This edition’s cover story chronicles the covid numbers through the first and second waves, the pandemic explained in graphs, plots the crests and the troughs, the decline and the ferocity of the mutant re-emergence. It also tabulates the vaccination status of our country, the available vaccines, the production capacities and their rollouts plus the administrative strategies. And it looks at the Vaccine Export question, which has been vilified in political slugfest. Our data centric examination of the issue shows that this was partly humanitarian responsiveness and partly commercial contractual obligations of the vaccine manufacturer, SII, makers of Covishield.
As the first wave tapered, India initially saw high levels of vaccine hesitancy. Priority group vaccination involving people dealing with covid patients commenced on January 16, 2021 and the target was to administer doses to 3 crore frontline workers. However, uptake was slow and after 6 weeks of the vaccination programme, only 1.36 crore doses were administered, a low coverage.
Meanwhile, the government was beseeched with vaccine supply calls from the neighborhood and LDCs. Since humanitarian relief is a core of India’s foreign policy, India supplied a grant of total 1.07 crore doses to 47 countries. Seven neighboring countries (Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Afghanistan, Myanmar, Sri Lanka and Maldives) got 78.50 lakh, while 40 other nations including UN Peacekeepers got a total of 28.65 lakh. Everything was declared transparently and India was thanked by the global community at a time when many developed nations were being listed as vaccine hoarders by global PPP, GAVI, which drives immunization for half of world’s children. It was certainly a time of high moral achievement for India.
SII exported 3.58 crore doses under a commercial arrangement with its UK based technology supplier and 1.99 crore doses were exported by them to GAVI Covax scheme, which supplies such vaccines to LDCs. Thus in all, a total 6.64 crore vaccine doses were exported. After the onset of the second wave, exports were completely stopped.
The first wave was vanquished with strong willpower and stringent lockdown. However the gains were squandered by dismantling health infra and it seemed that vanquishing the pandemic had fallen off the radar; the Rs 35K crore budgetary announcement made for this very purpose posted no milestones. India has expanded its vaccine basket but it is a tough challenge. As on May 10, 2021 a total of 17.11 crore vaccination doses had been given, out of which 13.52 crore have taken dose 1 only, while 3.59 crore have taken both the doses. Till the whole population is vaccinated, which will be the end of this year, India will have to live with intermittent lockdowns and sufferings.
