India on Saturday kicked off its nationwide vaccination drive at thousands of centers across the country, part of a bold bid to immunize 300 million people by this summer.
It’s a vital undertaking in a nation that has recorded more coronavirus cases than any other place on Earth except the United States.
The effort is being buoyed by two locally made vaccines and India’s prior experience with large-scale immunization campaigns. But what might have been a triumph for the country’s vaccine industry has been dogged by controversy.
The Indian government granted emergency approval to two vaccines — a locally manufactured version of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine and a vaccine called Covaxin developed by Bharat Biotech, an Indian pharmaceutical company.
Only the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine has completed a Phase 3 clinical trial for safety and efficacy. Bharat Biotech has finished earlier-stage trials on its vaccine but has provided no data on whether it works. Yet both vaccines are being administered, and people cannot choose which vaccine they receive.
Complicating matters further, Indian regulators said that the Bharat Biotech vaccine will be used in “clinical trial mode,” a phrase that left experts baffled. One of India’s foremost vaccine experts, Gagandeep Kang, told an interviewer that she had “no clue” what it meant. ...
