For Duflo and Banerjee, an important part of their work has been ensuring that the agency of the "beneficiaries" -- usually, in developing countries like India, poorer individuals -- is put at the centre of any policy design. This is a crucial way in which experimental results are often better than large scale data-based inference, says Mihir S Sharma.
The study titled 'Serendipitous COVID-19 Vaccine-Mix in Uttar Pradesh, India: Safety and Immunogenicity Assessment of a Heterologous Regime' has been uploaded on medRxiv, a preprint server and is yet to be peer reviewed.
The global heath body had earlier suspended the hydroxychloroquine arm of the clinical trials of experimental COVID-19 drugs over safety concerns.
According to a 2011 impact assessment study of the programme by Banerjee and Duflo, along with economists Raghabendra Chattopadhyay and Jeremy Shapiro, Bandhan's THP results in a 15 per cent increase in household consumption and had a positive impact on wealth and welfare, such as assets and emotional well being.
'Between its natural immunity with Delta, in so many populations, and then getting on top of the vaccination (situation), I do not think India is going to have another bad wave.'
Does Abhijit Banerjee's Nobel Prize help India reduce extreme poverty, asks Rajeev Srinivasan.
While Ramdev claimed that Ayurved-based 'Coronil and Swasari' medicine have shown 100 per cent favourable results during clinical trials on COVID-19 infected patients except those on a life support system, the Ayush Ministry sought from the company detailed report on composition, testing and other data of the drugs.
Good intentions are best left to political parties, governments and religious establishments, suggests T C A Srinivasa-Raghavan.
'Testing is a very good strategy if only symptomatic people are transmitting the disease.' 'Here asymptomatic people, with minimum, trivial symptoms, are transmitting too.' 'Testing, treating, tracing contacts and quarantining them -- yes, it will work up to a certain extent.' 'But more important is physical distancing, hand hygiene, cough etiquette and cocooning, protecting with reverse quarantining the most vulnerable people, senior citizens, people with other major medical problems.' 'To me, that makes much more sense.'