Institutional collapse
Bureaucracy must be held to account in India’s Covid surge
It is the opinion of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) that the media’s job during the Covid-19 pandemic should be to create an atmosphere of “positivity, hope and trust”. Idealistic beginners in journalism schools will hopefully interpret that as the exact opposite of what their job actually entails. But the cautionary overtones in the statement from the ruling party’s ideological patriarch are a heartening indication that the media may perhaps be among the few institutions actually doing its job of speaking truth to power.
That cannot be said for many, especially in the context of the country’s abysmal lack of preparedness for a second surge in Covid-19. Even if one attributes the ruling party’s political resolution passed in its national executive meeting on February 21 which declared that the BJP, under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has “defeated Covid”
COVID-19 vaccines: Waiting for advantage India
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A dose of truth: The real story of India s COVID-19 vaccination programme
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Overcoming formidable biological and sociocultural barriers, India eliminated wild polioviruses from its territory in January 2011. Looking back, it is obvious that the best policy would have been to introduce the inactivated poliovirus vaccine to prevent polio in every vaccinated child, and to use oral poliovirus vaccine by pulse campaigns to eliminate WPVs rapidly. This would have eliminated polio decades ago. Now that WPVs have been eliminated, IPV must be introduced as a prelude to withdrawing OPV. The road ahead is bumpy, but with the important lessons learnt so far, India can no longer pretend that it is too difficult to design a permanent public health infrastructure to control other communicable and non-communicable diseases.
India must ensure public trust in Covid vaccine is not eroded
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