COVID

Pseudoscience thrives during the Covid pandemic in COVID Response Watch — by Arka Deep — 17/02/2022 https://countercurrents.org/2022/02/pseudoscience-thrives-during-the-covid-pandemic/ Mamata Banerjee, the Chief Minister of West Bengal, stirred up a series of trolls and memes on social media recently by claiming that “Corona does not spread in salt water”, during a press conference related to the Gangasagar Mela.

During the early days of the pandemic, on March 2 of 2020, Suman Haripriya, an elected representative from the Bharatiya Janata Party, said that cow-urine and cow dung can be deployed as a remedy against Covid infections. Yogi Adityanath, the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh and one of the poster boys of Hindutva in India, even asked citizens to practice yoga in order to gain strength against several diseases, including COVID-19.

If this were not enough, the Union Ministry of AYUSH, set up to promote and regulate so-called traditional practices of medicine, put out a statement claiming that homeopathy can be used as a preventive treatment for COVID, while UNANI can be used for symptomatic treatment.

Back in 2020, the then-President of West Bengal BJP Dilip Ghosh, known for his loose talk said that drinking cow urine helps to battle Covid. Allegedly, many go-mutra parties were also held.

Pseudoscience has always given legitimacy to fascist governments. In a book on the Nazis of Germany named “Hitler’s monsters”, Eric Kurlander has shown how supernatural ideas, and ideas derived from religious myths had helped Hitler in garnering mass support for his German supremacy project.

https://countercurrents.org/2022/03/rural-and-urban-women-hit-hardest-by-covid-induced-unemployment/

The case of the ‘missing women’, i.e. women dropping out employment, that has worried political observers and demographers, so abjectly brazen and transparent, is one such example. The consulting firm, Dalberg, in a rare survey, discovered that almost 43 per cent of the labour force of women had simply disappeared from the unorganised informal economy. In terms of labour force participation, even in the capital of India just about 5 per cent female labour force was participating in the market as compared to almost 60 per cent of men.

At the current rate, it is possible that almost 140 million people have no jobs, and this includes professionals in the affluent corporate sector in urban areas. Unemployment has sharply risen to almost 12 per cent in recent times due to the pandemic and its devastating consequences. The Centre has left the people to their fate, even while the states have been given the sole responsibility to handle the current crisis.

A survey by the Pew Research Center discovered a ‘deep recession’ in 2020; the middle class had stunningly depleted by 32 million, pushing them from their reasonable comfort zones into the hard margins of low income groups. Almost 75 million people have fallen into poverty in India, mostly migrant and unorganised labour, a majority of them without fundamental rights, while most of them are Dalits, adivasis and extremely poor Muslims. Of these people on the margins, the majority are women, invisible, ghettoised, and now compulsively pushed outside the economy. Just about 19 per female workforce have jobs in the current scenario, while almost 50 per cent have been rendered jobless. They constitute the large number of unaccounted missing women.

By  Amit Sengupta 

04/03/2022

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A dipstick survey covering 30 villages in Rajasthan threw up some worrisome numbers. About 250 children missed their regular vaccination schedule in March alone. These numbers are alarming, since India has around 600,000 villages according to the 2011 census.

https://www.rediff.com/news/report/covid-19-fallout-5-million-kids-missed-vaccination/20200427.htm 

Leading vaccine makers say all vaccines, except those given immediately after birth (such as BCG), have been impacted.

The UNICEF recently said as Covid-19 continues to spread globally, over 117 million children in 37 countries could miss out on receiving life-saving measles vaccination.

Measles immunisation campaigns have already been delayed in 24 countries, and might be postponed in many more countries as well.

by Sohini Das

27/04/2022

Muslim Covid warrior victimised by Tejasvi Surya is still jobless and scared  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXXVtL5sLHo  

On May 5, BJP MP #TejasviSurya barged into a #Covid war room in #Bangalore and read out the names of 16 Muslim men. He accused them of being involved in a bed allocation scam. The men were immediately removed from their jobs.

When the police found no evidence against any of the men, the city's municipal corporation, which runs the war room, claimed to have reinstated the men. This is not true.

The men are still jobless. One of the men agreed to speak to us about what happened, how he lost his job, and the toll Surya's baseless communal attack has taken on him. 

Relief packages Nirmala Sitharaman Announces 8 Major Economic Relief Measures: Key Highlights https://www.ndtv.com/business/finance-minister-presser-live-june-28-2021-nirmala-sitharaman-announcements-on-economic-relief-measures-check-updates-2474200 Rs 1.1 lakh crore loan guarantee scheme for the sectors affected by the pandemic. An additional sum of ₹ 1.5 lakh crore under the Emergency Credit Line Guarantee Scheme (ECLGS) was announced, which was launched as part of the Atmanirbhar Bharat package last year. The overall cap of the ECLGS is now raised from ₹ 3 lakh crore to ₹ 4.5 lakh crore. Finance Minister announced ₹ 23,220 crore for public health, focused on short-term emergency preparedness with an emphasis on children and pediatric care. Ravish Kumar:https://youtube.com/embed/icwWhJqSdi4?start=786&end=1361 https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/business/finance-minister-nirmala-sitharaman-announces-relief-measures-amid-second-covid-19-wave-in-india-7096661.html

Pandemic Impacts~II Jaydev Jana | New Delhi | June 6, 2021 https://www.thestatesman.com/opinion/pandemic-impactsii-1502971175.html 
The pandemic in India has had an unequal impact on women in many ways. In terms of economic opportunity, women are losing jobs at a disproportionate rate compared to men, with four out of every ten working women having lost their jobs post the lockdown. Fewer have been able to rejoin the labour force. Levels of unpaid work have risen dramatically.

The number of workers vulnerable to lockdown could reach 364 million or more, including those in casual work, self-employment and unprotected regular job holders. Between March and April 2021, the male WPR had fallen from 63.4 per cent while the female WPR had come down from 8.5 per cent to 6.7 per cent. The numbers of pseudo-employment, or work that does not generate any income, had increased among self-employed people. Many of these people have been opening their business units, workshops or production centres, but hardly receiving any customers because of the pandemic and local lockdowns. The slow economic growth impacted rural India disproportionally.

Noam Chomsky: Corporate Patents & Rising Anti-Science Rhetoric Will Prolong Pandemic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvKL7K9WkaE Dec 30, 2021 

Noam Chomsky, the world-renowned political dissident, linguist and author, who just turned 93 years old. Chomsky spoke to Democracy Now! prior to the discovery of the Omicron coronavirus variant, but he predicted new variants would emerge. "If you let the virus run rampant in poor countries, everyone understands that mutation is likely, the kind of mutation that led to the Delta variant, now the Delta Plus variant in India, and who knows what will develop," Chomsky said.

https://countercurrents.org/2022/03/boatmen-pushed-to-the-brink-by-covid-in-up/

The economy of the impoverished Mallah or boatmen community living in various villages of Shamli district of Uttar Pradesh (UP) received a major jolt during Covid times. Many are stuck in a non-ending cycle of debt or have lost their precious valuables to local lenders.

 by Seema Sharma

01/03/2022

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https://countercurrents.org/2022/08/malnutrition-and-death-of-children-decreased-in-the-system-increased-in-reality/ 

In the last 17 months, from January 2021 to May 2022,  over 22,751 children in the age group of up to five years have died in the state according to a reply received to a Right to Information Act query by ‘Samarthan’, an organization working on children’s rights and health issues. Of these, 19, 673 were cases where the infant was stillborn.

As per the reply, Mumbai recorded the maximum deaths at 1,898, followed by 1,741 in Nagpur, 1,349 in Aurangabad, 1,127 in Nashik, 1,181 in Pune, 1,049 in Akola, 1,026 in Nandurbar and 1,015 in Thane.

The spike in stillbirths recorded in the last 17 months is believed to be due to the Covid pandemic. A recent study, conducted by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and the National Institute of Research in Reproductive Health (NIRRH), found a higher frequency of severe Covid-19 and intensive care admissions among pregnant women and more maternal deaths between February and May 2021 compared with the same period in 2020.

According to UNICEF, in the last two decades India has reduced its stillbirth rate by 53% –  from 29.6 per 1000 live births to 13.9 between 2000 and 2019. However, the pandemic threatens to reverse these gains.

The number of stillbirths among mothers infected with Covid-19 doubled during the second wave of the pandemic. According to UNICEF figures, there were 34 stillbirths per 1000 live births between February 2021 and May 2021 compared with the first wave that saw 15 per 1000 live births between April 2020 and January 2021. Both years the number of such deaths were significantly higher than the 13.9 recorded in 2019.

According to a global study published in JAMA Paediatrics in April this year, women with Covid-19 during pregnancy were 50% more likely to experience premature birth and pre-eclampsia, and require intensive care. The risk of maternal mortality was 22 times higher than those without Covid.

by Shirish Khare 

25/08/2022

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