Livemint Recent deaths in Gambia, Uzbekistan and the US, allegedly caused by toxic drugs made in India, has the Centre reportedly planning to centralize drug regulation. How effective will this measure be? The Central Drugs Standard Control Organization (CDSCO) is the apex regulatory body. Each state has its own regulator. The state regulators look after licencing and audit manufacturing facilities while CDSCO is responsible for approving new drugs, imports of devices, clinical...

-The Hindu Official secrecy on pandemic policies aggravates a crisis In August 2020, the Modi government constituted the National Expert Group on Vaccine Administration for COVID-19 (NEGVAC) as a nodal agency on all matters related to vaccine administration and rollout. Asked under the Right to Information (RTI) Act for details of the NEGVAC’s meetings, the Health Ministry, which anchors the expert group, replied that it does not know where the concerned documents...

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...

-Scroll.in The council chief wrote to 12 institutions asking them to enroll participants in the trials by July 7. Four days after India’s first indigenous vaccine candidate for Covid-19 was granted approval for human clinical trials by the drug regulator, the Indian Council of Medical Research on Thursday said that it wanted to “launch the vaccine for public health use latest by August 15”. On July 2, the council’s director-general Balram Bhargava wrote...

-The Hindu Claims made without approval from Ayush Ministry Police have registered a First Information Report against yoga guru Ramdev and four others for allegedly conspiring to sell a fake Ayurveda medicine with the misleading claim to cure COVID-19 following clinical trials on some patients. The FIR said the claim had been made without getting the Union AYUSH Ministry's approval. The others named in the FIR were Acharya Balkrishna CEO of Ramdev-promoted Patanajali...