Gearing up for the jab that liberates

Gearing up for the jab that liberates

The imminent availability of vaccines to inoculate against Covid has meant a proliferation of ideas as to how to proceed. Of course, there must be a rigorous approval process for assorted vaccine candidates, selection of multiple vaccines for distribution, so as to speed up vaccine delivery, instead of waiting for the same producer to churn out the entire supply over many months. There is talk of some needless ‘innovation’, such as an app for self-registration for the vaccine. Certainly, technology must be used to keep track of the population to ensure that they receive the full dosage of the vaccine. The sensible thing to do is to leverage the infrastructure deployed for the universal immunisation programme, augment data management capability, and procure personnel from parts of the civil service on the lines of the secondment process used to conduct elections.

India has, over the years, built up an extremely successful universal immunisation programme inoculating infants against 12 vaccine-preventable diseases. This is the largest immunisation programme in the world — covering 26 million infants and 29 million mothers — but it is small, compared to the Covid challenge. The system must be scaled up for 800 million people (it is enough to vaccinate 60% of the population to protect the whole) against 26 million. The decentralised system that has proved successful for the immunisation programme should serve as the basis of the Covid vaccination programme. Create synergies using the network of nearly 240,000 auxiliary nurse midwives and ASHA health workers, who can be trained to keep track of larger groups than the ones they are used to. Data from decentralised efforts can feed into stateand national-level databases. This would work out better than individuals voluntarily registering themselves.

This decentralised approach is particularly critical once the vaccination effort moves beyond the initial round where the target cohort are healthcare workers and other frontline workers, given the sheer scale of the endeavour.