India is launching one of the world’s largest coronavirus vaccination drives on Saturday, setting in motion a complex deployment plan aimed at stemming the wide spread of infections across a nation of more than 1.3 billion people.
At hospitals and vaccination centers across major cities — from Mumbai to New Delhi — tens of thousands of key front-line workers are expected to line up to receive and administer the first vaccines.
The inoculation campaign across the world’s second-most populous country will be a crash course over whether Covid-19 can be swiftly tamed in nations with disjointed health and transportation networks. Officially more than 10.5 million people in India have been infected with the disease that has also killed at least 150,000.
The effort comes as more-developed nations have struggled in trying to rush out inoculations. Though the U.S. and other countries have stockpiled hundreds of millions of doses, the pace of vaccinations has been challenged by unexpected glitches and logistical problems.
India’s rollout is one of the earliest and most ambitious in Asia, where many nations are taking a slower approach in inoculating their populations. That’s partly because those countries are facing less severe virus outbreaks than India, which has the second-highest number of infections in the world.
A cold storage haulage truck containing Covid-19 vaccines stops while being escorted by police
The country has initially granted emergency licenses to the two-dose vaccines manufactured by Bharat Biotech International Ltd. and the Serum Institute of India Ltd. The latter has partnered with AstraZeneca Plc to make at least one billion doses of their shot. New Delhi has already made its first purchase of 11 million Astra shots, as well as 5.5 million vials of Covaxin, the indigenous inoculation produced by Bharat Biotech.
Plans drawn up by the health ministry outline steps to vaccinate 300 million people in the first stage through August.
In an initial round, 30 million health-care and front line workers — such as police and defense force staff — will receive injections. In the second phase, about 270 million people above the age of 50 and those at particular risk to Covid will be inoculated. The process will draw on existing networks used to vaccinate tens of millions of babies each year against diseases such as polio.
The country’s deployment blue print “has a level of detail which I haven’t seen in any other rollout plans,” said Prashant Yadav, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development in Washington.
However, those arrangements may face bottlenecks and vaccine wastage when implemented by the country’s four levels of government, particularly once deployment fans out to rural hinterland, he said.
“There are going to be clinics in places which don’t have as much demand as was originally planned, which requires changing the plan, making supply shift to other locations quickly,” Yadav said. “Is the decision-making going to be agile?”
