India’s oldest Socialist Weekly!
Editor: Dr. G.G. Parikh | Associate Editor: Neeraj Jain | Managing Editor: Guddi
During the peak of the second surge of the deadly killer virus in summer this year, when patients in several parts of India were literally gasping for breath, the situation in West Bengal was much better managed.
A day after a judge of the Supreme Federal Court ordered a criminal investigation against Jair Bolsonaro in the Covaxin scandal, hundreds of thousands of Brazilians took to the streets in 350 cities and towns to protest against the government and demand that the president be impeached.
Japan is currently wrestling with a coronavirus upsurge and less than 3 percent of the population is vaccinated. According to polls, as much as 80 percent of the country does not want to host the games, for fear of it exacerbating this omnipresent public health crisis.
Stagnant funding, low allocations, badly-planned policies: people who live with disability deserve better.
We live in a time of ‘three apartheids’ – those of food, money, and medicine, which are a result of the control that a handful of monopoly companies exercise over the global economy. Cuba’s development of five different vaccine candidates, which it plans to export to countries around the world, challenges the medicine apartheid.
Five states saw over 460,000 excess deaths in the first five months of 2021, but the official Covid-19 toll in these states in this period accounts for only 6% of these excess deaths. How many of the remaining 94% are ‘missed’ Covid-19 deaths will not be easy to disentangle.
Having blundered on the COVID-19 vaccine front, the Narendra Modi government now appears to be pandering to the demands of the vaccine multinationals. They are demanding relaxation in three aspects of the Indian regulatory regime governing vaccines.
In Gujarat, only 45% boys and 29.2% girls enrolled in Class I make it to the higher secondary level; for Kerala, the corresponding percentages are 90.8% and 93.6% resp. In Maharashtra, two lakh students have dropped out of school after passing their ninth grade last year.
Since the beginning of the corona pandemic in early 2020, the number of COVID-19 deaths has been approximately 330 per day in India, while during the same period the number of tuberculosis deaths has been around 1,230 per day. Yet TB deaths never make the newspaper headlines.
The city where thousands come seeking moksha (salvation) has been swamped by deaths in the second surge of COVID-19. From end March to early May, Varanasi has had to accommodate more dead than the powers that be are ready to admit.
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