Akhilesh Yadav set the cat amongst the pigeons when he claimed that he would not take any of the Covid vaccines being offered in India as he was wary of a BJP vaccine. That ruffled the feathers of the scientific community and quite rightly so, for it’ was not the BJP or the Prime Minister that came up with the vaccine. Though, on second thoughts, you may be forgiven for thinking that, for don’t forget all the hype that the media gave to the PM’s visit to the Serum institute in Pune and the Bharat Biotech facilities in Hyderabad last November. With headlines such as ‘PM goes in search of vaccines’ blaring on our TV channels, one can understand why Akhilesh Yadav was misled into believing that it was the PM who came up with this vaccine, like a modern-day Hanuman in search of the Sanjeevani booti.
But to come back to Akhilesh’s comment, he was pulled up for this not just by the BJP, but also by some of his colleagues from the ‘secular’ side such as Omar Abdullah. But politics aside, Akhilesh did succeed in flagging some concerns as to the transparency of the entire process. There has been a lot of uncertainty about the ‘restricted emergency use’; go-ahead given to Bharat Biotech’s Covaxin and Serum Institute’s Covishield. Interestingly, the uncertainty comes coloured with political hues with the Congress and the liberals questioning the manner in which approval was granted while the BJP and the Right-wing were quick to defend the move. Congress leader Shashi Tharoor, for instance, tweeted, “I hope and pray that Covaxin and Covishield and other Indian made vaccines will prove to be safe and effective… but wouldn’t our global credibility and standing have gained if we’d respected established scientific procedures before approval?” While Tharoor was trolled for his comments, there have been media reports in the Indian Express, quoting minutes of the Subject Experts Committee of the national drugs regulator, as to how the Covaxin was first cleared for restricted use approval one day and restricted emergency use the next day. This has led other politicians such as Jairam Ramesh to question why “internationally accepted Phase Three protocols are being modified for Covaxin”. This quite naturally led to a war of words between the Congress and the BJP with Union Minister Hardeep Puri questioning why the Congress was unhappy with “Made in India” vaccines. BJP leader Dr Subramanian Swamy too made the same point in his interview with NewsX. And with all things BJP, this too was converted into a question of nationalism.
So there are two narratives at play here, the merits of Covaxin versus Covishield; and Indian vaccines versus Pfizer and Moderna. There are concerns about the transparency of the process which cannot be addressed by politicians but by medical and scientific experts, which is probably why AIIMS director Dr Randeep Guleria was fielded to the media to reassure the country that standard safety precautions were followed in the approval process. Apart from his media interviews, Dr Guleria has also made short explanatory videos which are going viral on WhatsApp regarding the safety and also the procedure to be followed in taking the vaccines; but then so are Dr Gagandeep Kang’s interviews questioning the clearance given to Covaxin without the efficacy data from Phase 3 trials. Which leads me to ask aloud a question that is being whispered on WhatsApp groups: Which vaccine will PM Modi, Rahul Gandhi, Shashi Tharoor, etc, opt for? Or, will the vaccines be also divided into liberal and Right-wing camps?
