A Strategy to Eradicate COVID-19

Interview with Paul Murphy, a Socialist in Ireland’s Parliament

Paul Murphy is a member of the Irish Parliament elected in 2014 on the basis of his firm opposition to the government’s attempts to impose water charges. Alongside 27 other activists, he was charged with the False Imprisonment of Joan Burton at a water charges protest in 2014. However, the #JobstownNotGuilty campaign proved victorious — 7 defendants were found not guilty, the attack on the right to protest was defeated, and the trumped up charges against all the other activists were dismissed. Paul is also a member of RISE (Revolutionary Internationalist, Socialist, Environmentalist), which is a network of People Before Profit, Ireland’s eco-socialist party. RISE is also the Irish sister organization in political solidarity with DSA’s Reform & Revolution caucus.  Alex Moni-Sauri from Reform & Revolution spoke with him about a socialist strategy for eradicating COVID-19.

Alex Moni-Sauri: To start with, what is Zero COVID? Is it a misleading name?

Paul Murphy: So zero COVID means zero community transmission of the virus. A good alternative term for community transmission is mystery transmission. So when a case arises and you can’t say you got the case from your brother or your partner or whatever and you don’t know where someone got it, that’s a mystery transmission, that’s community transmission. And that means there could be a whole bunch of other people who got it from the same place, and they haven’t been traced.

So a Zero COVID policy is about getting the numbers of total cases down and establishing the public health infrastructure to find, test, trace, isolate, and eliminate community transmission. It doesn’t mean that you will never have community transmission again, but it means you can get to that. A good example is Ireland and the US have zero fire policies. It doesn’t mean that we don’t have any fires, but, when we have a fire, we don’t say, “Oh, sure, there’s just fire everywhere.” Instead, we try and stop the fire and aim to have zero fire.

And so what policies would it entail to meet that goal? What would that look like?

In countries where you have transmission out of control like Ireland and definitely the US, zero COVID does entail lockdowns, but effective ones, and because they’re more effective, they’re relatively shorter lockdowns. To give the Irish example, right now we have a lockdown that’s very hard on ordinary people. So we’ve all been confined to five kilometers from our homes since December and will be for another month. People can’t visit, it’s extremely hard, but 40% of the construction industry is still open. The meat factories, they kind of have to stay open, but there’s huge outbreaks there because the meat factory owners are cutting corners. About twice as many people in this lockdown compared to the first lockdown are being forced to travel into work when they could be safely working from home.

So employers are able to flout this lockdown very widely. And so, we say this lockdown should be enforced on employers, trade unions should be empowered to have inspections, and we should fine employers who aren’t complying. And so, there is an element of lockdown in zero COVID, but we do it sharply and effectively. And then it’s about establishing the infrastructure so you can actually find, test, trace, and isolate the virus.

And then linked to that, people need to be supported to be able to do that. And that, in our opinion, means you need to have socialist policy. For example, we need to build a proper quality national health service, which in the US, you’d call Medicare For All. That’s an important thing to do. Secondly, everyone’s incomes and homes need to be protected. So you need to cancel rents, mortgages, etc. to make sure people can get through this together.

Are there any examples of these zero COVID policies being successfully implemented?

Yeah. There’s certainly much more positive examples than Ireland or the US. The US is really down to the bottom of the world’s list. Ireland now, out of the whole European Union, has the most days of lockdown over the past year. And it’s not because they’re doing some effective zero COVID strategy; it’s because they are repeatedly opening up for businesses and then things get out of control. And then they’ve got no other weapons apart from lockdown. And so, there are many countries which have implemented policies which approximate zero COVID: Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, Vietnam. In those countries, basically life has gone back to normal. 

A few weeks ago, there was an outbreak in New Zealand. In Ireland, because a big section of the media is very anti-zero COVID, they try to make this big news to say, “Oh, zero COVID doesn’t work.” But the response to the outbreak was that they had three days of lockdown in New Zealand, and then they had dealt with the community transmission and then the country reopened. Whereas in Ireland, we’re now in our third month of lockdown – of just this most recent round of lockdown. And we’ve been in lockdown for most of the last year. Because that’s the funny thing, they tried to say zero COVID equals lockdown, when in reality, the name of the official government policy in Ireland is “Living with COVID.” That’s just a disaster. You can’t do that.

There are many countries which have implemented policies which approximate zero COVID: Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, Vietnam – in those countries, basically life has gone back to normal. 

What do you think has led to the successful implementation of those policies in near zero COVID countries? Was it done in a socialist way? 

The biggest factor is that the public health infrastructure in those countries is substantially stronger, in particular because of the outbreak of SARS, so they have experience with pandemics and responding to them. And they have, certainly compared to Ireland, and definitely compared to the US, better public health infrastructure. You can read books from 20 years ago saying a pandemic is going to happen at some stage, but the investment wasn’t put into this infrastructure in places like Ireland and the US, which means we’re completely underprepared. 

There are parallels between the COVID crisis and the climate crisis. And we know that the political establishment and the capitalist class in Ireland are going to try to live with climate change as opposed to actually trying to stop this catastrophe — the same sort of approach. And a big factor stopping us from doing what is necessary is just really short-term profits. It was really incredible in Ireland. We had a lockdown from the start of November to the start of December. We saw very high case numbers and then, against the advice of the public health team, they opened pubs and restaurants for three weeks, supposedly to give people, “meaningful Christmas.” And it was just very blatantly done, lobbying for the private sector to open up, and 2,000 people have died as a result of that one decision. So very short-term profit thinking is a big reason this hasn’t been pursued.

What if only advanced capitalist countries could achieve zero COVID? Is that an effective strategy?

No. And I think this closely relates to the vaccine question. A crucial part, actually, of the zero COVID strategy is the idea of a people’s vaccine. Because, as it currently stands, in the poorer countries of the world, nine out of ten people will not be vaccinated this year. Many countries may not be vaccinated until like 2024. And the reason, pure and simple, is because the big pharmaceutical companies are hanging onto their intellectual property rights and are saying that the vaccines can’t be manufactured on a generic basis. That is completely immoral.

The UN said it really bluntly, as we would say, that these companies are preventing production of the vaccine to enhance their profits. That’s what’s happening. So the idea of a people’s vaccine is that intellectual property rights should not apply to any pharmaceuticals. They should be suspended to allow these vaccines to be produced on a generic, not-for-profit, public basis around the world.

Preventing production of the vaccine due to intellectual property rights is immoral, but it’s also a public health risk for the entire world because every single time the virus jumps from one person to another, there’s a chance it mutates. 

People of color are being hit much harder – higher percentage of deaths, vaccine rollout is leaving out huge sections of people of color, greater economic tolls. How does zero COVID address that?

Yeah. The traveler community, which is like an ethnic minority within Ireland, people who historically have not lived in houses, they have lived in caravans and travel around the country and have their own culture and language and are an extremely oppressed group. Racism against travelers is extremely widespread, relatively low levels of life expectancy, education, etc. Just as oppressed groups are being hit hard by COVID around the world, in Ireland incidences of COVID and outcomes of COVID for travelers are significantly worse. So for vaccination rollout, that needs to be taken into account. For example, travelers need to be put into higher-priority groups because of their vulnerability to getting it, and also their likelihood of more negative outcomes, if they do get it.

The other factor is the general policies to support people. So the government in Ireland was forced in the first lockdown, when COVID first hit, under pressure from below, to implement something called a “pandemic unemployment payment,” which has a higher rate than the normal rate of unemployment payments. But since then, the government has been trying to cut the number of people who got the higher rate, as well as bring down the higher rate. Traditionally, unemployment benefit is about 200 euros a week. The pandemic unemployment payment is 350 a week.

But the government started on a strategy of suggesting that some people were making loads of money, loads more than they were previously when they were at work, blah, blah, blah. And so we have tried to campaign, to oppose any attempt to divide workers. The reason 350 euros was chosen is because that’s the minimum you need to live a somewhat decent life. 

What about the burden of social reproduction during lockdowns, which disproportionately falls on women? How does the zero COVID strategy deal with that? Should women just continue to carry the burden even longer?

That’s a good question. This is a big issue. For example, in Ireland, as a result of COVID, unemployment rates of women have risen and gone higher than unemployment rates for men, which hasn’t been the case for 10 or 15 years. That’s partially because a lot of women are considered to be outside the workforce and, therefore, aren’t considered unemployed. The impact of COVID is gendered. And one of the things happening is women are being forced back into the home, to care for children, because of schools being closed.

So we introduced a proposed law for what we call “childcare leave.” It’s a measure that has been partially implemented in other European countries where they’ve increased the amount of parental leave, which in Ireland, parental leave is really bad.

We’ve introduced this measure, proposing that if your child has to be at home because of COVID, either because their school is closed, or because they have COVID, or because they have to self-isolate because someone else has COVID or whatever, you are entitled to “childcare leave,” which would be the equivalent of sick pay, full pay, paid by your employer. So people are able to say, “Well, I simply cannot work because the schools are closed. You cannot expect me to work from home and to do everything else all together, and I’m entitled to childcare leave.”

This is in the law that we wrote, this is a specific COVID measure, but then we will try to make it more general, to establish the right to childcare leave in the future, to counteract some of the effects of COVID.

If we do achieve zero COVID and eventually reopen again, what needs to change for the future of mutations and possible future global pandemics?

Yeah. It’s not something nice to talk about, but we’re likely facing more pandemics in the future. That’s what all the epidemiologists say. In a sense, we’ve been lucky to get away without a global pandemic up until now, or in recent decades. I think there is a fundamental question about humanity’s relationship to nature. The practices of capitalist agriculture are a big accelerating factor in the risk of pandemics emerging. That is one thing we need to address as socialists. We need a different sustainable model of agriculture, which doesn’t pose the same risks.

One thing that is clear, or really should be clear to people, is who is essential and who creates wealth. Who produces stuff? And it isn’t Jeff Bezos, and it isn’t the Irish equivalent of Jeff Bezos, it’s the worker in the factory, it’s the delivery person, it’s the nurse, it’s the person in the grocery store. The establishment and the media try to avoid that conclusion, but I think that’s out there, the idea that workers are really essential, and that’s very positive.

The other thing is, I do think we should draw out the connections to climate change. In a way what we’ve been through, that’s only, unfortunately, a glimpse of the nightmare of the climate catastrophe within our lives, if we don’t follow the science the way we should be following the science. The organization of society for profits, stands in the way of doing what is necessary to avoid catastrophic climate change.

Therefore, the conclusion is not to allow our society to be run for short-term profit, which means, taking over the fossil fuels, taking them out of the hands of Big Oil and saying, “We’re going to control them, and they’re going to stay in the ground.” It means taking the airline industry and other industries out of the control of the current owners and taking them in the hands of ordinary people and then enabling us to plan the economy based on human needs.