science.thewire.in
P.s. it is a rare delight that so many of my favourite trans-gangetic friends are drawn to this thread all at once! Feel free to partake in a straw poll about whether your grandparents will be encouraged to take the experimental Bharat vaccine or the scientifically assured British vaccine after reading the linked opinion piece.
"Was the approval process transparent and accountable? No. Did the government help Serum Institute of India and Bharat Biotech stockpile doses? Perhaps, although there was no formal announcement. Serum Institute also had an unusual advantage:
it is family-owned and doesn’t have to answer to shareholders, and so can manoeuvre more easily to changing market conditions.
Then, we don’t know what data Bharat Biotech and Serum Institute submitted to the Central Drug Standards Control Organisation, or what the subject expert committee and Drug Controller General’s (DCGI) deliberations were like. We don’t even know who the committee members were. No data about Bharat Biotech’s Covaxin trials is in the public domain either, apart from the
trials’ registrations on the Clinical Trial Registry website.
The Hindu reported that Serum Institute submitted data pertaining to only 100 participants of a phase 2 trial for its candidate, Covishield, to the DCGI’s office. Covishield is also saddled with doubts about its efficacy, thanks to the
actions of AstraZeneca, its biological parent.
Also read:
10 Questions the DCGI Needs To Answer About the Two Vaccine Candidates Approved
I would really like to take a vaccine for COVID-19 without worrying about whether it is safe, if it works, or if it is just going to jack up my already dispiriting medical bills. I would like to be able to happily recommend a vaccine to my grandparents even more. I definitely don’t want to tell them the DCGI said in his approval announcement that his office is approving Covaxin in “clinical trial mode”, then explain what clinical trials are. They are already so scared and lonely.
Last week, when my 82-year-old maternal grandmother and I were talking about COVID-19, she said she would be more than happy to forego immunisation so someone else could get the vaccine before her, “like you”. She is just as likely to step aside for you, dear reader.
As you deliberate on that, here is an adjuvant for your thoughts. In the new year, Subramanian Swamy, the Rajya Sabha MP with over 10 million followers on Twitter,
trained his guns on India’s principal scientific adviser, K. VijayRaghavan, calling him corrupt and alleging he colluded with Chinese scientists to “experiment” on bats in Nagaland. Second,
he alleged the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bengaluru could be working with the Chinese and American armies and that its scientists circumvented Indian authorities to study bats. (Here is the
background story.) Third, he
expressed shock that “
angrez” Serum Institute got “the contract” while “
swadeshi” Bharat Biotech’s vaccine candidate hasn’t yet been approved.
Less than 24 hours later, the DCGI announced that Bharat Biotech’s Covaxin was also being approved – “for restricted use in emergency situation in public interest as an abundant precaution, in clinical trial mode”. It shouldn’t take you long to find scientists scratching their heads about what the last sixteen words in this sentence mean. And irrespective of Swamy’s standing within the Bharatiya Janata Party, I’m not sure what I can tell myself or my friends to disabuse ourselves of the suspicion that the DCGI okayed Covaxin because of Swamy’s tantrum."