How India’s Covid 19 vaccination drive can benefit against diabetes, cancers, cardiovascular diseases

As India has commenced the world’s largest vaccination programme for Covid-19, the challenges for the Narendra Modi government to cope up with the new Covid strain which has hit European countries and the US badly. However, the vaccination drive in India is laying down a vaccine route to healthy India and there is hope that the end of the Covid pandemic is near.

The Covid vaccination drive is a huge challenge given the magnitude and number of individuals involved with the process. Going with its “Atma Nirbhar policy”, the Narendra Modi government has managed to address the stockpile issues as several Asian and European countries have started facing an acute shortage of Covid-19 vaccine dosage. Pune-based Serum Institute of India is the largest producer of vaccines overall and has confirmed that they will be producing one billion doses of Covishield vaccine, a version of Oxford-AstraZeneca’s Covid vaccine. The maker of India’s first indigenous Coronavirus vaccine Covaxin Bharat Biotech has also claimed that they have the capacity to meet vaccination requirements, according to a report by The Indian Express.

While India has managed to address the vaccine doses issue, key challenges were the training of a huge task force, managing the logistics, cold chain, which are pivotal for such vaccination program. The Central government has issued vaccination guidelines that target to administer the jabs to 30 crore population. We are witnessing that France and Germany have been struggling to expedite their vaccination drive whereas Israel has managed to vaccinate over 2 million or 20 per cent of its population. India has managed to implement what Israel did right to achieve rapid progress – a well-formulated, synchronised logistics and supply chain plan and abundant access to vaccines, The Indian Express report says.

According to a number of studies, more than 70 per cent of mortalities from Coronavirus occurred due to pre-existing non-communicable diseases such as cancers, diabetes, and cardiovascular ailments. By prioritising the people with co-morbidities for Covid vaccination, India will be able to keep the Covid-19 case fatality rate as low as possible, as per the IE report.

It is estimated that even as there are 30 million diagnosed diabetes cases in India, the prevalence rate estimated is 11.8 per cent in the adult population, as per a survey conducted by the National Diabetes and Diabetic Retinopathy Survey. This translates into around 72 million population. Studies have also shown that undetected hypertension cases are likely to be as high as 26 per cent of the adult population. Like many low-and-middle-income nations, roughly 40 per cent to 50 per cent of the non-communicable disease burden in India remains undiagnosed till the very advanced stages of the disease. India’s Covid 19 vaccination screening strategy for the population with co-morbidities can lead to the detection of such non-communicable diseases, the IE report says.