A SHOT OF HOPE
Officials exude confidence ahead of India’s mammoth Covid vaccination programme, but challenges remain on the ground BY SONALI ACHARJEE
India enthusiastically welcomes the rollout of the Covid vaccination programme, but challenges remain
AAt 5 am on January 12, three temperature-controlled trucks arrived at the Pune airport. Police and airport security in tow, they took a special route on the runway for their consignments to be loaded onto nine flights. Heading to 13 cities across India, these flights carried 5.6 million doses of the Covishield vaccine between them. It was the first batch of the much-awaited protection against the Covid virus, the first shots of which will be administered to some 30 million Indians for free, beginning January 16.
“Covid cases in India are declining, which is a good sign. Our vaccination drive will further help reduce transmission of the virus. Both Covishield and Covaxin, the vaccines approved for emergency use in India, have met all safety criteria,” says Dr V.K. Paul, NITI Aayog member and chairman of the National Expert Group on Vaccine Administration for Covid-19. “In fact, 12 countries have approached us for Covid vaccines.” Dr Paul adds that after nearly 10 days of dry runs across 33 states and Union territories, the country is fully geared up to vaccinate its entire 1.3 billion population against Covid-19, in what will arguably be the largest immunisation programme in the world.
India granted emergency use authorisation to Covishield, developed by AstraZeneca-Oxford and manufactured in the country by the Serum Institute of India, and Bharat Biotech’s Covaxin on January 3. Covishield is a viral vector vaccine that uses a weakened version of a common cold virus found in chimpanzees. It encodes instructions for making proteins similar to that of the novel coronavirus to generate an immune response and prevent infection. Trials have shown it to have an average 70 per cent efficacy. Covaxin, on the other hand, has been
derived from a strain of the novel coronavirus isolated by the National Institute of Virology (NIV), Pune. Bharat Biotech used this to develop an inactivated vaccine, which is still in phase 3 trials with efficacy not yet known.
A COLOSSAL EXERCISE
The Union ministry of health & family welfare (MoHFW) has issued guidelines to all states for the Covid vaccination programme. For the first phase, the Centre will procure and distribute the vaccines. States can then decide which vaccine to use in the subsequent phases. The guidelines mandate only one vaccine candidate per state to avoid confusion. From deciding the number of
people to be vaccinated in the first phase to identifying transport and distribution points, states have had around two weeks to plan their vaccination drives.
In all states, health and frontline workers will be the first to receive the vaccine. Bihar, for instance, has enrolled around 1 million beneficiaries for the first two phases of vaccinating healthcare and frontline workers. Around 430,000 health workers will be immunised in the first phase. In the next round, frontline workers, including police, armed forces, home guards, civil defence and disaster management volunteers and municipal workers, will be covered. Once this is done, dates will be announced for the priority target group of 15-20 million people who are
above 50 years of age or have co-morbidities. In Delhi, 5.1 million health and frontline workers will be the first to receive the vaccine while 425,000 people have been listed in Rajasthan. Around 407,000 health workers will be immunised in Madhya Pradesh and 267,000 in Chhattisgarh. Uttar Pradesh has announced figures for three phases of its vaccination drive: 800,000 health workers in the first phase, 1.6 million frontline workers in the second and 30 million people (above age 50 or having co–morbidities) in the third. West Bengal plans to vaccinate 10 million people in the next six months, with 600,000 covered in the first phase.
The states have drawn their individual plans for transporting, storing