NEW DELHI (AP) – India is expanding its COVID-19 vaccination program beyond healthcare and frontline workers, offering the injections to older people and those with medical conditions that put them at risk. One of the first to be vaccinated on Monday was Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Those eligible to be vaccinated now include people over the age of 60, as well as people over the age of 45 with conditions such as heart disease or diabetes that make them vulnerable to the severe COVID-19 disease. The shots are given for free in government hospitals and will also be sold to more than 10,000 private hospitals at a fixed price of 250 rupees, or $ 3.40 per shot.
Modi, who is 70, was given the opportunity at the All India Institute of Medical Science in New Delhi. He called on everyone to get vaccinated and then tweeted, “Let’s make India COVID-19 free together!”
The country of nearly 1.4 billion people has embarked on one of the world’s largest vaccination journeys in January, but the rollout was slow.
New coronavirus infections are on the rise after months of constant decline, and scientists have discovered worrying variants of the virus that they fear could accelerate infections or make vaccines or treatments less useful. Vaccinating more people is a priority, with the Indian Health Ministry urging states on Sunday to “not lower their guard” and “waste away the profits from the collective hard work of the past year.”
India has recorded more than 11 million cases, the second in the world after the United States, with more than 157,000 deaths in the country from COVID-19.
Although India is home to the world’s largest vaccine manufacturers and has one of the largest immunization programs, things have not gone according to plan. Of the 10 million health workers initially planned by the government to immunize, only 6.6 million have been given the first chance and 2.4 million both. Of the estimated 20 million frontline workers, such as police or sanitation workers, only 5.1 million have been vaccinated so far.
Dr. Gagangdeep Kang, an infectious disease expert at Christian Medical College Vellore in South India, said health workers’ reluctance to get vaccinated highlights the scarcity of available information on the vaccines. If health professionals are reluctant, “do you seriously think the general public is standing up for the vaccine?” she said.
India had set a target of immunizing 300 million people, nearly the entire US population, by August.
The spike in infections in India is most pronounced in the western state of Maharashtra, where the number of active cases has nearly doubled to over 68,000 in the last two weeks. Locks and other restrictions have been reintroduced in some areas, and the Prime Minister of the State, Uddhav Thackeray, has warned that another wave of cases is “knocking on our door”.
Similar peaks have been reported from states in every corner of the vast country: Punjab, Jammu and Kashmir in the north, Gujarat in the west, West Bengal in the east, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh in central India, and Telangana in the south.
Top federal officials have asked authorities in those states to increase vaccination rates in districts where the number of cases is increasing, and to identify clusters of infections and track variants.
“There is a sense of urgency because of the mutants and because the cases are occurring,” says Dr. K. Srinath Reddy, President of the Public Health Foundation of India.
He said the continued decline in the number of cases over months resulted in a “reduced perception of threat,” leading to hesitation with the vaccine. Experts point out that the reluctance to get vaccinated was reinforced, at least in part, by the opaque government decision-making while vaccines illuminate green. “The (vaccination) drive started when the perception that the worst was over, so people were more reluctant,” Reddy said.
The healthcare system in India is patchy and in many small towns, people depend on private hospitals for their medical needs. Getting these hospitals vaccinated will give you access to the recordings, experts said. India had rolled out online software to track recordings and receivers, but the system was prone to failures and delays.
What is not yet clear, however, is whether people will be given a choice between the AstraZeneca vaccine or one from the Indian vaccine maker Bharat Biotech. The latter was given the green light by Indian regulators in January without any evidence from late investigations showing the shots were effective in preventing illness from a coronavirus infection.
The priority for now is to increase the number of vaccines every day, said Jishnu Das, a health economist at Georgetown University who advises the state of West Bengal on the pandemic. But he added that with COVID-19 there are always dips and peaks, and the main lesson is that it won’t end until enough people have been vaccinated to slow the spread of the virus.
“Don’t use a trough to declare success and say it’s over,” he said.
Associated Press writer Krutika Pathi contributed to this report.
The Associated Press Department of Health and Science is supported by the Science Education Department of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The AP is solely responsible for all content.