Monday, July 7, 2025
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Vaccine shylocks

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The Covid19 saga, lasting two full years, is hopefully behind us. A fourth wave cannot be ruled out and big cities in China where the global spread started are back in lockdown mode in the face of a fresh spread. India and the rest of the world will have to keep their fingers crossed even as there is palpable relief about a positive turn for now. However, several matters relating to the pandemic that killed and shattered the lives of millions of families in this country are still in the realm of conjecture. We know too little as to how and where this pandemic originated and WHO itself is unclear yet about Covid and its many variants.
What we know for sure is that these past two years were also a season of virtual extortion of the hapless people by multiple agencies. It might sound curious that the two principal Covid vaccine suppliers under the Covishield and Covaxin brands have come up with a statement that they have slashed the prices of the vaccine jabs from over Rs 600 a dose to around Rs 250 after consultations with the Union Government. They stated this at the start of a new round of precautionary dose distribution. This simply means that what could be sold at Rs 250 was attempted to be sold at nearly three times this rate. Taking undue advantage of the scare in the initial phases of the Covid spread, manufacturers in India and abroad had been quoting high rates for their vaccines. This was also because governments directly intervened, took the full supplies and distributed them across the country. Even granted that these firms had given their vaccines at so-called subsidized rates to the government, there still was no justification for the high price quoted for each jab.
The Government spent money from the exchequer and got the vaccinations done partly free and partly via payment as in the case of private hospitals. Some 96 per cent of all those above the age of 15 among the 1.3 billion population have been administered one dose of the vaccine, while 83 per cent of the population received the second dose too. When more than two billion vaccine doses were thus sold by these two companies to a captive market, without any exertion by way of marketing or cash collections, a question remains as to why this high rate for each dose. The central government, which negotiated with the vaccine companies, should have handled the matter in a way that exploitation of the people, either directly or through the exchequer, was not allowed.

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