Vaccine Wastage

As the second wave of COVID-19 hits India, PM Modi raised concerns about vaccine wastage, i.e., the fraction of vaccines that go unused. The national average wastage rate is 6.5%, with Telengana and Andhra the worst offenders at 17.6% and 11.6%, and states like Tamil Nadu doing well at 3.7%.

 

So how does this wastage happen? Broadly, as this Indian Express article explains, it is split into two categories, as wastage in (1) Unopened vials, and (2) Opened vials.

 

In case of unopened vials, the reasons are (a) expiration date reached, (b) vaccine exposed to heat, (c) vaccine frozen, (d) breakage, (e) theft, and (f) discarding of unused vials. And in case of opened vials, the reasons are (a) discarding unused vials at the end of a session, (b) inability to draw enough doses from a vial, (c) submergence in water, (d) contamination, and (e) poor vaccine administration practices.

 

Or if you look at it from a different angle, wastage can happen during transportation, or storage or at the point of delivery. Transportation is done on an exact need basis:

“Issue of vaccine doses should match the registered list of beneficiaries (rounded off to the nearest higher whole number of vials)”

i.e., without any buffers added. While this may sound weird, it avoids, er, wastage of a different kind: there is no risk of the buffer going waste in this model.

 

The wastage is happening overwhelmingly at the point of delivery, the major culprits being (a) Enough people not turning up to use all 10 doses, and (b) inadequate skills of those injecting it. As mentioned, this wastage is becoming increasingly important at a time when the case count is rising.

 

In addition, there’s another problem: a shortage of raw materials to make the vaccine. And why is that happening? Because the US has invoked laws to restrict the export of some of that to cater to their own needs. So yes, we definitely need to tighten things.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more