Herd immunity can’t be a choice in India: Centre
cination,” said Rajesh Bhushan, the officer on special duty, health ministry, during a briefing on Thursday.
The march of an infectious disease such as Covid-19 can be halted only when there is a large enough proportion of the population that is immune to it – a threshold known as herd immunity. Besides a vaccine, which is yet to be approved, the only way people become immune is if they have had the disease and recovered.
“Government has not signed an agreement with any vaccine manufacturing company. There are multiple stakeholders within and outside government and ministry of health has started actively engaging with such stakeholders. It’s too premature to comment on supply and distribution of vaccine at this stage but whenever it comes it has to be deployed on a much larger scale than the existing vaccines,” said Bhushan.
Bhushan also said the question on who would get the vaccine first was still under deliberation at the health ministry.
World over, there are roughly 25 vaccines in human trial phases – including two from India. Three vaccine candidates – one each from US, UK and China – are largely regarded as the frontrunners since they are now at advanced stages of experiments among people.
Several countries have entered into commercial deals with the UK candidate’s developer Astrazeneca and the US candidate’s Moderna.
“India is in touch with global multilateral organisations such as GAVI, CEPI, WHO etc. to see how it can be made accessible for people in India,” said Bhushan. GAVI (Gavi-the Vaccine Alliance) and CEPI (Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations) have partnered with WHO and several of the vaccine developers to help pool resources for the production, acquisition of distribution of any potential Covid-19 vaccine, with fair access being one of the factors that they will keep in mind.
The two Indian vaccine candidates are Bharat Biotech’s Covaxin and Zydus Cadila’s Zycov-d, both in phase I/II human trials for determining its safety and dosage.
About 141 vaccine candidates globally are in the pre-clinical stage, which means these are into research stages or in preclinical trials where animal experiments are taking place to generate toxicity data.
The virus strain isolated for Bharat Biotech’s Covaxin was isolated at the Indian Council of Medical Research-national Institute of Virology (ICMRNIV) in Pune, and transferred to the company. It received central drugs controller’s approval for early human trials on June 29.
Zydus Cadila’s vaccine candidate is called Zycov-d, a DNA plasmid vaccine that received drug controller’s approval for early human trials on July 2. The candidate was developed indigenously at the company’s Vaccine Technology Centre in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, and uses DNA to train the body to recognise parts of Sars-cov-2 and build an immune response.
Experts said vaccine is the most cost-effective way to achieve immunity against an infectious disease.
“The vaccine will be ultimate to check the disease spread but we don’t know when an effective vaccine will be available for use even though all our efforts are being directed towards making it happen as soon as possible. A good vaccine is the most cost-effective way of preventing a disease,” said Dr Amita Jain, head, microbiology department, KGMU, Lucknow.
Till the time a vaccine comes, Covid-19 appropriate behaviour such as wearing a mask, maintaining physical distancing, and maintaining hand hygiene, etc, will work the best, Bhushan said at the briefing.
As the Covid-19 outbreak turned into a pandemic, epidemiologists around the world said countries would need to use a combination of suppression (not letting the virus spread) and mitigation (focussing on helping infected people and letting the virus spread in a limited manner to allow immunity to build up) strategies till a vaccine is developed.
For India, the second part has been deemed as not feasible since the country has fewer hospitals per person than developed countries – which raises the possibility of health services being overwhelmed.
Wow, she speaks such free-flowing Hindi!
Now, this might sound like an awkward compliment in the Hindi-speaking Delhi region. But then Hindi is not Veena’s first language.
“Main Tamil Nadu ki hoon,” she says, giving away her origins in Hindi.
This afternoon Veena is chatting on Whatsapp video from the isolation of her groundfloor home in Gurugram’s Sector 51, which she shares with her husband and their two daughters. During the coronavirus-triggered lockdown, Veena, 39, launched a multi-lingual Youtube channel called Gurugram Sisters, which basically consists of the dance and song performances etc., of two young sisters. “They are my daughters, Shivli and Aditri,” reveals Veena, effortlessly switching into an equally fluent English.
Veena grew up in Coimbatore’s Kuniamuthur neighbourhood. While a computer engineer student in a college of the same city, she met Visheshwar Dayal, a student hailing from Delhi’s Kamla Nagar neighbourhood. Their friendship evolved into love and a few years the city you never see later Veena Jayam stepped into the Hindi speaking world by becoming Veena Mathur. “I was the first one in my entire khandaan to marry a non-tamilian.”
Veena was 24.
It is considered relatively easy to learn a new language as a child, but not so as an adult when one’s first language has already taken over much of the linguistic mind space. Veena agrees with this theory and gratefully credits her husband’s parents in helping her with Hindi. “They gently nudged me to chat with them in whatever Hindi phrases I could manage.” At first the Tamilian was quite shy to speak outside—they were living in Indore then—fearing that people might laugh at her attempts. “But almost everyone would praise me for being so good with a language that wasn’t my own.”
Truth be told, Veena confides that learning Tamil is slightly more tough than Hindi. “After all, Sanskrit came much after Tamil... and some pronunciations in Tamil take time to master.”
Anyhow, the Tamil-hindi speaker has been living in the Delhi region—gurugram specifically—since