COVID-19 Vaccination In India Whither?
Everything seemed well thought out and prioritized in
the beginning: an extreme sense of urgency and the consequent hurry had been
shown by the Government of India in getting its vaccines ready at the earliest;
the new year 2021 started with the approval of Covishield, the Indian version
of Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, on the New Year Day and the approval of the
India-made Covaxin on the second day of the year; the vaccination was going to
start anytime soon amid a heady mix of euphoria and optimism. However, the days
that followed turned out to be somewhat disappointing. There are various
reasons for this.
First, the sense of suspicion even in the minds of
medical doctors after the Indian drug regulator gave its seemingly hurried
approval to Covaxin without the results of the final phase clinical trials and
an efficacy rate. Besides, there was no option to choose between the vaccines
for any state or authority of the country and there were initial hiccups in
terms of a number of instances of serious side-effects and two or three deaths
after vaccination. The willingness to get vaccinated thus got impacted right
from the first day, and it continues till today.
Second, after the Indian COVID-19 peak in September
2020 the graph of infections started flattening distinctly from the period
during December-January, and with the exception of Kerala and Maharashtra
almost all other states have managed to come back to near normalcy, particularly
the north eastern states. This, combined with the low fatality rate and the ever-rising
recovery figures, created a mixed feeling of safety and defiance in the minds
of the people thus reducing their willingness or urgency to get vaccinated.
Most of them even started discarding all Coronavirus prevention norms. Such a
phenomenon is unique to India only, this has been anticipated and observed in
many countries of the world.
Thirdly, the Government did not seem to keep up with
that sense of urgency as the drive went on. The health executives were very
prompt in denying that the initial cases of serious side-effects and deaths
were related to the vaccination. However, they did not initiate any public
service campaigns to encourage people to get inoculated despite there being no
reports of any adverse impact in the following weeks. The expected cooperation
between the central and the state governments also did not materialize to the
desired extent. Add to this the political differences, cross propaganda and the
preparations for the assembly elections coming up in five states. In fact, any
implementation of any scheme in India has always been impacted by
political/ideological, religious and caste differences. It was exactly in this
scenario that we thought earlier that vaccine was the only solution to end the
pandemic in India.
Last but not the least, there has been a rather
disproportionate focus shift from vaccination to the export of vaccines to other
nations. This is understandable for an economy so badly hit by the pandemic,
but this is not the time for promoting export of ‘India-made’ vaccines. As per
protocols of the World Health Organization vaccines must be developed and
shared as much as possible among nations, particularly the poor and developing
ones; but this does not mean that vaccinating one’s own population in the
fastest way possible is not a priority.
In a positive development, the president of the
Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), Uday Kotak, has called upon the Government
of India to allow private sector involvement in the vaccination drive and to
allow the corporates vaccinate their own employees while following the
Government’s priority categorization protocols. This makes perfect sense. If
the chain of private hospitals across the country gets permission to vaccinate
patients on payment basis the overall drive would get the much-needed fillip. The
Government is reportedly thinking on these lines and the vaccines are likely to
be thrown in the open market by the year end.
However, waiting for even a year seems to be risky at
this juncture. At the moment, no doubt, the situation is under absolute control
except for Kerala and Maharashtra, but cases of infections of at least three
COVID-19 variants, namely the United Kingdom, South Africa and the Brazil
variant, have been detected in India, and the elusive virus would hardly take
any time to create havoc again. Therefore, it is extremely important to speed
up the vaccination drive by making the vaccines available at a larger scale and
also allowing more vaccines like the Russian Sputnik V and other indigenous
ones come into the scenario.
Distractions, perhaps calculated, like the
suicide/murder of a film star last year, and now the ‘toolkit conspiracy’
should be avoided to put the focus back on the fight against the pandemic, and
major upheavals like the nearly three-month old farmers’ agitation should be treated
in a sympathetic and solution-oriented way, instead of trying to break those up
through more chains of distractions.
At the same time, all governments must undertake
extensive public awareness campaigns that are visible as headlines across the
internet, the social media, the print media and the news channels to increase
the willingness of citizens to get vaccinated. They cannot realistically expect
common people to flock continuously on to their specific information sites. The
largescale misinformation or fake news surging in the social media platforms
have also to be stopped by the respective governments of the states in close
coordination with the central government. A person above fifty or sixty doesn’t
have any idea at the moment about when his/her turn for inoculation is going to
come. This must change at the earliest.
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