India is being railroaded into vaccinating everyone

It makes no sense to jump onto the vaccines available, at least not yet

The subtle, and not so subtle, propaganda that India must immediately go full steam ahead into Wuhanvirus vaccination is rampant. Here’s The Economist magazine:

Isn’t it simply amazing that Indians are the most ready to accept the vaccine, and the eagerness has remained rock-steady whereas everywhere else, pretty much, people have become more sceptical in October? I find it hard to take this at face value. My suspicion is that, as usual, somebody asked 10 JNU people off the street: that’s what the word ‘survey’ generally passes for in India.

I also saw an astonishing table on @kaushikcbasu’s Twitter timeline today that said India has the worst of both worlds: among all of the Asia-Pacific, India has both the most negative GDP growth (at -10%), as well as the highest number of deaths per million population, at 95. In other words, the lockdown killed the economy, and didn’t save the people. Double whammy.

Pardon me, but I think the data is not correct, or at least it is misleading. For instance, there is a point of view that India will see a V-shaped recovery, as articulated by Arvind Virmani.

And since this data comes from Kaushik Basu, who was a World Bank honcho, and if I remember right, rather close to the Indian National Congress, I suspect it is intended to broadcast a message: “Modi screwed up by locking down!”

The implication is that India had better do something about it RIGHT NOW! And what could that something be? Conveniently, the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines have popped up.

I am highly sceptical about these mRNA vaccines as I said when the Pfizer vaccine was first announced.

According to an Economist podcast, the cost of these vaccines will be approximately $80 for a two shot-course for Pfizer, $40 for Moderna, and $6-8 for AstraZeneca/Oxford’s vaccine, which has not cleared its Phase 3 trials yet.

This sort of fits in with CEO Poonawalla of Serum Institute of India, Astra Zeneca’s Indian manufacturing partner, who said it would cost India 80,000 crore rupees to vaccinate its entire population. That’s about 700 rupees per person, and that, when the logistics cost is included, would be about right for the Oxford/Astra Zeneca vaccine.

But that is a gigantic amount of money (fyi, it’s about $12 billion, and for comparison, an American aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald Ford, cost about $13 billion) and an enormous number of people to vaccinate. That is indeed a huge leap of faith.

Let us note that the US FDA’s drug trials take roughly 10 years, as they put candidate drugs through an tortuous and detailed testing process, to guard against nasty side effects. It also takes an ocean-going container-ful (literally) of documents to win approval for drugs. I know this from a business school case study I have often taught.

I have no idea how long the usual FDA vaccine trials take, but they too should take some length of time (of the order of years) so that nasty side-effects, if any, show up. FDA trials are usually in three phases: animal trials, small human trials, and a large-scale human trial.

Since these vaccines have been in development only for, say, nine months, it is highly likely that the Pfizer, Moderna or Astra Zeneca Phase 3 large-scale human trials have been in place for only a few weeks. I am concerned that the urgency for a ‘solution’ for the Wuhan Coronavirus might be encouraging regulators to take short cuts.

This is not a good idea at least according to my judgment. The risk/reward tradeoff is not good enough. Let us remember thalidomide: a drug (not a vaccine, admittedly) that caused so many side-effects, including horribly deformed babies, that it spurred the setting up off the entire elaborate FDA drug-approval process.

I wonder if mRNA will have its, let’s say, ‘Thalidomide Moment’. This is because synthetic mRNA is the basis of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines (the AstraZeneca vaccine is more conventional). The mRNA encourages your body to develop certain proteins present on the surface of the Covid virus. The body recognizes these, and develops antibodies to the protein. When the real Covid virus attacks, the antibodies latch on to the proteins and attack the virus, destroying it.

That is the theory. But given that mRNA science is so new, it may have unintended consequences. Even CRISPR-cas9 which is for all practical purposes a miraculous technology, has had some aberrations where unforeseen genetic changes occurred. So what if the synthetic mRNA goes haywire, and produces other proteins than the target? Remember, this is a live strand of engineered genetic material running around in your body, and it will cause cells to make things!

I am reminded of Bill Joy’s legendary philippic against genetic engineering and other technologies, from Wired in 2000: it is a very long, and very scary essay on the kinds of things that could go wrong. Do we know they will not? Of course not.

I am also concerned about the proteins on the surface of the virus. There was a paper from IIT Delhi in January (the paper was hounded off the net) that said bluntly that the HIV-like ‘spike proteins’ that allowed the virus to latch on to a healthy cell and invade it were not the result of natural evolution. That has haunted me since then: and if the virus had been genetically engineered to be more, well, virulent using HIV/AIDS proteins, isn’t it going to be a risk if mRNA mistakenly manufactures these proteins?

The other part of the problem is that Indians in power seem to have this unfathomable fascination with Western ‘solutions’ to all sorts of problems. The fact is that they are often utterly wrong for India. I can give you several examples: Amul’s embrace of high-yielding Jersey-type bos taurus from Europe has decimated the native bos indicus, or humped zebu cattle breeds in India. However, they are hardy and heat resistant, and are thriving in the US (eg Texas) and Brazil.

Similarly the introduction of chemical fertilizers and pesticides has decimated organic farming in India, though we have old records of very high yields in paddy cultivation using traditional, organic methods. Today our yield is very poor, even with the chemicals, which of course are poisoning the land and the water.

But this touching faith in the West seems to endure. Today, it appears as though India is gearing up to revive the ‘cold chain’ it used for pulse polio drops, so that the entire 1.4 billion population can be vaccinated. There is also some talk that it will be compulsory: to get your e-pass on your Arogya Setu app, you need to be vaccinated.

I think this is alarmingly short-sighted. Why should poor Indians be guinea pigs for these vaccines? Anyway Big Pharma has been making free in India by taking advantage of lax ‘informed consent’ laws to secretly test experimental drugs on unsuspecting patients. For instance, Johns Hopkins university was castigated for trying out an experimental cancer drug on uninformed patients at the Regional Cancer Center, Trivandrum.

The Indian health authorities really need to be a little more sensible about jumping on something half-baked. I am reminded of the science-fiction film ‘The Day of the Triffids’ where the entire population goes blind as a result of some innocuous activity. Yes, unintended consequences again.

There is one more factor to be considered. Muslims have resisted vaccination especially in Kerala earlier, and more recently as well, for religious reasons. Christians are already preparing to ask for exemptions:

This means that it will only be docile Hindus who will be led like sheep to slaughter in the massive and compulsory vaccination drives that the health ministry is likely planning. And if there is a deadly side effect, it would affect Hindus disproportionately. Somehow that seems against ‘constitutional morality’. Maybe we should ask the judge who keeps talking about that.

Anyway, all things considered, it is premature to leap on this bandwagon. Let me hasten to add that I am not an anti-vaxxer, and I agree vaccination has generally been beneficial; I am only saying that these new Wuhan Coronavirus vaccines need to be tested more thoroughly. We need to wait, not rush in where angels fear to tread.