ALL publicity is good publicity—so the old marketing slogan goes. Is that why Ramdev courts controversy by laughing at Covid-19 victims gasping for air on his Astha channel? His attack on allopathic medicine as “stupid science” and false claims that “10,000 doctors have died” after two shots of the vaccine are recent ones.

FACED with scathing and mounting criticism of its mishandling of the Covid pandemic in India, the government seems to have launched an orchestrated defence of its policies and actions. Significantly, the task of opening this counter-campaign has been assigned to the leading science administrators in the country, namely the principal scientific advisor (PSA) to the government of India, and the secretaries of the department of science and technology (DST) and of the department of biotechnology (DBT). Each of them has given rather detailed interviews to major Indian newspapers.

ON Earth Day April 22, this year, US President Joe Biden hosted a summit of world leaders to address climate change, something he had promised he would do during his presidential campaign, to once again establish US leadership on this vital global issue that former US President Trump had abandoned four years ago. The summit was attended by 40 countries including most developed countries and other nations with large national emissions such as China, the world’s largest emitter, Russia, India, and Brazil.

THE whole country is reeling under the brutal second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, breaking world records for daily cases. The health infrastructure has collapsed and vital medical supplies such as oxygen are nearing exhaustion. With hospital beds and ICUs full, and no oxygen even leading to several tragic deaths, many hospitals have stopped admissions or have discharged patients. Thousands of people have been running from pillar to post for oxygen cylinders at least for use at home. Covid patients are helpless and literally gasping for breath.

WITH an eighth of the world’s population, the rich countries – the US, Canada, UK and the EU – have received more than 50 per cent of the world’s vaccine doses. The US alone has received 147 million vaccine jabs (see Table 1). This is more than 14 times what the entire continent of Africa – with four times the population of the US – has received. And if we do not count the vaccine doses that Morocco, truly an outlier in Africa, has received, the US has received 60 times the vaccine doses that Africa has!