Welcoming the current Cabinet shuffle the place Mansukh Mandaviya was made the Union well being minister, ICMR director common Dr Balram Bhargava praised him as “dynamic” including that till now the well being sector had been “facing a bipolar focus”.
NITI Aayog member VK Paul emphasised that the answer for pandemic response, whether or not within the current or sooner or later, lies in science, imploring for higher funding in science.
The two had been talking at a plenary session on ‘Future directive for Covid in India: Public Health Policy’ at a one-day digital worldwide convention on ‘Covid and Beyond’, organised by Collaboration to Eliminate Tuberculosis amongst Indians and Indian Institute of Public Health Gandhingar.
Emphasising that due to the pandemic, “health has become an important agenda,” Bhargava mentioned, “We have started realising what is quality health… and we have a dynamic health minister who has already met with all of us and has a very strong vision about how the health sector has to be taken forward because until now it has been facing a bipolar focus as to whether it has to be more government or more private or government… in the sense, both have to exist but we need to realise the pyramid of healthcare….”
Paul additionally added that there’s a consensus that “investment in health, public health system, science and technology, health products such as vaccines and biomedical products and medicines is very critical.”
Highlighting that viral infections are slowly changing into a frequent prevalence — with Zika, MERS, SARS, Nipah outbreaks — Bhargav cautioned that Covid-19 is a “wake up call for all of us”. The possible causes for such outbreaks can probably be attributed to the world being “at a critical point where we have been playing with the environment, the ecosystem, ecology, there has been rapid urbanisation, rapid connectivity with people traveling, but public health remains neglected and there is inadequate spending on public health across the world.”