Kriti Agrawal
During a pandemic, the “Entire globe is a unit.” This is how the government explained its choice to export vaccinations before the Supreme Court in the midst of the second wave of covid-19.
“Once an epidemic takes (the) shape of a pandemic, its management must be done with the entire globe as (a) unit,” the Health Ministry stated in a March 11 affidavit to the Supreme Court. The document gives more detail on the widely panned decision to sell covid-19 vaccinations.
According to the affidavit, the government reasoned that a country or state-specific approach was not possible.
The government planned to export vaccines as part of a global vaccination campaign. The Centre reasoned that it was necessary to protect the high-risk population in other countries in order to break the chain of transmission and minimize the chances of covid-19 cases being imported to India.
Both were done to minimize disproportionality between the manufacturing of covid-19 vaccinations and the country’s available health infrastructure and workforce.
The Centre told the Supreme Court that simultaneous vaccination without priority classification would have caused commotion.
The Government revealed, “Under the circumstances, the produced vaccine is exported because it is beyond the available labor and infrastructure facilities.”