NEW DELHI – India’s emergency permit for vaccination of two Covid-19 vaccines began over the weekend with a massive and logistically discouraging government inoculation campaign in the world’s most populous country, killing more than 150,000 people and destroying the economy destroyed.
The goal is to vaccinate more than 300 million of the 1.3 billion people in the country by the middle of the year, using an army of doctors, nurses, police officers, soldiers and others to deliver doses across the country. to supply and administer, from remote towns in the Himalayas to megacities such as Mumbai.
“This 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 that happen.”
An exercise for vaccination.
Photo:
Partha Sarkar / Xinhua / Zuma Press
On Saturday, India’s drug regulators gave the green light for emergency use of a vaccine manufactured by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca PLC, which is already being stored in the country in mass production and stock.
They also approved a vaccine manufactured by Indian manufacturer Bharat Biotech, saying that the Hyderabad-based vaccine, which is in late-stage clinical trials, is safe and causes a strong immune response in people who take it. received.
Authorities said they had in part granted special approval to ensure India had different options if the virus mutated in a way that rendered some vaccines ineffective.
Premier Narendra Modi said the approvals marked as a turning point ‘ in India’s fight against the virus, which, in addition to the large number of diseases, 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 months for the deployment of vaccines, building lists of the tens of millions of people who will receive the first doses, expanding the government’s vaccine supply chain, building an app to track vaccine doses and vaccines and practicing the legion people who will help.
The country in South Asia has a nationwide network of centers that vaccinate millions of babies annually. The successful campaign to eradicate polio has also helped build a strong network of experts and volunteers and a cold room that covers most of the country.
A mock exercise for vaccinations at a health center.
Photo:
Himanshu Sharma / NurPhoto / Zuma Press
The vaccination plans for Covid-19 are on a much larger scale, potentially involving billions of shots. To achieve this, India is also leveraging its knowledge of another regular event involving hundreds of millions of people: elections in the largest democracy in the world.
India uses menu to decide where citizens will be vaccinated and who should be vaccinated first. In later vaccination rounds, it could even use the same places as polls, officials say.
Thousands of people across the country tested systems for the transport, cooling and monitoring of vaccines on Saturday and Sunday, and some countries even went through droughts where they pretended to vaccinate volunteers.
A single-story government maternity clinic in a busy corner of New Delhi was ready to begin vaccinations last week. Half of it was turned into a vaccination ward, with lines of social seating in front of people upon their arrival. There were benches behind for those vaccinated so they could wait 30 minutes if they had a bad reaction to the shots.
The clinic’s industrial-sized freezer, top drawer, is marked with the names of vaccinations for children it usually contains – including hepatitis B, measles and rotavirus – and is awaiting delivery of coronavirus vaccinations.
Pareejat Saurabh, the district’s vaccination officer, had enough experienced people for the first wave of vaccinations – intended for health workers and other front-line workers. “We have a big pool of vaccines,” he said. “They’ve been vaccinating for years.”
The AstraZeneca vaccine can be transported and stored for months with normal refrigeration, making it easier to distribute in places where people and healthcare networks are over-funded and under-funded.
AstraZeneca has a production and distribution agreement with the Serum Institute of India to supply more than one billion doses to developing countries. The institute is already the largest producer of vaccines in the world and delivers more than a billion doses per year for everything from polio to measles, mostly for export to emerging markets.
“India’s first Covid-19 vaccine has been approved, is safe, effective and ready for launch in the coming weeks,” said SII’s CEO. tweeted on Sunday.
Serum Institute said that the vaccine will only be manufactured for India until March or April and therefore hopes to start exporting it. 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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