Vaccination

The patent waiver procedure at the World Trade Organization needs to be fast-tracked. The global community must not be constrained by the interests of private industry and saving lives is what matters.

Recurring waves of the pandemic are the biggest threat to the recovery of economic growth. 

Anant Phadke writes:

In Manoj Grover’s letter “Polio Elimination” (EPW, 17 May 2014) on two points in my article “Can the Polio Elimination Success Story Breed More Successes in India?” (EPW, 5 April 2014), the writer seems to answer the question in the negative, saying: “I cannot imagine any internal [read Indian] a

Overcoming formidable biological and sociocultural barriers, India eliminated wild polioviruses from its territory in January 2011. Looking back, it is obvious that the best policy would have been to introduce the inactivated poliovirus vaccine to prevent polio in every vaccinated child, and to use oral poliovirus vaccine by pulse campaigns to eliminate WPVs rapidly. This would have eliminated polio decades ago. Now that WPVs have been eliminated, IPV must be introduced as a prelude to withdrawing OPV. The road ahead is bumpy, but with the important lessons learnt so far, India can no longer pretend that it is too difficult to design a permanent public health infrastructure to control other communicable and non-communicable diseases.