A sworn report on whether Bangladesh actually has measles vaccine in its refrigerators is due in the High Court this week. On May 19, the court ordered the director general of the Directorate General of Health Services to file an affidavit within 30 days on the storage, supply, availability and adequacy of measles and rabies vaccines across the country. [2] That clock closes around June 18. The filing, not the daily death count, is the news.

The distinction is the one this paper has pressed twice. The June 15 edition argued that families need the affidavit, not another death count, and the June 14 edition watched the court's clock run toward exactly this deadline. A toll is a number. An affidavit is a service map — district by district, cold chain by cold chain — and it is the only record a citizen can inspect and a court can test.

The number, meanwhile, keeps climbing. The combined tally of confirmed and suspected measles deaths reached 656 by June 16, after four more children died in a single 24-hour period: 563 suspected deaths and 93 laboratory-confirmed. [1] Since March 15, the country has logged 86,923 suspected cases and 10,387 confirmed infections, with 71,467 patients hospitalized and 67,878 recovered. [1] Each daily update is grief rendered as arithmetic. None of it tells a parent in a rural upazila whether the clinic nearest them has a vaccine in stock tomorrow. The affidavit is supposed to.

That is why the court asked for it in this form. Alongside the report order, the High Court bench of Justice Rajik Al Jalil and Justice Debashish Roy Chowdhury issued a rule asking the government to explain why it should not provide adequate compensation to the families of children who died, and why the health secretary should not be directed to form a 10-member expert committee to identify the outbreak's root causes and those responsible. [2][3] The respondents named are the secretaries to the Health Services Division and the home ministry, the DGHS director general, and the director of the Institute of Epidemiology, Disease Control and Research. [3] These are the offices that hold the answers a death count cannot.

The petition that forced the order makes a specific causal claim, and it is the claim X has been amplifying for weeks. Filed on May 10 by the human rights organization Law and Life Foundation Trust, the public interest litigation argues that more than 500 children had died not from an unavoidable epidemic but from policy. [3] The supply of measles vaccine was disrupted, it states, after the previous interim government replaced the long-standing UNICEF-managed procurement system with an open-tender method, and UNICEF repeatedly warned the then health adviser, Nurjahan Begum, about shortages, outbreak risk and possible child deaths before those warnings were, the petition says, ignored. [3] Bangladesh had twice won the Gavi Award for eliminating measles and rubella between 2009 and 2015 — a record the petition holds up against the present. [3]

A second petition pushes the blame higher. Filed on May 17 by Supreme Court lawyer M Ashraful Islam, it seeks an inquiry commission into the role of former chief adviser Dr Muhammad Yunus and other advisers, and asks the court to bar 24 individuals — including Yunus and all former advisers — from leaving the country until the inquiry is complete. [3] On X, this is the whole story: the open-tender switch and the Yunus government are charged directly with the deaths, and the travel-ban demand circulates as proof of accountability. The attorney general, Md Ruhul Quddus Kazal, opposed the original petition in court. [2]

Here the timeline and the wire serve different appetites. X wants a culprit and has named one. The Daily Star, doing the patient work, runs the combined toll every day and reports the court's procedural steps. Both are real. Neither is yet the document that settles anything. The affidavit is. Whether the open-tender system left districts without vaccine, whether the cold chain held, whether supply was adequate where the deaths clustered — those are answerable questions, and the court has demanded they be answered under oath, in writing, on a deadline.

So the test this week is narrow and concrete. Either the DGHS files a sworn, inspectable account of the vaccine supply by roughly June 18, or it does not. A filing converts a months-long argument into evidence. A delay, or an affidavit thin on district-level detail, tells its own story. Accountability in this outbreak has been promised in death tolls and demanded in petitions. It becomes real only when the record is on the court's desk and open to anyone who wants to check it against the empty refrigerator down the road.

-- NORA WHITFIELD, Chicago