Name: India, Covid-19 and vaccine politics | FT
Uploaded: 2021-05-23T16:12:35.000Z
Duration: 5 min 13 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

India is embarking on one of the world's most ambitious

Central to this effort is the Serum Institute

of India, the world's largest vaccine manufacturer

As a major pharma player India has the advantage

Along with inoculating its own population,

India plans to export the vaccine to the developing

Rolling out the vaccine quickly across a diverse country

Convincing people from all walks of life to take the vaccine

What's more, the approval of its homegrown vaccines

And the first days of India's vaccine rollout

have been slow, underscoring the difficult path ahead.

Indian government realised very early that it's one

of our strengths to manufacture a vaccine and supply in large

India is one of the world's biggest manufacturers

Two vaccines have been approved by the government so far,

and the state-run Indian Council of Medical Research,

and Covishield, the locally produced version of the Oxford

There are several more in the pipeline based

one from Bangalore-based Mynvax that doesn't

In the developing world that could be a game changer.

For India, administering the vaccine to 1.4bn people is

a far bigger challenge than sourcing supply.

The government wants to vaccinate 300m people by July,

Official data shows more than 75 per cent of people

have not yet been exposed to coronavirus.

In the first two weeks of the vaccine programme India

The vaccination programme is focusing on healthcare

and frontline workers first, and then people aged over 50.

More than availability, I personally feel that, you know,

vaccine hesitancy is going to be a challenge, actually.

Another huge challenge is to convince people

Even healthcare workers are scared of taking the jab.

India's poor, who make up the majority of the population,

are far more concerned about the daily health

challenges they face from poor sanitation and hunger.

Convincing them that coronavirus is a priority

will be hard, despite being among the hardest hit

are not really concerned about whether they

India started its national vaccine rollout in mid-January,

but New Delhi is already looking beyond its borders.

The government sees an opportunity to boost its soft

power by supplying millions of doses of made in India vaccines

to its neighbours as gifts, as well as securing commercial

deals with countries, including Mongolia, Canada,

India is also a significant contributor to the Gavi Vaccine

Under its COVAX programme, India will supply a further 10m Covid

vaccine doses to Africa and a million doses to the UN.

India will even be sending vaccines to Pakistan

through COVAX in spite of their hostile relationship.

with questions over the efficacy of China's Sinovac vaccine.

marketing their products around the world

and have signed commercial deals with more than a dozen

The Modi government has made big promises

about its coronavirus vaccines, but delivering on them

Like China, India hopes to use its manufacturing capacity

At stake is not just the health of its people,

but whether the country gets a much needed injection

of confidence to start recovering from the wider

Subtitles ListPlay Video

India, Covid-19 and vaccine politics | FT

controversial

boost

impact

advantage