NEW DELHI – India’s emergency clearance for two Covid-19 vaccines over the weekend marks the start of a massive and logistically discouraging government vaccination campaign in the world’s second-most populous country, where the novel coronavirus has killed more than 150,000 people and 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 deliver and administer doses across the country. country, from remote Himalayan villages to megacities like Mumbai.
“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 make this happen.”
A field vaccination exercise.
Photo:
Partha Sarkar / Xinhua / Zuma Press
On Saturday, Indian drug regulators gave the green light to emergency use of a vaccine from the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca PLC that is already mass-produced and stored in the country.
They also approved a vaccine produced by the Indian manufacturer Bharat Biotech, saying that the vaccine from the Hyderabad-based company, which is in late-stage clinical trials, was safe and generated a robust immune response in people who got it.
Authorities said they had given it special approval in part to ensure that India has several options in case the virus mutates to such an extent that some vaccines become ineffective.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi said the approvals marked as “a decisive turning point” in India’s struggle with the virus, which, in addition to sickening and killing large numbers, also contributed to a contraction in economic output of more than 15% year-on-year in the six months ended September 30.
A vaccination site in Rajasthan.
Photo:
Himanshu Sharma / NurPhoto / Zuma Press
India has been preparing for vaccine rollout for months, building lists of tens of millions of people who will receive first doses, expands government vaccine supply chain, builds app to track vaccine doses and vaccinees, and trains legions of people that will help.
The South Asian country has a nationwide network of centers that vaccinate millions of babies every year. The successful campaign to eradicate polio has also helped build a strong network of experts and volunteers and a cold chain that covers most of the country.
A fake exercise for vaccinations in a health center.
Photo:
Himanshu Sharma / NurPhoto / Zuma Press
The vaccination plans for Covid-19 are on a much larger scale, with potentially billions of shots. To make this happen, India is also drawing on its knowledge of another regular event involving hundreds of millions of people: elections in the world’s largest democracy.
India uses voter rosters to decide where to vaccinate citizens and who should be vaccinated first. In later rounds of vaccination, it may even use the same locations as voting booths, officials say.
Thousands of people across the country tested systems for transporting, cooling and monitoring vaccines on Saturday and Sunday, and some states even took a test drive pretending to inoculate volunteers.
A one-story maternity hospital in a bustling corner of New Delhi got ready to begin vaccinations last week. Half of it had been turned into a vaccination ward, with rows of seats socially distant for those arriving. There were benches in the back for those vaccinated so they could wait 30 minutes in case they had a bad reaction to the shots.
The clinic’s industrial-size freezer is labeled with the names of the childhood vaccinations it usually contains – including hepatitis B, measles, and rotavirus – and is awaiting delivery of coronavirus vaccines.
For the first wave of vaccinations – aimed at health and other frontline workers – there are plenty of experienced people to do the trick, said Pareejat Saurabh, the district’s immunization officer. “We have a large pool of vaccinators,” he said. “They’ve been doing vaccinations for years.”
The AstraZeneca vaccine can be shipped and stored for months with normal refrigeration, making it easier to distribute in places where people and healthcare networks are overloaded 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 producer by volume, receiving more than a billion doses per year for everything from polio to measles, mainly for exports to emerging markets.
“India’s first Covid-19 vaccine is approved, safe, effective and ready to be marketed in the coming weeks,” said SII chief executive tweeted Sunday.
Serum Institute said it would make the vaccine only for India until March or April and hopes to export it accordingly. The price for the first 100 million doses delivered to the government in India will be approximately $ 2.75 per dose. It will later be sold to the private sector for approximately $ 13.70 per dose.
Write to Eric Bellman at [email protected] and Vibhuti Agarwal at [email protected]
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