 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Today we have with us Prof. Satyajit Rath and we are going to discuss again what we do every time and have been doing so for quite some time what is with COVID-19 situation in the country. Satyajit, we seem to be back in the worst days of COVID-19 surge. In fact, this is the worst day that we have had in terms of numbers for a very long time and probably the highest single day rise ever. Now we have been saying for some time that this surge has been quite steep. In fact, in terms of the steepness, the rapidity with which it has taken place, it has been faster than the earlier peak that we saw where after the first quick rise, we did see some amount of flattening partly because there was a lockdown that had preceded it or was also at the time coterminous with it, but this time the rise has been really, really fast. Two quick conclusions because of that and we can see the charts that are in front of us on the NewsClick site. You can see that there are at least six to seven states which have risen fast. Maharashtra of course has about half the country's population at the moment of people who have been infected in the last 24 hours, but if you see the trend, most states are also going up. So this is not something which is restricted to only some states. So what we are seeing is really that not only numbers going up, going up rapidly, but it is going up across the country. The second part of it is that this whole talk about herd immunity of course and this so-called supermodel has shown that it is bogus that this is really numbers going up in different parts of the country because there is still very large pockets of people who have not been infected till now and therefore this number simply indicates that this pandemic has yet lot of people that it can infect and therefore we should not believe that we are in a situation which is comfortable. We have not been so and we have to take for granted that the pandemic will continue till we are able to reach herd immunity through what has always been done, that's vaccination. Apart from that, there is really no other way of reaching herd immunity that we can think of. Satyajit, looking at what is happening, how do you account for the speed in which these numbers are going up at the moment and we don't seem to be in a position to really stop this because if we look at what is happening in different cities of Maharashtra, this has been really spreading very quickly. So let's first look at what the official take on this steep rise is and the official take has a major reason that is implicated and a minor reason that is implicated and the relative weightage varies a little depending on who you talk to but it seems to be as follows. Primarily the official version this is happening because people have become apparently simultaneously COVID careless and COVID fatigued and therefore it is people at large who bear the primary responsibility for the search. Now is this a reasonable ascribing of a cause? Yes, it is true that there is some amount of COVID fatigued given the damage to livelihood and to other related socio-cultural issues. It would be astonishing if there is not COVID fatigued but it's very conveniently forgotten that the COVID complacency which the people are being accused of has actually been fed by an official government triumphalist nationalist narrative. So when we assign responsibility, let me not use the word blame, when we assign responsibility let us keep in mind that this what I keep calling the triumphalist chest beating approach of the government to the periodic transient ups and downs of the epidemic has provided a great deal of fodder for complacency. Yes, the talk about that set of positivity shows we've almost reached herd immunity that most cities herd immunity was reached probably in December, January and this is Maharashtra, major cities Pune and Bombay being key in that and of course also Delhi. So if we want to take the credit for solving the problem in January and February as the government was doing as the various government officials were claiming then I think it's time as you said they should also take some of the blame for the vaccine complacency they created and not blame it simply on the people. I think we have to spot all on that. That said let me make two sort of biological points that are of interest when we are trying to understand the sheer rate of the what we are calling the search. Firstly as I never tire of pointing out the virus does not recognize political geography. It is essentially local community outbreaks and what is different between six months ago versus today implicit in your preliminary comments as well is the sheer breadth of places and kinds of localities in which there are now simultaneous outbreaks and the fact that the number of different local outbreaks today is much greater proportionately than the number of such outbreaks. The last time India's total aggregate case number was in the 90,000 plus is one major component of the steepness of increase. That's something that we should not be losing sight of as a matter of fact that is a major reason why both government triumphalism about having controlled epidemic and modulus complacency about having predicted the trajectory of the pandemic are somewhat mispleased because when we take aggregate numbers we are averaging out the somewhat contingent let me not use the word random but somewhat contingent nature of how local outbreaks start. There is so much of diversity in numbers that averaging loses sight of loses track of that diversity. It's called the statistician's delight if your head is in the fridge and your feet are in the oven you have a comfortable temperature but getting back beyond the outside of this it's also interesting to see that this is not a pattern only with India. You have seen we are seeing Brazil, European countries which were affected earlier also being affected now so apart from a few countries and that's really for instance China some of the Southeast Asian countries who seem to have done a much better job of controlling the pandemic most countries there has been this what you are calling contingent rise and fall and of course worst case scenarios like Brazil and the earlier Trump administration which allowed it to get completely out of hand anti-mask, anti-lockdown kind of positions which were ideological of course so is by Brazil's Bolsonaro's positions but the point is that irrespective of the positions rise and fall have a lot of this contingent nature of the epidemic those which have been affected earlier are affected again today showing the reservoir that has existed in these countries and therefore the possible of resurgence but coming back to the other issue which is of course vaccination. You know India the amount of vaccination that has been done compared to the stocks we seem to have had which what we were told by Sedum Institute that they have already had the stock of 50 million vaccines which are possible to deploy very quickly we have been a little slow on the delivery parts it's taking on but yes but not at the rate at which perhaps you could have done given our size of the problem and the fact that we have vaccine capable capacity but you know we took a very quick early decision on Bharat biotech co-vaccine issue emergency use we have talked about it earlier and the fact the Brazilian Am visa team came the regulatory authorities over there they had some of the issues with the manufacturing processes that you have talked about that this is live vaccine culture therefore we need to be more careful with it and this is one of the issues that they have raised but can we explain why a relatively easier vaccine process to scale up the adenovirus vector root which Gavalia Institute Sputnik 5 has been pressing on in India and it has very capable partners like Reddy Labs, Hetero and there is another four manufacturers who are willing to actually produce up to 850 million doses I just added them together why we are taking such a long time over it don't you think a partnership approach which is what we seem to have done with Bharat biotech would have got a third vaccine in India very quickly and also the Johnson Johnson singles that you know single jab vaccine which is also could be accelerated in terms of release that it will also add to our vaccine reservoir repertoire. So three quick points first let me connect to our earlier conversation about the surge in from a vaccine point of view one of the causes that government spokesmen men are describing for the present surge is the possibility of variants. The bulk of these variants in the first place are contributing to speed and efficiency of transmission and that mean indeed be one cause although India even today is not sequencing with sufficient organization and at a large enough scale to be able to be sure of what the contribution of variants is to the search but clearly they are likely to have some contribution to make but in addition to the mutations which increase efficiency of spread some variants also tend to reduce the effectiveness of pre-existing antibodies to provide protection and that brings us to the fact of the vaccines. The more widespread vaccination you have for variants the more likely it is that variant spread will be slowed down because the variants ability to resist vaccine protection is not absolute it's just a question of more or less not a question of yes or no. That said I must confess I agree with you I've been perhaps because I was pessimistically not expecting too much I've been agreeably surprised that we in India have managed to vaccinate as many people per day nationwide as the United States has managed. We should keep in mind that both countries are still vaccinating at only about half as many people as China is vaccinating today. That said it's not clear just how much of ramp up the system and the logistics and the administration still has in it. Can we can we can we reach a crore of vaccinations a day? I don't know and nobody in government is talking to us about what government expects the trajectory of this ramp up will be. As you point out currently the issue of vaccine supply does not seem to be the limiting factor from the numbers that we have been given the numbers that you quoted from the Salem Institute supply from the manufacturers does not seem to be the limiting factor in increasing daily vaccinations. So it's much more likely to be other factors such as transport such as storage vaccination centers, vaccinators and so on and so forth. That provides the other point about if that's the case then why is India not making its commitments living up to its commitments to COVAX of vaccine supplies to the world and again there is the government playing a little publicity game of appearing to be nationalist as well as appearing to be a global power. But as a consequence to come to your last question I suspect that one reason why many more vaccines are not being pressed through the regulatory process is that at the moment there isn't a supply shortage. If that calculation and interpretation is correct then it is to the advantage of the existing players namely the Salem Institute of India and Bharat Biotech which is in partnership with the government of India to have their vaccines be the major supply. It's a little surprising that approval processes for all these vaccines that you named seem to be moving slowly for lack of bridging phase one and phase two trials which by their nature are small and limited trials and the companies that are representing those vaccine originators in India are experienced players in the field. It's surprising that they haven't done the paperwork and the homework already. So all of this forms the backdrop. Just to interrupt Satyajin, the regulator leaks reported in one of the papers was Russian vaccine, the Sputnik 5. There were issues of their questions raised about their stability and so on. Now these would be standard questions because these are being supplied now. There are about 18 million doses available which have been produced. So seems to be a lack of urgency if I may say so on this and you know when you talk about other players not being important right now because you have enough supplies. The question is there is a huge global demand and if you look at both the Sputnik 5 and the Johnson and Johnson vaccines they could easily be exported as well as the Novavax vaccine which of course the Sedum Institute also wants to produce one million doses. So I'm still confused why would India not want to become a global supplier of vaccines which is what you know as a generic manufacturer that's what it has always done. So this is why I was raising the possibility that what the government is thinking about in this matter is what I'm calling the publicity game of vaccine nationalism on the one hand and global soft power status on the other hand with gifting or withholding at discretion and in all of this some amount of supply side scarcity is perhaps callously useful. This is all speculative but it does not leave as you point out a good feeling about how a global public pandemic perception is being dealt with and looked at. You know of course today we may not be able to discuss this issue just to leave this thought with you that now the Russian delegation is coming Lavrov is going to be in India. Hopefully this will also encourage the government of India to sign this or release provide the emergency use release because again the news which is supposed to be sources indicate that in next five to seven days coinciding with Lavrov's visit we might see emergency use notification coming out or the Sputnik 5 Gamalaya vaccine. So that is one thing I'll leave with you to think about but the other is that there is a serious complaint both from other Punawala of Serum Institute as well as Datla, Mahima Datla of Biologic E who is in partnership with Johnson Johnson and that's a single jump in vaccine which is therefore much more easy to distribute. That both of them have complained about serious shortage of intermediate goods plastics liners and so on coming from United States because Pfizer has received privileged treatment in the United States but the US administration and the Korean War Defense Act is being used to privilege supplies to Pfizer and therefore supplies to other companies in the world are not coming and if that continues it is going to be a serious constraint of Serum Institute ramping up its vaccine production even for Covishield though it may still supply enough for India it might impact Covax supplies but also it supplies for instance to UK which it was making Serum Institute as you know was making supplies to UK but more than that if the total number of vaccines NovaVax, Johnson and Johnson and Covishield does not come into the market say by June or so the world is going to take a huge pandemic hit continue to take a huge pandemic hit so it's a nobody's interest including India's to you know not take this up at a global level absolutely there's no question about it it is India's fault if you like that we have not thought carefully about the diversity of supply chains and their robustness for vaccine manufacture we are behaving as though a vaccine manufacturing company can stand on its own and make vaccines but that said the fact that every country is playing capitalist power games of great callousness in pulling against global public good is undeniable. I completely agree to Satyit but I must also say this that you know in this it's not just vaccine nationalism it's vaccine apathete because if you see the rich countries they have not supplied anything outside their borders and the only three countries who have supplied outside their borders is China, Russia, India this is only three countries Russia's production capacities are very limited and therefore they depend on India and South Korea to do their production but if we look at China and India the only two countries who have supplied significant amount of vaccines outside their country none of the rich countries have supplied anything outside their own borders they might supply within each other that they do even that as you can see European Union and UK are squabbling but the point is that if you take the entire Africa 1.4 billion people have got 8 million doses out of which 6 billion have gone to Morocco alone the entire of African continent has only 2 million doses and they even have not been able to supply their health workers while the United States refuses to even give intermediates release intermediates for vaccine production elsewhere so this is this is really callousness of a very high order and the fact they're saying it again and again we will do ours first when we are vaccinated every United States citizen then we'll think of rest of the world I think that is the kind of callousness which we also have to register critical as we are of government of India not taking a much more proactive stand on this except what they've taken up in WTO thank you very much Satyajit with being with us we'll come back on this and really the burning issue how do you vaccinate 7.7 billion population of the world how do you produce enough vaccines how quickly can you produce them and how can you deliver it to the arms of the people who need them thank you very much and we do hope that we will be able to engage with you on this discussion further this is all the time we have for news click today do keep watching news click and do visit our website