Overcoming vaccine hesitancy the key to a successful Covid-19 inoculation drive
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A week into its Covid-19 vaccination drive, India needs to overcome its vaccine hesitancy that is hobbling efforts.
Agencies
The bigger challenge to tackle hesitancy, though, might well be when the vaccine drive is opened to those beyond frontline workers.
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Please do come. There is no queue, it won’t take long,” Akash Kumar Jha says persuasively, as he speaks on the phone to a doctor at New Delhi’s Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital. It’s one of the many calls the hospital’s first officer for vaccination is making on Thursday morning to coax colleagues into coming in and rolling up their sleeves for a shot of Covaxin, one of the two vaccines India has approved to immunise the country against Covid-19. Jha has good reason to be as convincing as possible it had been five days since India launched its vaccine drive but the numbers at RML Hospital were not encourag
Many countries are trying to secure anti-COVID-19 doses from India, the world's largest manufacturer of vaccines. But India's domestic vaccination demand is also huge.
Many countries are trying to secure anti-COVID-19 doses from India, the world's largest manufacturer of vaccines. But India's domestic vaccination demand is also huge.
Even as India readies for the mass immunisation drive, there has been a steady decline in the daily number of cases and deaths, since the peak of mid-September. Less than 300 daily coronavirus deaths were recorded in the country for the last 16 days with the national recovery rate improving to 96.42 per cent, according to data from the union health ministry. Given that we will never know the true numbers during the pandemic or even after it, the trajectory is important and it has been on the downward slope, which leads to some pressing questions - Is the worst of the pandemic over? Are the numbers for real or there are other reasons like less testing or non-reporting of cases? Can we say that we are safe now? Will the virus pick up pace and spread again in the future, etc.
Updated:
January 09, 2021 22:19 IST
With the daily cases coming down, many people who would have volunteered would not see the urgency now as earlier
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The alternative: Vaccine manufacturers can carry out phase-3 trials outside India and efficacy results from such trials would be accepted by the Indian regulator for vaccine approval.
| Photo Credit:
Irina Velichkina
With the daily cases coming down, many people who would have volunteered would not see the urgency now as earlier
On January 1, Pune-based Serum Institute’s Covishield vaccine was granted permission for restricted use, while Bharat Biotech’s Covaxin got a similar approval the next day with certain other riders. With two vaccines now being greenlighted for restricted use, the four high-risk priority groups, beginning with frontline health-care workers, will soon begin getting vaccinated. Nearly 300 million people belonging to the four priority groups are to be vaccinated with either of th