Resurgent virus and vaccine worries

The third wave of Covid-19 infections has seen records broken for daily infections, with positivity rates hitting as high as nine per cent. The prime minister’s household has also been hit, with Imran Khan and Bushra Bibi both testing positive. The NCOC has thus ordered immediate restrictions on activities contributing to the surge in the infection. Under the decisions taken yesterday, no commercial activities will be allowed across the country after 8pm while businesses will remain closed for two days in a week. Indoor activities, of any type, are also prohibited. Meanwhile, vaccine availability remains problematic, with the government barely acquiring enough doses to vaccinate the country’s highest-risk groups, and the prices of even the cheapest vaccines are also too high for the common man.

Topping off the weekend’s Covid-19 news was a confounding update to the country’s travel restrictions. The three-tier system was updated to show travel bans for 12 countries and test-free travel allowances for 20 countries. Neither of those lists made much sense. The test-free countries in Category ‘A’ — which ostensibly should be countries that have largely beaten Covid-19 — includes several countries where the virus is still a significant problem. Meanwhile, Category ‘C’ does not include most of the countries where the most virus cases are being reported — India, the United States, Turkey, France or the rest of the European Union countries. In fact, not a single European country is in Category ‘C’, even though European countries have the highest infection rates these days. It is quite clear that the categorisation is based on commercial and political reasons rather than public health considerations.

Unfortunately, instead of calling out the government in such areas where it can be fairly criticised, the opposition is more interested in making dubious claims that could lead to a public health disaster. No major opposition leaders have offered solutions for the vaccine pricing mechanism or the travel restrictions, yet they are all raising questions about the government’s vaccination programme. Unsurprisingly, the one’s doing the most questioning have little to no background or understanding of medicine or public health.

Several opposition figures have used Imran’s infection to question the efficacy of the vaccines being used, never mind that even the most reliable vaccines in the world can sometimes fail. Plus, as the country’s top health officials have pointed out, vaccines do not take effect immediately. It takes a few days for them to kick in, and in the case of multi-dose vaccines such as the one received by the prime minister, they don’t reach maximum effectiveness until after the final dose has been received. The timeline of Imran’s illness also suggests that he already had the virus but had not begun to show symptoms, so it is not about the vaccine at all. The opposition is just drawing at strings.

Even if they wanted to question the government’s Covid-19 response, a better approach may have been to ask — as the government’s statements suggest — why Imran and his inner circle were not required to take daily tests. This has, after all, become the norm for the elected leadership of many countries. Instead, they have chosen to make vaccination controversial, perhaps forgetting that the only reason Pakistan is still fighting polio — a disease that has been eradicated in most of the world — is because of anti-vaccine propaganda.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 23^rd, 2021.

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