India Narrative

  The World Health Organization approved two new treatments for curing Covid-19 patients on Friday as Omicron cases continued to surge worldwide. WHO experts said arthritis drug baricitinib used with corticosteroids to treat severe or critical Covid patients led to better survival rates and reduced need for ventilators. Experts also recommended synthetic antibody treatment drug Sotrovimab for people with non-serious Covid at highest risk of hospitalization, such as the elderly, people with immunodeficiencies, or chronic diseases such as diabetes. Sotrovimab's benefits for people not at risk of hospitalization were deemed insignificant and the WHO said its effectiveness against new variants like Omicron was still uncertain. The recommendations have been published in British Medical Journal  BMJ. Only three other treatments for Covid-19 have received WHO approval, starting with corticosteroids for severely ill patients in September 2020. Read More

  Existing vaccines will still protect people who contract the Omicron variant from severe Covid-19 cases, according to a top World Health Organization (WHO) official. "We have highly effective vaccines that have proved effective against all the variants so far, in terms of severe disease and hospitalisation, and there's no reason to expect that it wouldn't be so for Omicron,” Dr Mike Ryan, the WHO's emergencies director, told AFP news agency. His observation comes at a time when the first lab tests of the heavily mutated new variant in South Africa suggest it can partially evade the Pfizer vaccine. Researchers say there was a "very large drop" in how well the vaccine's antibodies neutralised the new strain. But Ryan said there was no sign Omicron would be better at evading vaccines than other variants. He also said that initial data suggested that the COVID-19 symptoms in the case of Omicron were less severe than the Delta and other strains. Scientists

  Three Senators, led by Bernie Sanders, have attracted global attention for introducing the “Make Billionaires Pay Act,” aiming to tax US tech’s top leaders tens of billions of dollars in wealth made during the coronavirus pandemic . The “Make Billionaires Pay Act” would impose a one-time 60 per cent tax on wealth gains made by billionaires between March 18, 2020, and January 1, 2021. Riding growing global despair about inequity, the Senators suggest that funds would be used to pay for out-of-pocket health-care expenses for all Americans for a year. Besides Sanders, the Senators are Ed Markey and Kirsten Gillibrand. “Over and over again, we have been told that we cannot possibly afford to guarantee healthcare as a right by moving to a Medicare for All system – even on a temporary basis during the worst public health emergency in over a hundred years. Well, it turns out that is not quite accurate,” a post on Sanders’ Senate page argued. “While a record-breaking 5.4 million Americans re