How India plans to vaccinate against coronavirus

The coronavirus vaccine, once available, will be distributed under a special Covid-19 immunisation programme with the Centre procuring the doses directly and making it available for priority groups, as per official sources. States have been asked not to chart separate pathways.

TIMESOFINDIA.COM

Updated On Oct 24, 2020 at 05:21 AM IST

NEW DELHI: The government is in the process of setting up what could be one of the most ambitious Covid-19 vaccination plans the world has ever seen. The plan would involve over billions of rupees, millions of health workers and volunteers and astronomical-sized state machinery to vaccinate over 1.3 billion people along with millions of newborns.

Here is a look at how the Centre plans to vaccinate against the coronavirus, once the vaccine is available.

How will the vaccine be distributed?
The coronavirus vaccine, once available, will be distributed under a special Covid-19 immunisation programme with the Centre procuring the doses directly and making it available for priority groups, as per official sources.

The Centre will procure the vaccine directly to make it available to the priority groups free-of-charge through the existing network of states and districts. States have been asked not to chart separate pathways of procurement.

The existing digital platform and processes used for the Universal Immunisation Programme (UIP) are being enhanced to track Covid-19 vaccine administration and movement - from procurement to storage to distribution to individual beneficiaries - as and when the vaccine becomes available, health ministry officials said.

Also, online training modules are being developed for vaccinators. The digital platform that is being enhanced is Electronic Vaccine Intelligence Network (eVIN), which provides real-time information on vaccine stocks and storage temperatures across all cold chain points in the country under UIP.

The National Expert Committee on Vaccine Administration for Covid-19 has already mapped the existing cold chain being utilised under the government's immunisation programme and has also made a projection of the additional requirement, health ministry officials had said earlier.

Presently, the committee is engaged in mapping private sector facilities that could serve the needs of supplementing the cold chain equipment.

Union health minister Harsh Vardhan has said that the Centre estimates to receive and utilise 40-50 crore doses of Covid-19 vaccine covering around 25 crore people by July next year.

The biggest challenge for India will be building up cold-chain logistics to distribute vaccines across India in a short period of time, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, the founder and chairman of Biocon Ltd., said at the Bloomberg India Economic Forum last week.

Who are the people in the priority groups?
The Centre, with the help of state and Union territory governments, has started the process of identifying around 30 crore priority beneficiaries who would be given the vaccine dose in the initial phase.

The government has demarcated four categories of people for vaccination in the initial phase - around one crore healthcare professionals including doctors, MBBS students, nurses and ASHA workers, etc.; around two crore frontline workers including municipal corporation workers, personnel of the police and armed forces; about 26 crore people aged above 50; and a special group of those below 50 years of age with co-morbidities and requiring specialised care.

"States have been asked to enlist by mid-November the priority population groups...Each person in the immunisation list will be linked with their Aadhaar cards so as to track them," a source said.

How much will the vaccine cost?
The government has set aside about Rs 50,000 crore ($7 billion) to vaccinate Indian citizens, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi's administration estimates an all-in cost of about $6-$7 (approximately Rs 400-500) per person in the nation of 1.3 billion.

However, experts believe that a lot will depend upon negotiations. "I doubt that the marginal cost of a vaccine would be anything close to that number at the volumes that India will purchase. There's one large buyer - India - and one large seller, potentially," said Ramanan Laxminarayan, director of the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy. "A lot will come down to negotiations and the government has a lot more power in these situations."

Adar Poonawalla, head of the Serum Institute of India Pvt, the world's largest manufacturer of vaccines, has predicted the nation would need about Rs 800 billion to procure and inoculate people living everywhere from the Himalayas to the remote Andaman & Nicobar Islands. Apart from buying the treatment, transporting them from manufacturing sites would be a massive undertaking.

By one estimate, airlifting single-dose regimens to protect the world's population would require space in about 8,000 cargo planes.

What is the Universal Immunisation Programme?
Under UIP, children, adolescents and pregnant women are currently vaccinated against vaccine-preventable diseases free-of-cost by the state.

This special Covid-19 immunisation programme would run in parallel with the Universal Immunisation Programme, but will use its processes, technology and network of the existing vaccine distribution framework, sources said.

The biggest benefit that India has is that it has a robust immunisation programme in place and it is implementing the largest immunisation programme of the world, with nearly 27 million newborns targeted for immunisation annually, the minister said.

"We have an established infrastructure for supply, storage and delivery of vaccines to the last mile, under our Universal Immunisation Programme, where we are administering around 600 million doses to children every year," health minister Harsh Vardhan said.(With inputs from agencies)