Manas Dasgupta
NEW DELHI, Jan 18: Even though India’s mass inoculation programme is still suffering from the crisis of confidence with more than 40 per cent of the frontline workers listed for vaccination not turning up in the first three days of the drive, the health experts are confident that the move will start picking up in the coming days with more and more people casting their apprehensions aside.
The drive touted as the world’s biggest immunization programme, was launched in India on Saturday with the inauguration by the prime minister Narendra Modi. For the initial days, 3006 sessions sites were selected across the country to administer vaccines to 100 persons a day at each of the sites.
While the final figure of the third day was yet to be accumulated till late Monday evening, as against over three lakh people identified and listed for the inoculation on the first day and about one lakh on Sunday, only 2.24 lakhs turned up in the first two days. In some of the states, nearly half the people did not turn up to accept the vaccine disrupting the schedule.
Considering that the first phase of recipients of vaccines were only the frontline workers who had been dealing with the Covid patients even during the peak of the pandemic and taking into account that the list was prepared only last days considerably reducing the possibility of their absence from the location of the vaccination, the percentage of absentia was too high and reflected their lack of confidence in the two vaccine candidates or high apprehension of the risk factors.
The data from various States show that the uptake of the vaccine on the first day varied from as low as 16% in Tamil Nadu to about 72% in Kerala. Some of the shortfall was attributed to glitches in the Co-WIN app used to organise the drive. Health officials are also seeing a ‘wait and watch’ approach among many of those registered to receive the vaccine, possibly driven by fears of adverse reactions and also by the discrepancies between the two vaccines that are being provided.
The fact that one of the vaccines, Covaxin, is being distributed on a trial basis without any clear data on its efficacy could also be a deterrent among medical professionals who are the initial recipients. While recipients cannot choose between the vaccines, data from some districts show that Covishield, which has proven efficacy, had more takers than Covaxin.
The medical experts, however, said the media would have to play a major role in building up confidence of the people by highlighting the facts that the side effects of the vaccines were minimal and the impact against Coronavirus was maximum.
It was pointed out that of the 2.24 lakh people vaccinated in the last two days, complaints of some side effects came only from 447 recipients across the country of whom only three persons required hospitalization. The rest had very minor adverse effects that subsided within hours. Such minor adverse impacts like slight headache or pain at the injection site were expected and need not cause any worries to the recipients, the medical experts said.
Of the three people hospitalized, two were released within 48 hours after their health conditions stabilized. Only one patient has remained in the hospital for the third consecutive day.
A matter to worry was the death of a ward boy in a hospital in Uttar Pradesh a day after he received the vaccine on Saturday. A three-member panel of doctors carried out post mortem on the body to ascertain the exact cause of the death came to the conclusion that the person suffered a massive heart attack and the death was not related to the vaccine. His family members, however, refused to accept the post mortem result and maintained that he never had any heart problem or any breathing problems as the panel claimed though recently he had suffered a bout of pneumonia.
The condition of the nurse in the Kolkata hospital who had fainted after receiving the shot was still stated to be stable. Experts pointed out that adverse effect to such a small percentage of recipients in the opening days should help in creating confidence among the people and smoothen up the immunization drive in the coming days when more sessions sites will be opened and larger number of people vaccinated with the improvement in the availability of the vaccines.
The union health ministry, meanwhile, has directed that vaccination programmes in larger states would be conducted only four days a week and in smaller states only two days a week to ensure that other healthcare schemes were not adversely affected by the Corona immunization programme. The exception would be UP which despite being a large states, Corona vaccine would be administered only two days a week.
Meanwhile, the new Corona cases continued to drip in India and so was the fatality rate. India on Monday recorded 145 fresh fatalities due to the coronavirus disease (Covid-19), which is the lowest in eight months, according to Union health ministry data.
The country wide death toll has reached 1,52,419, health ministry’s Covid-19 dashboard showed at 8 am. The recoveries have crossed 1.02 crore. In the last 24 hours, a total of 13,788 new infections were recorded. The number of cases have been falling over the last week. In fact, the daily new cases have been below 20,000 for the past 11 days.
India’s Covid-19 tally had crossed the 20-lakh mark on August 7, 30 lakh on August 23, 40 lakh on September 5 and 50 lakh on September 16. It went past 60 lakh on September 28, 70 lakh on October 11, 80 lakh on October 29, 90 lakh on November 20 and surpassed the one-crore mark on December 19.
According to Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), 18,70,93,036 samples have been tested till January 17 with 5,48,168 samples being tested on Sunday.
