Heather SImpson is vaccinated against COVID-19 at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas.
Tara Haelle
Heather Simpson dressed up as measles for Halloween in 2019 because it was, as she told her growing following on social media, the “least scary thing I could think of.” The Dallas mom was then a full-fledged anti-vaccine influencer, drawing tens of thousands of likes and comments on her Facebook posts that denied the safety and necessity of childhood vaccinations.
But today most of the thousands who recirculated those posts have abandoned and shunned her. On a mid-April afternoon, Simpson battled traffic into downtown Dallas to reach Baylor University Medical Center for her first dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine against COVID-19. Clad in jeans and a black “Kiss Me I’m Vaccinated” T-shirt and a mask the upbeat thirty-year-old said she wouldn’t back out, despite her anxiety.
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After a tightly centralized vaccination drive that has delivered the required two shots to less than 2% of the population, India is opening up its inoculation strategy in the middle of a raging pandemic. Can the new approach flatten the curve?
Expanding the campaign to all adults below 45 starting next month is a late but welcome move. India’s daily infection rate of almost 350,000 is the worst any country has experienced. Even then, shifting a big part of the financial burden to 28 state governments and letting private hospitals buy shots at 600 to 1200 rupees ($8 to $16) apiece and sell them to patients at even higher prices are both wrong.
Government s New Vaccine Strategy Is Bad Economics Government s New Vaccine Strategy Is Bad Economics
Updated: April 27, 2021 9:36 am IST
After a tightly centralized vaccination drive that has delivered the required two shots to less than 2% of the population, India is opening up its inoculation strategy in the middle of a raging pandemic. Can the new approach flatten the curve?
Expanding the campaign to all adults below 45 starting next month is a late but welcome move. India s daily infection rate of almost 350,000 is the worst any country has experienced. Even then, shifting a big part of the financial burden to 28 state governments and letting private hospitals buy shots at 600 to 1200 rupees ($8 to $16) apiece - and sell them to patients at even higher prices - are both wrong.
Indiaâs virus surge is a flashback, and a warning, to many in Massachusetts
âItâs like experiencing what Boston went through,â only much worse.
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COVID-19 patients received oxygen in Delhi on Sunday.Atul Loke/NYT
For many in the health care field, Indiaâs tragic coronavirus surge â fueling a world-record 352,991 reported cases on Monday alone â is a painful flashback to the darkest days of 2020 when the virus rampaged through Massachusetts and the rest of the United States.
But itâs also a reminder that, while more than 42 percent of the American population has had at least one vaccine shot, immunization has barely begun in many parts of the world â fewer than 10 percent of Indians have received a shot.
Synopsis
After the current spike has peaked, people will still need to be inoculated at a rapid pace to flatten the curve and avert a third buildup. And that’s when the folly of charging Rs 600 or Rs 1,200 for a life-saving vaccine, in a country where the working class was struggling to buy Rs 5 biscuits even before the pandemic, may become clear.
A vaccine queue in Mumbai. The world’s biggest democracy can’t shut anyone out of the market for vaccines.
After a tightly centralised vaccination drive that has delivered the required two shots to less than 2% of the population, India is opening up its inoculation strategy in the middle of a raging pandemic. Can the new approach flatten the curve?