Last week, Union Health Ministry sources stated that India will take up “glaring anomalies’’ in a World Health Organisation (WHO) report on excess mortality estimates associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. The report suggested that there were around 47 lakh deaths in the country, directly or indirectly attributable to the pandemic in 2020 and 2021. This figure is 10 times higher than the government count of 4.8 lakh cumulative deaths as of December last year.
India disputing the global health organisations’ data on impact of a disease is not new. In 1998, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) put the death toll due to HIV between 1,60,000 and 3,40,000, while WHO put the toll at 1,79,000.
“They are quoting different figures when we ourselves don’t have any data on deaths,” the then health minister C.P. Thakur was quoted as saying. Again in 2006, the UNAIDS pegged the caseload due to HIV at 5.2 million in the 15-49 age group. India challenged those figures, but with data.
