There is suddenly major hue and cry over the British-Swedish pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca’s admission in court that its anti Covid vaccine, which has been manufactured and marketed in India as Covishield, may have some rare side-effects of blood clotting known as TTS, apart from loss of platelets. Amid the panic that is being sought to be created, a quick look at the statistics shows that worldwide, there have been 51 such cases among the billions of doses given of this particular vaccine. Most importantly, such cases had occurred typically within 4 to 42 days of the vaccine being administered. It is up to AstraZeneca to defend itself in the UK court which is hearing the lawsuit filed by British citizen Jamie Scott, who claims that it was because of the AstraZeneca vaccine that he got a permanent brain injury in April 2021. But the latest outcry brings to focus several larger issues that the world needs to talk about.
First of all, it is about vaccination, especially vaccination against Covid. According to scientists and health professionals the world over, it was rapid and widespread vaccination that prevented many more deaths that would have occurred if scientists had not been able to develop vaccines to counter the China-born virus that wreaked havoc in the world by killing millions. However, that does not take away from the fact that certain vaccines manufactured by Big Pharma were high priced, were of uncertain quality and totally unsuitable for use in countries like India because of the costs involved. That India did not fall into that trap by importing such expensive vaccines from the West, and instead opted for getting vaccines manufactured in India, was a good decision and should not be politicised, which some political parties are doing, in the wake of the AstraZeneca controversy.
The current controversy also reminds us of the condemnable role played by the World Health Organisation in allowing the spread of the virus, by turning a blind eye to China’s actions. Later, it also gave emergency clearance to Chinese vaccines with unproven efficacy. Thus the WHO put at risk the lives of millions of people, even while delaying the release of a far more effective Indian vaccine. Till date the WHO has not been able to explain why it unleashed on the world vaccines that were so ineffective even in the country of their origin—China. Beijing had to put large swathes of its population in extended periods of quarantine to stop the virus from spreading because the vaccines were not just working. As a result, unprecedented protests broke out in many parts of China against the series of lockdowns declared by Xi Jinping.
What is also important to remember is that there has been no accountability for what has been a once in a century pandemic, where millions have lost their lives and livelihoods. The global economy has been disrupted, with a death blow dealt to many in the Global South. Even the developed economies are yet to recover from the disruptions caused by Covid. Many have gone into recession. However, no one has held China accountable for unleashing the virus on the world. Instead there have been attempts to obfuscate the origin of the virus, even by the World Health Organisation, whose investigation into the virus has been a sham at best. The West, in particular, has been complicit in the cover-up of the origin of the virus. That is because westerners themselves had outsourced their research and experiments to China, which then used that to produce one of the deadliest viruses the world has ever seen.
So the controversy surrounding AstraZeneca may seem like a case of reviving something that is dead and long gone, but the fact is, the ripples of the world’s worst pandemic are still being felt, four years after it was unleashed on the world. Until and unless there is proper investigation, accountability and reparations, there is no closure.