Friday, February 19, 2021
Pakistan And Terror Financing – OpEd
Pakistan: Plan to commercialize COVID vaccine sparks outcry
S. Khan
Health experts are voicing concerns over Pakistan's decision to allow some private companies to import coronavirus vaccines, which are likely to be sold at commercial rates.
The move has caused an outcry among medical professionals, some of whom claim it amounts to commercializing human suffering.
The South Asian country has reported more than 567,261 coronavirus cases, and over 12,488 deaths, while over 20 million people have lost their jobs unemployed since the start of the pandemic.
The government started vaccinating frontline health workers on February 3 after receiving 500,000 doses from a Chinese company, setting up over 500 inoculation centers. So far, nearly 53,000 healthcare workers have been vaccinated, and those over 65 are starting to register to receive the jab.
The government is desperate to return to full normalcy, and in an effort to achieve it, Islamabad has allowed three companies to import coronavirus vaccines.
"Pakistan formed a national vaccine committee one month ago, which analyzed data from various companies' vaccines and recommended their use," Dr Abdur Rasheed, the chairman of the clinical committee with the Drugs Regulatory Authority of Pakistan, told DW.
Rasheed said that after their recommendation, the three companies — AJM, Sindh Medical Stores Services Karachi and AJP — are now allowed to import the jabs. The companies will purchase the Astrazeneca, CanSino and Sputnik V vaccines, with prices to be determined later.
The government claims it will monitor the prices and regulate the entire process. However, health experts don't buy the government's assertion. They fear that the commercialization of vaccines would cause a great injustice to the poor, in a country that is home to more than 600 million people living below the poverty line, and where regulations are extremely weak.
Are the companies qualified?
Critics have also raised questions over the credentials of the companies. Vaccines require a high level of care, but these companies do not have any experience dealing with vaccines, said Dr. Tipu Sultan, a prominent health expert and a former president of the Pakistan Medical Association (PMA), the country's largest doctors' body.
"Vaccines all over the world are being handled by the state sector, which is providing them free of cost. Pakistan is setting a bad precedent by commercializing it," Sultan told DW. "Now, greedy money-making individuals will also pressure their governments in other states into commercializing it, which will be disastrous for the poor."
Private companies in Pakistan have already made a lot of money out of the pandemic,"and now the government has opened the floodgates of profit," he said.
Dr. Ashraf Nizami, the PMA's Lahore president, believes that the poor masses of the country will have to wait for years to get the vaccine, and that "the rich with deep pockets will get it within no time. It was the poor who suffered during the pandemic the most, and they will be the ones at the bottom of the government's priority."
Nizami added that the government should be providing the vaccines free of cost. "States have a responsibility towards their citizens. It is a shame that ours is the only country that has decided to commercialize this human suffering and allow companies to buy vaccines. It is the job of the government to vaccinate all citizens of this country, and it must not leave them to the mercy of market forces, which are just there to make money."
A possibility of black market sales?
Experts also believe that privatization could lead to vaccines being sold on the black market. "There is no cap on prices," a director of a top Pakistani pharmaceutical company told DW, on condition of anonymity.
"Offers have started pouring in from unscrupulous elements from all over the world. Since the vaccine is likely to be lucrative, many have started making efforts to place it on the black market. In this case, who will be responsible for safety issues?"
The director said people had also contacted the company to trade the vaccine illegally. "But we don't want to indulge in this corrupt practice," they said. "If the government cannot ban spurious medicines that are rampant in the Pakistani market, then how would it be able to stop the sale of the vaccines on the black market?"
The source added that there are no Pakistan-based vaccine producers, and that AstraZeneca does not have a representative in the country. "So the questions are: How will users get them? How will it be transported? What will we do about the shelf life of these vaccines, which do not have a long shelf life? Where will these private companies set up standardized vaccination centers?"
A struggle to meet demand
Many insiders in the Pakistani pharmaceutical industry claim that the top brands of the vaccines have already been bought up by developed countries. Critics believe that even if the government allows more companies to import the vaccine, there will still be a major gap between supply and demand. Some have questioned where Pakistani companies will buy them, if not from the black market.
Sohail Aamir, a former product manager at the Swiss Pharmaceutical Company in Karachi, says the state is struggling to fill the gap in supply and demand, so private companies are likely to exploit the situation.
These three companies will import less than one million doses of the vaccine, Aamir said. "The government will get 8.5 million doses from AstraZeneca under Covax, besides importing 20 million from Cansino and 60,000 from Sinopharm. This will only cover around 16% of Pakistan's population of over 220 million."
https://www.dw.com/en/pakistan-plan-to-commercialize-covid-vaccine-sparks-outcry/a-56619003
Pressure grows to end 'virginity tests' in Pakistan rape cases
It is two months since Shazia underwent a so-called virginity test during a rape examination at a Karachi hospital, but the Pakistani teenager is still visibly traumatised. She winces as she describes how the doctor carried out the “two-finger test” (TFT), in which a doctor inserts fingers into the vagina, ostensibly to determine if a woman or girl is sexually active. “She put her finger and then something else inside me. I screamed loudly as it hurt a lot and told her to stop, but she continued and said angrily that I will just have to bear it,” said Shazia, whose real name the Thomson Reuters Foundation has withheld.Women’s rights campaigners in Pakistan have long fought for virginity testing to be banned, arguing it is degrading, and that a woman’s sexual history has no bearing on whether she has suffered rape.The World Health Organization said in a 2018 report the tests had “no scientific merit” and were painful and humiliating, and called for a global ban. In Pakistan, a series of legal rulings has raised hopes of an end to the practice, most recently in January when a court in the most populous province declared the test illegal, upholding a challenge by a group of campaigners. It is over a decade since Pakistan’s Supreme Court ruled that a rape complaint cannot be dismissed on the basis of a virginity test. But women working in the Pakistani judicial system said the tests were still widely used, blaming a lack of resources as well as deep-seated misconceptions about sexual violence. Summaiya Syed Tariq is a police surgeon who has been working with assault survivors in Pakistan’s Sindh province since 1999, carrying out rape examinations, conducting autopsies and presenting evidence in court.She stopped carrying out two-finger tests in 2006 after becoming aware of the damage they can do, and has been working to raise awareness ever since.But with just 11 female medical workers available to carry out rape exams in the whole of Karachi - Pakistan’s biggest city with more than 16 million inhabitants - Tariq said the two-finger test was often regarded as a “quick fix”.“The issue of virginity, or how ‘habitual’ a woman may be to the ‘act’, should never be a consideration for the examiners,” she said in comments on WhatsApp. “Commercial sex workers can be raped too. The charge of rape, per se, should be enough to carry out examination and investigation and past sexual history should not be taken into consideration.” LOW CONVICTION RATE Many human rights organisations have condemned virginity testing as inhumane and unethical, and it is banned in many countries. India’s government issued guidelines in 2014 saying the test “had no bearing on a case of sexual violence”, though women’s rights campaigners have said it is still being used. In Afghanistan, a study last year found that forced gynaecological examinations were being conducted in contravention of a 2018 law that requires either the consent of the patient or a court order. Pakistan’s president announced a ban in December as part of a raft of measures to strengthen the country’s laws on sexual violence following a public outcry over the gang rape of a woman who was stranded after her car ran out of fuel. But those measures will soon expire unless parliament votes them into law. Mirza Shahzad Akbar, an advisor to Prime Minister Imran Khan, said the measures would be presented to parliament after elections to the upper house, due to be held on March 3.Pakistan’s minister for human rights, Shireen Mazari, tweeted her support for a ban last month, calling the practice “demeaning and absurd”.She was responding to a Lahore high court ruling that virginity tests should not be carried out. The judge called it a “humiliating practice which is used to cast suspicion on the victim, as opposed to focusing on the accused”. A similar challenge is now being heard in the high court of Karachi, capital of Sindh province, where Tariq works. Last year she selected 100 rape cases in Sindh at random to see whether two-finger tests had been conducted. She found 86 of the victims had, like Shazia, been subjected to the test. Shazia said the medic who carried out her test appeared angry and in a hurry. The man accused of raping her is in custody, but she and her family have had to leave the neighbourhood where they lived due to the stigma that surrounds rape in Pakistan. She is receiving help through lawyer Asiya Munir, who works with campaign group War Against Rape (WAR), and believes the two-finger test is a factor in Pakistan’s low conviction rate for rape. Less than 3% of sexual assault or rape cases result in a conviction in Pakistan, according to the Karachi-based group. “It is very traumatising for a person already in a state of shock,” said Munir, criticising what she called the “almost accusatory tone” of many rape investigations. “I am certain there has to be a more dignified and less humiliating way of finding the truth.” https://www.reuters.com/article/us-pakistan-women-crime-feature-trfn/pressure-grows-to-end-virginity-tests-in-pakistan-rape-cases-idUSKBN2AI03W
Islamabad authorities threaten to forcibly remove Baloch Missing Persons protest camp
Sami Baloch, daughter of Dr Din Muhammad Baloch who has been missing for 12 years, tweeted they have been threatened by the Assistant Commissioner and Deputy Commissioner Islamabad to end her sit-in protest.
She wrote on Twitter, “We have (protesters) been threatened DC and AC Islamabad that if we do not end our protest, our camp will be forcibly removed from D-Chowk and we may be arrested. If the state tries to forcibly end our peaceful sit-in and arrest our elderly women and children, we are all ready for that. But our demands remain unchanged.”
Earlier Nasrullah Baloch, Chairman Voice for Baloch Missing Persons (VBMP) said that at least 20 youth were arrested by Islamabad police, tortured physically and mentally, and threatened not to visit sit-in-protest for release of Baloch missing persons.
“The police warned them, if they visit the join the protest again, they will be arrested,” Baloch said.
Meanwhile, the Baloch Solidarity Committee has organised a massive protest rally in Quetta to express their support and solidarity to the families of Baloch missing persons in Islamabad.
The BSC also announced more such rallies and demonstration in other cities of Balochistan. They urged Baloch people, human rights groups, civil society and people from all walks of life to come out in support of the aged mothers in Islamabad who have been sitting under the open sky for past nine days.
It may be recalled that different political party members and representatives have visited the protest camp to express their support to the protesters and urged the government to resolve the issue of enforced-disappearances.
#Balochistan - Kapkapar Middle School Awaiting Development
Sher Jan P. Shohaz
During Prime Minister Imran Khan’s visit to Turbat on 13 November 2020, hundreds of fake promises were made to console the people of Pakistan’s most impoverished and geographically largest province but later no practical progress from those promises was ever made possible to let Mr. PM’s words fulfilled since he stated, “very few federal governments thought of Balochistan,” adding that his regime would assist Balochistan especially in the field education.
It is no denying fact that the province, be it education or other issues, has experienced no improvement in the socio-economic situations. According to a report published in Dawn on 17 November 2020, approximately 60 to 70 percent of Balochistan’s children are out of school (the figure touches 78 percent for girls) which paints a gloomy picture about the most moneyed, culturally well-endowed, and resource-rich province which has around 12,500 primary schools from which a number is broken. The number of schools estimated without classrooms is nearly 7,000 and the following have an inadequate number of teachers. Nearly 5,000 ghost teachers have reportedly been found most of whom have been hired due to their political connections rather than having been appointed on the basis of merit.
What’s more, the report further reveals that around 2,200 schools are deficient in boundary walls while nearly 5,000 schools have been named, are run by one teacher. This intensive famine of low attention of federal and provincial government has resulted in greater illiteracy in the province that stands at 41per cent.
The education sector in each year owns prototypes in economic statistics via platforms our officials keep slogans of #emergingBalochistan but none of them is brought into play for all practical purposes.
However, rural areas of the province are prone to a greater educational crisis than urban. Under PSDP No 2419 for the financial year 2018-2019, The Executive Engineer 2 Provincial B&R Turbat tendered a work of infrastructural improvement and construction of about 200 middle schools, approved by the Government of Balochistan in which construction of school building for Government Boys Middle School Kapkapar was one the works yet awaits for improvement. Although, each work was directed duration of 12 months with different amount of budgets respectively yet question on implementation of budgets seem to be unheard to every official of the current regimen.
