 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Today we have with us as we have every week, Professor Satyajit Rat and we're going to discuss what is happening with the COVID-19 pandemic both in India and globally. Satyajit, we have been discussing this issue for quite some time now but we are reaching a phase where we now have started to see vaccines at least reach a section of the people in different countries. Of course some more in some certain countries in some countries yet to even receive a single dose. So we are into a very differential situation over there. India not so bad because it is indigenous vaccine capacity but we are also seeing the second third waves as they are called taking place numbers rising. So it's clear that without large-scale vaccination we cannot reduce the pandemic to any other disease which is endemic in the world. So we are really in that situation and there is no easy victory over the disease that's very clear at the moment. I'm going to take you through some of our charts the NewsClick chart just to show what is happening so we can discuss that with our viewers. If you see the chart now what's happening in India, what's our COVID tracker chart that's there on NewsClick and if you do the what we do normally the log view of the chart so you can have a look at the larger trend then you tend to see now that there is Maharashtra, there is Punjab, there is Karnataka, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Madhya Pradesh. Six states which are rising relatively fast compared to what we have seen in the past so we shouldn't think that this is just a small kink in the chart it is essentially showing there is a trend that is now visible and you will also see below it which are the not so colored lines gray lines you will see there are a number of states where the numbers are going up but not so fast I mean not at this rate but numbers are still going up. Kerala has been in the highlight for some time it is a state which has a large number of cases still but you can see the fall is there consistently now for a few weeks if you look at these charts where we have a little more detail then you will see certain other things that you can see that Chhattisgarh for instance is also there West Bengal is there Telangana is there numbers rising but not too high not too steep a rise but you look at the positivity ratio how many tests are being carried out and how many are proving to test positive you will see again that in Marahtra it's it used to be 7.5 per 100 tests now it's 15.5 and you will see similarly for instance Punjab also it was 1.5 a few third about four weeks back it's 5.8 now so all of this seems to indicate that we are seeing what is being called the second wave whatever veins you want to call it doesn't really mean much and if you look at Marahtra what you also see that the cities are at least four cities and you can see the urban areas near Mumbai really Thane and you will also see certain other districts near Mumbai also getting affected but you also Pune and Akpur and lower down your Bangalore and Delhi so again the urban centers being the focus but given Punjab it's also true that it is spread in other areas so Satyajit is it clear that we have a numbers rising again we may soon need to lock down already certain measures seem to be being taken and therefore without now vaccination reaching sections of the people you're not going to see this easily controlled it will still go down after a few months again as it did the last time but this is at least clear that the so-called DST model which had claimed victory by February this is not really what's happening that the epidemic is and will continue to burn into new sections of people. Absolutely let me add a couple of points of interest for the present situation as you know I'm reluctant to refer to it as a wave because the word implies that there is a certain uniformity and that it's going to recede and neither of those is as comfortably accurate as all that so what we are beginning to see is a growing number of simultaneous outbreaks in more and more localities there are two points that should be noted by all of us in this spread number one six months ago the bulk of this spread was in urban hyper crowded working class communities today the major points of spread are characterized by two interesting properties one they have now spread and are coming up in much more urban middle class localities secondly these are not outbreaks that are reoccurring in the same locations that were most seriously affected six months ago this is at least true of localities in for example Pune Mumbai and so on and so forth so while on the other hand it feel on the one hand it feels as though the same cities that were affected six months ago are being affected today within the structure of the cities the epidemic outbreaks have shifted location what this says is two things number one because they have shifted from hyper crowded to crowded localities the rate of increase of spread is going to be a little slower but because the localities are much larger it might even end up being more sustained as a spread secondly this is not contrary to what many people are beginning to think oh these are variants of the virus that are causing reinfection by and large the patterns are not patterns is yet that are explained by reinfection similarly they are not patterns that are as yet substantially affected by vaccinations since India only has about three percent of its population vaccinated anyway so that fraction of the population being vaccinated is not going to make any material difference to the pattern of local outbreaks so those are the issues that we should be keeping in mind and of course as you point out the only way forward we have is a sustained campaign of monitoring the virus and of vaccinating against the virus in the large scale along with support for livelihoods and economy. Saty that brings me to another question do you think epidemiologically there is an argument now to focus on vaccinating populations in centers where we are seeing outbreaks rather than focus on general rules for all states all sections starting with the health workers of course health workers first everywhere that is been taken for granted but above 60 population first and other population next rather than switching tack and saying okay those areas which are seeing very large numbers as of now and Maharashtra is really going up very quickly that those really centers which when we see this outbreaks taking place we should actually give them some amount of priority in the way we are vaccinating it's it's an extremely attractive model in in in vacuum to say oh you have an outbreak here let's just do vaccination there the uncomfortable and messy reality is do we have the kind of logistic supply chains for the vaccination campaign to to expand them explosively and keep in mind that what we are talking about is today's rates which are actually a reflection of transmission 10 days ago so our our picture of what's going on is always an after the fact picture so as as we plan vaccination campaigns even if we plan local intensive vaccination campaigns the time gaps and what will happen to the growth of the the rate of spread locally he might well make the gains really relatively small number one number two the other problem given our limitations we can only supply vaccines and put people in locations of this kind by withdrawing them from others this denial is both going to be a perception problem and quite frankly an actual problem so i'm not sure that this solution which many of my armchair friends are offering with perfectly good intentions and with reasonable anxieties is actually that cleanly implementable and and and i think that needs to be kept in mind attractive as an idea but practically has all kinds of issues one of which is trying to catch our own date so the chasing and if it is chase what is the current rate of infection you're really not chasing the current rate of infection you're chasing something that's happened two weeks back and as we have seen a lot of the places other places also we are seeing the curve rising therefore we seem to have a not exactly a localized phenomena but a relatively larger phenomena so switching tack midway and trying to rush things here and there it's better probably to to expand vaccination in in total rather than try and switch vaccines now that brings me to the next point you know India has a number of companies which have capacity to make vaccines and apart from AstraZeneca there are at least another six to eight companies who do deliver bulk vaccines they in fact India I think produces 60 percent of all vaccines in the world and we know that there are for instance the other tie-ups not just Sedum Institute and Novavax which is there I think it's called the Kovavax vaccine it's Kovavax vaccine Kovavax and then you also have the Johnson Johnson the single dose vaccine which there is a tie-up with biological E so you also have Zyda's cadilla which is vaccine in the offering we also have Dr. Reddy's laboratory which is tied up with Gamalaya Sputnik 5 vaccine you also have Hetero which also is produced going to produce a large amounts of vaccine I think there's another company which has also now thrown its hat with the Sputnik 5 vaccine almost half a billion doses of Sputnik 5 vaccine alone are seem to be in the pipeline if Government of India allows Gamalaya Sputnik vaccine to be actually given clearance so also the Johnson Johnson vaccine what is happening to this clearances because that could really bring an additionality into the vaccine market. So one doesn't know what the CDSCO the regulatory authorities seeing as data and what they are thinking the general pattern is the following as far as vaccines with international tie-ups that are being manufactured and being presented in India for regulatory clearance are concerned what they need to show so far as we understand this to the regulatory authority is a phase one testing in India which shows that the vaccine is safe and a phase two testing in India which shows that the vaccine generates an immune response generates antibodies in respectable amounts the same as it does elsewhere if this evidence is provided from within India then along with protection data from outside India the regulatory authority appears to be willing to provide emergency use authorization and the general rumour is that many of these vaccines that you named are waiting to get this set of data together evidence together to submit and that when they've been turned down they've been turned down because of lack of one or the other of these these what are being referred to as bridging data although so essentially more urgent action from both the government authorities the regulatory authorities in conjunction with the companies which are supplying the data because ultimately these are not large number of people's trials that you are doing for phase one and phase two the numbers are quite small it's actually possible to get it in the month and month and a half and that's that's why I'm surprised we are all surprised why it is taking so long considering that we are now in the grip of another seems to be outbreak which is going to with India's already almost the highest number of new cases in the world we are competing with prison which is not a good distinction to have at the moment so that's not a good sign for us so more urgent steps to be taken by the government perhaps in conjunction with the authority with the companies which are promoting these vaccines that is at least a takeaway we can have from this discussion but last question to you no this is not something which is restricted to India alone and the moment we are seeing free for all in terms of vaccine competition Europe European Union threatening UK for not supplying vaccine back to it from UK production centres when they have supplied 10 million doses to European to UK Europe is not getting vaccine supply of AstraZeneca some they're getting from the United States of the modern Pfizer vaccine Pfizer vaccine was originally a German vaccine but even given that they seem to have done pretty badly in how they're handling the supplies of vaccine and it's clear now that large parts of Europe particularly those inside as well as outside European Union and now tying up the Chinese and the Russian vaccines for their citizens and Serbia is a classic example when they seem to have had a very good run for their money in terms of vaccinating the people and Germany France Italy looking pretty bad of that count this brings me to the last question that I have of you you know European Union has enormous vaccine capacities and offy Merck they all have in house I'm not in house but in country capacity in Europe European Union capacity to produce vaccines we have ideal capacity of the vaccines which is almost as much as supplying the vaccines which are currently in the market now this has been one of the issues and this has now been focused by even New York Times that the global leaders and this is really Europe and the United States who are there funding these vaccine makers and the option to make this really available to the world instead of that trying to reserve it for the population they have neither got vaccines for themselves except the United States neither have has the rest of the world got the vaccines it needs and this is something which the IMF as well as other agencies have said this is a global epidemic if we don't stop it in the globe economies are not going to recover and this is something which is going to affect the developed countries rich countries as much as the poor countries even if the developed countries get rid of the pandemic from their shores do you think this is a classic example of trying to make profits for the big farmers we call it actually ending up by harming themselves they have shot themselves in the foot and of course denying vaccines to the rest of the world well absolutely except that I would extend your argument not simply to big pharma but to the basic model of market-based capitalist delivery of solutions to infrastructure needs COVID-19 pandemic responses demand vaccine supplies as an infrastructure need there is no escaping that to begin to delude yourselves as we have for the past year that the market-based profit competing system of supply can adequately and equitably fulfill an infrastructure need globally was always a mungerilal ka sabna and that's coming home to roost ultimately public health means what used to be called by it was called the Ronald Reagan the dreaded socialized medicine it's kind of the commie version of public health according to the American right this is a huge campaign in the 60s if you remember with the Ronald Reagan is the face of it at that point of time he was not the president he was just the film actors guild chairman or some president or something but that is still the specter that haunts a lot of these countries that socialized medicine is something which is equivalent to socialism and their ideology is private profits will always be more efficient markets will always be better than what you call infrastructure needs thank you Satyit for being with us explaining to us not only the science of what is happening the but also the larger framing the framework within which this is happening this is all the time we have the viewers today thank you very much for watching News Snake and do visit our website as well