Vaccines vs variants: the race to immunise the developing world
Spread of new Covid strains has made it even more urgent to launch rapid vaccination drives in poorer countries
11 February 2021 - 21:49 By David Pilling, Stephanie Findlay and Bryan Harris
On a balmy day in January on the outskirts of Pune, a city of three million people in Maharashtra state, women in saris are sitting on plastic chairs under a humming fan waiting for their first shot of Covishield as the Oxford/AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine is known in India.
Wearing a white doctor’s coat, Dr Varsha Gaekwad, who is overseeing the first immunisations of frontline healthcare workers in the country of nearly 1.4 billion people, says it will take time for the general public to gain confidence in the vaccine. “Once the health workers are going ahead with it, that means it’s 100% safe,” she says. “That is what the community will see.”..