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Recently, the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) released their analysis of breakthrough infections – a concept that looks into the number of people who were infected after receiving at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine.
ICMR claims that COVID-19 infections were seen in only 2-4 of every 10,000 individuals vaccinated. To arrive at these numbers, the ICMR needed to collect the vaccination status of all individuals who submitted a sample for an RT-PCR test since vaccinations began.
On the ground, this data is not being collected by major testing chains across the country, even today. The dataset used by ICMR to arrive at these numbers is faulty.
One can argue that ICMR has access to the vaccination database and can carry out its own surveys to arrive at these numbers. While that would be a good initiative, why did ICMR do a poor job of collecting and analysing information?
The US Centre for Disease Control (CDC) runs V-Safe, a programme to monitor the health status of vaccinated individuals. Once registered on their app, it sends out surveys to check on health status on a weekly basis.
This continues for six weeks and is extended to one year. We do not know of any similar tool having been deployed in India by MoHFW or ICMR.
ICMR declared its analysis on 20 April 2021. This was just two days after India administered 12 crore doses. ICMR’s analysis covered all recipients of the 12 crore doses.
A week ago, on 12 April, India had administered 10.3 crore doses. That would mean that ICMR claimed that the vaccine offered protection to 1.7 crore people after monitoring them for less than a week. That’s 14 percent of the people in its supposed dataset.
We all have anecdotes about vaccinated individuals being infected in this wave. We also have reports of frontline workers infected, hospitalised and even succumbing to the virus, after vaccinations.
ICMR’s analysis could have shed light on these issues and made a stronger case for the vaccines.
Since last year, ICMR has been engaging in activities that are not its job.
Both the Centre and ICMR are guilty of being very hands-on and wanting to centralise all activity related to the pandemic.
When things go south, they end up spending valuable time and resources on defending their previous actions. It is high time that both move out of pandemic management and assume their regulatory roles.
There are many advantages of doing this.
For Phase 3 of the vaccination drive, the Centre must clearly state that it will not procure any vaccines but only oversee the vaccination process. This will also iron out unnecessary issues that have arisen from differential pricing for the Centre and states or manufacturers aligning themselves to the Centre.
It must work to clear hurdles for importing vaccines doses in the short term and raw materials and equipment needed for the increasing capacity of manufacturing in the long term.
Even after that, there will be some surprises down the road. We must assume that a third wave is also imminent. We do not know how long immunity will last from vaccines and whether a wave is being caused by an immune escaping mutant.
Accordingly, we can switch to ones that work against variants, while dropping the ineffective ones. COVID-19 might become endemic and we might even need yearly shots like the flu.
The data we collect now will help us understand the direction we are heading in. So, let’s collect and analyse it in a fair, thorough and impartial manner.
(A molecular biologist by day and a blogger by night, Ameya Paleja writes about genetics, microbes and the future of technology at Coffee Table Science. Scientific research and policy making are also areas of his interest. You can tweet to him at @ameyapaleja. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)
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Published: 02 May 2021,12:46 PM IST