Indians mobilise for a massive vaccine push

NEW DELHI: India kicked off one of the world’s biggest coronavirus vaccination drives, as US drugs giant Pfizer moved to calm fears in Europe about delays to deliveries of its vaccine.

The United Nations intensified its push to speed up vaccine rollout globally, particularly to poorer countries, as officially recorded virus deaths surged past 2 million.

India, home to 1.3 billion people, has the world’s second-biggest number of recorded cases behind the US. The government aims to inoculate 300 million people by July with Covishield – developed by AstraZeneca and made by India’s Serum Institute – or the homegrown Covaxin.

Covaxin is still in clinical trials and recipients had to sign a consent form that said the “clinical efficacy … is yet to be established”.

But Prime Minister Narendra Modi, launching the immunisation campaign, urged people to reject “propaganda and rumours” about the indigenous vaccine.

The government says it has about 150,000 specially trained staff involved in the rollout and has ramped up security to avoid doses ending up on the black market.

While India pledges big strides in its rollout, Europe’s efforts continued to stutter.

Pfizer tried to allay concern among European Union countries that shipments of its vaccines would slow in January because of work at its Belgian plant to increase capacity.

Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech said the work would allow them to scale up production in the second quarter.

Deliveries would be back to the original schedule to the EU from the week of January 25, they pledged.

But there are concerns in hard-hit Europe the Pfizer delays could further slow a vaccine rollout that has already faced heavy criticism.

Ministers from several Nordic and Baltic countries said the situation was “unacceptable” and “decreases the credibility of the vaccination process”.

As cases mount, nations from Italy to Brazil have doubled down on restrictions and many places have tightened travel curbs in a bid to control new strains of the virus emerging in Brazil and South Africa.

France saw a 6pm curfew come into force, while Spain said although it was ruling out another lockdown for now, regions could extend local curfews.

China, which had all but wiped out the virus, is meanwhile battling a new cluster near Beijing with a series of lockdowns.

Serbia announced that it had received 1 million doses of the Chinese-made Sinopharm vaccine, one of the first European countries to do so.