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India’s economic growth picks up before huge COVID-19 wave hit

Gross domestic product grew 1.6% in January-March compared with the same period a year earlier, mainly driven by state spending and manufacturing sector growth, data from the statistics ministry showed on Monday.

Economists said the country faces a slowdown in consumer demand as household incomes and jobs have declined, with limited scope for the government to offer growth stimulus due to its rising debt.

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Smokers face 40-50 pc higher risk of severe diseases, death from Covid: Vardhan

“We have set an ambitious target of reducing tobacco use by 30 per cent by 2025. Our tobacco control targets have been devised keeping in view the targets for control of non-communicable diseases and are consistent with the targets set under the SDGs. We will be soon releasing the findings of fourth round of Global Youth Tobacco Survey conducted among 13-15 year school going students,” Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan said.

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B1617 variant spreading worldwide at ‘frightening speed’: Experts

“What is frightening is the speed at which this variant is able to spread and circulate widely within the community, often surpassing the capability of contact-tracing units to track and isolate exposed contacts to break the transmission chains, a Professor Teo Yik Ying, Dean of the National University of Singapore’s (NUS) Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health, was quoted as saying.

“It has the potential to unleash a bigger pandemic storm than the world has previously seen,” Ying added.

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Provide price capping waiver, indemnity for Moderna’s single-dose Covid-19 vaccine: Cipla to Govt

Requesting the government to provide confirmation on four critical points — exemption from price restriction, indemnification, bridging trial waiver and basic customs duty exemption,

Cipla has said such an assurance will help make this significant financial commitment of more than USD 1 billion (over Rs 7,250 crore) advance to Moderna for its booster vaccine in India, sources privy to the development said.

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‘Covid-19 has no credible natural ancestor’: Explosive study claims Chinese scientists created virus in lab

The new research claims that scientists took a natural coronavirus “backbone” found in Chinese cave bats and spliced onto it a new “spike”, turning it into the deadly and highly transmissible Covid-19.

The paper also quotes that researchers found “unique fingerprints” in Covid-19 samples that they say could only have arisen from manipulation in a laboratory.Authors Dalgleish and Sorensen wrote in their paper that they had prima facie evidence of retro-engineering in China’ for a year, but were ignored by academics and major journals, reported DailyMail.com.

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