A COVID-19 Vaccine Deployment Strategy for India

Abstract

Issue: Nov-Dec 2020
 Deploying COVID-19 vaccines once they are available is going to be an unprecedented administrative and logistical challenge. This paper proposes a plan to vaccinate 80% of India’s population by December 2021. We envision this process to be divided into four main stages viz., estimating the need, securing vaccine supply, distributing the vaccines, and post-market surveillance. Broadly, we suggest that essential workers be prioritised for vaccination in the first phase followed by everyone else. We recommend that the government issue a model contract to build manufacturer trust and incentivise ramping up manufacturing capacity. Vaccines can be priced as per market rates with the government subsidising the cost to necessary recipients to ensure equitable access. Along with public private partnerships and open markets, the government must leverage administrative capacities of Election Commission of India to roll out a nationwide vaccination drive for maximising vaccine coverage. Finally, we recommend post-market vaccine surveillance strategies to obtain data on adverse events and tweak vaccine deployments, when necessary.

Leveraging Lessons Learned from Yellow Fever and Polio Immunization Campaigns during COVID-19 Pandemic, Ghana, 2021

“…The population segmentation used in administering the vaccines ensured that the most at-risk groups were covered to reduce severity of the disease. This approach has also been used in India (10). An incident management system for COVID-19 vaccine deployment established within the National Public Health Emergency Operations Center served as a platform for resource mobilization and reduced duplication among stakeholders and partners (11)(12)(13).…”

Balancing Routine and Pandemic: The Synergy of India’s Universal Immunization Program and COVID-19 Vaccination Program

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