‘Vaccine grabs, the refusal to relax patents to enable mass production, and the use of vaccines for diplomacy run the risk that poorer nations may not be protected against Covid-19 quickly enough. This will prolong the pandemic, even for the richer nations.’
Read here (The India Forum, Mar 5, 2021)
‘Indian doctors and politicians on Thursday welcomed efficacy data for a state-backed coronavirus vaccine that was given emergency approval in January without the completion of a late-stage trial, making people reluctant to receive the shot.
‘Government data shows (dashboard.cowin.gov.in) that only 10% of about 13.3 million people immunised in India have taken the COVAXIN shot, which was found to be 81% effective in an interim analysis of the late-stage trial, its developer Bharat Biotech said on Wednesday.’
Read here (Reuters, Mar 4, 2021)
‘Yoga guru Baba Ramdev and his FMCG company Patanjali Ayurved have recently been in the news for advancing a supposedly Ayurvedic drug named Coronil as the “first evidence-based medicine” for COVID-19. But despite the dubiety of this claim, Coronil has been approved for sale by the Government of India on the sole basis of a scientific paper, published in the journal Phytomedicine in February 2021.
‘A previous article discussed the wobbly assertions in the paper and their mismatch with Patanjali’s conclusion that Coronil has been properly tested or that it is efficacious. But there is another bit of detail that may disqualify the paper’s publication itself. In the paper’s ‘Declaration of Competing Interest’ section, the authors say:
“Authors declare no conflict of interests with regards to the submitted work. The medications were provided by Divya Pharmacy, Haridwar, Uttarakhand, India. Acharya Balkrishna is an honorary trustee in Divya Yog Mandir Trust. Besides, providing the medications, Divya Pharmacy was not involved in any aspect of the clinical trial reported in this study. Clinical trial was conducted at National Institute of Medical Sciences, Jaipur, India.”
Read here (Science TheWire, Mar 3, 2021)
‘A controversial herbal concoction has been in the news again in India, with renewed claims that it is effective against coronavirus. The substance, called Coronil, was launched recently at an event attended by some Indian government ministers. But there is no evidence that it works, and misleading claims have been made about approval for its use.’
Read here (BBC, Mar 2, 2021)
‘India’s southern state of Karnataka alone may have had 31.5 million cases of COVID-19 or nearly 95 times greater than have been reported, says a new study that puts a question mark on the 10 million plus cases reported for the whole country so far.
‘Published this month in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the study is based on data collected from a representative sample of households in 20 districts of Karnataka, home to 70 million of India’s 1.3 billion people.’
Read here (SciDev, Feb 17, 2021)
‘By the middle of last week, India was barely counting an average of 10,000 Covid cases every day. The seven-day rolling average of daily deaths from the disease slid to below 100. More than half of India's states were not reporting any Covid deaths. On Tuesday, Delhi, once an infection hotspot, did not record a single Covid death, for the first time in 10 months.
‘So far, India has recorded more than 10 million infections - the second-highest in the world after the US. There have been over 150,000 reported deaths from the disease. The number of deaths per million people stands at 112, much lower than what has been reported in Europe or North America. It is also clear that the decline in cases is not because of lower testing.
‘Most pandemics typically rise and fall in a bell-shaped curve. India has been no exception. Also, it has seen a high proportion of cases and deaths of people above the age of 65 living in densely packed cities, hewing to infection trends around the world. "There's nothing unusual about infections dropping in India. There's no miracle here," says Dr Shahid Jameel, a leading virologist. Experts say there's no dearth of possible causes - explained below - for the relatively low severity of the disease and its toll.’
Read here (BBC, Feb 15, 2021)
‘Deficiency in a particular human protein, which is more common in Europe and the United States than in Asia, could explain why coronavirus is not spreading as fast in Asian countries. A team of scientists from the National Institute of Biomedical Genomics in Kalyani, West Bengal, have found a biological reason for the slower spread of a mutant of coronavirus in Asia compared to the West. The team has explained how higher levels of a human protein — neutrophil elastase — helps the virus to enter the human cell, multiply and also spread faster from infected individuals...
“However, some naturally-occurring mutations in the AAT-producing gene results in deficiency of the AAT protein. This deficiency is known to be much higher in the Caucasians of Europe and America than among Asians,” said Majumder. “While we used AAT deficiency data from East Asia, along with North America and Europe, for the study, considering the pace at which the coronavirus is spreading, the numbers are representative of other Asian regions too, including India.”...
‘As per their data, AAT deficiency is the least in East Asian countries — 8 per 1,000 individuals in Malaysia, 5.4 per 1,000 in South Korea, 2.5 in Singapore. On the other hand, 67.3 in per 1,000 individuals in Spain are AAT deficient, 34.6 in the UK and 51.9 in France and in the US it is prevalent in 29 individuals among 1,000.’
Read here (Times of India, Feb 9, 2021)
‘Pfizer Inc says it has withdrawn its application for emergency use of its COVID-19 vaccine in India. The company said Friday that it participated in a meeting of experts of the drug regulator on Feb. 3. Based on the deliberation of that meeting and “our understanding of additional information that the regulator may need, the company has decided to withdraw its application at this time,” it said in a statement.
‘The company was the first to approach the Indian regulator in December for its messenger RNA vaccine that it has developed with Germany’s BioNTech. They were closely followed by applications for two other vaccines --- a version of the AstraZeneca made by Serum Institute of India and another by Indian company Bharat Biotech -- which eventually got the nod for emergency use on Jan. 3. However, India’s Health Ministry has said that Pfizer hadn’t made its presentation to experts who needed to clear the vaccine, before the regulator could green-light its use in India.’
Read here (The Independent, Feb 6, 2021)
‘Last September, India was confirming nearly 100,000 new coronavirus cases a day. It was on track to overtake the United States to become the country with the highest reported COVID-19 caseload in the world. Hospitals were full. The Indian economy nosedived into an unprecedented recession.
‘But four months later, India's coronavirus numbers have plummeted. Late last month, on Jan. 26, the country's Health Ministry confirmed a record low of about 9,100 new daily cases — in a country of nearly 1.4 billion people. It was India's lowest daily tally in eight months. On Monday, India confirmed about 11,000 cases.
"It's not that India is testing less or things are going underreported," says Jishnu Das, a health economist at Georgetown University. "It's been rising, rising — and now suddenly, it's vanished! I mean, hospital ICU utilization has gone down. Every indicator says the numbers are down." Scientists say it's a mystery. They're probing why India's coronavirus numbers have declined so dramatically — and so suddenly, in September and October, months before any vaccinations began.
‘They're trying to figure out what Indians may be doing right and how to mimic that in other countries that are still suffering.’
Read here (NPR, Feb 1, 2021)
‘India has decided to export 8.1 lakh doses of Covaxin to Oman, Mongolia, Myanmar, Bahrain, Mauritius, the Philippines and the Maldives as a goodwill gesture, people in the know said. Government sources said Serum would supply a few lakh doses of Covishield to the Seychelles, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan and Nepal.’
Read here (Economic Times, Jan 19, 2021)
Indian nasal Covid vaccine can be potential gamechanger: Experts
‘Public health experts believe that intranasal vaccines for coronavirus, administered through nose rather than muscles, can be a potential gamechanger in Indias fight against the coronavirus pandemic. The nasal vaccine is different from two intramuscular vaccines which recently got approval, as it is non-invasive, needle-free, doesn't require trained healthcare workers, eliminates needle-associated risks, suits children and adults and has scalable manufacturing.
‘Several studies have proved that the clinical efficacy of intranasal vaccine is superior to that of injectable vaccine. In India, Hyderabad-based Bharat Biotech has sought Drugs Controller General of India's (DCGI) approval to conduct clinical trials of its nasal vaccine for coronavirus.’
Read here (Khaleej Tinmes, Jan 10, 2021)
‘India’s need for speed in providing a Covid-19 vaccine and attempts to push a locally-produced version through for use before a required phase 3 trial was finished has raised doubts and protests from politicians, scientists and academicians.
‘The Drugs Controller General of India (DCGI) approved the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine that’s being produced locally by the Serum Institute of India as Covishield. The world’s largest vaccine manufacturer based in Pune said it can readily provide 50 million vaccines to the government for immediate use and can roll out full production to start supplying the population by March.
‘The DCGI also approved a vaccine produced by Bharat Biotech Ltd along with the Indian Council for Medical Research and the National Institute of Virology named Covaxin for emergency use on a trial basis.’
Read here (Asia Times, Jan 4, 2020)
‘India will not allow the export of the Oxford University-AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine for several months, the head of Serum Institute of India, which has been contracted to make 1 billion doses of the vaccine for developing nations, said Sunday.
‘With rich nations reserving most of the vaccines that will be made this year, Serum Institute — the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer — is likely to make most of the inoculations for developing countries. The ban on exports, however, means that poorer nations will probably have to wait a few months before receiving their first shots.’
Read here (AP, Jan 4, 2021)
‘India, the world’s biggest vaccine maker, is getting set for the massive global blitz to contain the coronavirus pandemic with its pharmaceutical industry and partners freeing up capacity and accelerating investments even without firm purchase orders. India manufactures more than 60% of all vaccines sold across the globe, and while its $40 billion pharmaceutical sector is not yet involved in the production of the expensive Pfizer Inc and Moderna shots, the nation will play a pivotal role in immunizing much of the world. Indian companies are set to produce eight, more affordable vaccines designed to fight COVID-19, including AstraZeneca's Covishield, called the "vaccine for the world here" by its developers.’
Read here (Reuters, Dec 10, 2020)
‘Paper by Chinese researchers says a strain can be traced to eight countries from four continents before the Wuhan outbreak. First human transmission may have occurred on the Indian subcontinent, it says – but other scientists question the finding.’
Read here (South China Morning Post, Nov 27, 2020)
‘Indians are the keenest on getting vaccinated whenever a Covid-19 vaccine is available, even as people in 10 out of 15 countries showed a growing reluctance about getting vaccinated, according to a global survey.
‘In the World Economic Forum/Ipsos survey of 18,526 adults from 15 countries, 73 per cent said they would get a Covid-19 vaccine if available, down from 77 per cent in August. While vaccination intent has remained unchanged at 87 per cent in India since August, it has declined in 10 of the 15 countries surveyed, most of all in China, Australia, Spain, and Brazil.
‘Globally, the two main reasons for not wanting to get a Covid-19 vaccine are concerns about side effects (cited by 34 per cent) and concerns about clinical trials moving too fast (cited by another 33 per cent). In India also, 34 per cent respondents.’
Read here (Deccan Herald, Nov 6, 2020)
‘It has been touted as a breakthrough treatment by Donald Trump, and there are hopes that blood plasma containing coronavirus antibodies may help British patients during the second wave of Covid-19 as well. But a study, which is published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) on Friday, suggests “convalescent plasma” has only limited effectiveness and fails to reduce deaths or stop the progression to severe disease.
‘The research involved 464 adults with moderate Covid-19 who were admitted to hospitals in India between April and July. Approximately half received two transfusions of convalescent plasma, 24 hours apart, alongside standard care, while the control group received standard care only. One month later, 19% of those who received the plasma had progressed to severe disease or had died of any cause, compared with 18% in the control group. Plasma therapy did, however, seem to reduce symptoms, such as shortness of breath and fatigue, after seven days.’
Read here (The Guardian, Oct 23, 2020)
‘For months, experts have repeatedly told us that no one is safe from coronavirus until we are all safe. If that is true, we should be going all out to ensure the world’s resources are used to bring treatments and vaccines to the whole world as soon as possible. Several initiatives have attempted just that, but efforts have been stymied by the self-interest of big business, and by the leaders of rich countries who are terrified of undermining rules designed to keep their countries at the top of the pecking order.
‘A recent ground-breaking proposal by India and South Africa could change all that. Those governments have lodged a proposal at the World Trade Organization (WTO) to suspend international patent laws for an extended period, allowing countries to share technology and produce their own versions of patented medicines, treatments and protective equipment without being held to ransom by the corporations which own those patents. It is a game-changer, which challenges one of the most shameful aspects of modern trade rules.’
Read here (Aljazeera, Oct 18, 2020)
‘Nearly 380 civil society organisations (CSOs) have urged Members of the World Trade Organization to strongly support the adoption of a draft decision proposed by India and South Africa for a waiver from certain provisions of the TRIPS Agreement to combat the worsening COVID-19 pandemic.
‘India and South Africa have submitted a proposal (IP/C/W/669) to the WTO TRIPS Council on a “Waiver from certain provisions of the TRIPS Agreement for the prevention, containment and treatment of COVID-19”.
‘In their letter to the WTO Members, the CSOs said that in a global pandemic where every country is affected, a global solution is needed. According to the CSOs, adoption of a Waiver at the WTO level will suspend implementation, application and enforcement of the relevant provisions of the TRIPS Agreement in relation to prevention, containment, and treatment of COVID-19.
‘It enables an expedited, open and automatic global solution to allow uninterrupted collaboration in development, production and supply, and to collectively address the global challenge facing all countries. “It’s time for governments to take collective responsibility and put people’s lives before corporate monopolies,” the CSOs emphasised.’
Read here (InfoJustice, Oct 16, 2020)
‘A team of scientists in India has developed an inexpensive paper-based test for coronavirus that could give fast results similar to a pregnancy test. The test, named after a famous Indian fictional detective, is based on a gene-editing technology called Crispr. Scientists estimate that the kit - called Feluda - would return results in under an hour and cost 500 rupees (about $6.75; £5.25). Feluda will be made by a leading Indian conglomerate, Tata, and could be the world's first paper-based Covid-19 test available in the market.
‘Researchers at the Delhi-based Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (IGIB), where Feluda was developed, as well as private labs, tried out the test on samples from about 2,000 patients, including ones who had already tested positive for the coronavirus. They found that the new test had 96% sensitivity and 98% specificity...’
Read here (BBC, Oct 4, 2020)