The Vaccination Milestone And A Distant Goal

Context: India has surpassed the milestone of administering 100 crore COVID-19 vaccine doses, though several issues persist.

Issues associated with India’s COVID-19 pandemic management

• Risk of another episode of premature celebration: Just months before the disastrous second wave, Prime Minister told the Chief Ministers early in April that “we defeated COVID-19 without vaccines”.
  • Defying the dire predictions of several international experts proved to be a costly mistake as lakhs of Indians paid with their lives.
• Lack of state capacity and accountability question: Government and leaders were nowhere to be seen or heard but reappeared when the situation improved.
  • People gasping for breath and families desperately trying to obtain oxygen and hospital bed.
  • Government yet to give an accurate count of number of people who died as a result of negligence.
• Poor planning and execution: By sudden announcement of lockdown, lakhs of migrant workers were abandoned, left to themselves to trudge thousands of kilometres home to their villages.
• Mismanagement of vaccine procurement: Vaccination drive would have rolled out faster if Government had respected scientific breakthroughs in other countries and placed adequate orders for their vaccines.
  • Wrong policy assessment: Government’s initial “smart” vaccination strategy asserted that “there would be no requirement for vaccination of the whole population of the country”.
  • Policy of states procuring vaccines proved to be another misstep, which was corrected on back of sustained pressure from State governments, Supreme Court, Opposition parties, scientific community, and civil society.
• Gaps in vaccination: In the nine months since we started the vaccination drive, we have only been able to fully vaccinate less than a third of our adult population.
  • Gap between the proportion of population that has got at least one dose and two doses is widest in India.
  • Government is yet to roll out a plan to inoculate our children who could be particularly vulnerable to future waves.
• Rigid approaches: Government refuses to explore diverse methods, including compulsory licensing, to raise our domestic production of vaccines.
  • Government has dealt with queries about booster shoots with complete opaqueness.
• Learning loss: India has had one of the longest school shutdowns worldwide and the damage to their education and growth has been incalculable.
• Free or paid?: Prime Minister likes to emphasise that vaccines are free, but  a significant section of population was forced to pay for vaccines as government centres ran out of them.
• Shifting state responsibility on citizens and private sector: Not even 10% of our population can afford to pay for vaccines, yet the Government continues to allocate 25% of vaccines to the private sector

Way forward: Vaccinating all Indians as quickly as possible is linked to not only the health of our citizens but also the wealth of our nation

• Truth and transparency should be the hallmark of government actions and communication with the public to avoid any vaccine hesitancy.
• Ramp up the pace of the roll out of vaccines to all, completely free, including to children.
• Tripling the present rate of vaccination: 50 lakh doses a day is the rate of vaccination achieved in the first three weeks of October. This rate will have to be tripled to inoculate all eligible adults by year-end.