 Hello, you're watching NewsClick and today we're going to be talking about the latest New York Times report on India's COVID-19 preparedness before the second wave. Now this report makes a claim that actually the predictions of scientists, the models that were made were fine-tuned or finessed to suit the political needs of those in power. The government, of course, has responded very strongly to this calling it attention seeking and all that. But we do know that the second wave did happen in April. There was a lot of horrifying losses in the country. So to talk more about this, we have with us Prabir Prakash. Prabir, thank you so much for joining us. So the first question really is what are the new claims or the claims that the New York Times article is making and considering that especially not only NewsClick but many Indian media organizations have been tracking the response over the past year. What are the key components of the New York Times claims? You know, the key components of the New York Times story is that it does, it seems, have documents which talk about how the response of the government was to calibrate what the political forces required at the time, the party in power, the Modi government. And secondly, whatever was being articulated internally, that was disregarded completely by the scientific establishment. So these are the two basic claims which are there. Of course, these, as you said, are not new. They're new in the sense that New York Times has covered it, therefore it's become international news. But the reality is the criticism of the government having promoted certain quote-unquote scientific models which claimed that the COVID-19 wave was going to be over, in fact the prediction of the so-called supermodel, it was a super failure, was that by February COVID would disappear from India. In fact, it was the basis of that. The Prime Minister in Davos made the statement, India has scored a major victory for the world over COVID-19, which proved to be premature at best. And at worst, it was a complete disaster for India in terms of how public perceives the government of India's preparedness for facing the COVID-19 pandemic. So the clear issue is one part of it, the supermodel, and at that point of time the supermodel was heavily criticized by epidemiologists who do modeling and why this was a bad model. This was Professor Gautam Menon who spoke about it, wrote about it, this was a public discourse, but a lot of others. In fact, in this click, we have also talked about why these kind of models do not work in any case, because they assume that the so-called ACIR model is not meant for predicting a country's response to a pandemic, because it assumes everybody can infect everybody else, and that as we know is not the way pandemics really work. They work in smaller pockets amongst people who are connected to each other. Those are not the things that these kind of models can capture. They're very good for telling us what are the possibilities, and predicting at each point of time what are the future, say, maybe two weeks, three weeks that you are likely to see, but they're not meant for large-scale, large-time-based country-wide predictions. That's not the purpose of this model. They're purpose of taking certain actions to see that these things don't happen. They're not meant to predict what is going to happen, because that depends a lot on us as well. So that is one part of it. Why from the beginning, news click as well as lot of others have said, that the ACIR model should not be used in this way. They're not models for predicting, but they're models for telling us what we should do in order for these things not to happen. The second mathematical problem with this, of course, that human beings are very difficult to predict, and also you cannot predict their behavior. So what we do when we think everybody, everything is okay, is very different from what we would do when we know things are not okay. And that's obvious what is called COVID-appropriate and COVID-appropriate behavior. And there's a second part of the criticism which was at that time also made, that the government itself, while claiming that people were not behaving properly earlier and later at that time, was, in fact, giving signals that everything is okay. Why is it so? Because in rallies, the prime minister included, people were not wearing masks, neither was the leadership on the stage wearing masks. So never did the appeal from the stage go that please wear masks, never made. So by example, by not telling the people, in fact, congratulating the people for coming to meetings, the prime minister did that in the Bengal elections, he was sending exactly the opposite message. The government has said, we never said you should do ABCD. We never told them that you should do COVID-appropriate behavior. That's all I had to say retrospectively. But what did you do by example? That I think is the other criticism which is there. All of this has already come. So what is important in this case is there apparently is internal documents to show number of the scientific community had protested. But this was not something which was resistant. We also had the case of what was called the sero studies. These are very small sero prevalence studies. Numbers are very small on the basis of which you just said, maybe we're reaching herd immunity, which is also what we heard at that point of time. And again, as we know, that it was proven to be disastrously wrong. And as you said, the numbers went up high, the hospital systems collapsed. And all of this goes to show that the government was really completely taken aback. I'm not going to talk about the problems of the supermodel. This is something which suppose some few scientists have put together. Because that criticism we've already made earlier in news click. And we went over the basis of this. But I think what it shows is the ICMR's behavior in this particular case, as well as earlier, when ICMR asked that by 15th August, we should have a vaccine. And people said, how is it even possible to think about it? That you are asking all the things that have to be done to make the vaccine available, which means you have to also do all the studies which are required, including clinical trials. And how is it even possible to talk about 15th August? So these are the kind of things which is already, as I said, been made public. And obviously, what we now know from the New York Times report is there are internal voices which have said that this should not be the way to go. There are enough critical voices they will not listen to. We've also had major groups of doctors who deal with epidemiology, who are public health groups, who also said that what the government is doing is wrong. And they made even a larger criticism that the first lockdown was premature. It was too sweeping. It was not appropriate. And it hurt us. And it didn't stop the epidemic. So I think the various criticisms with scientific groups internally inside the government, which you might not have heard about, but outside the government have made which we have heard. And it has been widely reported. I think what the New York Times report says, there are also internal documents. Now, those are not surprising. We know a lot of other reports that groups which are set up were not called, their voices were not heard. Those reports are also in public domain. But yes, it's important to see that now we have more credible international opinion, also saying what we have been saying for quite some time. I mean, the second question really is basically what this also implies. I mean, not only this report, but the developments were the past year, also imply for the nature of India's scientific institutions. And say, bodies which, for instance, should be in the front lines of actually combating a disease like this. Because one of the key sources is a doctor who said he had to leave the country. He left the country because of what was happening. He was perhaps disenchanted. Now, regardless of the truth behind that, but there is also another systemic problem which actually leaves us with a question that are we prepared for another disaster of this sort? And what are the implications? You know, whether, in fact, we'll have a third wave. Now, that brings me to the question. We have a scientific advisor of the government, Vijay Raghavan, who came out for about two to three weeks at the height of the second wave. He hadn't spoken throughout this period before. He did not either support or critique what was being done. We don't know his views. He spoke for about two weeks when all the other leaders who had been speaking every day about the victory over COVID-19 had disappeared. I thought that perhaps they did not want to face the camera after having failed so disastrously. So it seems the scientific advisor was feeling at that point of time to face uncomfortable questions which others didn't want to face because they had been the face of propagating the victory over COVID-19. He also made the statement that it is likely to be a third wave. And he disappeared immediately after that. In fact, we have not seen any statement of his after the third wave statement that he made. And it appears that the government felt that that was not appropriate, that he shouldn't talk about the third wave. We should again declare victory, I guess. The reality is that we do not know what COVID-19 is going to do. Whether we will again do COVID inappropriate behavior, we do not know. Right. Festival season is coming up. That's why I'm saying it. Festival season is coming up. And we know that a number of scientific communities' voices disappear at this point of time. At festival times, the politics of festivals take over, which means pandering to popular desires of having mingling openly, having big festival gatherings and so on. So at this point of time, we don't know. But it is important to register this that the third wave has been predicted. And the number of people have said, given the fact that the virus evolves, that what is going to come, we do not know. So yes, Delta, we have dealt with partially with Delta at the moment. Maybe there is a lot of now herd immunity against Delta. We don't know. Cerro prevalence studies say that India, Cerro prevalence is now gone up. But I have to say these are still relatively small samples. We do not know how much of it should be really taken at that seriously. There are still large pockets of people who have not been infected who could fall prey to any new variant that comes up. If any new variant comes up, all the vets are off again. So we might have again a different kind of scenario that would emerge. So I would say the third wave is something we need to prepare for. We do not therefore lock down the country in advance. That's not what I'm suggesting, which is what we did in the first lockdown. But certainly we should prepare for possibly a third wave at the same time, not lock down the country because there might be a third wave. Observe very closely what is happening in different parts. Do certainly a lot more Cerro samples. Do a lot more genomic strain sampling to see what are the genomic strains which might be evolving. And then flag what could be what is called the strains variants of interest. Those are the steps that we need to take at the moment and of course this has to be dealt with as a public health problem and not as a law and order problem, which is what the government is doing. It still has a disaster management act in practice. So that attitude of the government that's an administrative issue or a political issue doesn't seem to have gone. Right. We'll be tracking this issue in the coming weeks as well, Praveel. Thank you so much for talking to us. That's all we have time for today. Keep watching NewsClick.