Oz defends travel ban amid furore
Australia has banned its citizens from returning home if they’ve spent time in India up to 14 days before flying back
Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison on Monday defended his government’s decision to ban and impose a jail term and a penalty for Australians trying to return from India, saying it is in the country’s “best interests” and to prevent a third wave of Covid-19 infections.
Australia recently imposed a ban on its citizens from returning home, if they have spent time in India up to 14 days before flying back. The government threatened to prosecute them with a possibility of five years of jail term or a penalty of 66,000 Australian dollars (US$50,899).
While the move has been criticised, Morrison said it is a temporary arrangement. “It has been put in place to ensure we do not get a third wave here in Australia and that our quarantine system can remain strong,” he said, adding that it is in the country’s “best interests”.
The US, meanwhile, set a record for the number of air travellers since the Covid-19 pandemic set in. Nearly 1.67mn people
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were screened at US airport checkpoints on Sunday. It was the highest number screened since March 12 of last year when air travel began to plummet.
Novavax starts Covid-19 vaccine trials on children
US biotech firm Novavax said on Monday it has started clinical trials of its proposed Covid-19 vaccine on children, in a programme that will involve up to 3,000 adolescents aged 12-17.
Novavax said the trials would test “the efficacy and safety” of the vaccine, with participants receiving either the vaccine candidate or placebo in two doses. The participants will be monitored for up to two years after their injections.
Denmark bars J&J vaccine over fears of blood clots
Denmark said it will debar the Johnson & Johnson vaccine from its Covid-19 inoculation drive over worries about blood clots. The Danish Health Authority noted that the European Medicines Agency (EMA) “has concluded that there is a possible link between rare but severe cases of blood clots” and the Johnson & Johnson drug.
READ: 2 cases of Indian variant of Covid-19 found in Indonesia which are being procured from the Pune-based Serum Institute of India, the official said.
Kejriwal last Thursday said that a plan has been formulated to vaccinate all adults against Covid-19 within the next three months. He had then said that everybody aged above 18 would be administered Covid-19 vaccines free of cost in Delhi.
Experts said it is imperative for the vaccine drive to cover as much ground as quickly as possible.
“The vaccination drive was announced for people over the age of 18 years from May 1 without ensuring availability of doses. No one is able to procure Covishield, which is what we have been administering...,” said Dr PK Bharadwaj, secretary, Delhi Voluntary Hospitals Forum and the chief executive director of Saroj Hospital.
Dr Narin Sehgal, Delhi secretary of Association of Healthcare Providers (India), said, “There is no clarity from the Delhi government on whether the private centres will receive any doses from them; they have started the drive today. Only a few private hospitals have started the immunisation drive with doses that they have procured themselves.”
before the Supreme Court. In the appeal before the top court, Dwivedi rued that the high court judges should use “temperate language” and not blame the ECI for something which was not within their domain.
“We do not take over the governance during the election. We issue directions and guidelines that the states are bound to follow. But if those responsible for adhering to the Covid guidelines are the ones to breach it, we cannot be held responsible. Now there is a non-stop coverage of how EC officials should be charged of murder. We are not seeking any order against media but we want the judges to exercise restraint,” said the counsel.
The bench responded that the EC’S concerns regarding the observations were taken into account and that a balance had to be struck. The bench said that it may not have used the words used by the Madras high court. It, however, pointed put that the plea before the high court to restrain the media was problematic.
“What is happening in the court is also of concerns to the citizens. What is happening; whether there is an application of mind; the dialogue between the bar and the bench; how it fosters justice; these are all of concern for the citizens. Their reportage instills a sense of confidence among the public about what has transpired in the court and how the decision was made. It was too far-fetched on your part to ask a constitutional court to restrain media,” remarked the bench.
Asking ECI to take the observations by the high court in the right spirit, justice Shah told Dwivedi: “Judges use harsh words sometime because of anguish; sometime out of frustration and sometime because of anger after seeing what has been happening around them. They are also human beings. It is also in the larger public interest what they said. And you can see the result. Your subsequent decisions improved the situation. You restricted election rally with more than 500 persons that you had not done earlier. Victory processions were prohibited too.”
Dwivedi, however, maintained that it was not appropriate for the high court judges to say that a high constitutional body like the ECI should be charged with murder and that they had serious objections to it.
The bench told ECI that the high courts were also a constitutional body and that the