Who failed India?

There must be an investigation, and consequences for those who failed innocent Indians in their critical hour of need

The world’s largest vaccine manufacturer is broke. Queues of anxious people, desperate to get a jab, have returned home disappointed as several inoculation centres have had no supply of the two vaccines currently being used in India, Covishield (made by Serum Institute of India under licence from AstraZeneca) and Covaxin (Bharat Biotech). With the second wave of the coronavirus on a dangerous trajectory, people are terribly worried. They should be. India’s caseload is at a staggering 26 million, and we have established dubious records in daily cases (over 400,000), daily deaths (4,522), and the fastest vertical progression in infection rate in the month of April 2021.

According to a New York Times report, the actual aggregate death count could be higher at 600,000, twice the official count. Dead bodies buried hurriedly along river embankments, lack of oxygen supply, inadequate ICU beds, black-marketing of life-saving drugs, the average Indian has experienced a dystopian nightmare. It can be unequivocally stated that Indians have been let down by their central government in a shocking exhibition of political hubris. And complete incompetence. Let me explain with the help of elementary arithmetic.

India’s population is estimated to be about 1.38 billion. The targeted group due for vaccination above the age of 18 years is 940 million. Now, India has approved vaccines that must be given in a double dose. Thus, even a toddler using a calculator can tell you that India should have ordered (from both domestic manufacturers and foreign suppliers) 940x2=1880 million doses, plus some to allow for wastage, at the earliest, preferably in December 2020-January 2021 itself. It is again basic knowledge that vaccination is the best preventive measure to stop transmission of the virus, save lives, and reduce pressure on a creaky health infrastructure. The government, however, was asleep at the wheel.

But which government would expose its own people to death and despair against a deadly disease? There is one, which is so inebriated by its electoral triumphs and the image of its strongman ‘Supreme Leader’ that they believed they could not look weak, nervous or uncertain in public perception. After all, they were lionised as macho and muscular avatars of political leadership. Basically, they were hallucinating, drunk on PR, dazzling sound-bytes of premature triumphalism and gloating on TV. Like the Titanic crew, they missed the emerging iceberg. Here is how.

Serum Institute of India (SII) and Bharat Biotech (BB), both given emergency use authorisations, were awaiting government orders. SII received orders till Jan-Feb 2021 of guess how many vaccine doses? A miserly 21 million doses (1.1% of India’s needs). It was preposterously low. BB’s production capacity was anyway limited to just 20 million at the time. Was the government living in a fool’s paradise? Were they not aware of the even more malignant second and third waves that had pillaged the US, UK, Brazil and Europe?

The answer to the coming challenge lay in investing significant funds in both SII (which had taken the business risk) and BB so that they could ramp up production capacity to about 150 million and 50 million doses, respectively, at the barest minimum. Despite allocating Rs 35,000 crore in the Union budget for vaccines, the government did nothing right until April 2021, when the crisis was already upon us. Foreign vaccine-makers like Pfizer who came knocking on our doors returned because of the government’s reluctance to acknowledge its shortfalls. The government thought that India’s war against the virus was over. Game, set and match, BJP.

The real tragedy is that we could have saved many lives had the government focused on governance instead of grand theatrics to appear like supermen. The BJP hailed PM Modi as the ultimate hero and the PM himself boasted of India being the “pharmacy of the world”. It was a self-goal. Now, we have to beg, borrow or steal vaccines to save ourselves. This was an avoidable disaster. In its bid to boost Modi’s global appeal, the government even exported 67 million vaccine doses (more than what we had used locally till then). It was bizarre. BJP spokespersons talked of India’s altruism, but in that case why did they suddenly stop helping poorer countries thereafter? Now India has failed not just its own denizens but even other vaccine-starved nations with vulnerable populations. And AstraZeneca has sent SII a legal notice for non-delivery against contractual obligations, as the government forced it to stop deliveries. It is a mess.

It is believed that External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar is now travelling abroad with a shopping bag, hoping for the charitable disposition of multinational pharma companies whose global commitments now restrict them from obliging India.

Of course, by the end of the year, there will be an oversupply of vaccines worldwide, but that makes the next few months crucial for India. At 70% of targeted population needed for herd immunity, India needs to vaccinate approximately 650 million people with at least a single dose. Right now, we have reached the 200-million threshold; the gap is 450 million. Ideally, if we were doing even five million vaccinations a day, India could have opened up, like the US and UK, by August 2021. But currently, the daily vaccination levels have collapsed to a dismal 150,000 a day. At this rate, it will take us 10 months, that is till March 2022, to hit the herd immunity benchmark. India cannot afford that.

Therefore, the only way forward is to back SII and, through compulsory licensing, widen the manufacturing base of Covaxin, even as we urgently facilitate conditions for import of foreign vaccines. Indian company Wockhardt has volunteered to make 500 million doses by February 2022. The question is, why was the government not engaging with the private sector to augment supply all these months?

One day, this dystopian nightmare will end. But a commission of inquiry will be needed to investigate if lives perished because of criminal negligence. There must be consequences for those who failed innocent Indians in their critical hour of need.

(The writer is a former spokesperson of the Congress party)