‘Coercion causing Uighur birth fall’
integrity. And this body does not only look at Covid-19 vaccinations, it also reviews the entire immunisation process in the country. It has been active from much earlier, and functions purely on the basis of scientific evidence before it,” he added.
Dr Balram Bhargava, director general, Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), and secretary, department of health research, also said that among key questions that the experts were dealing with in this pandemic was when to give the second vaccine dose.
“There has been a lot of scientific deliberation on the matter, and much of it is still underway. The Covid-19 working group has already met some four times to discuss this and other issues. The meetings also had developers of Covishield from Oxford and they presented latest data,” he said.
The recommendations for a longer dosing gap comes from a Phase 3 trial data set released in February after studies of the Oxford-astrazeneca vaccine conducted in Brazil, South Africa and UK found efficacy increased to 82.4% when the second shot was given at 12 weeks or more. Between 6-8 weeks of having been given the second dose, the efficacy was found to be 59.9%.
“It is a good move to extend the gap as there is quality data from UK to suggest that the neutralising ability of the antibodies increased significantly when gap was increased. The second dose works like a booster shot. Giving a time gap, however, is not suitable for a vaccine that is an inactivated whole virion vaccine,” said Dr NK Mehra, immunology and immunogenetics expert, who was formerly a senior faculty and dean at New Delhi’s All India Institute of Medical Sci
“Coercive policies” in China’s far western region of Xinjiang have led to a sharp decline in birthrates among Uighurs as well as other minorities, which could add to evidence of genocide, an Australian think tank has said in a new report.
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) report, citing official Chinese data, said that there has been an “unprecedented and precipitous drop in official birthrates in Xinjiang
BEIJING:
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Dr Gagandeep Kang, one of country’s top vaccinologists, said “Canada’s committee also decided on 4 months as trials showed continued good/ improved response after 12 weeks.”
month, or since April 13. A total of 10,489 new cases were reported on Thursday, the lowest daily tally since April 10, according to the Delhi government’s health bulletin.
“As of today, the positivity rate has come down to 14% and around 10,400 new Covid-19 cases were reported. Now that cases are reducing, we are seeing a decrease in demand for beds and medical oxygen. When daily cases were peaking around 15 days ago, our calculations, factoring in bed occupancy and active cases, showed Delhi required 700MT of oxygen. But today, after assessment of the Covid-19 situation, Delhi’s oxygen need has been revised to 582MT per day,” deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia said in a press briefing on Thursday.
“As a responsible government, we will give the surplus oxygen to the states that need it,” he said.
The development comes as the number of active cases in the city dropped to 77,717 on Thursday, the lowest in 24 days. Just 15 days ago, active cases in the city were hovering close to 100,000 mark – the number peaked at 99,752 on April 28, the highest ever recorded in the city. Active cases – those Covid-19 patients under treatment – is a crucial metric representing the region’s battle against the disease because it directly reflects the pressure on the health care system.
With active cases soaring, since 2017”, when China began a campaign to control birth rates in the region.
Xinjiang’s birthrate dropped by nearly half from 2017 to 2019, and areas where the population was predominately Uighur or another minority group saw much sharper declines than other areas.
The Chinese government maintains that changes in birthrates are linked to improved health and economic policy and it strongly rejects accusations of genocide.
ASPI “fabricates data and distorts facts”, Hua Chunying, the Capital’s raging fourth wave had sparked a massive health crisis in the city with reports emerging of hospitals running out of ICU beds, and crucial supplies such as oxygen cylinders with the Centre not supplying the demanded quota of 700 MT. Burdened by the massive caseload from midapril onwards, several hospitals across Delhi sent out distress calls, resorting even to making appeals on social media websites, as their stocks of medical oxygen dwindled rapidly.
At the worst of this crisis, only 13.6% of Delhi’s Covid-19 beds were empty (16,942 occupied and 2,666 vacant) on April 20, while six days after that the city had completely run out of ICU beds for general public, according to government data. Currently, of the total 24,418 beds across the Capital, 18,005 are occupied and 6,413 vacant.
This led to the Supreme Court initiating suo motu proceedings starting April 22 in order to deal with the Covid-19 emergency, including the shortages of oxygen in regions such as Delhi.
During the proceedings over the course of the past few weeks, the apex court directed the Union government to ensure 700 MT of medical oxygen is supplied to Delhi every day. The Centre had consistently claimed that it cannot supply as much oxygen as Delhi wants. But after days of repeated warnings and prodding by the high court as well as the apex court, Centre managed to eventually increase Delhi’s supply – on May 5, Delhi received over 700 MT for the first time.
In between, on April 29, the Delhi government had also revised its demand to 976 MT based on future projections as per its bed augmentation plan,
China’s foreign ministry spokeswoman, told reporters in Beijing on Thursday.
Exercises in Japan are waste of fuel: Beijing
China has described week-long military drill in southern Japan involving troops from France, Japan, the US and Australia as a “waste of fuel”.
Hua said, “Does [anyone think] this joint drill aimed at putting pressure on China would really frighten China?... This so-called joint drill has no impact at all on China, it only costs them fuel.” but soon reverted to its old demand of 700 MT after the Supreme Court directions.
With the situation improving, Sisodia said on Thursday the Delhi government has also written to the Centre about the city’s revised oxygen demand. He thanked the Centre, the Supreme Court and the Delhi high court for coming to the aid of the people of Delhi in times of distress.
On an average, Delhi is now getting 579.25 MT oxygen on a daily basis between May 4 and May 11, data showed.
At its peak, Delhi recorded 28,395 cases on April 20, soon after chief minister Arvind Kejriwal expanded the night and weekend curfew protocols into a lockdown. That protocol has now been renewed several times and will stay at least till May 17 in order to further flatten the curve.
In the past two weeks, however, the situation in Delhi appears to be consistently turning a corner with the positivity rate and new cases dropping at a steady rate. Average positivity rate has dropped more than 10 percentage points in the past 15 days – from 32.9% for the week ending April 28 to 19.7% in the past week. The rate of new infections, meanwhile, has dropped 44% from peak levels – the seven-day day average of new cases have dropped to 14,206 infections a day in the past week against a peak of 25,294 for the week ending April 23.
The reduction in the oxygen demand for Delhi also comes days after the Supreme Court on May 8 ordered an audit of supply, distribution and utilisation of oxygen supply in the national capital. The top court set up a panel comprising All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) director Randeep Guleria, Max Hospital’s
Sandeep Budhiraja and an IAS officer each from the central and Delhi governments to conduct the audit.
Dr Lalit Kant, former head of the department of epidemiology at the Indian Council of Medical Research, said the oxygen crisis should be taken as a lesson learnt and preparations should continue to face potential future waves of Covid-19, particularly by vaccinating as many people as possible.
“Oxygen supply and distribution has fairly been sorted for now. Administrations now know the drill about what is to be done when the demand spikes again. But preparations to face the third wave will largely depend on increasing vaccination coverage. The central government should urgently ramp up vaccine production and imports,” he said. judgement dated May 5, 2021, involving interpretation of the provisions of the Constitution 102nd Amendment Act, 2018. As provided in the Supreme Court Rules, 2013, a review petition has been filed by the Union of India on May 13, 2021.”
In its May 5 judgment, the five-judge bench had interpreted the 102nd constitutional amendment, whereby provisions were inserted to give constitutional status to the National Commission for Backward Classes (Article 338B) and for empowering the President to notify the list of socially and educationally backward classes of state or Union territory (Article 342A).
While justices Ashok Bhushan and SA Nazeer maintained that the amendment act was confined to the list to be issued for central government jobs, justices Nageswara Rao, Hemant Gupta and S Ravindra Bhat held that the scheme of the amendments has taken away the power of the state to identify backward classes.
The majority dismissed the Centre’s understanding of the amendments even as attorney general (A-G) KK Venugopal told the court that the 102nd amendment did not deprive state legislatures to enact law determining the SEBCS and conferring benefits on them.
According to the top law officer, Articles 15(4) and 16(4) of the Constitution were untouched by the insertion of Article 342 and that the states will continue to exercise their power to identify SEBCS and give reservation even after the amendments.
Several states, including Maharashtra, Punjab, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, also asserted their right under Articles 15(4) and 16(4) to make special provisions for SEBCS and give them benefits of quota.
Both the Centre and states urged the court to lend credence to the parliamentary select committee report of 2017 and a statement of Union minister Thawarchand Gehlot on the floor of Parliament in August 2017 that the amendments did not affect the rights of the state governments to notify backward classes for reservation.
But the majority judgment rejected this plea. “I am convinced that there is no reason to depart from the text which is in clear terms and rely upon the legislative history to construe Article 342 A contrary to the language...”
Stating that the states could only make suggestions with the President having the exclusive authority to notify the list of SEBCS, justice Bhat added that once the list was notified, states could exercise their power under Article 15(4) and 16(4) to decide on extent of reservations, the kind of benefits, the quantum of scholarships, etc.