Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Gloria Oladipo reports on the spread of two new Omicron subvariants (BA.4 and BA.5) across the U.S., while Rahul Suryawanshi et al. find that Omicron infection doesn't provide substantial immunity against other variants of COVID-19 (particularly among the unvaccinated). And Tanya Lewis discusses how a focus on cleaner indoor air would protect against COVID as well as other avoidable health problems. 

- Karen Hawthorne interviews Sue Robins about the need for our health care system to move toward a focus on care rather than business. But Katie DeRosa reports that B.C. is instead seeing (and investigating) the acquisition of medical practices by corporate providers who are looking to create a two-tiered system through individual subscription fees - a reality that's also playing out in Ontario. 

- Greg Jericho points out the obvious unfairness of allowing corporations to grab windfall profits by raising prices, while cracking down on any prospect of wage gains to direct anything to workers. And Alex Cooke writes about the devastating effects of an economy planned to provide less than a living wage to workers. 

- Steven Greenhouse and Harold Meyerson argue that established unions can and should do far more to build organizing capacity among younger workers, rather than limiting their focus to a failing effort to cling to what they have now. And Lee Fang discusses how one of the cynical corporate responses to any attempt at unionization has been to co-opt the language of social justice to claim there's no need for organization in the interest of equity and inclusion.

- Finally, Alex Williams discusses how the inflation we're seeing now is the result of conscious choices to eliminate physical productive capacity in all but the most exploitative jurisdictions in the name of goosing corporate profits. Liat Olenick warns that the U.S.' baby formula shortage is just a preview of the precarity of all kinds of food supplies as our climate breaks down. And Umair Haque writes that we can't plausibly treat the multiple, overlapping and substantially-unanswered crises we're facing as anything less than a collapse in progress.