COVID-19: Mamata Banerjee appeals to Centre to postpone JEE, NEET exams

Banerjee, in a series of tweets on Monday morning, said she was vocal about the issue during the last video conference of chief ministers with Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

PTI

August 24, 2020 / 12:22 IST

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Monday appealed to the Centre to postpone the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) and the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) due to the prevailing COVID-19 situation.

Aspirants sit for JEE for admission to premier engineering colleges and NEET for undergraduate medical courses.

Banerjee, in a series of tweets on Monday morning, said she was vocal about the issue during the last video conference of chief ministers with Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

"In our last video conference with the Hon'ble PM Shri @narendramodiJi, I had been vocal against the UGC guidelines mandating completion of terminal examinations in Universities/Colleges by the end of September 2020, which had a huge potential to put student lives at risk," she tweeted.

Banerjee appealed to the Centre to assess the risk and postpone the examinations until the situation is conducive again.

COVID-19 Vaccine

Frequently Asked Questions

How does a vaccine work?

A vaccine works by mimicking a natural infection. A vaccine not only induces immune response to protect people from any future COVID-19 infection, but also helps quickly build herd immunity to put an end to the pandemic. Herd immunity occurs when a sufficient percentage of a population becomes immune to a disease, making the spread of disease from person to person unlikely. The good news is that SARS-CoV-2 virus has been fairly stable, which increases the viability of a vaccine.

How many types of vaccines are there?

There are broadly four types of vaccine — one, a vaccine based on the whole virus (this could be either inactivated, or an attenuated [weakened] virus vaccine); two, a non-replicating viral vector vaccine that uses a benign virus as vector that carries the antigen of SARS-CoV; three, nucleic-acid vaccines that have genetic material like DNA and RNA of antigens like spike protein given to a person, helping human cells decode genetic material and produce the vaccine; and four, protein subunit vaccine wherein the recombinant proteins of SARS-COV-2 along with an adjuvant (booster) is given as a vaccine.

What does it take to develop a vaccine of this kind?

Vaccine development is a long, complex process. Unlike drugs that are given to people with a diseased, vaccines are given to healthy people and also vulnerable sections such as children, pregnant women and the elderly. So rigorous tests are compulsory. History says that the fastest time it took to develop a vaccine is five years, but it usually takes double or sometimes triple that time.

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