Covid19 pandemic-sindemia: national universal public health systems or barbaries

Abstract

This article presents a reflection of how the disease caused by the SARS-COV-2 virus to COVID-19 is not just a pandemic, but a pansyndemia, that is, a situation characterized not only by the respiratory disease of COVID-19 , but also by other conditions that are the result of biological and social interactions that contribute to worsening the health status of populations and generate impacts beyond the sanitary and particularly about the necessity  of strengthening Universal Public Health Systems. It is discussed in this article, how  capitalists societies have influenced, through the neoliberal agenda, the deconstruction of public policies, mainly in the health sector, which has reduced the capacity of national states to respond effectively to this Pansyndemia. In Brazil, the agenda implemented since 2016 has resulted in a reduction in SUS funding, in precarious work and in the reduction by the working class of their right to health. Furthermore, the international agenda of multilateral organizations has been building modest and timid alternatives to the right to health. We recover, in Marx's critique and in the health theoretical production inspired by Marx, that how the capitalist production and reproduction mode impacts health and that, historically, the struggle of the working class was decisive in guaranteeing the right to health within the framework of the states that emerge from these societies. Thus, we point to the need that the social and class tensions that emerge in the context of this Pansyndemia can reaffirm the importance and priority of a new cycle of struggles of the working and popular classes based on the universal right to health and in the construction of universal public systems, and that only in this way can we overcome the risks and damages of the current Pansyndemia.