-TheNewsMinute.com The Union government has been blamed for sitting on a pile of essential medical tools such as ventilators and oxygen concentrators while daily thousands of COVID-19 patients hustled for oxygen cylinders and hundreds died gasping for breath. Days after the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW) stated that COVID-19 relief aid was being distributed effectively in response to concerns raised by media reports, The Reporters’ Collective has found that...

With the rise in COVID-19 daily new cases and daily new deaths since March this year, media reports (please click here and here) on migrant workers returning back to their native places (i.e. places of origin) from migration destinations (i.e. workplaces likes cities and large industrial towns to where the informal and low skilled workers from the marginalised sections of the society migrate seasonally, and sometimes for a longer duration,...

-The Indian Express Innovation in vaccine production can have an impact only if it is accessible to all. Patents and access to life-saving drugs has always been an emotive and contentious issue. The right to healthy life is a moral minimum, and to find a rational basis to deny it is deeply offensive to the idea of life itself. At the same time, pharma corporations and institutions claim patents are a just...

-The Tribune Cabinet also approves purchase of Covaxin for 18-44 category industrial workers The Punjab government on Thursday decided to join the COVAX facility alliance for global sourcing and procurement of COVID vaccines at the best price, becoming the first state to take such a step amid vaccine shortage in the country. The decision was taken during the Cabinet meeting, which also approved the purchase of Covaxin for industrial workers, for whose vaccination...

-The Indian Express This initiative, officials said, is part of a wider effort on their part to work towards containing the pandemic in rural areas, with the situation beginning to come under control in urban parts of the district. Gurgaon: With COVID cases emerging from the district’s rural areas during the second wave of the pandemic, the Gurgaon administration has begun setting up isolation centres in villages as well. “Although the first wave...