India initiated their COVID-19 vaccination rollout a week ago. They mean to ramp up to over 3 million jabs/day, vaccinating 300 million people by July. Their initial week had the hopeful goal of around 300,000 per day, and they reached around 65-70% of that. They are using two different vaccines, the Covishield version of AstraZeneca and Covaxin by Bharat Biotech. Most of the first 30 million arms targeted are health workers.
Western media, with an attention span too narrow to conceptualize what rolling out and ramping up means, thought they found evidence of program-threatening problems — similar to coverage of the U.S. rollout. But videos of people getting their shot, and “texting rooms” set up by facilities for those getting shots to tell their friends how everything was fine, are having success. One immunization officer in Kashmir reported on Jan. 23: “Now they are picking up satisfactorily…. Yesterday, we met 80-90% of our targets across vaccination stations.”
