PUNE, India – India launched on Saturday one of the most ambitious and complex initiatives in its history: the nationwide deployment of coronavirus vaccines to 1.3 billion people, a venture that stretches from the dangerous parts of the Himalayas to the jungles of the country southern tip.
The campaign is unfolding in a country that has reported more than 10.5 million coronavirus infections, the second largest case load after the United States and 152,093 deaths, the world’s third highest score.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi kicked off the vaccination battle on Saturday with a live television address, as 3,000 centers nationwide would vaccinate a first-round health worker.
“Everyone asked when the vaccine was available,” he said. Modi said. ‘It’s available now. I congratulate all the countrymen on this occasion. ”
The government had hoped to vaccinate some 300,000 people on Saturday, but government data showed 165,000 people had been shot. The plan is to vaccinate millions of other healthcare and front-line workers by spring.
At Kamala Nehru Hospital in Pune, a city about 3.1 million southeast of Mumbai, 100 long-stemmed red roses were neatly stacked on a table next to a bottle of hand sanitizer. Every person registered to receive the Covishield vaccine, developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University and manufactured by the Pune-based Serum Institute of India, would receive a rose.
Covishield and another vaccine called Covaxin have been authorized for emergency use in India this month.
Neither the manufacturer of Covaxin, Bharat Biotech, nor the Indian Council for Medical Research, which contributed to the development of the vaccine, have published data proving that it works. In a consent form of Covaxin at Aundh District Hospital, one of a handful of places in Pune where the vaccine was administered, the manufacturer noted that clinical efficacy had not yet been established.
Dr Rajashree Patil, one of the health workers who received the Covishield vaccine at Kamala Nehru Hospital, said she was excited and nervous. After contracting the coronavirus while working in the government hospital’s emergency room in May, she spent 12 days in a Covid ward in another hospital after losing her sense of smell and taste and having severe fatigue.
“I’m a little worried. In fact, we are on a trial basis, ”said dr. “But I’m glad we got it so we can be corona free one day.”
Another doctor who received the Covishield vaccine at the hospital, Usha Devi Bharmal, said she wanted a chance to dispel people’s fears about coronavirus vaccines. “There are rumors on social media,” she said, adding that she hoped to show that vaccines are a ‘positive thing’.
Mr. Modi has promised to vaccinate 300 million healthcare and front-line employees by July, including police officers and, in some cases, teachers. But so far, the Indian government has bought only 11 million doses of Covishield and 5.5 million doses of Covaxin.
Indian television stations have dr. Randeep Guleria, the director of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi, and a leading government adviser on Covid-19. It was unclear whether Mr. Modi has been vaccinated.
India’s launch, one of the first in a major developing country, comes as millions of people in the United States, Britain, Israel, Canada and the European Union have received at least one dose.
India’s vaccination effort faces a number of obstacles, including a growing sense of complacency about the coronavirus. After peaking at more than 90,000 new cases a day in mid-September, the country’s official infection rates dropped sharply. According to the New York Times database, deaths have dropped by about 30 percent over the past 14 days.
City streets gons. Air and train travel has resumed. Social distancing and wearing of mask standards, which is already lax in many parts of India, has slipped further. This alarms experts, who say that the actual infection rate is probably much worse than official figures suggest.