NEW DELHI (AP) – India began vaccinating health workers on Saturday with probably the world’s largest vaccination campaign COVID-19, joining the ranks of richer countries where the effort is already well under way.
The country is home to some of the largest vaccine producers in the world and has one of the largest vaccination programs. But there is no playbook for the scope of the challenge.
Indian authorities hope to shoot 300 million people, roughly the US population, and several times more than the existing program aimed at 26 million babies. The recipients include 30 million physicians, nurses, and other front-line workers to be followed by 270 million others, who are over 50 or have diseases that make them vulnerable to COVID-19.
For workers who pulled the battered health care system through India through the pandemic, the shots gave confidence that life could return to normal. Lots of bursts of pride.
“I’m excited to be one of the first to get the vaccine,” Nurse Gita Devi said as she lifted her left sleeve to get the shot.
“I’m glad I made a vaccine manufactured by India, and we do not have to depend on it,” Devi said. He treated patients throughout the pandemic in a hospital in Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh.
The first dose was given to a health worker at the All Indian Institute of Medical Sciences in the capital, New Delhi, after Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the campaign with a national television speech.
“We are launching the world’s largest vaccination campaign and it shows the world our ability,” Modi said. He begged citizens to keep their hats off and not believe any “rumors about the safety of the vaccines”.
It was not clear whether Modi (70) took the vaccine himself like other world leaders as an example of the safety of the shot. His government said politicians would not be considered priority groups in the first phase of implementation.
Health officials did not specify what percentage of the nearly 1.4 billion people would be targeted by the campaign. But experts believe it will almost certainly be the biggest global action.
The sheer scale has its obstacles. India, for example, plans to rely heavily on a digital platform to track the delivery and delivery of vaccines. But public health experts point out that the internet remains volatile in large parts of the country, and that some remote towns are not connected at all.
About 100 people will be vaccinated on the first day in each of the 3,006 centers across the country, the Ministry of Health said.
News cameras have captured the rituals of an injection in hundreds of hospitals, highlighting the pent-up hope that vaccination was the first step in overcoming the pandemic that devastated the lives of so many Indians and plagued the country’s economy.
India nodded for emergency use of two vaccines, one developed by Oxford University and UK medicine maker AstraZeneca, and another by Indian company Bharat Biotech, on 4 January. Last week, cargo planes flew 16.5 million shots to various Indian cities.
Health experts are concerned that the shortcut used by the regulation to approve the Bharat Biotech vaccine without waiting for concrete data that could show its effectiveness in preventing coronavirus disease can boost the vaccine’s hesitation . At least one state health minister opposed its use.
The Indian Ministry of Health has voiced the criticism, saying the vaccines are safe but claims that health workers will have no choice but to decide which vaccine they will get themselves.
According to SP SP Kalantri, the director of a rural hospital in Maharashtra, the country worst hit in India, such an approach is worrying because he said the regulatory approval is hasty and not supported by science.
“In a hurry to be populist, the government is making decisions that may not be in the best interests of the common man,” Kalantri said.
Against the background of the increasing global death toll COVID-19 – which reached 2 million on Friday – the clock is ticking to vaccinate as many people as possible. But the campaign was uneven.
In affluent countries, including the United States, Britain, Israel, Canada, and Germany, millions of citizens have already been given some protection with at least one dose of vaccine developed at revolutionary speed and quickly allowed to be used.
But elsewhere, immunization drives have barely come off the ground. Many experts predict another year of loss and suffering in places such as Iran, India, Mexico and Brazil, which together account for a quarter of the deaths worldwide.
India is second to the US with 10.5 million confirmed cases, and ranks third in the number of deaths, behind the US and Brazil, with 152,000.
According to the University of Oxford, more than 35 million doses of different COVID-19 vaccines have been administered worldwide.
While the majority of COVID-19 vaccine doses have already been collected by affluent countries, COVAX, a UN-backed project to deliver shots to developing parts of the world, has a shortage of vaccine, money and logistics help.
As a result, the chief scientist of the World Health Organization has warned that it is highly unlikely that herd immunity – which requires at least 70% of the world to be vaccinated – will be achieved this year. As the disaster has shown, it is not enough to eradicate the virus in a few places.
“Even if it happens in a few pockets, in a few countries, it will not protect people around the world,” said Dr. Soumya Swaminathan said this week.
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Associated Press author Biswajeet Banerjee in Lucknow, India, contributed to this report.