India on Monday used a global health meeting in Geneva as a platform to convey its “disappointment” over WHO’s mortality assessment exercise that has estimated India’s all-cause mortality under Covid-19 at 4.7 million.
The 4.7 million estimate of excess deaths from all causes during 2020 and 2021 is 9.8 times India’s official Covid-19 mortality figures of around 481,000 over the two years and 31 per cent of the WHO’s global estimated mortality of 14.9 million.
“India would like to express its disappointment over the manner in which the report by WHO on all-cause excess mortality was prepared and published, ignoring the concerns expressed by India and other countries,” the Union health minister Mansukh Mandaviya said in his address to the World Health Assembly.
Mandaviya said India and other countries shared concerns over the methodology and sources of data and the manner in which the WHO’s mortality assessment exercise had set aside “authentic data” from India’s statutory authority.
The Union health ministry had earlier this month accused the WHO of ignoring authentic data from the Civil Registration System (CRS), the country’s births-and-deaths registration system, that had documented around 474,000 all-cause excess deaths in 2020.
Mandaviya said the Central Council of Health and Family Welfare, a constitutional body with representation of health ministers from all states, had passed a unanimous resolution asking him to convey “their collective disappointment in this regard.”
The health ministry has since July 2021 attempted to discredit several scientific studies that have yielded large estimates of all-cause excess deaths –from 3.2 million to 4.9 million -- in India during 2020 and 2021. The WHO estimate is the result of the latest such study.
But multiple health experts, including members of a technical advisory group that guided the WHO exercise, have said the health ministry’s attempts to discredit all such studies appear to be part of a campaign to influence public discourse, no matter what the science suggests.
