-The Hindu Ministry concedes Q1 growth to be hit, bats for expanding vaccination pace. The second COVID-19 wave which is spreading fast beyond the worst-affected districts in the country, could dent economic activity till June this year, and expanding vaccination pace in the country is the “need of the hour”, the Finance Ministry said on Friday. The Ministry also indicated it is not in favour of a national lockdown to curb the pandemic,...

In the month of April this year, there has been an unprecedented upsurge in daily new cases and daily new deaths in the country due to Covid-19. States, which reported large increases in daily new cases and daily new deaths, are Maharashtra, Kerala, Karnataka, Delhi and Uttar Pradesh, to name but a few.   Data accessed from https://www.covid19india.org/, which is a crowdsourced platform and an independent aggregator of daily Covid-19 figures and...

-NDTV The government is taxing people who buy Covid-related medical drugs like Remdesivir and others, as well as taxing the supplements and medical grade oxygen for oxygen cylinders, with a tax as high as 12 per cent. New Delhi: Indian and global medical experts are shocked at the Indian government making money off the sick and dying. Every expert consulted for this report said this has to stop. A family that buys an...

-The Hindu Without good data, accurate projections are impossible, making it difficult to gauge the true state of the pandemic India, now home to the world’s worst ongoing coronavirus pandemic, is currently reporting nearly a million new cases and 10,000 deaths every three days, according to data released by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. The true extent of the second wave now ravaging India is likely much worse than official...

-The Hindu Over the last few decades, intellectual property rules have served as a lethal barrier to the right to access healthcare Even an unprecedented pandemic can do little, it appears, to upset the existing global regime governing monopoly rights over the production and distribution of life-saving drugs. If anything, since the onset of COVID-19, we’ve only seen a reaffirmation of intellectual property rules that have served as a lethal barrier to...