How did the ‘vaccine capital’ of the world come up with such shortage of vaccines that within a few months of declaring that we were going to save the world with our vaccines, now individual states are banging the doors of manufacturer’s outside of India. India’s vaccination project is woefully slow and slowing down further (on May 14th, the number was 11 lakh jabs, down from 40lakh jabs/day a few weeks ago)

While in the past few days, the BJP and fans of the PM, have made some impressive mental and verbal gymnastics to either claim the situation isn’t as bad as it seems or completely shift the blame on to everyone else. Even after having considered all their arguments, it appears that, whichever way the facts are sliced and diced, most of the fault seems to lie with the Central Govt.

Unlike enforcing a lockdown, which even with hindsight, nobody really knows what is the right way to impose them, vaccination strategy should have been very very simple. Someone in the central government should have made these back of the envelope calculations 4–5 months ago. India needed a little over 2 billion (200cr) doses of vaccines to fully vaccinate its adult population. Indian manufacturers can produce 7–8 Cr/Month (with capacity going up to 10Cr/Month). So, with Indian manufacturers alone it’d take 25 months to get enough vaccines for everybody. If the goal was to vaccinate everybody within a year, we needed to import at least a billion doses. All the central government had to do was place $15–20 billion on the table and ask suppliers from around the world.

Instead of that now, we have a strategy where local vaccine manufacturers should handover 50% of their production to the central government. 25% to states (with fixed quotas for each state at higher price determined by Centre) and 25% to private hospitals. And the responsibility of importing any additional vaccines that we need now lies with the individual states who will be competing against each other in international markets to procure vaccines. You couldn’t design something messier if you wanted to! And if so many people believe that states competing against each other global market is a good thing, then our country has a much bigger problems even after the virus is defeated.

Apart from logistics, even economically, the center procuring 200Cr doses at say Rs 150 each (30,000Cr) makes the best sense. Any other combination of states buying within India and importing is going to be, in the end, tens of thousands of crores more expensive and that’s public money squandered for no benefit (in fact only drawback).

“But the states wanted to decentralize vaccine administration” — My personal opinion is even if some states wanted this, it shouldn’t have been done. Even then clearly if Center is still controlling quotas and prices for each state, nothing is actually decentralized. And even if states can import, the foreign reserves have to come from Centre. Even now, one can register for vaccines only through Co-Win portal, which is managed by the Centre. Fun fact, abdication of responsibility and blame is not the same as ‘decentralization’. Also, when states do eventually import vaccines and inoculate the citizens, guess who is going to take credit for it? Will vaccine certificates going forward have the pictures of state leadership or Prime Minister?

“but but Healthcare is state subject” — Well not after the Central Govt invoked the Disaster Management Act, that gives them power to micro manage every district. Also, if we had an abundance of vaccines, oxygen and anti-viral drugs and the states were botching it getting them to the patients (which by the way is happening to some degree), then yes, those lapses are largely the states’ fault. Getting these resources to the states hands is the job of the Centre and there it failed.

“’Vaccine hesitancy’ slowed down…blah blah” — This is such an infuriatingly stupid point. If out of a 100 people, 20 people are vaccine skeptics, but 80 want to take the vaccine, but you only have 10 doses in hand, you are in no position logically, morally or ethically to blame those 20 people for the shortage. Any discussion about ‘vaccine hesitancy’ when we are so short of supplies is criminal. Let’s discuss this when we have a surplus of vaccines and no takers.

Also, when has this government ever responded positively to criticism before? There were lots of voices that criticized the GST, Article 370, CAA-NRC and this government never budged an inch on those issues but suddenly the government is holding up some opinion articles by some critics as an excuse for not stock-piling vaccines!

Any which way you spin the narrative here, the Centre has to take a lot of blame.