Focus needs to stay on tracking virus behaviour and on ramping up vaccine supplies: WHO’s Dr Swaminathan

The container carrying the first instalment of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine travelled more swiftly on social media than on the road. Emerging slowly out of the gates of Serum Institute of India and driving past the flashlights mounted on waiting cameras and video recorders, the enthusiasm was palpable and with good reason. The company’s CEO Adar Poonawalla tweeted the dispatch as an emotional moment. The company sent out close to 6 million doses out of the total of 11 million doses to be dispatched over two days. While the focus now shifts to local municipal authorities and to the vaccination centres, it is finding answers to larger questions beyond the initial vaccine jabs that now begin to matter.

Experts point to challenges on two fronts – keeping up the supply momentum and on tracking the behaviour of the virus, which has caused havoc in other countries, especially the UK with a new strain that is more infectious. This apart from concerns around a new virus variant in the US and the rising caseload there. In the light of these, questions around what should concern a country like India that also has a large number of people still infected by the virus even if the number of new cases is declining.

On the supplies, the 11 million doses sought by the Indian government from Serum would be deployed for administering the first dose of vaccine to the one crore odd medical professionals but then there are the 29 crore others (frontline workers and the vulnerable elderly) that also need to be covered under the current emergency use authorization for the vaccine. And we are yet to talk of the national rollout.

While, India is fortunate to have several domestic companies into vaccine development such as Bharat Biotech, Zydus Cadila and Biological E, so far it is only Serum that has got the emergency use authorization apart from Bharat Biotech, whose vaccine is to be delivered in a clinical mode. The others are still to conclude their clinical trials. Supply shortage is a global problem. Speaking to Financial Express Online, Dr Soumya Swaminathan, the chief scientist at the World Health Organisation (WHO) says, “globally, there is a vaccine supply shortage resulting in a huge mismatch between supply and demand but this will improve during the course of the year (2021). However, in the next couple of months it is going to be very limited. So, our goal at COVAX (WHO’s initiative aimed at ensuring equitable access to COVID-19 vaccine globally) is really to see that the priority groups of healthcare workers and high-risk people get vaccinated in all countries.”

Appreciating the move by the Indian government to set up a consortium of several research institutions (10 in all) to take up the sequencing of the virus, as the right thing to do because “doing genomic surveillance” is what is needed, Dr Swaminathan says, “there needs to be a strategic approach to how sequencing is done – going beyond just the new mutations that have been noticed to also keeping a track on how the virus is evolving in India, major strains emerging, the geographical differences within the country and then trying to collate it with transmission and clinical severity.”

In short, she says, “there are a lot of research questions around the virus behaviour that can be answered if there is genomic surveillance combined with clinical and epidemiological data. This is because the sequencing of the virus alone is not going to give us the information that we need on the virus behaviour.” Also, after the vaccine rollout, “it will be important to continue to sequence those breakthrough infections from the trials as well as the rollout,” she says.

Dr Swaminathan points out that variants of a virus are always going to arise. There will be many mutations over time and genomic data needs to be analysed temporally as there is little value in a one-time snapshot.”

Quick to add that while “there is nothing to panic, we cannot rule out significant changes in the future which have implications for vaccines and treatments. We have to be on guard and careful,” she says.

On the plausible explanation for the declining caseload in India, she says, “it could be attributed to some amount of herd immunity that has developed. This is especially so in places where there were a lot of infections earlier.”

After all, she reminds that “it was the cities and densely populated urban areas that were driving the epidemic in India and not the rural areas and in the cities, it appears there is some population immunity. However, we need to wait for the ICMR (Indian Council of Medical Research) sero survey results to understand the levels of population immunity in different areas,” she says. But then, she cautions, “it could always take off as it has done in other countries. Therefore, we need to be vigilant.”