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| Challenge for Distribution | | | Sameer Khan
India has one of the biggest manufacturing capacities in the world with SII alone producing 1.5B vaccines every year. So far, the country has managed to inoculate 2.9 million frontline and healthcare workers, 13 days into its vaccination drive and it aims to vaccinate 300 million people by the end of August 2021. Despite India being the center of global vaccine manufacturing, the distribution of the vaccines for such a huge population still remains an intimidating challenge.
With most of the vaccine candidates requiring extremely cold sub zero temperature storages, The major bottleneck in the distribution process will be the country’s cold storage infrastructure and capacity. Speaking to The Straits Times, leading epidemiologist, Shahid Jameel said “I feel the biggest challenge would be cold chain (management), depending upon what vaccine is to be deployed” and that “There would be limited capacity in India to store, let alone transport vaccines to all parts of the country if they require minus 20 deg C or minus 70 deg C temperatures. India should go with vaccines that require storage and transport in liquid form (that is, between 4 deg C and 10 deg C) and not the ones that have to be kept frozen.”
There also exists a major disparity in the allocation of Cold chain points across the country. India’s cold chain infrastructure is skewed towards more rich and urbanized centers, for example: 4 cold chain points cater to about 1,00,000 in Gujarat whereas there is only one for the same number of people in Jharkhand.
This would require the country to call in help from the private sector along with its already existing Universal Immunization programme with 27000 cold chain points which cater to about 600 million doses. According to a report by Credit Suisse, even with the overall bottleneck with the cold chain infrastructure, the estimated annual vaccinations may be just around 550-600 million doses and the skilled manpower required to administer these doses is less than one lakh which should not prove to be a bottleneck. |
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