VACCINE: Ready, Set, Roll-out

With two vaccines having received emergency use authorisation, India is prepared to meet the logistical challenge. For now, the deployment has begun with the vaccination of frontline healthcare workers.

- GINA KRISHNAN

FROM THE MOMENT Chinese scientists sequenced the genome of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, or Covid-19, a year ago, the goal for healthcare teams across governments, the science community, and pharmaceutical companies had been defined: finding a vaccine to control the pandemic.

It has been a long year but that wait seems to be over. As of January 2021, six vaccines had received emergency use authorisation (EUA) internationally: Russia’s Sputnik V, China’s Sinovac Biotech and Sinopharm, Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, and Oxford-AstraZeneca in different markets. In India, the two vaccines with EUAs were Covaxin, developed indigenously by Bharat Biotech India Ltd (BBIL), and Covishield, co-developed by Oxford University and AstraZeneca, and manufactured and marketed in India by Adar Poonawalla’s Serum Institute of India.

Now, the logistics, speed, and efficiency of vaccinations for frontline workers have taken centre stage. State governments, under the direction of the National Expert Group on Vaccination Administration of Covid-19 (NEGVAC), began the vaccination drive on January 16. At this point, India is only at the beginning of the initial phase of vaccination in which 30 million healthcare workers, from the public and private sectors, will be receiving their first shot. In the first six days of the roll-out, over one million had been vaccinated.

A hierarchy of health centres—primary health centres (PHC), subcentres (smaller facilities with lesser infrastructure which operate as subsidiaries of a PHC), and community health centres—has been set up for smooth deployment. (Government-owned facilities are primary sites, while others—a panchayat