309 - How the COVID-19 Crisis in a Vaccine-Generating Powerhouse Like India Took Hold, and What This Means for the World's Supply of Other Life-saving Vaccines
Public Health On Call
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
4.6 • 644 Ratings
🗓️ 4 May 2021
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
India produces much of the world's vaccines in normal times, and even produced enough COVID-19 vaccines that it was donating doses to poorer countries earlier this year. So how did a vaccine powerhouse with an existing distribution infrastructure end up with one of the world's worst COVID crises? Dr. Anita Shet of the Johns Hopkins International Vaccine Access Center talks with Stephanie Desmon about India's vaccine situation, what the crisis could mean for the supply of other critical vaccines, and what needs to be done to stem the outbreak.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Season 3, a Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. |
| 0:12.3 | I'm Josh Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, and a former secretary of Maryland's Health Department. |
| 0:19.6 | Our goal is to bring scientific evidence |
| 0:22.4 | and experience to the public health news of the day through informative interviews with scientists, |
| 0:27.8 | community leaders, policy experts, public health officials, clinicians, and more. If you have ideas |
| 0:34.4 | or questions for us to cover, please email us at public health question |
| 0:38.8 | at jh.edu. |
| 0:41.1 | That's public health question at jhhu.edu for future podcast episodes. |
| 0:47.4 | Hi, I'm Lindsay Smith Rogers, the producer of Public Health On Call. |
| 0:51.2 | Today, Stephanie Desmond talks to Dr. Anita Shet of the International Vaccine |
| 0:55.5 | Access Center at Johns Hopkins about how India went from a country donating some of its |
| 1:00.8 | vaccine supply to poorer countries to being in dire need of those doses today. Let's listen. |
| 1:08.1 | Anita Shet, thanks so much for joining me. Thank you for having me today, Stephanie. |
| 1:12.6 | Anita, today I'd like to talk about India. |
| 1:15.6 | We have discussed a little bit about what's going on with terms of COVID there. |
| 1:21.6 | Could you talk to me a little bit about the situation? |
| 1:25.6 | Yes, absolutely. You know, India peaked in COVID cases last year around |
| 1:32.0 | mid-September and then the curve came down in December, in January and February and started rising |
| 1:39.3 | slightly early March, 2021. And then we crossed last year's peak early April, and it was a steep rise after |
| 1:48.4 | that. It started looking like a wall, really, and crossing 350,000 cases and 2,000 deaths per day |
| 1:56.6 | that we're seeing this week. So just in the past week alone, India reported 2.5 million cases, |
| 2:04.3 | and this is the highest ever number in any seven-day period. And we think that these numbers |
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