ON MARCH 13 chief scientific adviser Patrick Vallance announced the government was considering using the strategy of herd immunity to beat the coronavirus crisis.

Not only did this stand in stark contrast to the lockdown measures being rolled out across the world, but it was clear that the strategy would result in the needless deaths of thousands of people.

To a group of working-class Morning Star readers in Derbyshire, Vallance’s announcement signalled what they already knew about our government: “They don't really give a monkey’s for people like us.”

“The fact that the Tory government seriously flirted with using this strategy shows the extent to which they are willing to put the profits of big business above the lives of workers,” Oliver Dodd, one of the Derby activists, tells me.

It was this notorious example of “conscious cruelty,” Dodd says, that sparked the idea to create an online campaign — Coronavirus Fightback — to expose how workers are paying the price for the crisis.

“We decided that, to defend working families, to highlight how big businesses and their political friends are misleading people and covering up what is really happening to workers, that we’d start a social media campaign,” he explains.

For the moment the campaign has taken the format of a Facebook page disseminating information on the crisis from a working-class perspective.

Regular posts and discussions shine a light on the multiple ways workers are bearing the brunt of the crisis, from couriers being forced to risk their health to deliver non-essential items by greedy bosses, to nurses being sent to work on the front lines without PPE.

“In the view of our campaign, the health crisis is a political and economic crisis and this needs to be remembered,” Dodd stresses. 

“Working families are being made to pay for the coronavirus, while the more privileged social classes have the autonomy and flexibility to self-isolate.”

The online campaign is a natural progression for the Derby crew, who have been protesting against the very measures that have now weakened the ability of our public services to cope with the pandemic.

Before the lockdown, the campaigners were protesting welfare cuts outside the jobcentre, holding street stalls and launching a local inquiry into funding cuts and privatisation at their local hospital.

The same hospital is now suffering from a woeful lack of staff and ventilators. 

“As everywhere else, the NHS is already very weakened by years of cuts and privatisation,” Dodd says, pointing out this has now led to healthcare workers risking and even losing their lives in hospitals. 

When the lockdown measures are relaxed the team hope they can move the campaign to the “real” world. 

“When the coronavirus is over, the health crisis will still be around, because the potency of the coronavirus essentially results from policies which have been implemented in the health sector to the disadvantage of working families,” he says.

But for now Dodd says the Facebook page is doing the job. Within two weeks of the page going up, it had already gained 4,000 followers, and reached hundreds of thousands of people.

By organising online, the campaigners hope to change minds, and make those first steps towards mass opposition to a return to the austerity and neoliberal policies that left the majority unable to survive the pandemic. 

“We must not allow people to forget how the Tories and big business have the blood of thousands of working-class people on their hands, but to do that, we need to organise together as a class against them and hold them to account now and in the future.” 

You can follow Coronavirus Fightback at www.facebook.com/coronavirusfightback