“Covid related deaths could have been prevented to some extent if we had by now vaccinated 20 % of the population in every country. Over the last several weeks we have seen many countries across many different regions of the world seeing an increasing surge in cases due to delta variants with hospitalisation and health systems being overwhelmed leading to more deaths,” stated Dr Soumya Swaminathan, Chief Scientist, World Health Organization on the occasion of second day of Virtual FE Healthcare Summit which started from August 18 and will conclude on August 20, 2021 whilst delivering her crucial note address on the theme “Innovative Research pandemic and beyond. Global perspective, lessons and way forward for India.”
“India is a vaccine manufacturing powerhouse and has enough capacity to manufacture vaccines for its population which is huge and therefore it is time to scale up,” she added
“Besides this, the fair and equitable distribution of vaccines did not happen. If around 3,8 billion vaccine doses have been distributed in a fair manner, we may not have seen 8000 to 9000 deaths a day that we continue to see today due to pandemic, she further added
“During the pandemic, the lessons learnt are many but I would like to focus on areas that are related to science, research, innovations, R&D, product development and access to medicines, vaccines and diagnostics. The Covid pandemic has highlighted the fact that when health is impacted then everything else suffers. We have seen the economic fallout of Covid because it is an inter-connected area where you cannot have few countries and communities to suffer and rest fare well and something when there is a global catastrophe,” she stated.
She advised that there are other international challenges ahead of us like climate alter, antimicrobial resistance. Action desires to be taken at a international level. Within 48 hours of the complete genome sequencing of the virus getting place on a public database base, we had created the initial RT PCR test at our WHO collaborating centres and we had a network of labs in case of the influenza network of labs which has been operational for more than 50 years.
Influenza network of labs is a excellent instance of international collaboration to address respiratory viruses that trigger a lot of illness everywhere. For which there is a vaccine for but it desires to be updated each year based on the new strains of influenza. Unless all the nations agree to share information and pool in the information on influenza and information is circulated, vaccines can not be updated appropriately.
“On the developments of diagnostics, there was a period when there was initially severe lack of diagnostics and testing facilities. In most countries including the high income countries, many countries were quickly able to ramp up and expand testing including India where labs for testing went from a few labs in 2020 to 3000 labs and indigenous kits were produced. The lesson learnt is that diagnostics are very important because you need to understand the extent of the problem. This is true for all other diseases and even in cases of non-communicable diseases like for instance blood pressure need to be taken at the right time and the right place through a measuring machine. There is a need to understand the regulatory process on how diagnostics are going to be tested, validated and approved,” she recommended.
A representative set pool of sample sets which are readily readily available to companies which diagnostic companies can access in a repository which has all the information associated to illness and from which patient it was taken. These sorts of sets can then be applied with the diagnostic companies to generate diagnostics and enhance the production for which there is a want for cooperation in between the public and private sector.
There has been an extraordinary and unprecedented development of more than 250 vaccine candidates about the world, once more quite a few revolutionary items have been getting created in India which is a matter of excellent pride.
“We still don’t have a very effective antiviral oral medicine which can be taken early on the stage of the Covid on which we need more R&D. A more public and private collaboration is required as we continue to look for those antiviral medicines which are broad spectrum antivirals that will not only help from Covid but could also help for future pandemics,” Dr Swaminathan explained.
“There are huge number of trials done across the world and this has resulted in large number of fragmented small inconclusive trials which has led to more confusion than actually providing the answers. The solution lies in large platform trials like the WHO solidarity trial which has 30 countries and 500 hospitals in India participating which was able to test some of the repurposed drugs that were thought to have some potential for Covid -19. We are looking at launching second solidarity trial which is looking at immuno modulatory drugs for people who are hospitalised with critical illness. The other example of a successful trial is the UK Recovery trial conducted at NHS hospital UK where over 30, 000 candidates were given different drugs to prove that the drug is effective and has proven its efficacy,” Dr Swaminathan concluded.