From May 1, India began the vaccination drive for its adult population, its citizens between 18-44 years of age group.
Many of them anxiously waited for this since the last three months. The desperation to get vaccinated at the earliest has only grown as India is flooded with the Second wave of Covid-19.
For Almost a week now, India is recording more than 3 Lakh Covid 19 cases and for the past three days, every day death toll is touching 3000 mark.
Hence, amid this crisis, there are only two ways to ensure our safety: First Precautions and Second Is Vaccination.
Though India has launched its vaccination drive in January, three months later, it is yet to be a smooth process for many. You see queues outside vaccination centres, People waiting sometimes 3-4 hours to get one shot of vaccine, many are facing problems with registration, getting slots, the glitches have marred the vaccination drive which was touted as the largest drive anywhere in the world by the Central govt.
Other than the glitches and problems, there are also people who are not showing up for appointments because of safety fears or because of the fears related around the vaccination that is it safe for them or not.
With clouds of disinformation soaring on the Covid-19 vaccine horizon, the Indian authorities are rushing against time to boost people’s confidence in the two approved vaccines — Serum Institute of India’s Covishield and Bharat Biotech’s Covaxin.
However, Covishield (an Oxford University-AstraZeneca vaccine) has shown over 70 per cent safety, immunogenicity and efficacy in the UK trials and comparable safety in a bridging study on 1,600 Indians. The other approved made-in-India Covaxin is, yet to conclude phase-3 trials, triggering fears over its efficacy.
So in order to understand about fears and myths that people have in their mind related to Covid-19 vaccination, we reached out to Dr. Anant Bhan, Global Health and Bioethics Researcher.
“During the current situation, the data that we have seen, shows that vaccination is very important to protect individuals and society, the vaccine play a huge role. According to the data, vaccination is important because it builds up an immunity in the body which helps you fight this virus and even if you get infected with the virus after getting vaccinated, you will have very mild symptoms, hospitalization is not needed. It will not cause any kind of severe disease,” said Dr. Anant Bhan.
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