India starts massive vaccination drive

India kicked off one of the world's largest coronavirus vaccination drives yesterday as the pandemic spread at a record pace and global Covid-19 deaths surged past two million. 

The World Health Organization has called for accelerating vaccine rollouts worldwide as well as ramping up efforts to study the sequencing of the virus, which has infected more than 93 million people globally since it was first detected in China in late 2019.

India, home to 1.3 billion people, has the world's second-largest caseload.

The government has given approvals to two vaccines -- though one is yet to complete clinical trials -- aiming to inoculate around 300 million people by July, AFP reports.

One of the first to receive a jab in the eastern city of Kolkata was 35-year-old health worker Santa Roy, who told AFP he now saw a "ray of hope" after witnessing people die of the coronavirus.

Authorities say they are drawing on their experience with elections and child immunisation programmes for the drive, which is a daunting task in an enormous, impoverished nation with often shoddy transport infrastructure and one of the world's worst-funded healthcare systems.

Regular child inoculations are a "much smaller game" and vaccinating against Covid-19 will be "deeply challenging", said Satyajit Rath from India's National Institute of Immunology.

The government has readied tens of thousands of refrigeration tools and about 150,000 specially trained staff to try and overcome some of those challenges.

The vaccines will also have high security, so that doses do not end up being sold on India's large black market for medicines.

On day one around 300,000 people were expected to be vaccinated with Covishield, developed by AstraZeneca and made by India's Serum Institute, or the homegrown Covaxin.

Covaxin is still in clinical trials and recipients yesterday had to sign a consent form that stated that the "clinical efficacy... is yet to be established".

But Prime Minister Narendra Modi as he launched the vaccination programme urged people to reject "propaganda and rumours" about the indigenous vaccine.

"The world has immense faith in India's scientists and capacity of vaccine production," Modi, 70, said in a video message.

Meanwhile, Indian High Commissioner to Bangladesh Vikram Doraiswami has said that Bangladesh will get COVID-19 vaccine urgently from India as it began yesterday the world's biggest vaccination to combat the pandemic.

"The government [of Bangladesh] has to have its arrangement first. As soon as the government indicates that everything is ready, we will provide the vaccine," he told journalists.

He said the process of bringing vaccine from the Serum Institute of India is underway.

"Vaccine will be given to everybody. Neighbourhood is our priority and in that Bangladesh is the first," Doraiswami told reporters after attending the opening of the 19th Dhaka International Film Festival at the National Museum in the city.

He, however, did not say the exact time of the vaccine delivery to Bangladesh, but added that he would do it to the government first.

"Vaccination is everybody's right. We will ensure that to our friends and partners to get it quickly."

India's main opposition Congress and some public health experts had questioned the decision to allow use of Covaxin for emergency use without completion of its human trial and availability of the trial data.

WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on Friday said he wanted "to see vaccination under way in every country in the next 100 days so that health workers and those at high risk are protected first".

His call came as infections snowballed, with 724,000 new cases recorded on average per day globally over the past week, according to AFP's tally -- a record 10 percent increase on a week earlier.

The worrying spikes in deaths and infections come as concerns and criticism grow over vaccine logistics and supply issues in many parts of the world.

US pharmaceutical giant Pfizer said shipments of its vaccines would slow for a period in late January.

In hard-hit Europe, there are concerns that the Pfizer delays could further slow a vaccine rollout that has already faced heavy criticism.

Pfizer, which jointly developed its vaccine with German company BioNTech, said EU countries could expect delayed deliveries in the coming weeks due to work being done at its plant in Belgium.

It promised that there would be "a significant increase" in shipments in March, and the European Commission said all vaccines ordered by the bloc for the first quarter would be delivered on time.

As cases mount, nations have doubled down on restrictions.

Portugal entered a fresh lockdown Friday, and new curbs on populations were announced from Italy to Brazil.

Beijing extended its isolation period for overseas arrivals, requiring travellers to spend an extra week at home after the 21 days in hotel quarantine already in place, state media reported yesterday.