When the HIV pandemic occurred, not only did the Reagan administration deny the pandemic and allow it to infect a large portion of the population, but all the bourgeois media called it “GRID”, gay-related immuno-deficiency. During the period, there were large, flashy LGBT demonstrations in more and more US cities against oppression, and there were fears on the part of the government of LGBT people associating with the left that was against the wars promoted by the US. A large portion of scientists were promoting an alternative name for the disease, because the name GRID was harmful to the gay community, and also to the understanding of the virus, which affected not only homosexuals, but all human beings.

As a result, the event served to marginalize the LGBT movement, promote homophobia, and practically genocide the LGBT population. The case was so serious that there were rumors that the US had created HIV in a laboratory to genocide the LGBT population. Even the Soviet Union and Cuba took the same position, that it was a virus created to genocide the LGBT population. But it also killed heterosexuals, transgender people, and injecting drug users.

Now, talking about a subject that has nothing to do with it. In December 2019, a virus is first identified in Wuhan, but later it was found in sewage samples from countries in Europe, including Brazil, presence of coronavirus since August. When enough people became infected, Chinese doctors were able to notice a pattern in their symptoms, and could see what could be expected from this virus. What the doctors initially could not predict, was the length of hospitalization that people needed. Some patients needed to be hospitalized for days, weeks, and some even months.

China, faced with a picture in which beds were increasingly occupied, immediately ordered Wuhan closed. It was an extremely efficient and organized lockdown, with neighborhood organizations and authorities even using remote drones with 5G technology and speakers to insist that people stay home, except in emergencies such as shopping or going to the doctor. Literally overnight, the city came to a standstill. This entire effort occurred because the doctors correctly predicted that if more people became infected, there would not be enough beds for everyone. To ensure the safety of the population, China even built an entire hospital dedicated to treating COVID patients in just 10 days. Meanwhile, the bourgeois media was reporting that those measures were “authoritarian measures” against the people, and that the government was using the pandemic to deprive people’s freedom.

By the way, before all this, from January to August 2019, the US departments, including health, economics, commerce, and state department, conduct an exercise to find out how the state would handle a possible pandemic. The details are staggering: the test conducted was based on a scenario of a pandemic of a virus originating in China that compromises the respiratory system. This simulation was called “Crimson Contagion,” crimson being a bright shade of red. In November 2019, U.S. counterintelligence agencies warned NATO and Israel about an “epidemic in China,” that is, a month before the discovery of the coronavirus by China itself and the WHO. It is worth noting that the US has used biological weapons before in its history, having researched for 27 years biological agents for use in warfare, and carried out in the case of the imperialist invasion in the Korean War, and in Cuba. In 1956 and 1958, the US Army released Aedes Aegypti mosquitoes into the air in the states of Georgia and Florida to test whether mosquitoes could be used as biological weapons in warfare. In 1967, it was published in the journal Science that dengue fever was “one of the diseases considered for biological weapons research.” In 1981, a dengue outbreak sickens more than 300,000 Cuban citizens. The government of Cuba claims interference by the US, which has denied any involvement.

Back to the pandemic (as if we had ever come out of it!), the bourgeois media started to associate masks with prisons, and the president of the United States used the term “Chinese virus”. In his speeches, he denied the pandemic, his ideological propaganda network promoted conspiracy theories, and encouraged people not to wear masks. Later, it went on to promote the idea that China had hidden the virus. In the case, China as soon as it sequenced the coronavirus genome sent its scientific findings to the WHO. Hidden from whom? Meanwhile, most capitalist countries promoted denialism and misinformation.

As a result of all this, the countries that promoted denialism and disinformation the most, by far, were Brazil and the USA, which registered the most deaths and infections. Brazil has now reached 300 thousand deaths, the US has already registered 560 thousand, in a horror movie that is not over yet for Brazilian workers and US workers. We are living a genocidal government, that made mere rhetorical concessions, but in practice got in the way of getting vaccines, tried to use the Supreme Court to punish state governments that were managing lockdown autonomously since the federal government did nothing (or when it did, it didn’t do enough) and took advantage of the pandemic period, when workers are unable to organize face-to-face (although they are still safe to organize by other means of communication :winking face:), to pass anti-people measures, administrative counter-reforms, interventions in the education of federal institutes, so that the government can misinform and persecute our students who dispute the government’s narrative.

Some governors and mayors have also been examples of “representatives” who took advantage of the pandemic moment to advance against the workers’ right to exist. We have the example of the opening of trade at the moment when the pandemic was getting worse under the government of Camilo Santana (PT) and the administrative counter-reform measures promoted by Mayor Sarto (PDT) during the pandemic here in Fortaleza, Ceará, to name one example, but I am sure others will come. This is the total disorder and lack of control of the capitalist system, which takes advantage of a social crisis and promotes mass terrorism to take away workers’ rights.

Let this be registered as the need for workers to organize in a revolutionary way, to fight the capitalist system as one force, a social force that can defeat the dictatorship of capital to install the dictatorship of the proletariat, the moment when the people start dictating the rules of the economic system. The dictatorship of the proletariat is when workers no longer serve the economy, and instead the economy serves the workers. We need to articulate ourselves and find any means possible to organize, we need to be creative in the struggle and figure out how to act in the face of the contradictions that sustain the moment, in particular the contradiction between the need to organize and the health difficulty of doing it in person.