Forced to steal vaccination: Doctor

New Delhi/Mumbai/Nagpur: As the cases surge, the knives are out with the Centre and the State governments flinging charges and accusing each other of messing up the anti-Covid battle.

The State governments say they're running short of vaccines and being forced to close vaccination delivery centres. The Centre accuses States like Maharashtra of letting vaccine doses go to waste.

India now has all three coronavirus fast-spreading variants that are worrying the global medical community -- B117, first detected in the UK; B1351, now dominant in South Africa; and Brazil's P1.

And now a "double-mutant" variant found in India. Because of a severe lack of genome-sequencing labs, we have little idea of how fast and to what extent these variants are spreading across the country, though the government has said it will step up its genome-sequencing testing to get a better idea.

Hospitals in Mumbai are bearing the brunt of the surge. A video from Mumbai's premier Lilavati hospital was widely circulated on social media, showing how the hospital was forced to convert its lobby into a Covid ward.

A senior doctor of the hospital voiced his desperate appeal on camera. The hospital was not only short of vaccines but also life-saving drugs like Remdesivir, said Dr Jalil Parkar, a pulmonary consultant with the hospital, according to NDTV report

"In my hospital there are no vaccines for the last two-three days. There is a shortage of Remdesivir, there is shortage of Tosilizubam. We are having to beg, borrow, steal," Dr Parkar said.

"My earnest request for God's sake please see to it that Remdesivir, Tosilizubam, vaccination -- they are available. Because that's the only way we can save lives.

The only way we can conquer Covid 19. So for god's sake, let there be no red tapism, let there be no discussion, but let there be action," he added.

Union minister Nitin Gadkari has called up Sun Pharma's chief to arrange for 10,000 injections of Remdesivir in Nagpur in view of a shortage of the medicine.

Research conducted by the Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (IGIB) revealed that the immunity for Covid-19 lasts for 6-7 months at least, but between 20% and 30% of those infected lose this immunity after 6 months.

"The key finding of 20-30% of subjects losing virus-neutralizing activity, despite staying seropositive, at 6-month follow-up helps understand why the large second wave has not spared cities like Mumbai with high seropositivity," Dr Anurag Agarwal, the director of IGIB said in a tweet.