Roving Periscope: The US offers vaccines to China as cautious India braces for uncertainties ahead

Virendra Pandit

New Delhi: As China battled the Covid tsunami, its worst-ever health crisis threatening to snowball into a global challenge, the US on Friday offered effective vaccines to help control the coronavirus wave as India braced for uncertainties ahead, and added a nasal vaccine in its arsenal to meet the challenge.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said America is prepared to help China with vaccines to help address its Covid-19 outbreak, but the government in Beijing hasn’t asked for help so far.

“We want to see China get this outbreak under control,” he told a press conference, adding the US is worried about the rise of new coronavirus variants. This outbreak has “clear implications for the global economy because of China being shut down on multiple levels.”

After unsuccessfully trying to eliminate the coronavirus for three years of the Zero Covid policy, China is now letting it circulate widely. This triggered an explosion in cases and reports of uncounted Covid-19 deaths are mounting. Many older Chinese people remained vaccinated, and China approved no foreign vaccines, including mRNA-based options from BioNTech or Moderna, for its own population.

Reacting to Blinken’s offer, Liu Pengyu, a spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, said in a statement that his nation’s vaccine stock “can generally meet demand” and boosters were being rolled out. This showed China’s reluctance to import better vaccines.

With the new year 2023 just a week away, China’s soaring Covid infections are keeping people home and causing a slump in travel and economic activity. After the recent abrupt end to Zero Covid controls, an exit wave of infections has hit more Chinese cities in the past week, leading to crowded hospitals and queues at funeral parlors. That’s keeping people in Beijing, Shanghai, and elsewhere from going out despite workers in some places being told to return to work even if sick, the media reported.

As uncertainties soared globally, India, the fifth largest economy, braced for difficult days ahead. A day after reviewing the situation, Prime Minister Narendra Modi called an all-party meeting on Friday in Parliament to apprise them of the country’s preparedness.

Amid the fresh spurt in infections in China and other countries, the Union Health Ministry on Friday approved Bharat Biotech’s intranasal Covid-19 vaccine to include in the vaccination program as a booster dose for those above 18 years of age. The needle-free vaccine will be available to private clinics.

The nasal vaccine—BBV154—received approval from the Drugs Controller General of India (DCGI) in November for restricted use in an emergency for those above 18 as a heterologous booster dose.

This will be India’s first such needleless jab. As of now, Bharat Biotech’s Covaxin, Serum Institute’s Covishield, and Covovax, Russian Sputnik V, and Biological E Ltd’s Corbevax are listed in the Cowin portal as valid vaccines.

On September 6, Bharat Biotech announced that its iNCOVACC (BBV154) received approval from the DCGI under “Restricted Use in Emergency Situation” for ages 18 and above.

PM Modi had on Thursday cautioned people against complacency and urged them to wear masks in crowded places and also directed officials to strengthen surveillance measures, especially at international airports where random checking of incoming passengers has started.

Meanwhile, India’s leading virologist Gagandeep Kang said that XBB and BF.7, the variants behind a surge in Covid-19 cases in China, have been in India for a while, and a wave of new cases from them is thus not expected in the country.

In a series of tweets, Kang, a professor in the Department of Gastrointestinal Sciences at the Christian Medical College, Vellore, signaled that the situation in India is not alarming and there are no new variants of the virus.

“At the moment, India is doing fine. We have a few cases, we have had the XBB & BF.7 for a while and they have not driven an upsurge in India. In the absence of an even more highly infectious variant, I do not expect a surge,” she said.

“As far as we know, there are no new variants. China has the capacity to sequence, and we hope it will share data in real-time. The variants now circulating in China have been in the rest of the world for months. The behavior of the virus is not any different from expected,” she added.

Kang said that Indians are vaccinated and had an infection rate of 90 percent, mostly because of the Omicron wave. This gave them hybrid immunity.

She suggested that increasing the testing of the patients needs a strategic approach. “Randomly increasing testing has little value. Testing incoming travelers needs a risk-based framework, but X percent sampling also means that you accept that every incoming case will not be detected,” she said.

She also said that India has ample capacity to detect a new variant or a surge in India. “We have ample sequencing capacity and if sequencing is done in real-time, absolutely we can. When hospitals begin to see severe cases, we will know. Need to & can understand & measure both the virus & the disease,” Kang added.

The main threat from China is that the increased spread of the virus could cause the evolution of new variants. To stop this, India should maintain surveillance so that any change in the virus’s behavior is detected at an early stage.

“For this, they (China) and we should maintain variant & clinical surveillance to ensure that we detect the signal of any changes in the virus’s behavior. This is a public health function where stable surveillance runs in the background & ramps up for emerging threats,” Kang said.

“Periodic serosurvey & environmental surveillance can be useful depending on the pathogen,” she added.

“If you have elderly persons in your family, please get them an additional dose,” Kang advised. If anyone has any respiratory infection, they should stay at home. But if they need to go out, she suggested wearing a mask.

“If you are vulnerable, stay masked in an unfamiliar company or if someone around you is obviously ill. If there are a lot of infections/cases in the community, staying masked in crowds is good,” she suggested.