Top public health expert of USA, Dr. Anthony Fauci on Sunday called for scaling up the manufacturing of vaccines against the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) in India. He reiterated that vaccination is the only long-term solution to control the raging pandemic.
Speaking to local television in the United States, Dr. Fauci said, “The endgame of this all is going to be to get people vaccinated. India is the largest vaccine-producing country in the world. They have got to get their resources, not only from within, but also from without.”
Calling for global cooperation, Dr. Fauci further said, that other countries also “need to chip in to be able to get either supply to the Indians to make their own vaccines or to get vaccines donated.”
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Currently, India is struggling with an unprecedented second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic with more than 400,000 cases being registered daily over the past few days. The healthcare system has also reached a breaking point, with hospitals swamped with patients. People are struggling to secure things like oximeters, key medicines as the sudden surge has led to an acute shortage of medical necessities.
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Soumya Swaminathan, Chief scientist of World Health Organization, on Saturday, warned that a Covid-19 variant spreading in India is more contagious and maybe dodging vaccine protections, contributing to the country’s explosive outbreak of Covid19 cases.
The top epidemiologist of USA, Dr. Fauci, 88 is one of the leading global voices on coronavirus pandemic. He is currently serving as the director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Speaking further on India’s Covid-19 situation, he said that big companies should scale up manufacturing of Covid-19 vaccines in a way that India gets “literally hundreds of millions of doses.”
Calling India’s situation “tragic”, he further said, “the oxygen situation is something that was really critical. I mean, to have people not have oxygen is really tragic.” He suggested that India should build makeshift hospitals as China did a year ago to deal with the pandemic.
