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eagle-eyez · 4 years ago

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The third phase of COVID-19 inoculation in the country saw a rocky start on Saturday amid a shortage of vaccine doses. States like Gujarat, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh, and Rajasthan were among the few that conducted the vaccination of people from 18 to 45 years, but that too only in certain districts.

Several states including Delhi, West Bengal, Assam and Karnataka didn't launch the third phase due to a paucity of vaccine doses, while some like Odisha organized a symbolic inoculation drive for those between 18 and 45 years.

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Additionally, private hospitals like Apollo, Fortis, and Max started inoculating people at limited centres in various cities.

The vaccination drive commenced at Apollo Hospital centres in Hyderabad and Kolkata, but not in Delhi, PTI reported. The report quoted sources as saying that the Delhi branch was waiting for the vaccines doses to arrive and that inoculation in the National Capital is likely to begin either by 3 or 4 May.

Max Healthcare announced the drive will begin at "select hospitals in the network in the NCR of Delhi".

"Presently, vaccines will be available at Max Healthcare facilities at Panchsheel Park, Patparganj, Shalimar Bagh, Rajinder Place (BLK-Max Hospital), Noida and Vaishali in the NCR," its statement read.

As of 12 pm on Saturday, the Fortis Hospital was also awaiting the arrival of vaccine doses, and PTI reported that the vaccination was set to start later in the day.

Fortis Healthcare, in a statement on Friday, had said people in the 18-44 age group will be administered Covaxin for Rs 1,250, which will include the cost of vaccine and administration charges, at its "centres across north India from Saturday".

However, the situation was not as smooth in the states on Saturday. As many as 17 state governments had flagged a shortage of vaccine doses on Friday and expressed doubt about being able to start the much-touted third phase of inoculation as per schedule.

These included Punjab, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Delhi, Maharashtra, West Bengal, Odisha, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Karnataka, Jammu and Kashmir, Arunachal Pradesh, Goa, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan, and Telangana.

How did the states fare?

However, on Saturday, some states rolled out the immunisation drive in select districts and centres.

In Gujarat, vaccination was undertaken in 10 districts, while in Uttar Pradesh the authorities gave jabs to eligible beneficiaries in seven districts.

The districts in Uttar Pradesh where the vaccination started on Saturday are Lucknow, Kanpur, Prayagraj, Varanasi, Gorakhpur, Meerut and Bareilly.

Additional Chief Secretary Amit Mohan Prasad had on Friday said, "From 1 May, vaccination for people between 18-44 years will also start. In the first phase, which will be extended to other cities also, the government will start the vaccination in seven districts that have more than 9,000 active cases."

Lucknow: Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath reaches Avantibai Hospital vaccination centre to inspect the phase 3 #COVID19 vaccination drive, that begins today.

Vaccination for people above 18 years of age has begun today. pic.twitter.com/02GeAqef4L

— ANI UP (@ANINewsUP) May 1, 2021

The Gujarat government conducted the vaccination drive in Ahmedabad, Surat, Vadodara, Rajkot, Bhavnagar, Jamnagar, Kutch, Mehsana, Bharuch and Gandhinagar districts, which are most affected most by the pandemic.

The drive was launched in a limited number of districts as the state government has received only three lakh doses from vaccine manufacturers, as against the order of 2.5 crore doses placed by the state government, PTI quoted officials as saying.

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In Maharashtra's Pune district, officials were quoted as saying that vaccination will begin in 19 centres on Saturday.

Maharashtra: #COVID19 vaccination for people in the age group of 18 to 44 years of age, begins at Kamla Nehru Hospital in Pune. pic.twitter.com/NF9LVjs5v1

— ANI (@ANI) May 1, 2021

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The Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir also began vaccinating people on Saturday "in a phased manner".

The Department of Information and Public Relations said that the vaccination will begin in Jammu and Srinagar.

"COVAXIN will be administered to this age group free of cost. It will be by *prior registration and prior appointment only.* Please do not crowd the vaccination centres without appointment (sic)," it said.

In Tamil Nadu, people were able to get their vaccine shots at the Apollo Hospital in Chennai, ANI reported.

Tamil Nadu: #COVID19 vaccination for people above 18 years of age, begins at Apollo Hospital in Chennai. pic.twitter.com/Er0hKLjGt5

— ANI (@ANI) May 1, 2021

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The Odisha government announced on Friday night that it will "symbolically" start the vaccination drive only in Bhubaneswar. The Times of India reported that the state had received 1.5 lakh vaccine doses late on Friday night. The Naveen Patnaik government had asked the Centre for 25 lakh additional doses of Covishield on Friday.

Chhattisgarh chief minister Bhupesh Baghel said since there was a shortage of vaccines, his government will begin inoculating people who have 'Antyodaya' (poorest of the poor) ration cards.

"From 1 May, we will administer 2.60 crore free vaccine doses to 1.30 crore people in the 18-44 age group. Since vaccine manufacturers are providing doses at higher rates to the states than the Centre, we will incur extra expenditure of Rs 800 crore. We have ordered 25 lakh doses each from Serum Institute of India and Bharat Biotech," Baghel said.

Rajasthan health minister Raghu Sharma also said that people from 18-45 years will be vaccinated from Saturday.

He said vaccine manufacturer Serum Institute of India had initially assured to give only three lakh doses, therefore, it was decided to cover people in the age group of 35-44 in 11 district headquarters from Saturday.

Late on Friday evening, the manufacturer assured 5.44 lakh more doses, following which the vaccination can now be done for people in the age group of 18-44 across the state from May 1, the minister said.

He said there are 3.25 crore beneficiaries in the 18-44 years age category in the state.

Inoculation fails to take off in Assam, Delhi, Karnataka, West Bengal

The AAP government in the National Capital, which is reeling under a severe shortage of medical oxygen to treat COVID-19 patients, appealed to people not to queue up outside vaccination centres on Saturday.

Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal on Friday said that the city will not join the national level rollout of COVID-19 vaccination for people aged 18-44 because the required vaccine doses had not been received.

The Karnataka government had also said that it would "not be possible" for the vaccination drive to begin from Saturday due to a paucity of doses.

The Assam government was also unable to roll out the third phase of the vaccination drive due to the non-receipt of vaccine supply from the Centre, a top NHM official was quoted as saying by PTI.

The process for the third phase of vaccination, as part of the nationwide drive to inoculate younger people "will commence from the moment the corresponding number of vaccines are received from the Government of India", National Health Mission director S Laxmanan.

The Centre has sanctioned five lakh COVID-19 vaccines for the 18+ age group and the process for securing them is in progress, Laxmanan added.

The West Bengal government had also said that the vaccination drive will not begin on Saturday due to the shortage of vaccine doses.

With inputs from agencies

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newsmatters · 4 years ago

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8 States Account For Over 84% Covid-19 Cases in India; Maharashtra, Punjab, MP Among Them

Congress leader Milind Deora has demanded ‘decentralisation’ of Mumbai’s vaccine rollout, and has said that a lockdown in Maharashtra is not the answer. This comes days after chief minister Uddhav Thackeray had asked the administration to prepare for a ‘shutdown-like’ measure. Shiv Sena’s ally NCP too had rejected the idea of such curbs. “Mumbai accounts for 10% of India’s daily #COVID19 cases &…

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economyandfinancialnews · 4 years ago

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Vaccine diplomacy is winning India new friends and goodwill

One can’t blame South Block for riding on the new initiative. As The New York Times says, the Covid-19 vaccine is the latest diplomatic currency

India’s vaccine diplomacy is moving at a trot and has set the pace for countering the Covid-19 pandemic. It was indeed a big boost when, as part of the first virtual Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (QSD) leaders’ meeting on March 12, US President Joe Biden, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga decided to help India produce at least one billion vaccine doses for the Asia-Pacific region.

The Quad initiative aims to reduce manufacturing backlog, speed up vaccination, and defeat some Coronavirus mutations. The funding would be from the US and Japan and logistical help would come from Australia.

South Block claims that India has now become a “vaccine superpower” in tackling the COVID-19 crisis. The new orientation is in tune with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s significant foreign policy approach at projecting India as a global stakeholder. A Wall Street Journal (WSJ) editorial has praised India for its Covid diplomacy.

“India has emerged the surprise leader of the global vaccine diplomacy race. It has exported three times more doses than it’s given its own citizens and can spare even more without hurting its own rollout”, Eric Bellman of WSJ tweeted.

New Delhi has not only managed to thwart China’s Covid diplomacy but also overtaken it. According to the United Nations (UN), India has made more vaccine donations than China, with over eight million doses given away, compared to 7.3 million from China. Both are making vaccines for the rest of the world in addition to getting their vast populations inoculated. Chinese premier Xi Jinping has called Chinese medical supplies to the ‘Health Silk Road,’ a part of China’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). According to the Chinese Foreign Ministry, it plans to provide free vaccines to 69 countries and sell them to 28.

India, too, has adopted vaccine diplomacy as part of its foreign policy. External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar declared in Parliament last week that the ‘Vaccine Maitri (Vaccine friendship)’ programme has “raised India’s standing and generated great international goodwill.” Giving details, the Minister said, “In fact, we supplied 150 nations with medicines, 82 of them as grants by India. As (the production of) our own masks, PPEs and diagnostic kits grew, we made them available to other nations. This generous approach... was also extended to the ‘Vande Bharat Mission.’ Starting from Wuhan, we brought back nationals of other countries while looking after our own.”

“Acting East” and “acting fast” is the new mantra for South Block. The Modi Government’s vaccine initiative got a boost, particularly in the neighbouring countries. For instance, strained ties with Nepal, Bangladesh, the Maldives and Sri Lanka have improved after a timely vaccine supply. Indicating the importance of this, Sri Lanka and Dominica’s leaders personally received Indian-made vaccines at the airport, and the Mongolian Prime Minister took the Indian vaccine.

All these initiatives were possible because India’s massive pharmaceutical industry accounts for about 20 per cent of the world’s generic medicines and more than 60 per cent of all global vaccine production. In fact, India administered 29.74 million doses of the anti-COVID shots to its own citizens by March 15 and the inoculation drive is in full swing. However, the rising number of variants and a second surge of Covid in States like Maharashtra, Punjab, Gujarat, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu is causing concern. There are some concerns about vaccine diplomacy, too, in a few quarters. The first is whether India will be able to meet the demand and the second is whether the vaccine diplomacy is taking place at the expense of the citizens of the country?

Union Health Minister Dr Harsh Vardhan is confident that the Government has addressed these concerns.

The Serum Institute of India (SII) — which produces the Novavax and the AstraZeneca vaccines — recently raised concerns about raw material shortages. Its Chief Executive Officer, Adar Poonawalla, alleged, “The sharing of these raw materials is going to become a critical limiting factor — nobody has been able to address this so far.” Another Indian manufacturer, Biological E, which produces the Johnson and Johnson vaccine, has also raised similar concerns. The other worry is that the country is lagging behind its target. However, there is optimism that other vaccines in the pipeline might ease this burden.

Overall, the covid diplomacy so far has yielded goodwill for India and won it some new friends. One can’t blame South Block for riding on the new initiative. As The New York Times says, the Covid-19 vaccine is the latest diplomatic currency.

The writer is a senior journalist.The views expressed are personal.

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expatimes · 4 years ago

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Vaccine hesitancy in Pakistan heightens risk of COVID resurgence

Islamabad, Pakistan – Pakistan’s success at managing the coronavirus pandemic – with relatively low rates of severe disease and death – and distrust of government-led and foreign-funded public health initiatives has driven vaccine hesitancy, which could put the country’s fragile gains against COVID-19 at risk, say experts and officials.

Since the pandemic began, Pakistan, a country of 220 million people, has registered more than 586,000 cases of the virus, with 13,128 deaths, as per government data.

Its current case-fatality rate of 2.2 percent is comparable to countries such as France and Canada – and is slightly higher than the United States – but is extremely low when its very low rate of testing is accounted for.

Pakistan conducts 0.18 tests per 1,000 people, compared with 4.62 per 1,000 in France or 2.76 per 1,000 in the US, as per government data.

In February, the country opened up vaccinations for hundreds of thousands of front-line healthcare workers across the country, with the arrival of more than 500,000 doses of the Chinese Sinopharm vaccine donated by the Chinese government.

Almost immediately, however, the campaign hit a snag.

“Even in the healthcare community, people thought that taking the vaccine might be harmful,” says a senior health official involved in vaccination efforts in Sindh province, which saw some of the worst of Pakistan’s COVID-19 pandemic.

The official spoke on condition of anonymity.

While thousands of healthcare workers registered themselves for the vaccine, initial rates of vaccination were slow, with doctors saying they were concerned about possible side-effects or reactions to the vaccine.

In the first two weeks after vaccinations began, only 32,582 front-line healthcare workers in Sindh, out of an eligible 78,000, had gotten their first jab of the vaccine, as per government data. In other provinces, the situation was even worse.

“Initially, people did not get vaccinated and a lot of people were concerned about reactions ,” says Dr Ahmed Zeb, a physician in the northwestern city of Peshawar, which saw hospital intensive care units overflowing in June, during Pakistan’s first peak of coronavirus cases.

Dr Faisal Sultan, Pakistan’s health minister, says the hesitancy has been driven by healthcare workers “over-analysing the data”.

“That is a hazard in today’s world, with a number of vaccines available and people looking at all the pros and cons and analysing efficacies, and sometimes losing sight of the fact that for the individual the most important number to remember is the protection against severe disease,” he told Al Jazeera.

“And all the licenced vaccines protect against severe disease in the 90 percent .”

So far, a month after vaccinations began, Pakistan has only administered 197,000 doses of the vaccine, or 0.09 vaccinations per 100 members of the population, putting it almost dead last in countries where vaccination data is available, according to the Our World In Data dataset.

Moreover, as the vaccination programme moves towards getting senior citizens their jabs, the lack of public buy-in is clear.

Only 240,000 out of an estimated eight million citizens over the age of 65, or three percent, have so far registered to receive the vaccine in the next phase, according to government data.

Why the hesitancy?

So what is driving this hesitancy and could low rates of vaccination drive a later resurgence of the coronavirus?

Dr Faisal Mahmood, head of the infectious diseases department at the Karachi-based Aga Khan University Hospital, says there are “many reasons” for the hesitancy but one stands out.

“In a small survey I did, the most common reason concerns regarding safety,” he says. “There is an inherent fear in some to get the vaccine, in some fuelled by distrust of the data, or perhaps due to ‘news’ received from social media.”

Pakistan is currently administering doses of the Chinese Sinopharm vaccine, with 14.6 million doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine due to arrive in two batches in March and between April and May through the global COVAX initiative.

The country has also approved the use of the Russian Sputnik V vaccine.

All three vaccines have passed peer-reviewed phase III clinical trials and are in use in at least 10 countries collectively, according to medical journal The Lancet.

“We always have vaccine hesitancy in Pakistan,” says Dr Wajiha Javed, the head of public health at the multinational pharmaceutical company Getz Pharma’s Pakistan division.

“People don’t understand scientific data, if it gets in the hands of people who are not educated enough to understand it .”

Dr Javed said that qualified doctors in her own company had refused to take the vaccine “because they don’t have good information”.

Rumours of the vaccine’s safety were not helped by the provincial health minister in Punjab province, the country’s largest, saying during a press conference that citizens took the vaccine “at their own risk”.

By the end of February, levels of vaccine uptake by healthcare workers were so low that Sindh’s health minister ordered all government healthcare workers to take the vaccine or face disciplinary action, with similar orders given by directors at main government hospitals.

According to the country’s health ministry, meanwhile, there has not been a single case of serious side-effects from the vaccine reported in Pakistan since vaccinations began.

The concerns around safety alone, however, may not be enough to fully explain the hesitancy, says Maha Rehman, a data analytics specialist and member of faculty at the Lahore-based LUMS University.

“Efficacy data alone is not enough to scepticism around the vaccine rollout,” she says. “The overall level of trust in the health service provider is critical.”

Pakistan consistently ranks low on global healthcare indicators such as access to healthcare and child mortality.

It is one of two countries in the world where polio remains endemic and faces a number of other health challenges.

“People don’t really trust the government,” says Rehman.

“They don’t trust what vaccine they will get, will it be a trial, will it be a placebo? There needs to be an active policy shift that everything is being done very, very transparently.”

Health Minister Sultan says that concern may not be relevant, pointing out that vaccines have been developed by international companies and are being administered worldwide.

“At the end of the day, people do know that the vaccines have not been made in a backroom by anyone, they have been made by leading entities in advanced countries who used their technological muscle billions of dollars,” he says.

That, however, opens a different kind of distrust, say experts.

“There is this conception that it is foreign-funded, so there must be some other agenda, why can’t our own government look into it?” says Dr Javed, explaining a trend that has driven the country’s challenges in eradicating polio.

Polio vaccine refusals in Pakistan have grown because of misinformation about the foreign-funded vaccination programme being harmful to children’s health.

‘What difference does it make?’

In addition to hesitancy around the vaccine itself, doctors say there is also a sense of indifference among the general public regarding the virus, given Pakistan’s relatively low number of deaths and cases of severe disease from COVID-19.

“There is a sense of why should we get it, what difference does it make, corona is not a major issue,” says Dr Adnan Khan, a public health researcher and infectious disease specialist. “Mostly it is indifference, that what’s the need to for getting the vaccine when corona was not that big a deal.”

Khan said that when he got the first dose of his vaccination last week, none of the staff who administered the injection to him had gotten the jab themselves, despite being eligible.

“Even now, I still run into people who say that what is this corona that you are talking about? I still wear my mask and I am probably the only person who is wearing a mask in an overwhelming majority of situations.”

During the country’s first peak of coronavirus cases in June, Pakistan saw cases rising by more than 6,000 each day, with daily deaths peaking at 155 on June 19.

At the time, intensive care units in main cities were beginning to turn patients away for a lack of ventilators.

As cases subsided, however, so did social-distancing measures and government-mandated restrictions on gatherings.

The country’s second peak hit in late November, and appeared to be shallower and more sustained, with cases still not back down to the levels seen in between the peaks.

The slower rate of cases and deaths, say experts, has led to public indifference regarding the seriousness of the virus.

“There are people who don’t even believe in COVID here, so how would you find people to take the vaccine?” asked the senior Sindh health official.

The risks created by the rates of vaccination remaining low, however, are very real.

“The risk to Pakistan or any country where the vaccination rates remain low is that here will be chances of a resurgence and the resurgences will impact our businesses ,” says Health Minister Dr Sultan.

“Our ability to resume normal is heavily dependent on having community-level immunity and the best way to get that is to get vaccinated.”

Dr Mahmood, the infectious disease specialist, agrees, although he also stressed that vaccines were not a silver bullet for the pandemic and that continued social-distancing restrictions were required.

“Without the vaccine, we will always be under the threat of more surges,” he said. “That is not to say that this is not possible even with the vaccine, however, the chances do drop.”

Momentum picking up

For the government, the issue of the slow vaccine distribution is more a question of time and momentum than one of serious vaccine refusal.

“The hesitation is based on doctors and nurses looking and asking each other whether their peers and opinion leaders have taken the vaccine,” says Dr Sultan.

“This is not strange, it happens in every country and is happening in Pakistan as well.

“Gradually we are seeing a good pick up of it. And we are seeing that as well.”

This week, daily vaccination numbers went up to about 15,000 per day countrywide, from 3,000 per day earlier in the campaign, according to government data.

Doctors, too, say they are beginning to see the campaign pick up momentum.

“Once people started getting the vaccinations and they saw that people are not suffering side effects ,” says Dr Zeb, the physician in Peshawar.

“The awareness is getting better and the number of people who are getting vaccinated is increasing.”

Zeb, who works with a doctors’ union, said his organisation’s data showed that only 36 healthcare workers were vaccinated in the first four days of the campaign in Peshawar but that there were currently between 70 and 80 doctors being vaccinated each day at his hospital alone.

As momentum for vaccinations picks up, Pakistan’s challenges may shift from being demand-side to supply-side.

Currently, the country has confirmed supplies of roughly 15.85 million doses of the Sinopharm and Oxford University-AstraZeneca vaccines (both requiring two doses per person) arriving through Chinese government grants and the COVAX initiative by the end of May.

In a country of 220 million, that will not be near enough to cover enough of the population to establish herd immunity.

“By the end of the year, our estimate is that about between 45 to 50 million people,” says Health Minister Sultan.

“We will get those from whatever entities make it available, largely COVAX and then whatever .”

Pakistan’s government has also authorised the private sector to acquire government-approved vaccines for sale, although no company has yet been able to do so due to a shortage of global vaccine supplies.

“If someone wants to buy it separately, we will not stop them, that path is available,” says Sultan.

“We will control the prices, but the price control will be reasonable.”

Others in the sector, however, are sceptical that the distribution of vaccines will remain equitable if there is a shortage of free government vaccines and an open private market.

“The haves will have it and the have-nots will not be able to afford it,” says Dr Javed.

Read full article: https://expatimes.com/?p=18763&feed_id=36276

#Asia #Coronaviruspandemic #COVID #heightens #hesitancy #News #Pakistan #resurgence #risk #vaccine

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