https://www.dhakatribune.com/opinion/op-ed/2020/07/23/op-ed-vaccine-dreams-the-pandemic-end-game
Even as Covid-19 spikes dramatically in the subcontinent, there are unmistakable indications of light at the end of the pandemic tunnel. Earlier this week, two broad serological surveys – tests that look for disease-specific antibodies – implied 22.86% of New Delhi residents and 24.3% in Mumbai have been infected. That means national totals are probably in multiple millions. India almost certainly has the most cases in the world. When prime minister Narendra Modi addressed the United Nations recently, he noted “our grass-roots health system is helping India ensure one of the best recovery rates” and “in our joint fight against COVID, we have extended medical and other assistance to over 150 countries.” Those are both important points, and crucial to potentially positive future scenarios. For some months it has been clear pandemic mortality in India is significantly lower than other countries - around 20 deaths per million people, compared to hundreds in Brazil, the USA, and Western Europe. Some reasons could be the relatively youthful population, or less diabetes and obesity. Whatever the cause, if this trend continues to hold up, it means the subcontinent could emerge fairly well from the pandemic, if in fact Covid-19 can be quickly controlled in the next few months, or perhaps by this juncture in 2021. >From what seemed to be only pipe dreams, those possibilities suddenly emerged as plausible this week, when The Lancet medical journal published two separate studies demonstrating excellent progress towards effective Covid-19 vaccines. There is one in China which showed “widespread antibody immune response” in 500 subjects. Another, much larger, test at Oxford University in the UK “induced strong antibody and T cell immune responses.” Mike Ryan, head of emergency services at the World Health Organization, immediately cautioned, “we’re making good progress [but] realistically, it’s going to be the first part of next year before we start seeing people get vaccinated. And we need to be fair about this, because this is a global good. Vaccines for this pandemic are not for the wealthy, they are not for the poor, they are for everybody.” These are perfectly laudable sentiments, but unlikely to translate well in the real world. As we have seen repeatedly during the past few months, every aspect of this pandemic has underlined and exacerbated deep-seated inequalities. For example, across many months, the United States was literally hijacking PPE (personal protective equipment) supplies, wherever they showed up anywhere in the world. We can expect exactly the same in the future, as the country has already signed an unprecedented exclusive contract with Pfizer and BioNTech in Germany committing nearly 2 billion dollars to secure the first 100 million doses of yet another promising new vaccine. Still, this is one area in which India – and by extension, the rest of South Asia – is not entirely disadvantaged by the lack of resources. Due to the combination of historical factors (including an alternative legal framework for medical patents) and long-term effective entrepreneurship in the pharmaceutical sector, this part of the world will be essential to any global Covid-19 solution. As the Director General of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) Dr. Balram Bhargava put it earlier this month, “any vaccine candidate that is being produced or developed in any part of the world will ultimately have to be scaled up by India or by China. Because these two countries are the major producers, and India [already] supplies 60% of all the vaccines to all countries. We are the pharmacy of the world.” For this specific reason, if the awful global Covid-19 pandemic eventually yields an inspirational hero, it could well turn out to be Adar Poonawalla of Serum Institute of India, the world’s largest manufacturer of vaccines. Back in April, the ambitious 39-year-old (he says his mentor and role model is Bill Gates) took the huge gamble of plunging into mass-production of the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 experimental vaccine being developed by the Jenner Institute at Oxford University. It was an astonishing $100 million bet on “gut feeling” and – even more amazing – embarked upon only by “gentleman’s agreement.” But now comes the payoff. Of all the Covid-19 vaccines being tested – there are over 100 – scientists believe this one has the most potential. If cleared for use, Serum Institute of India will have stockpiled millions of doses by November, and can start distributing hundreds of millions early next year. Poonawalla says, “we want to give half of our production to India and the other half to other countries on a pro-rata basis. We need to understand that this is a global crisis and people across the world need to be protected. It's important that we equally immunise the entire world. I don't think any individual will have to pay for it because the vaccines will mostly be bought by governments and then distributed free.”