AA Edit | Govt needs to do more to push vaccine awareness

The news of Haryana health minister Anil Vij contracting Covid-19 after receiving a shot of Covaxin, the coronavirus vaccine that Indian company Bharat Biotech International Ltd has developed in association with the Indian Council for Medical Research, may be seen as a setback but the larger point the incident flags is the need for a far better understanding of the defence that human beings have created against the killer micro-organism. It has now emerged that the state minister, who volunteered for the trial, had received only one shot of the vaccine and that he had missed the second one, which should have been administered 28 days after the first one. Though anyone’s body should start developing immunity with the first dose itself, it would take the second dose to make it fairly foolproof.

According to the company, the Covaxin trials are based on a two-dose schedule, which are administered 28 days apart. The vaccine’s efficacy will be determined two weeks after the second dose. As per the data the company has published, it expects a certain number of infections among the volunteers, and the minister contracting the disease is not entirely unexpected. It may be remembered that the efficiency of the Pfizer vaccine that has been given a licence in the United Kingdom as well as Bahrain is only 95 per cent.

So, it’s no reason to be less confident about the indigenous vaccine development process that is now under way. It should not also impact India’s partnership in the development and manufacture of the other vaccines as well -- Indian volunteers are part of the clinical trial of vaccines developed in foreign countries; Indian companies are gearing up for the mass production of vaccines once they receive the authentication. 

However, the incident related to the Haryana minister has some lessons for the government. It has been working with the stakeholders on the details of the way people are to be vaccinated. It has a lot of ground such as finalising the norms for preparing the priority list, arranging the logistics, creating a cold chain and setting up the last mile inoculation mechanism to cover. It looks like the government has taken one area for granted -- public awareness about the vaccine. That the government had made no plans as such on handling Covid-19 when it struck is obvious -- most decisions were haphazard, giving little thought on their impact on the people at the bottom. It is noteworthy that the government later launched awareness campaigns about the pandemic. And given that the number of daily cases has not risen the way it was projected, it would be safe to assume that the campaign had played its part.     

The government should think of designing a similar campaign on the need for vaccination and its protocols. If a minister can skip a dose for whatever reason, it is highly likely that millions of Indians could do something similar due to sheer ignorance or negligence, defeating the very purpose of the entire exercise. This is a serious public health issue, and the government must use whatever tools it has to make it a success. The campaign on vaccination looks as important as vaccination itself.