NEW DELHI: India’s emergency clearance for two Covid-19 vaccines over the weekend launches a massive and discouraging government inoculation campaign in the world’s second most populous nation, where the new coronavirus has killed more than 150,000 people and has devastated the economy.
The goal is to vaccinate more than 300 million of the country’s 1.3 billion people by mid-year, using an army of doctors, nurses, police officers, soldiers and others to administer and administer doses across the country, from remote villages. from the Himalayas to megacities like Bombay.
“It will be the largest vaccination program in the world,” said Giridhara R. Babu, an epidemiologist at the Indian Institute of Public Health in Bangalore. “India has the skills and facilities to achieve this.”
A practical vaccination drill.
Photo:
Partha Sarkar / Xinhua / Zuma Press
On Saturday, drug regulators in India gave the green light to the emergency use of a vaccine made by Oxford University and AstraZeneca PLC that is already being mass-produced and stored in the country.
They also authorized a vaccine produced by Indian manufacturer Bharat Biotech, which said the vaccine from the Hyderabad-based company, which is in final-stage clinical trials, was safe and generated a strong immune response in people who they received.
Authorities said they had given it special approval, in part, to ensure India has different options in case the virus mutates in a way that makes some vaccines ineffective.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi said the approvals marked “a turning point” in India’s battle with the virus, which, in addition to sickening and killing large numbers, also contributed to a contraction in economic production of more than 15% year-on-year in the six months ended 30 September.
A vaccination site in Rajasthan.
Photo:
Himanshu Sharma / NurPhoto / Zuma Press
India has been preparing for the deployment of vaccines for months, drawing up lists of the tens of millions of people who will get the first doses, expanding the government’s vaccine supply chain, building an application to track doses of vaccines. vaccinations and vaccinations and training legions of people to help you.
The South Asian country has a national network of centers that vaccinate millions of babies each year. Its successful campaign to eradicate polio has also helped build a strong network of experts and volunteers and a cold storage chain that covers most of the country.
A mock vaccination mock at a health center.
Photo:
Himanshu Sharma / NurPhoto / Zuma Press
Covid-19 vaccination plans are on a much larger scale, with possible billions of shots. To achieve this, India is also taking advantage of its knowledge of another common event in which hundreds of millions of people are participating: the elections for the world’s largest democracy.
India uses voter lists to decide where citizens will be vaccinated and who should be vaccinated first. In later rounds of vaccinations, he can even use the same locations as polling stations, officials say.
Thousands of people across the country tested systems to transport, cool and control vaccines on Saturday and Sunday, and some states even went through droughts where they pretended to inoculate volunteers.
Last week a one-story government maternity clinic was set up in a bustling corner of New Delhi to start vaccinations. Half had been moved to a vaccination room, with lines of seats socially spaced in front of people when they arrived. At the back were sofas for vaccinated people so they could wait 30 minutes in case they had a bad reaction to the shots.
The clinic’s industrial-sized, top-loading freezer is labeled with commonly used childhood vaccine names, including hepatitis B, measles, and rotavirus, and is awaiting delivery of coronavirus vaccines. .
Pareejat Saurabh, the district’s vaccination agent, said there are already enough experienced people to make the shots for the first wave of vaccinations, aimed at health workers and other front-line workers. “We have a lot of vaccinators,” he said. “They’ve been vaccinated for years.”
The AstraZeneca vaccine can be transported and stored for months with normal refrigeration, which facilitates distribution in places where people and health networks are overly stretched and underfunded.
AstraZeneca has a manufacturing and distribution agreement with the Serum Institute of India to provide more than one billion doses to developing countries. The institute is already the world’s largest vaccine maker by volume, and makes more than a billion doses a year, from polio to measles, primarily for export to emerging markets.
“India’s first Covid-19 vaccine is approved, safe, effective and ready to roll out in the coming weeks,” the SII chief executive said he tweeted on Sunday.
Serum Institute said it would prepare the vaccine only for India until March or April and then hopes to start exporting it as well. The price of the first 100 million doses delivered to the government in India will be about $ 2.75 a dose. It will later be sold to the private sector for about $ 13.70 a dose.
Write to Eric Bellman at [email protected] and Vibhuti Agarwal at [email protected]
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