India’s oldest Socialist Weekly!
Editor: Dr. G.G. Parikh | Associate Editor: Neeraj Jain | Managing Editor: Guddi
By Nov. 15, Cuba will have fully vaccinated an astounding 92% of its population, thanks to Cuba’s development and production of its own vaccines. Cuba’s vaccination rate is the fastest in the world, and the only country whose children as young as two years are being covered.
If the Union government thinks that the Global Hunger Index’s methodology is ‘unscientific’, here is another Index that shows a troubling picture for the state of ‘Access Inequality in Basic Amenities’ across India.
Knowledge, scientific discoveries, and technical processes ought to be common goods of humankind. However, Big Pharma is engaged in private appropriation of knowledge and techniques, notably through patents, enabling it to rake in colossal profits, esp. during the corona pandemic.
The health emergency of the coronavirus is inseparable from the health emergency of extinction, biodiversity loss and climate change.
Recent estimates made by the Economist suggest that the global toll of the pandemic is 16 million, more than three times the official toll of COVID-19 deaths. Estimates of India’s pandemic excess deaths range from between 3 to 5 million deaths, a quarter of total global pandemic deaths.
A study shows that during the summer of 2020 and 2021, the pandemic-induced lockdowns led to most female domestic workers experiencing extreme shocks to their incomes, leading to a rise in poverty and hunger.
African nations might have produced a patent free vaccine that would have benefitted the whole world. Instead they purchased patented vaccines which enriched pharmaceutical corporations outside of the continent.
New data shows that Indian men are shorter now than they were a decade ago. So are large numbers of women. This is a worrying situation. Height is one of the most basic indicators of nutrition as well as public health and is directly linked to a country’s standard of living.
The noted economist speaks of how the idea of examining discrimination through economics has changed over the past two decades in India, why much more needs to be done to examine the biases of the field, and her discomfort with the pervasive myth of “merit” in India.
The primary obstacles to expanded vaccine production are political: corporate power and IPR fundamentalism. Unions have backed the call for a TRIPS waiver. Organized action at all levels will determine which will prevail: human rights or intellectual property rights.
Janata Weekly is India’s oldest independent socialist weekly.
Ever since its founding in 1946, Janata has voiced its principled dissent against all conduct and practice that is detrimental to the cherished values of nationalism, democracy, secularism and socialism, while upholding the integrity and the ethical norms of healthy journalism. For more than seventy years now, week after week, it has continued to analyse the changes taking place in the country and the world from a socialist standpoint, and thus promote the spread of socialist ideology in the country.
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