NEW DELHI – India’s emergency authorization for two Covid-19 vaccines over the weekend kicks off a massive and daunting government inoculation campaign in the world’s second-largest country, where the new coronavirus has killed more than 150,000 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 deliver doses across the country. to remote villages in the Himalayas to megaliths 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 practical vaccination exercise.
Photo:
Partha Sarkar / Xinhua / Zuma Press
On Saturday, Indian regulators gave the go-ahead for the emergency use of a vaccine produced by Oxford University and AstraZeneca PLC, which is already mass-produced and stored in the country.
They also authorized a vaccine produced by Indian manufacturer Bharat Biotech, saying the vaccine from the Hyderabad-based company, which is in late-stage clinical trials, is safe and has generated a robust immune response in people who received it.
Authorities said they had given special approval in part to make sure India has different options if the virus moves 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 making it sick and killing a large number, also contributed to a contraction in economic output 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 launch of the vaccine for months, building lists of tens of millions of people who will receive the first doses, expanding the government’s supply chain of vaccines, building an application to track vaccine and vaccinated doses and training legions of people that will help.
The South Asian country has a national network of centers that vaccinate millions of children every year. Its successful polio eradication campaign has also helped build a strong network of experts and volunteers and a cold storage chain covering most of the country.
A mock simulator for vaccinations at a health center.
Photo:
Himanshu Sharma / NurPhoto / Zuma Press
Covid-19 vaccination plans are on a much larger scale, potentially involving billions of photos. To achieve this, India is using its knowledge from another common event involving hundreds of millions of people: elections in the world’s largest democracy.
India uses voter lists to decide where citizens will be vaccinated and who should be vaccinated first. In subsequent rounds of vaccination, he can use even the same locations as polling booths, officials say.
Thousands of people across the country tested vaccine transport, cooling and monitoring systems on Saturday and Sunday, and some states even went through dry cycles in which they pretended to inoculate volunteers.
A one-story government maternity clinic in a lively corner of New Delhi was preparing to start vaccinations last week. Half of it had been turned into a vaccination ward, with lines of chairs socially spaced in front of people upon their arrival. In the back were the couches for those who had been vaccinated, so they could wait 30 minutes in case they had a bad reaction to the blows.
The clinic’s top-loading freezer is labeled with the names of vaccinations for children it usually has – including hepatitis B, measles and rotavirus – and is awaiting administration of coronavirus vaccines.
For the first wave of vaccinations – for health workers and other front-line workers – there are already enough experienced people to fire, said Pareejat Saurabh, the district’s immunization officer. “We have a large group of vaccinators,” he said. “They’ve been vaccinating for years.”
The AstraZeneca vaccine can be transported and stored for months with normal refrigeration, which makes it easier to distribute in places where people and health care networks are overburdened and underfunded.
AstraZeneca has a manufacturing and distribution agreement with the Serum Institute of India to supply more than one billion doses to developing countries. The institute is already the world’s largest producer of vaccines by volume, delivering more than a billion doses a year for everything from polio to measles, especially for export to emerging markets.
“India’s first Covid-19 vaccine is approved, safe, effective and ready to be launched in the coming weeks,” said SII Executive Director wrote on Twitter on Sunday.
The Serum Institute has said it will only make the vaccine for India by March or April and then hopes to start exporting it as well. The price for the first 100 million doses delivered to the government in India will be about $ 2.75 per dose. It will later be sold to the private sector for about $ 13.70 per dose.
Write to Eric Bellman at [email protected] and Vibhuti Agarwal at [email protected]
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