 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Today we are joined by Professor Satyajit Rath to get the most recent updates on COVID-19 and how the vaccination campaigns are progressing. Welcome Dr. Satyajit. So to start with, we want to ask you about the AstraZeneca vaccination. Recently there's been news that South Africa has returned 1 million doses of this vaccination. So because it's not very effective against the variant in South Africa, the South Africa variant as it's known. So what implications does this have even for India? Because we know that there are cases of this variant in India as well. So let's get a few facts clear before we discuss implications for India. In the first place, as we keep pointing out in our weekly updates, we should not be calling it the South African variant, we should be calling it B1351, which is what it is called, formally. So the reason why the South Africans have currently halted the AstraZeneca vaccine rollout is a small study that suggested that the B1351 variant was not terribly well protected against for mild to moderate COVID-19. That study did not test whether severe COVID-19 illness was protected against or not. It's plausible that it is, it just hasn't been tested. So those two issues, number one, that it's a limited study, it's a very small study and number two, it hasn't tested for serious illness need to be kept in mind. So even within the South African government, it seems that there are multiple voices with respect to COVID-19 vaccination policy, some people wanted to stop the deployment of the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine, some people thought we should halt and wait for more data. And currently what seems to have happened is they've halted and are waiting for more data. And that's why, because vaccines are time bound, there is an expiry date, they've asked for current doses to be repatriated so that they can be used elsewhere. So if this is not about South Africa, I haven't decided that it doesn't work and therefore having rejected it or anything of the sort, this is much more nuanced and complex than that. Let's keep also something else in mind, which is that the South African government seems to have decided on the basis of a similarly small study and preliminary evidence that the single dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which properly should be called the Janssen Johnson & Johnson vaccine, since Janssen is the company that developed it, Johnson & Johnson just spent money on it, on buying IP for it. That vaccine is to be deployed. Now once again, the small study that says that that vaccine works is really small, number one. Number two, the Johnson & Johnson vaccine and the AstraZeneca vaccine are not terribly different from each other. So all of this is based on very preliminary, very modest differences in evidence. And therefore, none of us should get terribly worked up about any of these decisions. All of these are going to be interim decisions that will get revisited as more and more evidence comes along. That's background that I think is important to keep in mind. Coming to the Indian issue, since B1351 variant cases have been now detected, they are really single hand count numbers. But given that we are testing for variants in very, very limited fashion as yet, who knows how many more there are out there that we haven't detected. How widely is that going to spread? And is that going to have consequences for the success or vaccination program for bringing down the spread of transmission of COVID-19 in India and for life to come back to normal? So the issue is really variants of this sort are going to take time to establish themselves. Keep in mind that this variant seems to spread just a little bit better than the original strains. Keep also in mind that it's not that this strain is likely to have escaped vaccine-mediated protection completely. It's just that protection is not as robust as it could be. The current estimates are that there is a three-fold decrease in protection, but those are very crude estimates. With all of that, it's not that within the next few weeks we are going to be overwhelmed by this variant. So I think that it is appropriate for our current vaccination rollout to carry on. I think it's appropriate for us to keep the physical distancing rules and norms in place, both physical distancing of people from each other and mask wearing. Regardless of whether you've had COVID-19 or not, whether regardless of whether you've been vaccinated or not, these norms ought to be kept. Are we going to triumph in our fight against COVID-19? As we keep saying in this program, this is not a war, COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2 are not evil enemies. This is a biological phenomenon. We will arrive at an equilibrium at some sort of compromise and accommodation, at which point the disease will subside to the point of not being a public health emergency. How long will that take? That depends on how well we follow physical distancing norms. It depends on all of us who have access to it, taking the vaccine shots and not giving into vaccine anxieties. It depends on our government providing vaccination, providing credible information and support, and providing the vaccine in an appropriate, credible, accessible rollout in the interests of public health, as well as providing for variant testing and variant tracking. Now, all of those are open-ended questions at the moment, so we cannot be too sanguine about this, but that's where we currently stand. And as you've been talking about variants and the effectiveness of vaccinations against these variants, we also have our own indigenously developed vaccination co-vaccine. And we recently have Dr. V. Ravi, who is the former Dean of Basic Sciences at National Institute of Mental Health and Neuroscience, who said that this co-vaccine is capable of working against all variants, all COVID-19 variants, because it's a vaccination that uses the wholly inactivated virus and not like a part of the virus, which is what other vaccinations are doing. So what do you think about this statement of his? How true is it? So Ravi is an old friend for 30 years. He's also an outstanding medical virologist, but when he says this, unless he has access to unpublished information that I am not aware of, where this claim has been actually tested, unless that is the case, I have not seen any such evidence. Currently, he is a little bit in Mungerilal mode, where he hopes that this guesswork that because you are vaccinating with a whole virus, many more antibodies will be generated, a much greater diversity of antibodies will be generated and they will stop even variant viruses from sticking to cells, whereas when you think about the other vaccines which are directed at just one part of the virus, if that part changes shape, as it does with some of these variants, then that antibody response will not protect. That's the guess he's offering. But as far as I'm aware, in the first place, that's really just a guess. There is currently no evidence for this. And in the second place, even the biology that the diversity of antibodies against a whole virus is much greater has not been properly established with evidence as far as I'm aware. Finally, to say this on the background that weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks after leadership of Bharat Biotech said, give us 15 days and we will provide you preliminary evidence of co-vaccine efficacy. We still have not seen preliminary evidence of co-vaccine efficacy, gives me a skeptical pause about accepting any of these claims about co-vaccine. I hope that Bharat Biotech is right and that efficacy data are good. I hope that Ravi is right and that it will provide a little more robust protection. But we have as yet seen no evidence and I think jumping the gun with wishful thinking is everybody's entitled to their own wishes. Finally, to wrap it up, there's one question which is still on everyone's mind that we have these vaccination campaigns, which of course we just had the UN Secretary General Antonio Gutare say, reinforced that how there is still extreme inequity in vaccine distribution. So keeping that in mind and keeping in mind all the vaccination campaigns that are ongoing, how soon can we really expect life to return to normal? Also because what does getting vaccinated mean? Does it mean you cannot transmit the disease anymore? Will it curb the pandemic? What is the future look like with this? Let's think about it this way. Again, as we've discussed on this weekly update for months now, only part of the answer to this question of yours is in the science and the technology. A large part of it is in the politics and it's in the politics not simply of capitalist profit making sector generated vaccination. Remember that all of these vaccines that are currently out there are private sector, profit making sector. But it's in addition to that, it's also over the past year become an apparent reality that conservative xenophobic political ideologies and governments across the world have taken advantage of fear generated communities, xenophobia across the world, and therefore vaccine nationalism and in fact COVID nationalism has become yet another obstruction, I would argue, to a global community collective response to the pandemic. And in the absence of a coordinated global collective community response to the pandemic, we are going to have fragmentary responses popping up. We are going to have countries pulling at cross purposes with each other. We are going to have these situations of vaccines being returned or vaccines being demanded. We have the situation that the WHO sponsored covax program to supply vaccines for underprivileged communities across the world, not having enough vaccines as yet being supplied to that those programs. In addition to that we have these variants that are inevitably going to pop up. We have extremely variable variant tracking methodologies in place across the world. And we have stigmatization as a consequence of variants that is going to be prevent travel from the UK from Brazil from South Africa identify those players those people lock them up, and so on and so forth. In this extraordinary coordination of capitalism and xenophobia. It's a little hard to make optimistic predictions about how well life for the ordinary people of the world is going to return to normal. It's certainly not going to happen, like magic over the next few months. I remind all our listeners that in the last one whole month, India has not vaccinated even one crore people. Now, we have heard brave words and I hope they are real that we are going to ramp up our vaccination capacity and so on and so forth and we are going to do better and therefore by July we are actually going to achieve 25 crore vaccinations. But I ask all of us how likely do we think that is. So under those circumstances over the next few months, let us not live in a fool's paradise of hope. Let us stay with the community norm of physical distancing and masking. Let us acknowledge that the vaccines are safe, because the evidence is that the vaccines are safe, and therefore let us not give into vaccine anxieties and take vaccine shots as and when they become available. Let us keep pressing our governments for better public health system investment, resources, vaccine rollout and variant tracking. More than that, we will meet and see. Thank you Satyajit for talking to us today on this issue. We will come back to you next week to discuss further developments. That's all the time we have for today. Keep watching.