-The Telegraph  Jon Wakefield picks holes in Narendra Modi government’s twin claims Jon Wakefield was disappointed. India’s health ministry had issued a statement decrying the methodology adopted by the World Health Organisation to estimate excess deaths worldwide during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021. The exercise indicated 4.7 million excess deaths in India, 9.8 times the country’s official Covid-19 death toll. The ministry statement itself didn’t surprise Wakefield. Five times since July 2021,...

-The Telegraph Court expresses 'hope' that the states and Centre would 'restrain from registering any FIR, continuing any investigation or taking any coercive measures' New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Wednesday stayed “until further orders” all pending proceedings under the sedition law across the country, overruling the Centre’s objections by citing the government’s own stated intention to “re-examine and reconsider” the provision. The court also expressed “hope” that the states and the Centre...

-The New Indian Express The government needs to understand that better official statistics are required not just to counter estimates by global agencies. It is required for better policymaking. The government is upset with the estimates of the World Health Organisation (WHO) about how many Indians died because of the pandemic. India’s official Covid-19 death count in 2020 and 2021 is 481,000. The WHO puts India’s death toll at 4.7 million till...

-The Hindu Reporting every death with the accurate and verifiable cause of death is essential for public health The World Health Organization (WHO) has estimated the number of deaths in India directly or indirectly attributable to COVID-19 to be 4.74 million. This is the highest for any country and nine times the nation’s official count of 5,24,000 as of May 2022. The WHO numbers are derived through robust statistical methods that consider...

-NDTV.com "India has consistently questioned WHO's own admission that data in respect of seventeen Indian states was obtained from some websites and media reports and was used in their mathematical model," the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare said. New Delhi: India has strongly refuted the World Health Organisation's use of mathematical model to calculate the number of Covid deaths, saying the "figure is totally removed from reality". Contending that the country...