The supply side

Ramping up vaccine availability has become critical

With the daily Covid-19 caseload in India crossing 200,000, surpassing the September 2020 peak, it is clear that the government needs to get its vaccination act together fast. Instead of opting for transparency and clarity on vaccine availability and delivery, the government appears to have retreated into a web of obfuscation. While the government claims that there is no shortage of vaccines even as states such as Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh, Uttar Pradesh, and now Delhi complain of shortages, simple math shows that there is one.

The health ministry claims that it has supplied 131 million doses of Covishield and Covaxin to states till April 14. Of these, 114 million doses have been consumed (this includes wastage) and the states have about 16 million doses with them. Broken down, those numbers actually suggest a supply emergency. At four million doses administered a day, the states could run out of vaccine supplies in four days. The health ministry claims another 20 million doses are in the pipeline, which the states will get at the end of April. That is just five days’ worth of supplies. Clearly, there is a problem on the supply side that the government needs to tackle urgently. If the states are wasting vaccines, as the Centre has claimed, then it should tackle that problem rather than apportioning blame. Wastage occurs for a number of reasons — from crossing the expiry date, to poor storage facilities to the discarding of leftover doses. Investigating these causes and addressing them would go a long way towards proactively addressing the situation.

Doing so becomes vital because the Centre’s big-bang announcement that it has fast-tracked emergency approval of vaccines cleared by the drug regulators of the US, the UK, the European Union (EU), Japan, and the World Health Organization is unlikely to alter India’s vaccine dynamics anytime soon. That’s because all these manufacturers have commitments to deliver a large chunk of their vaccines to these countries, having received upfront payments from those governments. Pfizer, for instance, is committed to supplying 600 million doses to the US by July and 500 million doses to the EU by the end of 2021. That centres hope on the Russian Sputnik V vaccine, which is to be initially imported and distributed in partnership with Dr Reddy’s Laboratories and will be available only in May — it is unclear how many doses will be imported — but domestic production, for which the Russians have tied up with six Indian companies, will begin later this year.

The Indian government has claimed that it remains on top globally in terms of daily doses, but the fact is that just about 111 million people have been vaccinated since January 24, about 14 million of them with both doses, which amounts to just 1 per cent of the population. It is now clear that the decision to rely on just two vaccine manufacturers, one of them in partnership with a government outfit that has been notably slow to ramp up production, has delivered sub-optimal results, and the government needs to meaningfully tackle the Covid-19 crisis. Slogans such as “Tika Utsav” and pronouncements such as delivering vaccines to those who need it rather than want it no longer hold much credibility when it is clear that India and with it the Indian economy are headed for another emergency.