New Delhi: Ignorance, nuisance created by a section of people and glitches in Co-WIN digital app are some of the major reasons attributing to the vaccine hesitancy in India, said Dr Sanjay K Rai, Professor in Centre for Community Medicine, All India Institute of Medical Science (AIIMS) to ETV Bharat on Thursday.
Dr Rai who is also the national president of the Indian Public Health Association (IPHA) said that people should believe in science "instead of listening to the rumours."
"Whenever a new drug or vaccine is launched, it needs to go under several procedures and clinical trials before it gets the approval of the regulators. The vaccine hesitancy exists because people do not have the right information. Ironically some people create nuisance over vaccines," said Dr Rai.
Admitting the fact that vaccine hesitancy occurs, Dr Rai recalled that in the case of Polio immunisation similar hesitancy occurred.
"There were false rumours and earlier the vaccine was rejected by the people. We worked on that and subsequently, everything went well. After 2011, there was no single polio case reported in India," said Dr Rai.
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He claimed that COVAXIN being an indigenous vaccine "it's the safest among all other Covid 19 vaccines found globally".
"The problem is people don't go through data and scientific literature...people should believe on scientists," he added.
Stating that vaccine efficacy data will certainly come following trials, Dr Rai said, "due to shortage of infection cases, the efficacy data of COVAXIN is not calculated. It will be done during the course of time."
Quoting scientific data, Dr Rai said that a majority percentage of people have already developed neutralizing antibodies in their body which can neutralise the vaccines too
"...This is an indirect efficacy data, though safety data is most important," added Dr Rai.
As the people are generating antibodies, the infection rate is also lower in the country, Dr Rai said.
He admitted that the target for the vaccination has not yet been achieved ever since the drive was launched on January 16.
"Maybe we have set a big target. In addition, the ongoing vaccine hesitancy and glitches in Co-WIN app are also hampering the vaccination process," he said.
Although the government had been using the Co-WIN app for vaccinating 3 crore health care and frontline workers for the time being, the app is facing severe problems like data configuration, display of data among others.
In many states, health workers administering the vaccine had to manually verify and record data after Co-WIN app failed to update the names of the beneficiaries. Informing vaccine recipients about their appointments in advance proved the primary challenge in the absence of reliable automated communications.
"If everything is settled down and goes well, vaccination for health care workers will be completed by next 15-20 days," Dr Rai said.
