Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and UPMC, the school’s medical center, are working on a possible vaccine for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Scientists announced news of the potential vaccine, which has now been tested successfully on mice, on Thursday.
Several research groups around the world are racing to create a vaccine, including a temporary jab, which might protect people for a month or two while longer-lasting measures are developed. The scientists are working at extraordinary speed. Scientists said the speed and level of global co-operation that led to this stage had been unprecedented.
According to a press release from UPMC and the university, “When tested in mice, the vaccine, delivered through a fingertip-sized patch, produces antibodies specific to SARS-CoV-2 at quantities thought to be sufficient for neutralizing the virus.”
The vaccine has been dubbed “PittCoVacc” — short for Pittsburgh coronavirus vaccine — and would be delivered via a “microneedle array” in which a small patch containing 400 tiny needles “delivers the spike protein pieces into the skin, where the immune reaction is the strongest.” The patch would adhere to skin — just like a band aid — and the microneedles, comprised “entirely of sugar and the protein pieces” would dissolve and be absorbed by the skin.
The vaccine needs U.S. FDA approval in order for the team to begin human clinical trials. The team hopes that the application and approval processes can be expedited so that they can produce a tested vaccine as quickly and responsibly as possible.
In a paper announcing the vaccine in the journal EBioMedicine, co-author Andrea Gambotto, an associate professor of surgery at the university said the researchers hope to “get this into patients as soon as possible.”
Through their previous work on SARS-CoV in 2003 and MERS-CoV in 2014, researchers and scientists in that lab have learned that a spike protein is of particular importance to building immunity against the virus. Thanks to that research, Gambotto said, “We knew exactly where to fight this new virus.”
There are currently at least 35 companies and academic institutions working to do so, four of which have developed vaccines that are in the animal-testing stages, reported The Guardian.
Last month, researchers at the University of Pittsburgh estimated it could take at least a year to 18 months to develop a vaccine and get through the trial period.
According to Louis Falo, a professor and chairman of the Department of Dermatology at the University of Pittsburgh who co-authored the paper in EBioMedicine, they would like to start clinical trials in about a month, “give or take. Maybe two months. We just started the process.”
A report – “UPMC announces potential COVID-19 vaccine” – in Pittsburgh’s Action News on April 3, 2020 (https://www.wtae.com/article/upmc-to-discuss-potential-covid-19-vaccine-on-thursday/32014437#) by Nick Matoney said:
UPMC and scientists from Pitt Health Sciences announced a potential vaccine against SARS-CoV-2, the new coronavirus causing the COVID-19 pandemic.
Researchers said they had previous experience with two viruses closely related to SARS-CoV-2.
“We had previous experience on SARS-CoV in 2003 and MERS-CoV in 2014. These two viruses, which are closely related to SARS-CoV-2, teach us that a particular protein, called a spike protein, is important for inducing immunity against the virus. We knew exactly where to fight this new virus,” said co-senior author Andrea Gambotto, M.D., associate professor of surgery at the Pitt School of Medicine. “That’s why it’s important to fund vaccine research. You never know where the next pandemic will come from.”
Compared to the experimental mRNA vaccine candidate that just entered clinical trials, the vaccine developed at Pitt “follows a more established approach, using lab-made pieces of viral protein to build immunity,” which is the same way the flu shot works.
Last month, researchers were estimating at least a year to 18 months to develop the vaccine and go through the trials to make sure it would be safe.
Production of a potential vaccine would also take time.
On April 2, 2020, UPMC said (https://inside.upmc.com/covid-19-vaccine-candidate/):
UPMC and University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine scientists announced a potential vaccine against SARS-CoV-2, the new coronavirus causing the COVID-19 pandemic.
The paper appeared in EBioMedicine, which is published by The Lancet, and is the first study to be published after critique from fellow scientists at outside institutions that describes a candidate vaccine for COVID-19. The researchers were able to act quickly because they had already laid the groundwork during earlier coronavirus epidemics.
Scientists in Australia begin tests of potential vaccines
Scientists in Australia announced on Thursday they had begun testing another potential Covid-19 vaccine on ferrets, with a team at the University of Oxford set to trial the same drug on humans in the next few weeks.
The vaccines, made by Oxford University and US company Inovio Pharmaceutical, have been cleared for animal testing by the World Health Organization (WHO).
Australia’s national science agency will assess if the vaccines work, and if they would be safe for humans.
Australian researchers said they had mapped the immune responses from one of the country’s first Covid-19 patients, which the health minister said was an important step in developing a vaccine and treatment.
Researchers at Australia’s Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity said they had taken an important step in understanding the virus.
By examining the blood results from an unidentified woman in her 40s, they discovered that people’s immune systems respond to coronavirus in the same way it typically fights flu.
The findings would help scientists understand why some patients recover while others develop more serious respiratory problems, the researchers said.
Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) says its tests will be the first comprehensive pre-clinical trials of the vaccines to use an animal model.
“Normally it takes about one-to-two years to get to this point and we’ve in fact shortened that to a period of a couple of months,” Dr Rob Grenfell from the CSIRO told reporters on Thursday.
In the past few days, the CSIRO team has inserted vaccine samples into ferrets – small, furry mammals which have been proven to contract the coronavirus in the same way humans do.
The first human trial of a vaccine began at a lab in Seattle last month after a team of U.S. researchers skipped animal testing, which is used to establish effectiveness and safety.
Even if initial safety tests go well, “you’re talking about a year to a year and a half” before any vaccine could be ready for widespread use, Anthony Fauci, the director of NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told the Associated Press.
It still would be a record-setting pace, but manufacturers know the wait – required because it takes additional studies of thousands of people to tell if a vaccine truly protects and does no harm – is hard for a frightened public.
WHO launches global clinical trials
On March 20, the WHO announced the launch of a multi-country clinical study called ‘Solidarity.’ This trial will test the effectiveness of four different drugs — remdesivir, chloroquine, a combination of lopinavir and ritonavir, and that combination of lopinavir and ritonavir in conjunction with interferon beta (which helps reduce inflammation) — against COVID-19. According to the announcement, the WHO will “compare [drug] effectiveness to what is called standard of care — the regular support hospitals treating COVID-19 patients use now.”
So far, several countries — Thailand, Argentina, Bahrain, Canada, France, Iran, Norway, South Africa, Spain, and Switzerland — are on board with the Solidarity trial. The U.S. is absent from that list.
Five Minute Test ready to go
The fastest available COVID-19 diagnosis test, which can produce results within five minutes has been dubbed ID NOW and was developed by Abbott, a medical device company.
ID NOW will reportedly be ready for use in hospitals and medical offices beginning in the second week of April 2020.
Abbott plans to begin delivering “50,000 tests per day” for rapid diagnosis uses. The ID NOW machine is similar in size to a toaster, weighs 6.6 pounds, and uses molecular technology to deliver results.
Scientists pool their data
Wired reports that staff from the University of North Carolina (UNC) Chapel Hill and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City have teamed up to pool data for patients who have chronic illnesses — with a focus on people with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and have contracted COVID-19. These registries include what medications each person takes for their chronic illness and what they have been prescribed for COVID-19 in addition to how the patient responds to treatment.
The registry has been named Secure-IBD (Surveillance Epidemiology of Coronavirus Under Research Exclusion) and went from an idea to launch within a week per Michael Kappelman, a pediatric gastroenterologist at UNC and one of the founders of the registry.
This effort has been a call to action for doctors in other disciplines who have begun working on creating their own international registries including the COVID-19 Global Rheumatology Alliance. This research could help doctors better understand COVID-19, its interactions within different populations who have preexisting conditions, and its interactions with prescription drugs.
AI takes a crack at COVID-19
Two of the biggest threats COVID-19 poses include how rapidly and how easily the virus is transmitted. Mitigation efforts so far include social distancing and self-quarantining, but AI has also shown that it could play a role in virus mitigation and treatment creation.
Summit, the world’s fastest super computer, used AI to find out which drugs might prevent COVID-19 from spreading to new hosts. Summit discovered that 77 compounds — out of 8,000 that it ran simulations on — might be able to “limit viral recognition of host cells and/or disrupt host-virus interactions,” according to a paper published in ChemRxiv. While this is new information is helpful, it does not mean that an effective COVID-19 treatment is right around the corner.
“Our results don’t mean that we have found a cure or treatment for the coronavirus,” Jeremy Smith, one of the paper authors and director of the University of Tennessee’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory Center for Molecular Biophysics, said.
“We are very hopeful … that our computational findings will both inform future studies and provide a framework that experimentalists will use to further investigate these compounds. Only then will we know whether any of them exhibit the characteristics needed to mitigate this virus,” Smith adds.
Protein may “distract” virus
Scientists from Sweden’s Karolinska Institutet and the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Canada teamed up to study how a protein used to treat patients with lung disease using a genetically modified version of angiotensin converting enzyme 2 (ACE2). The modified protein — human recombinant soluble angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (hrsACE2) — appears to decrease the growth and efficacy of COVID-19 to attach itself to our cells with results depending on dosage administered and “the total amount of virus” present. Still, the results are not decisively conclusive — the research and experimentation has only been conducted on cell cultures and engineered organ tissue; it remains to be seen if this treatment will be effective in protecting humans from the virus. The study and results were published in Cell.
Peptide may be able to block COVID-19
A peptide developed by chemists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in U.S. may have the ability to disengage and block COVID-19 from entering our cells.
The scientists synthesized a peptide fragment made of amino acids that blocks “the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein interaction … precluding virus entry into human cells.” The finding has been published in bioRxiv but has yet to be peer-reviewed.
Antibodies hidden in plasma
Those who have been infected and fully recovered from COVID-19 may have antibodies in their plasma that can help patients in critical condition from the virus.
The Atlantic called it a “Hail Mary,” but there does seem to be some promise in using convalescent plasma therapy from recovered COVID-19 patients to treat those with severe symptoms.
Gary Kobinger, a virologist and director of the Infectious Disease Research Center at the Université Laval in Quebec, told Wired that plasma transfer may be an effective therapy based on the results of a tiny sample size of five patients in China who were treated with the antibody-filled plasma from recovered COVID-19 patients. Still, we should not count the plasma therapy as a cure all.
“If I had to put money on something that would help the most, it would be that. It’s not to say other drugs we are trying won’t work. But I wouldn’t expect miracles, because we would know already if they worked really well,” Kobinger said.
One of the challenges that come to mind includes obtaining donated plasma from those who have already recovered from COVID-19.
UNMC tackles COVID-19 diagnosis and testing
Among the scores of healthcare professionals toiling away to save patients infected with COVID-19 is Jana Broadhurst, director of the Nebraska Biocontainment Unit Clinical Laboratory. Broadhurst told Esquire that her lab is “the beating heart of a novel infectious disease response.” The U.S. only has one federal quarantine center and it sits on the University of Nebraska’s Medical Center (UNMC) campus in Omaha. Here, Broadhurst, with the support of her lab team, has spent 20-hour days working on a faster diagnosis kit than the testing procedures set up by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The grueling effort is working. Broadhurst and her team were among the first stateside clinicians to create their own effective diagnosis test. While this UNMC test is not as fast as Cepheid’s, same day results (Broadhurst says it takes four to six hours) are still possible.
A flu drug may treat COVID-19
Favipiravir, an antiviral drug typically used to treat flu patients, may be effective in also treating those who have contracted COVID-19. A member of China’s science and technology ministry shared that the drug was used to treat patients in clinical trials in Wuhan, the virus epicenter, and Shenzhen in Guangdong Province.
The patients out of Shenzhen who had tested positive for COVID-19 were retested — on average within a four-day period — after receiving favipiravir. The results came back negative. The Guardian reports that x-rays showed improved lung conditions in 91 percent of those who received favipiravir doses compared the 62 percent who did not receive the drug. Japanese doctors are also using favipiravir on patients who have been diagnosed with COVID-19 and exhibit “mild to moderate symptoms.”
However, it seems that favipiravir — also known as Avigan — is less effective in patients with “more severe symptoms,” per a Japanese health ministry source.
Additional treatments in progress
Stat News reports that several drug companies are working to create treatments and vaccines for COVID-19. They note that Gilead Sciences, Ascletis Pharma, Moderna Therapeutics, and CanSino Biologics are among the groups working on novel medicines to combat COVID-19.
Some of these companies are trying to develop vaccines while others are focusing on virus treatments. So far, no vaccine exists for COVID-19 — for a couple of reasons, the main one being that vaccine development can take years. Typically, introducing a vaccine to the public involves three lengthy approval process: licensure, recommendations, and requirements. Licensure is where the FDA needs to approve a new vaccine for use. The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) says that licensure can take decades and notes that the varicella vaccine took 11 years to get FDA licensure.
Recommendation is where healthcare providers “seek the recommendations of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which advises the CDC, the Committee of Infectious Diseases of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), and the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP),” according to CHOP. This is where the FDA compares the risks vs. benefits of the vaccine. Finally, a vaccine reaches the requirements stage. This is where it’s determined whether or not a vaccine is required by state legislatures, health departments, and local governments.
Additionally, vaccines must undergo trial phases in which humans and animals alike are used to test the efficacy and effects of the new vaccine. According to CHOP, phase III is the “final stage of development before a company requests product licensing, and it takes three to four years to complete.” So, even with expedited trials and phases and approval processes, a COVID-19 vaccine will still take time.
FDA fast tracks diagnosis test
The FDA has approved a COVID-19 test that delivers diagnosis results in 45 minutes.
Science Alert reports that the “emergency clearance” designation occurred to “make up for lost time” in reference to the glacial pace at which the U.S. has responded to and tried to mitigate the COVID-19 outbreak.
The tests are produced by Cepheid, a California-based biotech company, and will not need to go through a lab for processing but will have limited use. According to Cepheid’s Chief Medical Officer, David Persing, “the test should primarily be used in emergency rooms and hospitals, not in doctors’ offices.”
Into the seventieth year of life and having survived a life-threatening heart attack in January 2017, I’m fit as a fiddle – thanks to Mother Nature – and do my bit as an activist along with co-workers in Delhi. Were n-Coronavirus to take abode in my body and I develop mild symptoms like ‘flu’, I’ll quarantine myself strictly at home. Presently 1.25 billion people in India are anyway under a lockdown but are allowed to visit the market place for buying essential items; though of course I’ll have to stop these visits once flu-like symptoms appear. But what about millions who have no home or financial resources? Lockdown ordered in many countries across the globe should make everyone aware – at least now – of what Kashmiris and Palestinians have gone through in the last seven decades.
At home I’ll take a tablet of Crocin (Paracetamol) if fever rises above 100° F. Apart from my usual cardiac medicines I’ll avoid all drugs. Will keep myself well hydrated. Of course middle class existence ensures meals, but what about the working class during clamp-downs?
I do not underestimate the reach of the watchful eyes of the Big Brother; a District Magistrate can – under cover of the Epidemic Diseases Act, 1897 – dispatch a policeman to get me forcibly admitted in a hospital for ‘treatment’. Under protest I would agree. Once having settled there I’d try to ensure a letter-petition challenging the Constitutional validity of the Epidemic Diseases Act, 1897 – a law enacted by the erstwhile colonial rulers. This Act is a Draconian Law which takes away the civil liberties and democratic rights of a citizen. The Indian Higher Judiciary takes up Constitutional validity cases in the presence of real-life case, which I would have become by then.
After the confirmatory tests for COVID-19 get undertaken, were I to develop breathing problem then X-ray chest/scanning of chest would be done to confirm presence of pneumonia. If prescribed antibiotics for pneumonia I’ll discuss with the treating physician since existing antibiotics cannot tackle pneumonia due to n-Coronavirus. I won’t let the treating doctor bluff me. I see no point in consuming medicines which are useless or harmful by way of side-effects. I won’t consent to being administered untested drugs even if this has the tacit backing of W.H.O. Recently an Italian tourist visiting India – upon developing pneumonia due to n-Coronavirus – was administered such untested drugs. He subsequently died in a hospital in Rajasthan. This qualifies to be an ‘encounter death’ – a term used for cold-blooded murder of innocents by uniformed security personnel in India!
As for relief to my breathing problem I’ll consent to medication like steroids, bronchodilators for opening up my respiratory passages keeping in mind my underlying heart condition.
At a later stage – when breathlessness becomes severe, as it will likely – if need arises for a ventilator, I’ll deny consent for two reasons.
Why I will opt out of a ventilator?
Firstly, ventilators (along with their appendages) are difficult to be sterilised properly; and actually give patients another type of pneumonia (iatrogenic) which may be impossible to treat. Ventilators notoriously often become vehicles of introducing drug-resistant, hospital-borne infection – often fatal – against which existing antibiotics have become ineffective. My second reasoning is this: I see no logic in this exercise. I’ll explain –
True, ventilators could be of use in patients with severe pneumonia in which the causative organism is known and antibiotics – tested and duly approved – exist. In such a situation a course of antibiotics could clear the pneumonia (congestion/patch) in 1-2 weeks or more. Once the pneumonia has resolved and patient is able to breathe on one’s own (voluntarily), he/she is gradually weaned off the ventilator! A happy development in ordinary case of pneumonia. However in the case of COVID-19 pneumonia (really nasty one at that) no time-tested and duly approved medicine exists. In some countries (including India) untested drugs are being used in limited cases (like the Italian tourist treated in Rajasthan with fatal results).
About patients or their relatives (if patient is not conscious) who consent (read coerced) to untested drugs and also ventilator, the attending doctors feel they have done their best; the patient’s family, friends and well-wishers go through an emotionally exhausting period. It is the unconscious patient who suffers the ordeal; with the ventilator in place the patient has to be sedated 24×7. As the nurse regularly sucks the fluid out of the respiratory passage a perceptive person can observe the patient’s body twitch. And the pneumonia will not resolve since medicines don’t exist as of now; the doctors will not remove the ventilator on their own; these doctors would quote the Hippocrates oath in their defence. The immediate family members won’t have the courage to ask for the ventilator to be switched off; neither the priest nor a judge will provide a clear-cut answer.
Finally Mother Nature resolves the dilemma created between the doctor and patient by a machine called Ventilator. The weakened flesh of the patient succumbs to multi-organ failure after days of ‘avoidable medical torture.’ At that point of time sleep’s elder brother/sister – to wit death – takes over. The philosophical question remains un-answered. Whose life is it anyway?
After not consenting for a ventilator, I’ll request the medical staff to consider administering me oxygen through nasal tube; and intra-venous fluids in case I’m not able to eat anything orally. That done, I will thank the medical staff and request them to leave me alone. Every human being has a right to peaceful and graceful exit from planet earth.
P.S.
- This piece is clearly not an advisory; patients should follow the advice of their attending doctor.
- Yes, ventilators have a role in many conditions as a temporary aid & should be considered.
- It is understandable if patients consent to un-tested drugs.
- Mortality rate for n-Coronavirus infection is under four percent. Over ninety-six percent recover.
Dr. P. S. Sahni is a member of AIDS Bhedbhav Virodhi Andolan (ABVA) and has worked in six epidemics/infectious diseases – Cholera (1971) West Bengal, bordering Bangladesh; National Small Pox Eradication Program (1974) Bihar; Leprosy (1984-89); Cholera (1988) Delhi; Plague (1994) Delhi; HIV/AIDS (1988 onwards).
Email: aidsbhedbhavvirodhiandolan@gmail.com
In a set of stable circumstances, funding higher education should be a matter of automatic persuasion. If you want an educated populace, the tax payer should muck in. In some countries, however, this venture is uneven. In the United Kingdom, the system remains divided, an echo of class stratification. In Australia, which took so many of its behavioural and policy cues from ancestral Britain, investment in public education as a measure of Gross Domestic Product does not stack up well, in real terms, with other countries of the OECD. Its school system is also something of a mild perversion – wealthy private schools receive millions as a windfall; state schools, short of equipment and facilities, starve and moulder.
This state of affairs is highly unsatisfactory, but it is one made worse by the governance of tertiary institutions that remains, at heart, anti-democratic and oligarchical. More to the point, they have lost their way, becoming beasts of private endeavour without enterprise; business driven without being entrepreneurial. Poor, even disastrous investment decisions have been made, most notably the foray into the international student market. This has often been done without a care about financial reserves or insurance that might cushion any precipitous fall in revenue. Notwithstanding this, university politburos are putting out feelers for bailouts and financial assistance. The begging bowl is doing the rounds.
In the United States, colleges have received a small slice – some $14bn of the multitrillion-dollar stimulus measure – to soften the blow caused by COVID-19. And some blow it has been, with LIU Post and Quinnipiac University laying off staff and the distinguished San Francisco Art Institute closing after a stint of 150 years. Of that, $6bn is in the form of student aid; $7.5bn goes to the institutions. The American Council on Education is none too pleased, claiming that the institutional portion is less than $8bn colleges and universities have spent in refunds and board charges. Sector-wide losses are predicted to come in at $50bn.
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is an exception, having taken steps to insure itself against a sharp drop in Chinese student revenue. Moves were made in 2018 by the institution’s colleges of business and engineering to sign a three-year contract with an insurance broker to the value of $424,000, which would cover potential falls of revenue up to $60 million. As Jeff Brown, dean of the Gies College of Business explained at the time, the insurance would be “triggered” by a fall of 20 per cent in Chinese student revenue in a single year. “These triggers could be things like a visa restriction, a pandemic, a trade war – something like that that was outside our control.”
The picture before those seeking relief is not a good one. Combined with the characteristically shabby, ill-informed corporatism of the modern university, students in the higher education sector are receiving the attentions of an overworked and anxious teaching staff, many on sessional contracts, even as student fees feed the burgeoning managerial complex. And international student fees, varying from twice to three times the domestic rate, have proven irresistible, leading to a seemingly endless number of appointments in management, marketing and public relations. A logos-before-learning sentiment prevails.
In the United Kingdom, the question posed by the Financial Times over the weekend was whether universities are “too big to fail”. Student numbers have galloped away, with University College London finding itself with twice as many it had a decade ago (38,000) and Manchester University still mighty with 39,000. But this has not stopped the higher education sector’s call for a £7bn bailout. This has come with the rich assumption that universities, as a matter of course, will receive such assistance, assumed as given by such international ratings agencies as Moody’s. “It is not axiomatic,” retorts Baroness Cavendish, an adviser to the UK Department of Health and Social Care, “that UK taxpayers should now take on the financial risks of bridging what will be a shortlived hit to revenue – or without a quid pro quo.”
In 2018, the seasoned education specialist Sir Michael Barber, as head of the Office for Students, warned universities that they could not assume an automatic line of credit in the case of a financial crisis. “The OfS will not bail out providers in a financial difficulty,” reasoned Barber during the Wonkfest higher education festival in London. “This kind of thinking – not unlike the ‘too big to fail’ idea among the banks – will lead to poor-decision making and a lack of financial discipline, is inconsistent with the principle of university autonomy and is not in the students’ longer term interests.” In two words: too late.
This makes calls for more funding, or a bailout package, as sharp as a double-edged sword. Universities should receive generous funding from the public purse but there is also an expectation that such money be spent to advance the cause of education and the welfare of students, neither of which has featured much in the last decade. The Australian Labor Party, in traditional fashion, has fallen for the magic of higher education in its ideal, rarefied form rather than actual, grounded practice. That practice, which entails giving tax payer insurance to cover the outcomes of shoddy decision making, is ignored.
For its part, the position of the Morrison government is best put by Senator James Paterson. Admittedly, it supplies an incomplete picture, and a disingenuous one at that. Nonetheless, it carries some weight. Despite being warned about the China risk, universities, claimed Paterson, “rode the cycle up”. It was time for them to ride it down.
Inadvertently, the talk of protecting universities has started to resemble that of holding up financially imprudent banks. Labor frontbencher Tanya Plibersek, for instance, has warned of “serious concerns that without federal government action some leading institutions could collapse.” She proposes “low or no-cost loans to provide stability in coming months.” She misses a beat on the issue of financial folly. “For years, universities have used income from international education to help fund their world-leading research.” Such an equation is, if not false, then only a small part of it, ignoring the multi-million dollar amounts expended on non-research and teaching related operations, notably the spread-sheet devotees of management.
With such circumstances in mind, it would surely be fitting for the university in general to start a process of considered self-examination or, as novelist Arundhati Roy suggests with sharp clarity, take advantage of the coronavirus to “break with the past and reimagine their world anew.” But what we find in certain marked instances is a hearty cri de coeur, a demand for financial padding that will tie things over. Worst of all, it is a call for generous insurance without a promise of change and without condition. Woe to the students, the sessional staff and the frontline academics.
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com
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