In This Article:
(Bloomberg Opinion) -- The Indian state faces one of the world’s most formidable challenges: rolling out a Covid-19 vaccination program for 1.3 billion people. To succeed, many things have to go right in a country that usually gets a lot wrong. The government would be wise to enlist the country’s private sector in this gargantuan effort — and soon.
The vaccine rollout is already off to a shaky start. The government last week announced emergency approval for two vaccines. The first, a joint effort from AstraZeneca PLC and Oxford University, is being produced by the Serum Institute of India, the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer. The other has been developed by the Indian company Bharat Biotech International Ltd.
The media and opposition figures have justifiably asked why Bharat Biotech’s candidate was approved at the same time as AstraZeneca’s, when it hasn’t even finished or published results from Stage III trials. There’s no evidence that Indian drug regulators allowed political considerations to affect their decision. Still, the timing is suspect, given that the approval comes after right-wing legislators began to attack regulators for preferring “foreign” vaccines, and the government itself has begun to show a distinct protectionist tilt.
If the approvals appear rushed, unfortunately the rollout seems anything but. India’s health administrators just completed a massive practice exercise in four states — something that surely should have been wrapped up weeks ago.
Worse, even though the Serum Institute has already produced 50 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine, CEO Adar Poonawalla admitted in an interview published on Monday that he hasn’t yet been given a purchase order from the government or even a “letter that says, ‘We want the vaccine.’” He needs to get those 50 million doses on trucks and out of his factory fast, so he can start producing and storing more.
Nor has the government allowed the Serum Institute to export any of its existing doses to other poor countries, even though Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself promised at the United Nations that India’s manufacturing would be the solution to the pandemic in the developing world. Of the billion doses that the Serum Institute intends to produce, half are ultimately expected to go to other developing countries.
This has the whiff of typical Indian bureaucratic delays and lack of accountability. The ugly truth about India is that its problems rarely revolve around production; too often they center on distribution. We produce more than enough food but can’t distribute it to our population, so we have a third of the world’s malnourished children. While we generate more than enough electricity, our distribution system is inefficient and unprofitable — and so businesses and homes are plagued by constant power cuts.