Dr Anthony S Fauci on India’s Covid Crisis

Excellent study material for all civil services aspirants - begin learning - Kar ke dikhayenge!

  Dr Anthony S Fauci on India’s Covid Crisis

---

Read more on - Polity | Economy | Schemes | S&T | Environment

---

• A recent interview: Dr Anthony S Fauci, one of Covid’s most trusted global voices, was interviewed by The Indian Express. 
• What he said: There are many eye-opening things from Dr Fauci. We are reproducing some, from the interview published.

1. The one thing I don’t want to do and I hope it doesn’t turn out this way, is to get involved in any sort of criticism of how India has handled the situation because then it becomes a political issue and I don’t want to do that since I’m a public health person and I’m not a political person.
2. It just seems to me that, right now, India is in a very difficult and desperate situation. When you have a situation like that you’ve got to look at the absolute immediate.
3. First of all, I don’t know if India has put together a crisis group that would meet and start getting things organised. I heard from some of the people in the street bringing their mothers and their fathers and their sisters and their brothers searching for oxygen. They seem to think there really was not any organisation, any central organisation.
4. The first thing to do is to first look at what is the immediate thing you can do right now. What is the intermediate thing that you can do in two weeks? One of the things that you can do to prevent this prolonging — you’ve got to look at it in multiple different phases.
5. For example, vaccinating people right now, which you absolutely must, must do — it’s essential — is not going to alleviate the immediate problem of people needing oxygen, needing hospitalisation, needing medical care. That’s not going to fix it now because vaccinating people today, it’s going to be a few weeks before you alleviate the prevention of other people getting sick.
6. So take care of the people right now. I would think that you’ve got to get some sort of a commission, or an emergency group to make a plan how to get oxygen; how do we get supplies; how do we get medications, and call — maybe with help from WHO — countries.
7. And the US, thankfully, has now moved to make a major commitment for medications, for oxygen, for PPE, and for ventilators. But we’ve got to get other countries to come in and help India right now because India has been very generous in the past crises in helping other countries. Now is the time other countries to try to alleviate the immediate problem that India has. That’s the first thing.
8. Then the intermediate. I think you need — these emergency units that served as hospitals to take care of people. 
9. The second thing, you can mobilise different groups of government. For example, what is the role of the military? Can the military come in and help? I mean, you can immediately get military help the way we, in the United States, have used our National Guard to help us distribute the vaccinations.
10. I think it should at least be seriously considered. The intermediate — to get hospitals built quickly. I mean really quickly, within a matter of — you know, they put up these field hospitals that they built during war. You should think of this, in some respects, like a war. The enemy is the virus. So you know where the enemy is, so I would make it almost like wartime because it’s an emergency.
11. And, finally, in the longer range, in a matter of a couple weeks, I would do whatever you can do to get vaccinated. To have a country like India, where two per cent of people are vaccinated, is a very serious situation. You absolutely have to get more people vaccinated.
12. Address the absolute immediate problem, get the intermediate things going, and then take a look at the longer range in regards to vaccines.

• On the virus itself: It’s a realisation of what the capability of what this virus is. This virus has shown us that if left to its own devices, it will explode in society. It happened to us in the US. You might recall, I am speaking to you as an American. But, in fact, the United States, for a while, was the worst-hit country in the world and the United States is the richest country. We were supposedly the best prepared and we got hit very badly. So you know, the reason is that the virus doesn’t care how rich you are. Or how advanced or developed you are. If you don’t respect its ability to cause serious damage, you are going to get into trouble. I think one of the things that maybe should have been recognised, that victory was declared maybe too prematurely.
• On genome sequencing of Indian variants: We absolutely need to study it intensively to find out if the vaccines that are being used are inducing a response that would be protective against this variant. We heard some preliminary announcements that the vaccine appeared to be okay. But there are another announcements that were saying we aren’t so sure about that. So what I think needs to be done very, very quickly is to get specimens and material outside of India and sent to the CDC of the United States, the NIH (National Institute of Health) of the United States, to the Wellcome Trust in the UK. There are a lot of groups that would like very much to help out and they can help out by doing the sequencing and the surveillance and the determination if the virus is, in fact, sensitive to the antibodies that are induced by the vaccine.
• On vaccines: On vaccines, we have a 50/50 for open market and government ownership. There’s debate over costing. What is your view on this, when you look at the US model? What is the best way to get the public interest served on the vaccination front? How do we ramp it up? You’ve got to get supplies. You’ve got to make contractual arrangements with the various companies that are out there in the world. There are many companies that now have vaccines. I think you have to negotiate with them to try and get a commitment. India is what, 1.4 billion people? You have a lot of vaccines that you need to get, and I would go to multiple different companies and try to get contractual arrangements so that you can get vaccines as quickly as you possibly can.
• On shutting things down: Well, one of the things you really need to do that to the extent that you can — is shut down temporarily the country, I think is important. If we want to time out and go back to what I said. There is the immediate, the intermediate, and the long range. I think the most important thing in the immediate is to get oxygen, get supplies, get medication, get PPE, those kinds of things but also, one of the immediate things to do is to essentially call a shutdown of the country. We know that when China had this big explosion a year ago, they completely shut down. And if you shut down, you don’t have to shut down for six months. 
• Summary: Dr Fauci has highlighted all the important steps that India can take urgently. It's upto the government now. 

Read more on - Polity | Economy | Schemes | S&T | Environment

Join UPSC Self Prep course | Online Course (PT Gurukul)  | Covid Special Course | Join PT courses

* Content sourced from free internet sources (publications, PIB site, international sites, etc.). Take your own subscriptions. Copyrights acknowledged.