India COVID Infections Surge Past 300k for 12 Consecutive Days
Voice of America
India has reported more than 300,000 new COVID cases daily for 12 consecutive days. On Monday, the South Asian nation said there had been 368,147 cases recorded in the previous 24-hour period.
While India is home to the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer, the Serum Institute of India, only 2% of the country’s 1.3 billion people have been vaccinated, according to local reports. “I don’t think even God could have forecast it was going to get this bad,” Adar Poonawalla, CEO of the Serum Institute of India, the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer, told Britain’s newspaper The Sunday Times. After scathing criticism about his comments during the interview with the newspaper, the 40-year-old billionaire said he was cutting the vaccine’s price and that move would enable countries to obtain “more vaccinations and save countless lives.”FILE - Danny Fenster, center, hugs his mother Rose Fenster as former U.S. diplomat Bill Richardson, right, looks on at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York, Nov. 16, 2021. Journalist Fenster was held in a Myanmar prison. Harrison Li holds a photo of his father, Kai Li, on Jan. 23, 2024, in Palo Alto, Calif. Li's father, Kai, remains detained in China on espionage charges his family says are bogus and FILE - A Hamas cameraman stands behind Israeli soldier Gilad Schalit, released after more than five years in captivity, on the Egyptian side of the Rafah border crossing on Oct. 18, 2011. FILE - Families and friends of current and former hostages and detainees gather outside of the White House in Washington, May 3, 2023, to ask the Biden administration for more help. FILE - Joey and Paula Reed pose for a photo with a portrait of their son Marine veteran and Russian prisoner Trevor Reed at their home in Fort Worth, Texas, Feb. 15, 2022. FILE - In this March 16, 2016, file photo, American student Otto Warmbier, center, is escorted at the Supreme Court in Pyongyang, North Korea.
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FILE - Achraf, 16, cries as he swims using bottles as floaters, near the fence between the Spanish-Moroccan border, after thousands of migrants swam across the border, in Ceuta, Spain, May 19, 2021. Migrants from Eritrea, Libya and Sudan sail a wooden boat before being assisted by aid workers of the Spanish NGO Open Arms, in the Mediterranean sea, about 30 miles north of Libya, June 17, 2023. FILE - Migrants navigate on an overcrowded wooden boat in the Central Mediterranean Sea between North Africa and the Italian island of Lampedusa, Oct. 2, 2021, as seen from aboard the humanitarian aircraft Seabird.