NEW DELHI – India’s emergency authorization for two Covid-19 vaccines over the weekend kicks off a massive and logistically frightening government vaccination campaign in the world’s second most populous nation, where the new coronavirus 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 inhabitants by mid-year, using an army of doctors, nurses, police, soldiers and others to deliver and administer doses across the country, from remote villages in the Himalayas to megacities 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 the facilities to make this happen.”
An exercise in vaccination practice.
Photograph:
Partha Sarkar / Xinhua / Zuma Press
On Saturday, India’s drug regulators gave the go-ahead for the emergency use of a vaccine made by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca PLC which is already being mass produced and stored in the country.
They also authorized a vaccine produced by Indian manufacturer Bharat Biotech, saying that the vaccine from the Hyderabad-based company, which is in the final stages of clinical testing, was safe and generated a robust immune response in those who received it.
Authorities said they gave special approval in part to ensure that India has different options in case the virus mutates to make some vaccines ineffective.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that approvals marked “a decisive turning point” in India’s battle with the virus, which, in addition to sickening and killing a large number, also contributed to a contraction in economic production of more than 15% year on year in the six months ended September 30.
A vaccination site in Rajasthan.
Photograph:
Himanshu Sharma / NurPhoto / Zuma Press
India has been preparing for the launch of a vaccine for months, creating lists of tens of millions of people who will receive their first doses, expanding the government’s vaccine supply chain, building an app to track vaccine and vaccine doses and training legions of people who will help.
The South Asian country has a national network of centers that vaccinate millions of babies every year. His successful campaign to eradicate polio also helped to build a strong network of experts and volunteers and a network of refrigerators that covers most of the country.
A simulated exercise for vaccination at a health center.
Photograph:
Himanshu Sharma / NurPhoto / Zuma Press
Covid-19’s vaccination plans are on a much larger scale, potentially involving billions of vaccines. To achieve this, India is also using its knowledge of another regular event involving hundreds of millions of people: elections in the world’s largest democracy.
India is using voter lists to decide where citizens will be vaccinated and who should be vaccinated first. In subsequent rounds of vaccination, you can even use the same polling booth locations, officials say.
Thousands of people across the country tested vaccine transport, cooling and monitoring systems on Saturday and Sunday, and some states even ran tests where they pretended to inoculate volunteers.
A one-story government maternity hospital in a busy corner of New Delhi was preparing last week to start vaccination. Half of it had been turned into a vaccination ward, with rows of socially distant seats in front for arriving people. There were sofas on the back for those vaccinated so they could wait 30 minutes if they had a negative reaction to the vaccines.
The clinic’s top-loading freezer is labeled with vaccine names for children it normally contains – including hepatitis B, measles and rotavirus – and is awaiting delivery of vaccines against the coronavirus.
For the first wave of vaccinations – aimed at health professionals and other frontline professionals – there are already people experienced enough to deliver the vaccines, 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, making it easier to distribute in places where people and healthcare networks are overloaded and under-resourced.
AstraZeneca has a manufacturing and distribution contract with the Serum Institute of India to supply more than a billion doses to developing countries. The institute is already the world’s largest manufacturer of vaccines by volume, producing more than one billion doses a year for everything from polio to measles, mainly for export to emerging markets.
“India’s first Covid-19 vaccine is approved, safe, effective and ready to be launched in the coming weeks,” the SII chief executive tweeted Sunday.
The Sorum Institute said it will manufacture the vaccine only for India by March or April and that it hopes to start exporting it too. The price of the first 100 million doses delivered to the government in India will be about $ 2.75 a dose. Thereafter, it will be sold to the private sector for about $ 13.70 a dose.
Write to Eric Bellman at [email protected] and Vibhuti Agarwal at [email protected]
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