Herd immunity can’t be a choice in India: Centre
NEW DELHI: The herd immunity level is “far away” for the Indian population and it can only be achieved through immunisation by vaccines, a top health ministry official said on Thursday and added that reaching this threshold – believed to be crucial for the Covid-19 outbreak to end – in any other manner will exact too high a cost.
The official also hinted that India is looking at a multilateral, WHO-led mechanism to secure Covid vaccines and the country is yet to begin direct discussions with any of the developers that are leading the development race.
“For a large country like India, herd immunity cannot be a strategic choice or a strategic option... It will come at too high a cost and can be done only through immunisations via vaccination,” 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.
OFFICIAL HINTS THAT INDIA IS LOOKING AT A MULTILATERAL, WHO-LED MECHANISM TO SECURE COVID-19 VACCINES
WASHINGTON: Congressional lawmakers finally got a chance to grill the CEOs of big tech over their dominance and allegations of monopolistic practices that stifle competition.
But it’s not clear how much they advanced their goal of bringing some of the world’s largest companies to heel.
Invective flew on Wednesday as US legislators questioned Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai of Google and Tim Cook of Apple at a hearing of the House judiciary subcommittee on antitrust. For the last year, that panel has probed the business practices of the Silicon Valley giants with an eye to determining if they need to be regulated more heavily, or even broken up.
In nearly five hours, there were few startling revelations or striking confrontations. While the executives faced hostile questioning and frequent interruptions from lawmakers of both parties, little seemed to land more than glancing blows.
The CEOs testified via video to lawmakers, at times appearing together on the committee room display as tiny individual figures in a mostly empty array of squares. Most committee members were seated, masks on, in the hearing room in Washington.
The execs provided lots of data purporting to show how much competition they face and just how valuable their innovation and essential services are to consumers. But they sometimes struggled to answer pointed questions about their business practices. They confronted concerns about alleged political bias, their effect on US democracy and their role in China.