BackGo all syringes blazing against this covid wave
At last, the Centre has given all vaccines okayed by major regulators abroad an in-principle go-ahead in India. This could’ve been done earlier. Let’s lose no further time against covid-19
PremiumThis is a big decision that could tilt the scales in India’s favour in our battle against the deadly corona- virus, whose resurgence has revived painful memories of last year’s migrant crisis and raised the spectre of another suffocating lockdown. On Tuesday, the government fast-tracked approvals of all covid vaccines that have received okays for emergency use from credible foreign regulators—such as those of the US, UK, EU and Japan—and also all jabs that feature on the World Health Organization’s emergency-use list. These vaccines need not be put through local clinical trials for efficacy and safety, having passed tests abroad, but will still be required to undergo post-approval ‘bridging trials’ designed to assess their effect on Indians. Moreover, the first 100 beneficiaries of each fast-track entrant shall be monitored for a week to gauge safety outcomes before it can be widely deployed. This shift in stance, made just a day after Russia’s Sputnik-V jab got an Indian go-ahead, should serve to widen our arsenal against covid infections. So far, we have relied on Serum Institute of India’s (SII’s) Covishield and Bharat Biotech’s indigenous Covaxin for our inoculation drive. This effort can now be joined by Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose vaccine (though, like SII’s, it is under watch for a tiny risk of blood-clots) and a couple of mRNA jabs that represent a recent leap of technology: Moderna’s and BioNTech-Pfizer’s.
While Tuesday’s decision has sent out ripples of relief, rearguard action always lacks the punch that an anticipatory thrust packs. Surely, we should not have waited for our daily count of infections to surpass the peak it hit during last year’s first wave to open the sluice gates. As new jabs would take time to arrive, we may have to content ourselves with only a trickle for now. Signs of a second wave, however, were evident several weeks ago. Experts had warned of higher infectivity this time around. That our progress on vaccination was too slow had also been pointed out. Today, far too many people are contracting the virus, even as the country’s death toll rises alarmingly. The speed of the contagion’s spread suggests far worse to come. With the pandemic raging in various other parts of the world, a global vaccine shortage was easy to foresee. But, sadly, we appear to have made two errors of judgement, the second flowing from the first. One, we were so relieved to see last year’s wave subside, even without protective jabs, that the country was lulled into a false sense of security. Complacency got the better of us. Two, we took our status as the ‘world’s vaccine-maker’ too seriously for our own good. We saw it as an endorsement of our productive power, perhaps even of our new dedication to self-reliance, and failed to pull all forces together to the task of large-scale vaccine production. Take the case of SII, a private firm. It got no state support, could not rely on earnings off a vaccine market to subsidize cheap supplies to the Centre, found its export avenues blocked, and ran short of funds for capacity expansion. This offers a stark study in contrast with the West, where public money was used to aid vaccine makers.
The sclerotic approach visible in India can be attributed partly to our bureaucracy, which has a poor record of working smoothly with private partners. Blame this on an old suspicion of profit as a motive, something that has long held India back. Yet, it’s for our political leadership to jolt our governance systems out of inertia. There’s no further time to lose. Let’s now go all syringes blazing to snuff out this pandemic.
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