Rethink vaccination strategy, experts write to PM

Suggest selective immunisation instead of mass vaccination

Hyderabad: A group of public health experts from across the country in an open letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday said the Centre must rethink its Covid-19 vaccination strategy. Instead of going for mass vaccination, the country should opt for selective immunisation against the coronavirus.

Test results of different vaccine candidates claiming to have more than 90 per cent efficacy were based on a very small number of positive persons out of the large number of volunteers being put on trial. Efficacy data was not presented through peer-reviewed articles, they said.

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The released data did not provide any differentiation between ages, sex, geographies, BMI, antibodies status prior to trial and after testing positive. Therefore, the efficacy of these vaccine candidates for the entire range of the population was still not established, the group said.

Some of the pharma companies had used gene-based mRNA technology to develop the vaccine. The Gene-based tech was used for developing vaccines earlier too, but none for vaccines of any human illnesses so far. What could be its long-term effects on human body were uncertain. It was still unclear how many doses of the vaccine would be needed and how long the immunity would last, they said.

The health experts who wrote to the Prime Minister are from public health voluntary organisations in Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Telangana, Odisha, Karnataka and Chhattisgarh.

 

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