The Hindu Editorial Analysis | 28th August ’20

Table of Contents

An air-tight case

Nearly 1.5 year ago: terror attack on a Central Reserve Police Force convoy in Pulwama that killed 40 personnel
JeM claimed responsibility immediately after the attack in February 2019.
NIA filed a chargesheet against 19 people including Maulana Masood Azhar, the leader of the terrorist group Jaish-e-Mohammed, for planning the attack.
Attack was in the works since 2016.
With the involvement of the Pakistani security establishment.
The Pulwama attack was followed by the bombing of a “terror training centre” in Balakot in Pakistan by the Indian Air Force and retaliatory air strikes by Pakistan.
For the Indian government, the chargesheet presents a case not just for detailing the role of Pakistan and its proxy actors in Kashmir, but to re-evaluate its strategy.
The involvement of a local Kashmiri youth in the attack as a suicide bomber.

Categorising activities in the context of the pandemic

The number of daily new cases has crossed 75,000, but the fear of contracting the virus has reduced.
Why do people misunderstand risk?
SARS-CoV-2 virus is not novel anymore.
When we read that three million people in India have contracted COVID-19, most people can’t make much sense of it.
But when someone close to us in proximity or relationship contracts COVID-19 or succumbs to it, the fear becomes tangible.
Emotions cause us to misunderstand risk.
Flying evokes a powerful emotional response.
Likewise, some people believe that they should not step out of their homes because going out means that they will catch COVID-19.
The risk of contracting COVID-19 in any given situation can be categorised as ‘very high’, ‘high’, ‘medium’, ‘low’ or ‘very low’.
1. Visiting a gym generally would fall under ‘very high’ risk, while playing tennis would generally fall under ‘very low’ risk, even though both activities are related to fitness.
To help people get a better understanding of risk, the government needs to devise a simple behavioural design.
Just like a traffic signal communicates ‘stop’, ‘ready’ and ‘go’ with ‘red’, ‘yellow’ and ‘green’ colours respectively, our daily activities need to be categorised as ‘red’, ‘orange’ and ‘green’.
Having outsiders visit your home would be ‘red’, visiting retail stores would be ‘orange’ and meeting a friend at an uncrowded park while keeping a safe distance and wearing a mask would be ‘green’.
If people can’t judge risks accurately, COVID-19 is likely to continue to spread like a raging fire in a forest.

The participants we need in Phase 3 trials

Vulnerable groups such as the elderly and those with co-morbidities have five-fold to 15-fold greater mortality when they get COVID-19 than others.
Healthcare workers have to work in high-risk environments with repeated exposure to infection.
Two COVID-19 vaccines have been accepted for Phase 3 trials after passing the Phase 1 trial for safety and the Phase 2 trial for both safety and the vaccine’s ability to induce a virus-neutralising antibody with or without T-cell-mediated immunity.
Vaccine-induced immunity has not yet been proven to protect against COVID-19, but the likelihood of protection is quite high for the following reasons.
Natural infection induces both a virus-neutralising antibody and T-cell-mediated immunity.
Convincing reports of reinfection by the novel coronavirus in previously infected individuals are extremely rare, suggesting that natural infection is indeed protective in the vast majority.
When a vaccine candidate produces similar immune responses, the probability of it being protective against the disease is high.
A vaccine that has passed Phase 2 should therefore be assumed to be protective, unless proved otherwise in a Phase 3 trial which will provide additional evidence of freedom from rare side-effects.
Once cleared in Phase 3, the vaccine is registered by the drug regulatory agency and vaccination of the general public carried out as per national policy.
The objective of vaccination is three-fold:
1. In the short term, to protect vulnerable individuals from serious disease and death
2. To protect occupationally exposed individuals from acquiring and unwittingly transmitting infection to their patients and family
3. Eventually, to eradicate the viral infection.
To demonstrate that the vaccine achieves the short-term objectives, it is important that the vaccine trials include a good proportion of special groups of individuals.
The twin clinical outcomes of reduced mortality in vaccinated vulnerable individuals and reduced infection rates among healthcare workers will quickly provide unequivocal clinical measures of vaccine efficacy.
The drug regulatory agency should recognise this risk-based categorisation of the public and help design the Phase 3 trial in which vulnerable people and healthcare workers are preferentially given an opportunity to register themselves as volunteers.
Participation of healthcare workers will motivate and enthuse members of the general public to participate in the trial and make recruitment easier.
All round it would be a good idea for healthcare workers and vulnerable subjects to enrol in the COVID-19 vaccine Phase 3 trials in India.
If this is to be done quickly, professional organisations, civil society, regulatory agency, the Indian Council of Medical Research and vaccine manufacturers should act immediately and allow and encourage enrolment of healthcare workers and vulnerable people in Phase 3 trials.

Impartial, aloof and sober as a judge

Supreme Court decision convicting Prashant Bhushan of contempt of court.
A case that took place in the early 1950s when he was a junior lawyer in the Allahabad High Court.
A villager from Uttar Pradesh had written postcards making allegations against a magistrate.
The magistrate complained to the High Court.
The court sent a number of notices to the villager to appear in court but he ignored them.
Finally, non-bailable warrants were issued and the police produced the villager in court.
The Bench asked the villager why he had not responded to the notices. He said he could not afford the railway fare and as the police had brought him to court, he did not have to pay a paisa for the journey.
The judges conferred with each other and decided that his allegations would not shake the administration of justice in the State; a warning would be sufficient.
So, they warned him to not make such allegations and told him that he could go back home. “How will I go home? I have no money,” the villager told the judges.
That flummoxed them but they quickly recovered and decided to personally pay the fare!
A senior advocate who was there to assist the court offered to ensure that the villager was given a meal and dropped to the railway station.
The personal qualities that were then required of judges and shown by those two Allahabad High Court judges are no different from those expected of present-day judges.
Apart from integrity, in all its aspects including intellectual, and impartiality, the one word which comes readily to mind on the qualities of judges is sobriety.
Sobriety is not greyness or humourless grimness but a characteristic that denotes balance and connotes a desire to shun the limelight.
Judges in the past and most now too avoid being flamboyant.
In paragraph 62, the court in the Bhushan judgment notes: “The first part of the first tweet states, that ‘CJI rides a 50 lakh motorcycle belonging to a BJP leader at Raj Bhavan, Nagpur without a mask or helmet’.
This part of the tweet can be said to be a criticism of the CJI as an individual and not against the CJI as CJI”.
It thereafter proceeds to mention the second part of the tweet where Mr. Bhushan says, “at a time when he keeps the SC in a lockdown mode denying citizens their fundamental rights to access justice”. The court holds that the second part of the tweet was critical of the CJI as CJI and was contemptuous.
Many lawyers on elevation to the bench have to curb their enthusiasm, change some habits and become sober in their conduct.
At some stage judges began to seek to be equated with executive officers and politicians in terms of some perks and privileges.
This does not imply that the standards of judicial work were compromised but it did mean that they came more in the public eye.
Official cars with sirens and red lights were symptomatic of the changing mores.

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