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Cannot order door-to-door COVID vaccination in this diverse country, or just scrap policy: SC

A bench of Justices D Y Chandrachud, Vikram Nath, and Hima Kohli refused to entertain a plea of a lawyers’ body seeking door-to-door COVID-19 jab for the disabled and people belonging to weaker sections of society, said the vaccination drive is already in progress and over 60 percent of the population has been administered the first dose.

Reinsurance price rise slowing due to strong capital supply and recovering profitability: Fitch

Fitch expects the sector’s combined ratio, normalised for large losses, to improve by 2pp–3pp in 2021 and another 1pp–2pp in 2022 as price increases gradually feed into underwriting margins.

However, price rises are slowing due to strong capital supply and recovering profitability, and we expect risk-adjusted prices to remain largely unchanged in 2022.

India’s vaccination drive will be the largest in the world: Fitch

With a population of 1.3 billion (and 94 million over 65-year-olds), the domestic vaccination drive will be the largest in the world, said Fitch.

The country has a good track record of such drives with masses of the population regularly gaining inoculation for various diseases such as polio and cholera. India’s vaccine rollout will begin in Q1 2021 with frontline healthcare workers and individuals over the age of 50 years gaining priority.

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New, more contagious coronavirus strain in UK does not appear to be deadlier: Vivek Murthy

“This news from the UK appears to be about a new strain of the virus that’s more transmissible, more contagious than the virus we’ve seen prior to this,” he said.

“While it seems to be more transmissible, we do not have evidence yet that this is a more deadly virus to an individual who acquires it,” Murthy told NBC News on Sunday.

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Supplying enough Covid-19 vaccines for half the country’s nearly 1.4 billion people can be daunting:Bharat Biotech

“We have started producing at risk because we know that it will be an uphill task — in the Indian context it’s small,” Ella said in an interview from Hyderabad on Monday. “That’s a huge challenge in front of us when we think of the hundreds of millions of doses even if half the country needs to be vaccinated.”

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India finds five with coronavirus on UK flight, testing for strain

The discovery of the new strain, just months before vaccines are expected to be widely available, sowed new panic in a pandemic that has killed about 1.7 million people worldwide and more than 67,000 in Britain.At least two other flights from Britain have landed in India since the announcement of the flight ban, one in Mumbai and the other in the northern city of Amritsar.

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WHO calls meeting on new virus variant, European head says

“Limiting travel to contain spread is prudent until we have better info. Supply chains for essential goods & essential travel should remain possible,” WHO Regional Director Hans Kluge said on Twitter, urging increased preventive measures.
South Africa has announced that a new variant of the COVID-19 virus is driving the country’s current resurgence of the disease, which is seeing higher numbers of confirmed cases, hospitalizations and deaths.

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Scientists say UK strain unlikely to affect efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, warn against more mutations

According to Jeremy Farrar, director of the London-based research charity Wellcome Trust UK, there is no indication at the moment that the new strain would evade treatments and vaccines.

However, the mutation is a reminder of the power of the virus to adapt, and that cannot be ruled out in the future. Acting urgently to reduce transmission is critical, Farrar said in a statement.

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