India Begins One of the World’s Biggest Coronavirus Vaccine Rollouts

India Begins One of the World’s Biggest Coronavirus Vaccine Rollouts.

India today, Saturday, January 16, begins one of the world’s biggest coronavirus vaccine programmes, a colossal and complex task compounded by safety worries, shaky infrastructure and public scepticism. The world’s second-most populous nation hopes to inoculate around 300 million of its 1.3 billion people by July — a number equal to almost the entire US population.

Health workers, people over 50 and those deemed at high-risk are prioritised to receive one of two approved vaccines, although one has yet to complete clinical trials. On day one around 300,000 people will receive the first of two doses, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi set to launch the programme virtually in New Delhi.

Authorities say they are drawing on their experience with elections and child immunisation programmes for polio and tuberculosis in rolling out the vaccine. About 150,000 staff in 700 districts have been specially trained, and India has held several national dry runs involving mock transportation of vaccines.

But in an enormous, impoverished nation with often shoddy transport networks and one of the world’s worst-funded healthcare systems, it is still a daunting undertaking. Regular child inoculations are a “much smaller game” and vaccinating against Covid-19 will be “deeply challenging”, said Satyajit Rath from the National Institute of Immunology.

Both vaccines approved so far need to be kept refrigerated at all times, and others being developed will need to be stored at ultra-low temperatures too. To account for this, India has readied tens of thousands of refrigeration tools — including 45,000 ice-lined refrigerators, 41,000 deep freezers and 300 solar refrigerators.

They will be sorely needed when India’s scorching summer rolls around. But in one recent exercise in rural Uttar Pradesh, a health worker was pictured transporting boxes of dummy vials on the handlebars of his bicycle.

There are also concerns about plans to manage the entire process digitally via India’s own app, CoWIN — of which there are already several fake versions. During one recent practice in IT hub Bangalore, workers at one health centre had to use a cellphone hotspot to go online because their network was down.

Authorities also need to make sure that vaccine doses do not “go missing” and end up being sold on India’s large black market for medicines.

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