‘Better vaccine messaging needed’

AS INFECTION cases rise, the country is struggling to keep up with demands for vaccination.

Two months ago, the health minister said India was in the “end game” of the pandemic as it sent millions of vaccines abroad, but now exports have stopped and people are desperate to be inoculated.

Until now, only “frontline” workers like medical staff, people over 45 and those with preexisting illnesses have got the Oxford-AstraZeneca (known as Covishield) or Covaxin shots.

So far, around 150 million shots have been administered, which is 11.5 per cent of the population of 1.3 billion. Just 25 million have had two doses.

All adults, around 600 million, are now eligible to get vaccinated, but many states said they have insufficient stocks.

“Half my family is positive, so everybody wanted to get vaccinated,” data scientist Megha Srivastava, 35, said in Delhi. “It won’t completely protect us, but it will ensure that even if we get infected, we’ll recover.”

Dr Lancelot Pinto, a consultant respirologist at Mumbai’s PD Hinduja Hospital, acknowledged that “vaccine shortages are a real problem right now”.

He told Eastern Eye that some people who took the first dose of the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine are struggling to get their second dose.

There also could have been better communication about vaccines saving lives, he added.

“We needed to be proactive, telling people that if you hear stories of individuals getting infected after receiving two doses of the vaccine, it’s not shocking at all, it’s expected.

“The question should be, how many of them had severe disease, how many of them ended up in a hospital? How many of them passed away because of the disease? And that number is a really small fraction. But unfortunately, this was not out there.

“People on social media started saying, ‘My friend had two doses and got the disease… so why are we taking the vaccine to begin with?’ I think that’s where communication plays a very important role.

“We have a whole database of healthcare workers now, who received two doses of the vaccine. All the government needs to do is release that database saying, during the current surge, how many of them actually got infected? What proportion of them ended up in an ICU? What proportion of them died? And data like that being out there in the public domain can raise much more confidence (in vaccines).”