I don’t understand people randomly clamouring for ‘vaccination for all’ without understanding reality.
The primary aim of vaccination is to reduce mortality among the most vulnerable people, and enable society to beat the pandemic.
- Frontline / Health workers were the priority so that they can be safe when helping Indians fight the pandemic.
- Over 88% of deaths have occurred in 45+ age group with almost all of those between 45 & 60 being those where the person had a comorbidity.
Hence these 2 groups of people were prioritised.
Right when approvals were recd in January, India has placed. big orders and as of March 1, we had a stockpile of 10Cr vaccines for the above. Approx 9Cr of these have been used up for the above 2 groups. And now we have opened up for all over 45 (which is approx 30Cr people or 22% of India’s population).
Despite India being the largest producer of vaccines globally our population is so large that there is simply not enough capacity to open up to vaccinate everyone. While efforts are made / will be made to ramp up the supply, we have a manufacturing capacity of approx 7.5Cr vaccine doses per month between Serum Institute & Bharat Biotech, which is already a 100% increase in capacity over their regular capacity.
So long as the supply of vaccines remains limited, there is no option but to prioritise. When people ask to open up vaccine supplies to everyone over 18, do they have ANY idea on how many people are there and how many vaccine doses are available to use currently?
That said, there are 4 complaints that one can have of the government:
- India has exported approx 6.45Cr doses of coronavirus vaccines to various countries, out of which 3.58Cr were commercial contracts, 1.05Cr were supplied as grant assistance (Vaccine Maitri) and 1.82Cr were supplied as per our UN obligations. India could have not done any giveaways and thereby had another 1Cr vaccines available (the commercial ones & the UN ones would have to have gone anyway).
- We should have given grants to Serum and Bharat Biotech to ramp up vaccine manufacturing capacities more than they did.
- We should have placed orders left-right-centre for ALL the possible stock of vaccines we could get our hands on over the past 3 months. I don’t know how many we may have recd since US & Europe have blocked exports but we could definitely have recd some of the Sputnik vaccines.
- We should have allowed Serum Institute to create a parallel free / commercial market in advance, thereby enabling them to sell vaccines to those who can afford it at a higher cost and use that money to expand their capacity. While this sounds crude and would look very much capitalist, it would have enabled Serum to expand even more without government grants.
While all of these 4 complaints are legitimate, simply ignoring the current situation and asking for all over 18 to be vaccinated reeks of cluelessness / ignorance. People should avoid it…