This commentary is by Narain Batra, a contributing columnist for The Times of India, author of “The First Freedoms” and “America’s Culture of Innovation,” and a professor of communications and diplomacy at Norwich University.
In the worst of the Covid-19 pandemic last year, New York and major cities in the United States had acute shortages of oxygen and ventilators, as India is experiencing now. For days, dead bodies in New York were left in refrigerated trailers, waiting for burials. Disaster morgues and crematoria operated around-the-clock in the city.
Quarantine and lockdown policies differed from state to state. It was also the year of the presidential election and there were widespread protests, including Black Lives Matters, LGBTQ, Greta Thunberg-inspired climate protests, among others.
The Covid-19 situation in America seemed hopeless, as it seems in India today. But then entered President Joe Biden and he said that in his first hundred days 100 million Americans would be vaccinated. Today, one-third of the U.S. population is fully vaccinated. America is bursting with optimism.
As of May 11, out of the more than 33 million Covid-19 cases in the United States, there were 589,221 deaths. India had 19 million cases and 208,000 deaths. America has brought Covid-19 under control through a massive and speedy vaccination program. So would India, sooner than later.
But the question is whether India, the United States and other countries would be prepared for the next Covid-19 wave, which could be more deadly than this one.
Only a couple of months ago, many countries looked up to India as a global ally for combatting Covid-19, hoping it would continue supplying vaccines and health equipment (PPE) to them, which it did unhesitatingly — until it was caught unaware in a most vicious Corona-19 mutant surge that sent shockwaves around the world.
The abundance of vaccine supply created a feeling of safety, which was not matched by the strength of its health care infrastructure when the virus cases suddenly spiked from 10,000 daily to more than 400,000.
As a major pharmaceutical producer of generic drugs accounting for 20 percent of global supply and world’s largest vaccine manufacturer, meeting 62 percent of the demand, India has been an indispensable nation for global health. Confident that Covid-19 was under control and manageable, India supplied about 64 million vaccine doses to 76 countries through the WHO Covax alliance, and grants, as well as on commercial basis, according to official sources.
Massive political rallies for elections held in five states, millions of people dipping into the Ganges for the Hindu Kumbh Mela, and the continuation of the farmers’ protests against the recently enacted agricultural laws made the people feel that life was getting back to normal, and the economy — which had been hit hard due to lockdowns — would be getting back on track.
But in the noise and chaos of India’s complicated democracy, the fast-mutating virus was forgotten.
The ferocious virus spread much faster than the nation’s capacity to jab people’s arms to reach the level of herd immunity for India’s 940 million adult population. With about 157 million people vaccinated, India has a long way to go.
If sufficient supplies were available and the vaccination rate accelerated from the current 3 million to 10 million a day, as Bhramar Mukherjee, a biostatistician at the University of Michigan told BBC, Covid-19 would come under control in the next few months. India then would be able to resume its role of a global vaccine supplier under the WHO Covid-19 alliance, as it did earlier.
In a perceptive article in Foreign Affairs, Nicole Lurie, Jacob Cramer and Richard Hatchett, experts in epidemic preparedness innovations, write that “vaccine technology is only as good as the infrastructure around it. … International institutions, national governments and private companies (need) to work collectively to ensure that the resources and capacity exist to take full advantage of this medical miracle.”
They caution, however, not to be complacent because the pathogen and the vaccine are new; it’s uncertain how long the immunity would last, and therefore we must prepare for new variants that might require newer or upgraded vaccines.
Since the new variant could be a fast-transmissible virus, it would be necessary to build mobile “vaccine production units that could eventually be shipped to the site of an outbreak and rapidly make targeted vaccines locally.”
Global problems need global solutions. The bottleneck that India, a crucial vaccine producer and supplier, is experiencing now is the lack of resources, raw materials and investment in manufacturing capacity. The recently announced Indo-Pacific Quad Covid-19 vaccine partnership must be made fully operational at the earliest.
India is a densely populated country with millions of internal migrant workers, where frequent lockdowns could derail the economy, pushing back millions into poverty. It needs an efficient system of health surveillance.
Covid-19 would provide India with a huge amount of health data, which would be immensely useful in preparing for future epidemics. All public and private health facilities should be on a national health database linked to India’s gigantic national database, Aadhaar. The health data should be shared with friendly countries like the United States.
The Covid-19 pandemic is an equal-opportunity lethal disease that can strike anyone regardless of religion, race, gender, sexual preferences, political ideology or wealth. Therefore, the health benefits distribution system must be fair, equitable and accessible, leaving no one behind.
A community or neighborhood, Blacks or whites, left behind in the darkness could become the next hotbed of the Covid-19 virulent attack. We are one nation under Covid-19 for some time to come.
