One way of pushing up vaccinations is to empower each centre to accept bookings or at least give tokens to its customers on payment ( or deposit for those who want free) . The centre then have a backend verification, in batch processing mode once a day and allocate appointments according to availability. This way customers don't have to go continuously to the co win app.. and we who are trying to get an appointment know that (apna time aayega". The app given to each centre could be a model app, where centres can run them from their own servers and take payments online, thereby removing one more delay at the vaccinations site.
To prevent fraud each booking and modification can be block-chained. The same procedure can be adopted for the free jab. This way even off line centres could have a drive to register on a portable device and then batch process it by physically going to the nearest town. This way the central distribution system can have daily monitor and allot the vaccination according to demand. The allocation can also be done in a geographic mode so that sensitive districts can ask for universal jabs based on actual orders. The main problem with cowin is that it is playing divine..I have been trying for a long time to get a slot.
Daily COVID-19 Vaccinations Likely To Go Up To Five Million Per Day In 10 Days: EGVAC Chairman R S Sharma - Jun 15, 2021 https://swarajyamag.com/insta/daily-covid-19-vaccinations-likely-to-go-up-to-five-million-per-day-in-10-days-egvac-chairman-r-s-sharma
So after the Covid lockdown, have most of the migrant laborers returned to work outside Bihar?
“Oh no, no! For the first time in my life it seems that the village has been populated. Over the years the boys and men of the village have returned to the village and are mingling with each other here. Now you will say that it is a matter of great happiness, but our village, which looks populated from outside, is miserable from inside. The reason for this misery is unemployment. For how many days can one feel good in the village with unemployment? Tell me?” asked Afzal Ali.
It was a question posed to us as reply to our question. Pankaj and I stared at each other. The village is full of people and there is much joy visible but the families are helpless, what kind of contradiction is this?
It turns out that most of the people of the village have been here for two years, because most of them have not been called to work in the big cities as yet. Many are still scared that their condition may become similar to that during the Covid lockdown – they may be trapped in the city without any support system to take care of them!
“If 40 people returned to the village, there were only ten among them who had managed to return to the city for work. The rest are sitting around in village jobless” says Afzal.
The MGNREGA scheme, also known as the ‘100 days guaranteed employment’ scheme was meant to ensure that ‘every hand gets work with full wages’. So, what is the status of MGNREGA in this village?
Pankaj Ram provided the answer. He said, “How can people live on the basis of MGNREGA, sir? Low wages are also one of the reasons why MGNREGA does not attract people anymore. On top of this the local panchayat can’t even generate 100 days of employment for the laborers in a year, that’s why people have also stopped asking about it. People would prefer to work instead of sitting empty handed but MNREGA work is simply not available”.
16/06/2022
A Tale of Two Indias https://www.theindiaforum.in/article/tale-two-indias Jan 2023
Pandemic in India has seen a majority of its citizens going hungry to bed while another, smaller, section making millions. An inclusive, sustainable, and equitable recovery must deal with the triple crisis of the economy, health and climate.
unlike countries that have robust social security systems or have pursued aggressive fiscal measures, a temporary supply ‘shock’ in India can lead to a longish depressed effect on jobs, incomes, and demand. Countries with such systems or policy responses would have, in effect, guarded against an aggregate demand and supply mismatch once the lockdowns were lifted.
A pandemic-induced lockdown disrupted the supply side of the economy. But once the supply gets stabilised, the overall demand needs to match up to it...
A purely fiscal measure may address just one — economic — of the three crises. Instead, a green fiscal response, which focusses on spending on greening the infra sector while changing the energy mix of the economy as well as spending on the care economy, may take the triple crises head-on.
Such a response needs to forefront climate justice by incorporating redistributive elements, some of which are intrinsic to this path and some need to be designed as part of the programme. Our work shows that this green path is not only more labour-intensive compared to the business-as-usual scenario, it also favours the rural, unskilled and marginalised sections of the population. Additionally, some specifically built-in components — financing the programme through wealth and inheritance taxes; a right to access to energy to all — could help address the growing wedge between the two Indias.
https://scroll.in/article/1044264/pushed-out-of-school-in-the-pandemic-they-now-stitch-shoes
Data shows that the pandemic severely disrupted the education of children in India, as it did of children across the world. A 2021 UNICEF report noted that in India, the “closure of 1.5 million schools due to the pandemic and lockdowns in 2020 has impacted 247 million children enrolled in elementary and secondary schools”. It further estimated that 9 million children were at risk of being pushed into child labour by the end of 2022 as a result of the pandemic.
“Children from marginalised groups were already at risk of dropping out even before the lockdown struck,” said Ankit Vyas, an independent education consultant and co-author of a report published by OXFAM on the impact of the pandemic on education. “With physical closure of schools and lack of access to education, their dropping out of education became inevitable.”
22/02/2023
he Impact of Censorship on Covid-19 Policy Formation in the United States by Victor Wallis https://esmed.org/MRA/mra/article/view/3822 https://esmed.org/MRA/mra/article/view/3822/99193546939
Dissident doctors whose response to Covid was censored found a platform with right-wing politicians and media. This gave enhanced political legitimacy, ironically, to the very forces that were most opposed to the kind of regulatory policies and system of universal healthcare....
Contrary to the view advanced by right-wing ideologues, what threatens people’s wellbeing is not public authority as such, but rather public authority shaped by private interests. There is no way the needed improvements in public health can be attained without government playing a role. The Right plays upon people’s fear of government by invoking Orwellian images of totalitarian intrusion into everyone’s private life. But such intrusion is carried out by private as well as governmental entities..
Steven Johnson : I'm disheartened to see an article .. arguing some crucial points about the need for universal health care, mixed in with much more dubious and potentially discrediting points, and published in what appears to be a faux academic publication see http://flakyc.blogspot.com/2020/11/european-society-of-medicine-esmed.html
public health people did what they could to combat the endless B.S. attacks by the Covid denying industry/cult against each and every one of the only tools we have in our toolbox to address the pandemic: masks, distancing, contact tracing and isolation, vaccines, etc. And when they called that life-endangering B.S. for what it was, and refrained from
publishing it in prestigious journals, the B.S. production industry/cult
calls it censorship.
Victor Wallis : Instead of addressing the arguments given and the evidence cited, he targets the author and the venue.... If what the dissidents asserted was simply wrong, the defenders of orthodoxy would be able to refute it. Recourse to censorship suggests that they are unable to do this. Steven Johnson suggests that criticizing a big pharma-driven agenda clashes with the goal (which we share) of working toward universal healthcare. Not so. A holistic approach to health-matters -- challenging big pharma's overemphasis on drugs, pills, and vaccines -- is consistent with a socialist approach to healthcare, which rejects profit-driven choices. Climate, Covid, Class, and Capital Victor Wallis https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10455752.2023.2175974 parallel between the ecosocialist goal of biodiversity and respect for the complexities of the human immune system
Mofwoofoo: there can never ever be an "arbiter of truth". Censorship is a big step towards totalitarianism and the Left should have never gone along with it
Taken from a discuss in WSM
Scientists Are Just Beginning to Understand COVID-19's Effect On the Brain https://time.com/6294762/how-covid-19-affects-brain-memory/?utm_source=pocket-newtab-intl-en
tracking the long-term neurologic issues that some people with Long COVID experience --- cognitive decline, changes in brain size and structure, depression and suicidal thinking, tremors, seizures, memory loss, and new or worsened dementia have all been linked to previous SARS-CoV-2 infections. In some cases, these longer-term problems occur even in patients with relatively mild COVID-19.
The “Holy Grail” question now, Meropol says, is what’s going on in the brains of COVID-19 patients—and how to reverse the damage.
Pharma giant AstraZeneca's Covid-19 vaccine is being withdrawn worldwide after the company acknowledged for the first time in court documents that it can cause a rare and dangerous side effect, according to a report in the British newspaper The Telegraph.
In recent months, Vaxzevria has come under scrutiny over a very rare side effect, which causes blood clots and low blood platelet counts. In court documents, AstraZeneca in the high court in February admitted that the vaccine "can, in very rare cases, cause TTS".
TTS, which stands for Thrombosis with Thrombocytopenia Syndrome, has been associated with at least 81 deaths in the UK and hundreds of serious injuries. More than 50 alleged victims and grieving relatives have filed a lawsuit against AstraZeneca in a high court case.
AstraZeneca has insisted that the decision to withdraw the vaccine is not related to the case or admission that it can cause TTS and termed the timing a pure coincidence, according to The Telegraph report.
Source: ANI
08/05/2024
Why NGOs want to help but can’t Pradip K. Saha Delhi 28 May 2021 https://themorningcontext.com/chaos/why-ngos-want-to-help-but-cant
Civil society organizations are crucial for last-mile delivery of services and relief, especially when a pandemic is raging. Yet the restrictive new FCRA rules have left them starved of funds and unable to respond to those in need.
So after the Covid lockdown, have most of the migrant laborers returned to work outside Bihar?
“Oh no, no! For the first time in my life it seems that the village has been populated. Over the years the boys and men of the village have returned to the village and are mingling with each other here. Now you will say that it is a matter of great happiness, but our village, which looks populated from outside, is miserable from inside. The reason for this misery is unemployment. For how many days can one feel good in the village with unemployment? Tell me?” asked Afzal Ali.
It was a question posed to us as reply to our question. Pankaj and I stared at each other. The village is full of people and there is much joy visible but the families are helpless, what kind of contradiction is this?
It turns out that most of the people of the village have been here for two years, because most of them have not been called to work in the big cities as yet. Many are still scared that their condition may become similar to that during the Covid lockdown – they may be trapped in the city without any support system to take care of them!
“If 40 people returned to the village, there were only ten among them who had managed to return to the city for work. The rest are sitting around in village jobless” says Afzal.
The MGNREGA scheme, also known as the ‘100 days guaranteed employment’ scheme was meant to ensure that ‘every hand gets work with full wages’. So, what is the status of MGNREGA in this village?
Pankaj Ram provided the answer. He said, “How can people live on the basis of MGNREGA, sir? Low wages are also one of the reasons why MGNREGA does not attract people anymore. On top of this the local panchayat can’t even generate 100 days of employment for the laborers in a year, that’s why people have also stopped asking about it. People would prefer to work instead of sitting empty handed but MNREGA work is simply not available”.
16/06/2022
The UNAIDS Executive Director Winnie Byanyima had appealed before the 12th WTO Ministerial Conference in Geneva that the world would face a grim future if patent waivers did not take place. At a press conference, Byanyima had said, “In a pandemic, sharing technology is life or death, and we are choosing death.” During the 12th Ministerial of the World Trade Organization (WTO), which took place from June 12 to 17, the rich countries did precisely that. They blocked almost all possibilities of providing cheap vaccines, antiviral drugs and diagnostics to the world. After two years of the WTO “postponing”—or blocking—the India-South Africa proposal for a waiver on patents for COVID-19 vaccines and medicines, the club of the rich countries—the European Union, the United States and the UK—ensured that no worthwhile patent waiver measure was passed. The profits of Big Pharma once again trumped the lives and health of the people. This is also what happened during the AIDS epidemic.
In vaccine manufacture, it is not the formula of the vaccine that matters. Unlike many medicines, which are small molecule drugs and therefore easy to patent, vaccines are large molecules and belong to the group of medicines that are called biologics. The key to manufacturing biologics is not the formula of the compound but rather manufacturing it at an industrial scale and ensuring the production process of replicating the complex large molecules accurately. This know-how is guarded not under patents but under trade secrets. It is possible to duplicate these trade secrets or secure them by giving somebody who knows the process the job. But this opens companies that try to do this to costly legal action, including by the WTO. And there is also the threat of unilateral sanctions by the United States, the EU and the UK.
The upshot is that Pfizer and other Big Pharma companies will continue to make huge profits at the expense of people’s lives, even if this leads to new SARS-CoV-2 variants emerging and causes the continuation of the pandemic. Less than 20 percent of people in Africa, which has a population of about 700 million, have been fully vaccinated, while millions of vaccine doses are going unused and are going to waste in the United States. We have the vaccine production capacity to immunize the entire global population, thus saving countless lives and reducing the possibility of new, dangerous variants emerging. But doing so is not in the interest of Big Pharma, for whom profits matter far more than human lives.
23/07/2022
How Bill Gates and partners used their clout to control the global Covid response — with little oversight https://www.politico.com/news/2022/09/14/global-covid-pandemic-response-bill-gates-partners-00053969
Armed with expertise, bolstered by contacts at the highest levels of Western nations and empowered by well-grooved relationships with drug makers, the four organizations took on roles often played by governments — but without the accountability of governments. While nations were still debating the seriousness of the pandemic, the groups identified potential vaccine makers and targeted investments in the development of tests, treatments and shots. And they used their clout with the World Health Organization to help create an ambitious worldwide distribution plan for the dissemination of those Covid tools to needy nations, though it would ultimately fail to live up to its original promises.
The largest and most powerful was the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the largest philanthropies in the world. Then there was Gavi, the global vaccine organization that Gates helped to found to inoculate people in low-income nations, and the Wellcome Trust, a British research foundation with a multibillion dollar endowment that had worked with the Gates Foundation in previous years. Finally, there was the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, or CEPI, the international vaccine research and development group that Gates and Wellcome both helped to create in 2017.
Leaders of three of the four organizations maintained that lifting intellectual property protections was not needed to increase vaccine supplies – which activists believed would have helped save lives...
The last three paras of the report.. “You need to have a reckoning on this. The way the G-7, and the G-20, showed up in the pandemic was pretty disappointing, to put it mildly,” said a person who works with one of the four organizations and requested to remain anonymous to speak more freely about the state of global health care. “There was a complete lack of leadership. On this issue of equitable access, people made big statements, but they didn’t follow through at all.”
Without governments stepping in to take the lead on pandemic preparedness, the four organizations, along with their partners in the global health community, are the only entities that are in a position to lead in the world’s response to a devastating outbreak — again.
“They’re funded by their own capabilities and or endowments and trusts. But when they step into multilateral affairs, then who keeps watch over them?” a former senior U.S. official said. “I don’t know the answer to that. That’s quite provocative.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VbalqF7kkg
In an interview about what he calls a “once in a century crisis” which hasn’t got anywhere near the media attention it requires and deserves, the Vice-Chancellor of the Azim Premji University says schools are struggling to recover the learning students lost during the two years of Covid when schools were either shut or not fully functioning. Although there are schools where “near complete recovery” has been achieved there are many where there is practically no recovery and many where it is patchy and very incomplete.
10/12/2022
Researcher claims mRNA COVID-19 vaccines can increase serious adverse events; calls for it to be withdrawn from the market https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/life-style/health-fitness/health-news/breaking-researcher-claims-mrna-covid-19-vaccines-can-increase-serious-adverse-events-calls-for-it-to-be-withdrawn-from-the-market/articleshow/96854278.cms Jan 12, 2023, Joseph Fraiman, an emergency physician and a clinical scientist from Louisiana, claims that the messenger RNA COVID-19 vaccine can increase serious adverse events in people, including sudden cardiac deaths. video https://twitter.com/i/status/1612352266228441094 He found the vaccine increases serious adverse events at a rate of one in 800
This type of vaccine uses the mRNA that directs and instructs the cells to produce copies of a protein, also known as the “spike protein” that are found outside of the coronavirus. This triggers an immune response inside our bodies. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), COVID-19 vaccines provide strong protection against serious illness, hospitalization and death. While breakthrough infections are still prevalent, vaccines reduce the risk of severe infection.
India is in the middle of general elections. Spread over seven weeks, this is the first election for the Lok Sabha post the biggest human misery recorded in history after 1918; the COVID-19 pandemic. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has made several references to it, making tall claims about its ‘management’.\https://thewire.in/health/covid-second-wave-anniversary-modi-election-promise
Here is a reality-check on India’s COVID-19 crisis in five points.
A deadly second wave
The dead bodies lying on the banks of the Ganga and people queuing up outside the burial grounds for the last rites seem to have been either forgotten by the PM when he makes tall claims regarding the pandemic management, or it is a deliberate attempt to manipulate the memory of the common people.
2. The highest death toll
No wonder the second wave led to a storm that had no precedent. India had the highest death toll of the pandemic across the world. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO) excessive death estimates, as many as 47 lakh people in India died till the second wave. This is equal to a little less than the entire population of Maldives.
3. First wave hangover
If the second wave was all about the absence of government, the first wave would be remembered for the long march of the migrant workers due to a lockdown that PM Modi announced while giving a window of just four hours on March 24, 2020.
4. Science took a back seat
Bhargava wrote to the principal investigators on July 3, 2020, that the vaccine should be available for public use by August 15, 2020 – a timeline that was impossible, those conducting the trial told this reporter. It was perhaps one of the most telling examples of the worst kind of science. The letter warned of consequences if the deadline was not met.
It led The Lancet, one of the oldest medical journals, to come down heavily on ICMR – India’s premier medical research agency – perhaps for the first time in history, in a scathing editorial in September 2020 titled: ‘COVID-19 in India: The Dangers of False Optimism’.
5. Solution? Worse than the problem
Two agencies of the government came out with such treatments for which the scientific rationale was hard to find. One was the Drug Controller General of India’s (DCGI) approval of certain drugs for COVID-19 use. Despite the WHO strictly advising against use of remdesivir for treatment of COVID-19 after the large scale ‘Solidarity Trials’ were completed in May 2020 showed no relevance of the drug, the DCGI approved its use a month later.
by Banjot Kaur
23/04/2024
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