India has rolled out the world’s largest Covid-19 vaccination programme by hesitancy of doctors and healworkers to get vaccinated has been a big drawback.
India’s Covid-19 vaccine drive has been hampered by turnout as low as 22% in some states, as fears over the safety of the vaccine and the spread of misinformation has fuelled widespread hesitancy.
So far the overall national turnout has averaged a lacklustre 64%, while in states such as Tamil Nadu and Punjab, uptake of the vaccine was as low as 22% and 23% in the first two days of the vaccination drive.
The low turnout was attributed to a nervousness about safety among the healthcare workers who were first in line to receive the vaccine, as well as technical difficulties with the app designed to alert people to their vaccine appointments.
Two Covid-19 vaccines have been approved for emergency use in India, the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine – known as Covishield in India – and a domestically developed vaccine called Covaxin, produced by Indian company Bharat Biotech.
The Oxford/AstraZeneva vaccine, which has completed international trials and was found to have about 62% efficacy with two doses, has already been widely distributed in the UK. Britain’s NHS says of the vaccines in use in that country: “The coronavirus vaccine is safe and effective. It gives you the best protection against coronavirus.”
Covaxin has not completed phase 3 trials and so there is no final data on its efficacy, making India one of the few countries rolling out a vaccine still in its trial stages. However, the drugs controller of India said interim data from an ongoing trial of more than 22,000 people showed it was “100% safe” and effective.
Nonetheless, some healthcare professionals in India expressed concerns that they had not been provided with enough data on the vaccines’ safety and efficacy and were nervous at the speed the vaccines were being rolled out.
Dr Namrata Agarwal, a paediatrician in Kashipur, was among those not eager to take the vaccine. “I’m very hesitant,” she said. “All the protocols have been rushed and hurried through. I am not so concerned about the efficacy of a vaccine – that can vary – and I can handle that but what concerns me is its safety and the chance that it might cause harm.”
On Tuesday, Bharat Biotech released a fact sheet of those with underlying heath problems who should avoid the Covaxin vaccine, raising questions about why it had not been publicised before the vaccine was released.
Dr Mandeep Aulakh, a pathologist in Chandigarh, said she would wait a few weeks before getting vaccinated. “The vaccine development was rushed,” she said. “I also have a few allergies so I have not volunteered to take it.”
Such hesitancy has led to lower turnout from healthcare and frontline workers, especially in large metropolitan cities in the country. In Delhi, for instance, only eight people were vaccinated at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), India’s leading public healthcare institution, on Jan. 18, a source-based report said.
(Inputs from The Guardian and Agencies)