No decision without me”—lessons learnt from other illnesses have shown the importance of involving those most affected. Patients experiencing persisting symptoms of covid-19 have a great deal to contribute to the search for solutions. Involving patients in research design and the commissioning of clinical services will ensure that the patient perspective is listened to and will optimise the development of such studies and clinical services. This may take the form of representatives from patient formed groups, which may include signatories of this letter, liaising with policy makers, researchers, and healthcare leaders.
Access to services—clinical services commissioned should not unfairly discriminate against those with negative tests and a clinical diagnosis should be adequate for accessing any appropriate services.
Widespread testing was not available in the early days of the pandemic. The timing of tests for active covid-19 infection (such as RT-PCR tests) affects test performance, and even if performed at an optimal time, the test is associated with a considerable risk of false negatives. We know antibody tests have mainly been validated in patients in hospital and are poorly sensitive early in the illness. There are few data regarding testing later in the disease course, and false negatives seem to be common. Some people do not seroconvert despite having previously tested positive. Thus, adherence to positive test results as a criterion for access to medical services or specific covid-19 sick pay arrangements with employers is unacceptable in the context of a clinical diagnosis of covid-19.
We welcome increasing awareness of the problem of persisting symptoms of COVID-19. As politicians, scientists, and doctors attempt to tackle this issue, these principles can act as a guide enabling the experiences of those with the condition to inform the efforts of experts and lead to improved research and clinical care, benefiting those affected and society as a whole.
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WHO Manifesto for Healthy Recovery from COVID-19
[This manifesto has been quite abridged to focus on its essential points while making room for others. To read in its entirety go here.]
1) Protect and preserve the source of human health: Nature.
Economies are a product of healthy human societies, which in turn rely on the natural environment—the original source of all clean air, water, and food.
2) Invest in essential services, from water and sanitation to clean energy in healthcare facilities.
Investment in healthier environments for health protection, environmental regulation, and ensuring that health systems are climate resilient, is both an essential guardrail against future disaster, and offers some of the best returns for society.
3) Ensure a quick healthy energy transition.
Energy infrastructure decisions taken now will be locked in for decades to come. Factoring in the full economic and social consequences, and taking decisions in the public health interest, will tend to favour renewable energy sources, leading to cleaner environments and healthier people.
4) Promote healthy, sustainable food systems.
There is a need for a rapid transition to healthy, nutritious and sustainable diets. If the world were able to meet WHO’s dietary guidelines, this would save millions of lives, reduce disease risks, and bring major reductions in global greenhouse gas emissions.
5) Build healthy, liveable cities.
Many of the largest and most dynamic cities in the world, such as Milan, Paris, and London, have reacted to the COVID-19 crisis by pedestrianizing streets and massively expanding cycle lanes—enabling “physically distant” transport during the crisis, and enhancing economic activity and quality of life afterwards.
6) Stop using taxpayers money to fund pollution.
Financial reform will be unavoidable in recovering from COVID-19, and a good place to start is with fossil fuel subsidies.
Globally, about US$400 billion every year of taxpayers money is spent directly subsidizing the fossil fuels that are driving climate change and causing air pollution. Furthermore, private and social costs generated by health and other impacts from such pollution are generally not built into the price of fuels and energy. Including the damage to health and the environment that they cause, brings the real value of the subsidy to over US$5 trillion per year—more than all governments around the world spend on healthcare—and about 2,000 times the budget of WHO.
