Union Health Minister Dr Harsh Vardhan on Sunday complained about “disgraceful” attempts to “politicise [the] critical issue” of Covid-19 v...
Union Health Minister Dr Harsh Vardhan on Sunday complained about “disgraceful” attempts to “politicise [the] critical issue” of Covid-19 vaccinations, after the Drug Controller General of India approved two vaccines for emergency use in the country.
The problem with the health minister’s comments was his inability to recognise that any blame for politicising or raising doubts about the vaccines lay primarily with his own government.
Rather than being open to questions or lucidly explaining why the regulator created an entirely new approach to vaccine approvals, ministers and members of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party have declared that the many genuine concerns are politically motivated and indeed “anti-national”.
In most cases, it is the opaque approval process – and not the vaccines themselves – that are being questioned. Yet the government and the BJP have tried to make it seem as if critics are baselessly attacking made-in-India vaccines.
This refusal to communicate and build trust in the public health system is not new.
Independence Day vaccine
Think back to July, just months after India first went into a national lockdown to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, when experts were saying a vaccine would not be ready for another six months at the earliest.
At the time, the Indian...
