Just over a year ago, I wrote a piece in this publication , urging the imposition of a modest “Covid tax” on the country’s ultra-wealthy. T...
Just over a year ago, I wrote a piece in this publication, urging the imposition of a modest “Covid tax” on the country’s ultra-wealthy. The essay was not written in a spirit of wide-eyed innocence: it was written altogether less with the expectation of being received positively than as a gesture, plain and simple, that demanded to be performed as part of a professional economist’s sense of public responsibility. It is in much the same spirit that this theme is revisited, very briefly, in what follows.
From May 1, the Centre has determined that it will be the states’ responsibility to find the means of vaccinating the country’s 18-45 years age cohort, numbering around 60 crore. What – assuming the vaccine is available – would be the likely cost of this massive operation? As Rohan Venkataramakrishnan has pointed out in Scroll.in, there is little clarity on the government’s vaccine policy, which it seems to have left to a private vaccine producer, Adar Poonawalla, the CEO of the Serum Institute of India, to spell out to the public.
From what one can gather, the new Central dispensation is that the Serum Institute and the much smaller Bharat Biotech will be free to supply up to 50% of their production...
