Daily UPSC Mains Question – July 22/2020

GS – 2

The burden of a pandemic will have to be borne by governments and pharmaceutical companies alike. Explain in detail.150 Words

In the News:

• The quest for developing a vaccine and finding a definitive treatment for COVID-19 treatment is reportedly making good progress. However, with the number of infections around the globe having crossed 14.7 million, there is no easy containment of this pandemic.
•  Clinical trials with re-purposed antiviral and biological have been approved in different geographical settings. These medicines are believed to have some potential in shortening the recovery time in COVID-19 patients. 

Question of affordability:

• The updated clinical management protocol of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MHFW) lists Remdesivir as a potential medicine for investigational therapy in moderate COVID-19 infections without underlying contra-indications. The protocol does not mention Favipiravir, which nevertheless finds a place in the WHO Clinical Management Protocol.
•  Itolizumab figures neither in the MHFW nor in the WHO protocol. Affordability of medicines is a matter of particular concern. When companies attempt to recover the fixed costs or sunk costs that went into the investment and development of the medicine, the final price becomes unreasonable.
•  This is distressing for the patient, especially when the therapeutic results or clinical benefits have not been fully established.

Various laws:

• Akin to the flexibilities in the TRIPS agreement which helped in making antiretroviral affordable during the AIDS crisis, some countries are resorting to enabling legislation and procedural modifications of existing regulations to address affordability of anti-COVID-19 medicines.
• Indian patent laws too are armed with sufficient powers to ensure reasonable pricing for pharmaceutical products. India has used compulsory licensing only once in 2012 for Sorafenib. Section 92 of the Act enables grant of compulsory licensing in circumstances of national emergency or extreme urgency. Compulsory licences may not be the solution in all such situations.
•  Nevertheless, the pricing will have to reflect the magnitude of the crisis and the socioeconomic realities in individual countries.
• The burden of a global pandemic will have to be borne by governments and pharmaceutical companies alike. Unprecedented public health crises call for situation-specific decisions from pharmaceutical companies and profit maximisation should take a back seat.
• At least there is a strong case for reconfiguring the pricing strategies of the re-purposed medicines for COVID-19 treatment.

The pandemic and the lock down will have a lasting impact on children and we need to know how to deal with it. Comment 250 Words

In the News:

• Schooling is more than just learning and writing exams. Children are waiting to run in their school playgrounds, hop onto swings, and high-five their peers. They are never happy about being kept away from school for long.

Many concerns:

• As we debate when schools should be re-opened in India, it is important to also ask how children and teachers are going to respond to the reopening of schools. The debate on the pros and cons of online education must now shift to how school spaces can be made safer and hygienic to counter community infection.
•  There are various kinds of schools in India: rural and urban, government and private, single-sex and co-educational, and so on. Within them, there are multiple categories. For example, Navodaya Vidyalayas and Army Schools are very different from schools managed by the State government or municipal corporations in terms of infrastructure and management.
• One cannot visualise a pan-Indian response of the school system to reopening. Similarly, children’s response will also vary according to their age. A six-month gap for primary school students may be huge to counter, but may be easier to overcome for older children.
• We must discuss how these months of disruption and the so-called continuity of learning through online education will affect learning, teaching, the environment and culture in schools once they reopen.

Episodic memory:

• The episodic memory of this pandemic time will affect the learning and memory of children. Tulving’s theory of memory distinguishes semantic memory from episodic memory. Evidence from neuropsychology suggests that these two types of memories don’t operate in isolation but are interdependent.
•  For example, our ideas of family, society, and the nation as matters of general knowledge are influenced by our experiences of them. This pandemic has its own share of vocabulary which will contribute to a newer language.
•  We must be prepared to deal with the many challenges that will come with reopening schools. Our lives, brought to an abrupt halt by this pandemic, must not be abruptly started again.
•  It should be a smooth transition. Otherwise, it won’t just accelerate the spread of the virus but also severely affect our children’s future well-being and learning.