Sometime in May this year, amidst a ravaging second wave, and all-round talks about vaccine scarcity, Indian authorities came out with this plan to procure 2 Bn vaccine doses by this year end.
Math was rather simple, ~1 Bn eligible adults, 2X vaccination doses, and hence we needed 2 Bn vaccination doses to vaccinate all eligible adults in India.
I pointed out at that time as well that this is an over-reaction.
Why? Because it was not a valid assumption that all eligible adults in India will be reached out or will even be willing to go opt for the vaccinations. Just like all other nations we were supposed to slow down as we get over administering vaccinations to a section of public that is willing/eager to get vaccinated.
If we look the whole vaccination drive, in India, we have now seen all 4 phases of the cycle:
- Yes we also started …yawn!: In Q1 2021, Covid seemed like a thing of past, Vaccinations were neither open for general public, nor was there a serious interest/pressure for it.
- Hey! Where are the Vaccines? When Covid second wave engulfed everyone, within a short span of 4 weeks (reported)cases skyrocketed to 4 times the peak of wave 1, casualties piled up and everyone wanted the vaccination shot to save his or her own life. System crashed, vaccination slots were grabbed up within seconds of opening, it was a nightmare with Supply and administering capacity being a tiny fraction of demand.
- Supply increased and vaccinations accelerated: In this phase, pace of vaccination drive was still governed by available supply availability.
- Demand and not supply dictating vaccination pace: How to reach more people? (falling new registrations)
I earlier thought that we will hit phase-4 a lot earlier, but the public, authorities and medical/para-medic Infra surprised everyone.
As explained in another post here, examples from around the world show that beyond a threshold, it becomes very difficult to enroll new people for vaccinations.
For countries like US and UK, they saw the first inflection point once they crossed ~50% of vaccine eligible population. For a country like India we had to overcome so many barriers to achieve high vaccination levels:
- Education/awareness levels of a developing country
- Poverty, will people be able to afford this? Will govt be able to afford free vaccinations for public?
- Rumors! of all kinds and gullibility of general masses to fall for them
- Geographical spread, far flung and relatively inaccessible areas.
- Politics: Federal structure with vaccines and Covid in general becoming a political issue
- A weak medical Infrastructure
And yet, looking back, despite all these challenges, India has done so well on the vaccination front.
beyond which the pace of vaccination was governed by Demand,
and not supply(and administrative capacity)
For India, we passed that barrier of ~50% vaccination levels without any apparent slowdown in the vaccination pace or demand. We finally hit this inflection point(phase 4) at a time when we have vaccinated ~70% of eligible population in India.
This requires all round appreciation for collective efforts of general public, our pharma industry, medical and para medic staff, and government machinery.
Well done India!