Dilip Simeon's blog

Ever since the pandemic struck, concerns have been raised about the improper use of antimicrobials amongst  Covid-19  patients. The worry is that unnecessary prescription of antimicrobials will lead to a further increase in the already high levels of drug resistance in most parts of the world. In the past few years, alarmingly high resistance rates in pathogens of public health importance have been reported from Indian hospitals. Unfortunately, the resistance rates reported by the hospitals and laboratories do not automatically translate to disease burden unless each resistant isolate is correlated with the clinical outcomes in the patients from whom they were isolated. This has to do with inadequate hospital information systems in most public sector funded healthcare facilities in India and many low-middle income countries. In 2014, economist Jim O’ Neill estimated that 10 million annual deaths from AMR could occur by 2050. Studies such as the ones conducted by him paved th...

The  “sovereign citizen” theory  is a powerful current running through these movements. Its adherents insist that they stand above the law. Some of them refuse to buy vehicle licences, or pay taxes or fines. They believe they are exempt from public health measures, such as lockdowns and vaccine passes. In other words, they arrogate to themselves sovereign powers that not even the monarch enjoys... There’s no solidarity in ‘sovereign citizen’ protests — only incoherent rage When a group in black fatigues called Alpha Men Assemble began  practising paramilitary manoeuvres  in a park in Staffordshire   at the beginning of this year, it looked pretty threatening. These men, we were warned, were about to launch an insurrection against vaccines and in favour of “ the sovereign citizen ”. Since then, silence. It wouldn’t be surprising if the group had dispersed: a society of self-proclaimed alphas is bound to fall apart. This was just one example of the incoherent pr...

Weiss is the former New York Times journalist best known for her  departure from that paper . In a  resignation letter  posted to her own website, Weiss complained that she had been subjected to constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with her views, and that the Times had "become a kind of performance space." A New York Times spokesperson then  said  the company is "committed to fostering an environment of honest, searching and empathetic dialogue between colleagues, one where mutual respect is required of all." I had followed Weiss' resignation with interest -- in no small part because I am drawn to nuanced conversations about the loss of nuance itself in academic and intellectual discourse. But as I watched Weiss' performance in the space across from Maher -- who was quick to testify that he didn't take the same Covid precautions as Weiss -- I did not see much in the way of nuance. I found myself comparing her comments to the quiet suffering of...

Europe’s political approach to the coronavirus pandemic has divided down stark east-west lines, a Guardian analysis has found. Five of 18 eastern European countries have registered major violations of international democratic freedoms since March 2020, according to  research  conducted by the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute, compared with none of 12 western European countries. The research also shows that eastern European countries have been more likely to turn to abusive enforcement, disinformation and discriminatory measures, with the most common violation being restrictions  on the media . The worst violations were observed  in Serbia , which recorded a violations score three times higher than the European average. Under a special regime implemented in a declared state of emergency, refugees, migrants and asylum seekers were selectively targeted and put under strict 24-hour quarantine, controlled by the military. They were banned from leaving the centre...

The climate crisis resembles a huge planetary lockdown, trapping humanity within an ever-deteriorating environment. T here is a moment when a never-ending crisis turns into a way of life. This seems to be the case with  the pandemic . If so, it’s wise to explore the permanent condition in which it has left us. One obvious lesson is that societies have to learn once again to live with pathogens, just as they learned to when microbes were first made visible by the discoveries of Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch. These discoveries were concerned with only one aspect of microbial life. When you also consider the various sciences of the earth system, another aspect of viruses and bacteria comes to the fore. During the long geochemical history of the earth, microbes, together with fungi and plants, have been essential, and are still essential, to the very composition of the environment in which we humans live. The pandemic has shown us that we will never escape the invasive presence of th...

It's possible that the latest Covid-19 variant is actually a blessing in disguise.    In 1796 an English physician, Edward Jenner, observed that milkmaids who had gotten cowpox were immune to smallpox. He surmised, rightly, as we now know, that the disease was related. Smallpox, which has killed hundreds of millions of people dating all the way back to prehistory, is caused by the virus  variola  and is related to cowpox, catpox, and several other virus-caused “poxes ( Orthopoxvirus  family).” Our present day mandated vaccine against smallpox is also a related virus,  vaccinia , which causes a small localized lesion leaving a scar and immunity against the  variola  or smallpox virus. Thus we are used to accepting a minor disease to protect against a lethal disease.  Is Omicron the Cowpox of Covid-19? To date, the World Health Organization, WHO, has recorded no deaths from the Omicron Covid-19 variant. What is this newly identified Covid-19 Om...

The advent of the Omicron variant has given us a glimpse of an alternative future in which, had the Sars-CoV-2 virus been initially identified in  Africa  in early 2020, the world would have maybe locked Africa away. There would have been no emergency funding for vaccine development, limited global attention, and Africa would have become known as the continent of Covid. We may never know the origins of Omicron, but there is now evidence that this variant was  circulating in the Netherlands  before it was officially identified in South Africa. African scientists’ superior level of pandemic preparedness is what has enabled the world to quickly respond to this new threat. However, the response has entailed the imposition of travel bans – shutting out southern African countries, as well as Nigeria and Egypt, who have now had to pay a heavy price in trade and tourism for identifying this variant in such an expeditious manner… https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/20...

Despite the repeated warnings of health leaders, our failure to put vaccines into the arms of people in the developing world is now coming back to haunt us. We were forewarned – and yet here we are. In the absence of mass vaccination, Covid is not only spreading uninhibited among unprotected people but is mutating, with new variants emerging out of the poorest countries and now threatening to unleash themselves on even fully vaccinated people in the richest countries of the world. On Thursday, the UK’s Department of Health, which has placed a travel ban on southern Africa, warned that the B.1.1.529   “Omicron” variant was the  most “complex” and “worrying”  seen so far. And yet with 9.1bn vaccines already manufactured and 12bn expected by the year’s end – enough to vaccinate the whole world – this was the “arms race” that we could have won. No country should be facing yet another winter with the uncertainty of a new wave of Covid hanging over us… https://www.theguardian.c...

Last Friday’s jobs report from the US Department of Labor elicited a barrage of gloomy headlines. The New York Times emphasized “weak” jobs growth and fretted that “hiring challenges that have bedeviled employers all year won’t be quickly resolved,” and “rising wages could add to concerns about inflation.” For CNN, it was “another disappointment”. For Bloomberg the “September jobs report misses big for a second straight month”. The media failed to report the big story, which is actually a very good one: American workers are now flexing their muscles for the first time in decades. You might say workers have declared a national general strike until they get better pay and improved working conditions. No one calls it a general strike. But in its own disorganized way it’s related to the organized strikes breaking out across the land – Hollywood TV and film crews, John Deere workers, Alabama coal miners, Nabisco workers, Kellogg workers, nurses in California, healthcare workers in Buffalo… ...

Mort Report is a labor of love by old-style correspondents with lifetimes on the road and young ones with fresh eyes. Our philosophy is simple: we report at first hand with analysis based on non-alternative fact, not opinion.  If we get something wrong, we fix it. https://www.mortreport.org/ Covid 19 - A Cri du Coeur From a Doctor-Diplomat Who Knows  Afghanistan - “We Tried to Tell You” Archive

The  International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies  special issue on the COVID-19 pandemic comprises articles from across the globe, encompassing psychoanalytic perspectives from Europe, Asia and North and South America.  Click here to read the issue for free.  The issue features Ira Brenner’s new paper: ‘Disinformation, disease, and Donald Trump’. Issue Information Pages: 107-108 - First Published: 22 June 2021 Abstract   PDF EDITORIAL: Free Access Editorial introduction: Psychoanalytical perspectives on the COVID-19 pandemic Marianne Leuzinger-Bohleber ,  Heribert Blass Pages: 109-120 First Published: 03 June 2021 First Page Read more:  https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/15569187/2021/18/2

For more than a generation of economic globalisation, to turn the old adage on its head, it seemed to many that ‘wealth is health’. In the bargain, as everything, including health, came seemingly to rest on the willing shoulders of money, huge fortunes were made and all but universally sought, in what has come to be called an ‘aspirational world’. Although it might equally be called a world of emptiness, one without aspiration to anything  worthwhile . For, in a grim reminder of the fact that we have in effect been encouraged to escape reality itself in the name of ‘freedom’, the Coronavirus pandemic has been here during the last year to rap us on our knuckles, as you might reprimand little children, that health is still wealth, that, as the great John Ruskin had it,  life  is the true wealth, and that little has actually been  well  with us and the world all this time that the big fortunes were being made. We live in an age soaked in propaganda. Could reali...

The second wave of Covid-19 ravaged India as hospitals and then crematoriums ran out of space.  Families struggled to find beds, oxygen or even medicines to save their loved ones. While cities were first hit, the second wave soon reached rural parts of the country.  Hundreds died due to poor or no access to good healthcare. Most of them were not even able to get a Covid test done. Now experts believe that the number of deaths in rural India is much higher than official statistics. The BBC's Vikas Pandey and Anshul Verma visit villages in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, one of the worst-hit, to investigate alleged under-reporting of Covid-19 deaths... https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-asia-india-57383131 Pinjra Tod activist Natasha Narwal's father dies of Covid day before her bail hearing // That Monday will not come, Judge Sahib Gujarati Poet Parul Khakkar Blames 'Naked King' for Corpses Floating in the Ganga Avay Shukla: LEST WE FORGET A Call for Nati...

People often assume that the objectivity of science requires it to be  isolated  from governmental politics. However, scientists have  always gotten involved in politics  as  advisers  and through shaping public opinion. And science itself – how scientists are  funded  and how they choose their research priorities –  is a political affair . The coronavirus pandemic showed both the  benefits  and  risks  of this relationship – from the  controversies   surrounding   hydroxychloroquine  to the efforts of  Operation Warp Speed  allowing researchers to develop vaccines  in less than a year . In this context, it is understandable that many people began to doubt whether they should trust science at all. As a  historian of science , I know that the question is not whether science and politics ought to be involved – they are already. Rather, it is important for people to understand how thi...

For most of last year, the idea that the coronavirus pandemic could have been triggered by a laboratory accident in Wuhan, China, was largely dismissed as a racist conspiracy theory of the alt-right.  The Washington Post  in early 2020 accused  Senator Tom Cotton  of "fanning the embers of a conspiracy theory that has been repeatedly debunked by experts."  CNN  jumped in with "How to debunk coronavirus conspiracy theories and misinformation from friends and family."  Most other mainstream outlets, from  The New York Times  ("fringe theory") to NPR ("Scientists debunk lab accident theory"), were equally dismissive. ( Newsweek  was an exception,  reporting  in April 2020 that the WIV was involved in gain-of-function research and might have been the site of a lab leak; Mother Jones, Business Insider, the NY Post and FOX News were also exceptions.) But in the last week or so, the story has burst into the public discourse. President...

External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar, in a visit to Washington DC last week strongly defended “the governance record” of the government at the Hoover Institution, blaming perceptions to the contrary as “political imagery that has been concocted”. He claimed that the Modi government was being harshly judged because its leaders being less familiar with English were “less connected to other global centres”. They were nevertheless “much more confident about their culture, about their language and their beliefs”, had ended “vote bank politics” and deepened democracy. He was responding to a question from former US National Security Advisor, H R McMaster, who asked whether India’s friends should worry about the impact of  Hindutva  politics on secular democracy. McMaster offered Jaishankar an “out” observing that the minister was seen as non-partisan because of having served different governments. Jaishankar however clearly distanced himself from his former avatar as a civil serv...

NB : What remains to be said about Indian justice? When an 84 year old Jesuit father with Parkinson's disease and loss of hearing is repeatedly denied even a medical bail hearing , kept in jail without trial during a deadly pandemic, and is now found infected with Covid, what may we think? All he ever did was agitate peacefully for the rights of the poor. What lesson are the Home Ministry and the judges conveying to us? That to take seriously the democratic rights granted to us under the Constitution, to struggle peacefully for basic human rights is tantamount to sedition and may result in prolonged incarceration even to the point of death? Thank you, Your Lordships and Your Excellencies. I only hope that some day your children will ask you when and how and why you lost your conscience and your humanity. DS Father Stan Swamy tests positive for coronavirus after being moved to private hospital Tribal rights activist and Jesuit priest Stan Swamy tested positive for the coronavirus in...