The vaccination data will help the Government take forward the immunisation campaign more effectively
By the trial-and-error method, the Union Government appears to be reaching a stage where it can base its decisions on vaccinations on real-life data rather than suppositional data or data derived from abroad on tangential bases. The Government now proposes to launch a nationwide platform to track vaccination data in India. The National Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation will oversee the programme. The data will be an amalgam of vaccine data (impact of vaccinations on immunity from COVID-19 or reduction in severity), diagnostic data (positivity rate) and overall disease data (national virus trends and mutations). These three elements will be tracked together to answer a basic question: Should the gap between the vaccination doses, that according to the latest notification is 12-16 weeks, be reduced or increased? The attempt to seek the answer comes four and a half months into the vaccination programme that began on January 16 and after incrementally hiking the jab gap from four-to-six weeks to six-to-eight weeks to eight-to-12 weeks to 12-to-16, giving rise to speculation whether the increase had anything to do with the temporary scarcity of vaccines in the country. The scarcity in end-April and May had seen a toss-up between single shot for as many as possible versus two jabs for a small number of people. It is not yet known when the platform will be ready and when will it start filtering in the results. The timing is crucial, considering the Government’s commitment to itself to vaccinate the population by the end of this year.
The Government has to date relied on data from foreign countries, particularly the UK, to fix its domestic vaccination interval policies. The biggest drawback of the British data is that it considered only symptomatic infection, and not severe disease, to show how effective the vaccine is against COVID-19 and its mutations. Secondly, there is no convincing evidence based on concrete data about the efficacy of either reducing or increasing the jab gap. Thirdly, scientists say that no real-life data is available about the efficacy of a 12-week gap or beyond and the only evidence available is from the phase-3 clinical trial. Fourthly, the UK is sitting comfortably on the vaccination issue, with over 75 per cent of the population having received one dose and nearly quarter of them receiving both jabs. In contrast, India faces an uphill task as the population receiving both doses is yet to cross even the 10 per cent mark and many regions are reeling under the second surge. The new platform should help answer the following India-centric questions: How does a single dose of vaccine perform against a severe disease? Should India revert to a small gap in the absence of an effective single-jab vaccine? What does real-life data (India now has it) tell us about the effectiveness of an eight-week gap? When will India reach the point in vaccination where the goal is to prevent the disease or end all infection?