Authorities should stop ignoring life-saving inventions

During the pandemic, many brilliant minds in our country have come up with prototypes of various life-saving devices. Their urgency was bolstered keeping in mind the fate of their fellow citizens, who had been suffering greatly during the pandemic, especially due to the shortage of ventilators, high-flow nasal cannulas and the likes. Disappointingly, a lack of investment, industry support and government red tape have forced the majority of these innovations to be shelved, putting what could have been life-saving inventions onto the backburner.

Their examples range from domestically produced ventilators that cost a fraction of the price of regular ventilators, to high powered air-purifying respirators that could protect healthcare workers from contamination, and disinfection chambers that use ultraviolet rays to sterilise medical gear. Some of these inventions never saw the light of day due to government restrictions, which in normal circumstances could be understandable. However, given the lack of life-saving facilities available in the country's hospitals, and particularly in government hospitals, that the health officials could not find the time to approve their use nor make special exemptions during the pandemic, allowing them to be produced at greater scale, is shameful. What were they so busy doing?

During the entire pandemic, the government's health system has performed woefully—being riddled in one incident of corruption after another and with health officials making one disastrous decision after the other. This seems to be just another disaster of their own making. At a time when the government hospital system has only 1,225 ventilators and 13,000 patients currently hospitalised with Covid-19, just imagine how much of a relief some of these cheaper ventilators could have provided. And the same applies for all the other devices. Though it is disappointing that the pharmaceutical industry did not show any interest in investing in these devices, the government could easily have funded their production using the Tk 100 crore that has been allocated to finance health research for the current fiscal year—or by saving up on one of its many wasteful spendings that have been exposed over the past couple of years by various media outlets.

We call on the authorities to change their ways—to give innovators the proper shot they deserve to showcase their inventions and prove that they are worthy of being produced on a larger scale. They must invest in them, as well as provide whatever support is necessary for these creations to be brought to market so that lives can be saved.