The Spark

the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist

“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx

Money for War, Not for Covid

Mar 14, 2022

Democrats in the House of Representatives agreed to drop 15.6 billion dollars in emergency spending for the Covid-19 pandemic from the 1.5 trillion dollars appropriations bill Congress just passed to keep the government running. The money would have gone to developing next-generation vaccines and for monoclonal antibody treatments for Covid-19. Despite their majority in both houses of Congress, the Democrats blamed the removal of the pandemic funding on Republicans’ insistence on more detailed accounting on where the money would come from.

At the same time, however, the politicians of both parties somehow managed to find 13.6 billion dollars for “military and humanitarian assistance to Ukraine and its Eastern European allies,” which was included in the same spending package.

Whether any humanitarian aid ever ends up in anyone’s hands remains to be seen. In any case, one thing is clear. To the politicians, spending money on war is more important than preventing further infections and deaths from Covid.