Another company, Bharat Biotech, was producing its own vaccine in collaboration with an Indian government body. India’s drug regulator suddenly approved the company’s Covaxin for public use before it completed its Phase 3 trials. The hasty decision, seemingly motivated by nationalism, created doubt about the vaccine’s safety and efficiency. Health care and other frontline workers were reluctant to take it.
And India, which takes pride in its information technology prowess, set out to develop a digital vaccine management system. The health ministry introduced CoWIN, a website, and Aarogya Setu, a contact tracing mobile application introduced after the pandemic’s outbreak, to handle registrations, create vaccination schedules, direct people to vaccination centers and create vaccination certificates.
The focus on online registrations ignored a fundamental fact: More than half of the Indian population doesn’t have access to the internet, computers or smartphones. Reports in the Indian press suggest a stark class divide in the vaccination drive: The middle and upper classes arrived at the vaccination centers in much greater numbers than the urban and rural poor.
Mr. Modi’s vaccine rollout group proceeded to limit the first phase of the vaccination program to India’s public health system, which caters to about one-third of the population, and left out the privately run health care facilities, which two-thirds of the population rely on. The wise members of the expert group also limited the vaccination sessions to 100 people per session at a facility, which slowed down the process.
After the infections started to rise by mid-February, a combination of political criticism and popular backlash eventually pushed India to correct course. On March 1, as the second phase of the vaccination drive started, eligibility was expanded to citizens above age 60 and those above 45 years with comorbidities.
The government has also roped in the private hospitals, opened up in-person registration at vaccination centers and allowed people to choose their vaccination center. On March 3, the release of the trial data for Bharat Biotech’s Covaxin demonstrating 81 percent clinical efficacy significantly increased trust in it.
As of March 10, 54 days into the drive, India had administered 25 million doses of the vaccine. In number of doses administered, India is third after the United States and Britain, but it still covers merely 1 percent of the country’s 1.3 billion people.
