'Vaccine friendship': India offers to help Kenya with rollout

India has officially requested to be part of Kenya's vaccine rollout through its vaccine maitri (Hindi for vaccine friendship) initiative.

This comes a week after the country donated a consignment of 100,000 AstraZeneca vaccine doses to Kenya.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has been supplying developing countries around the world with free coronavirus vaccine doses amid concerns that this "vaccine diplomacy" will come at a cost.

Historically, India's entry into the manufacture of HIV drugs enabled access to them by countries in Africa that could not previously afford them.

Speaking to the Nation on Sunday, Kenya's vaccine advisory task force chair, Dr Willis Akhwale, said India’s offer entails collaboration in technical exchange, virtual training and the sharing of notes and experiences.

"We are going to be sharing a lot with them in terms of discussing what they are going through and their investigations into the AstraZeneca vaccine, exchanging reports and learning how they are monitoring impact,” said Dr Akhweale.

“They have also offered to help with building capacity. We are going to pursue this.”

Vaccine side effects

In effect, India has supplied vaccines to at least 50 per cent of the world's least developed countries and a third of the small island developing States, according to official reports.

With the pandemic entering a third lethal phase, the country is seeking to bolster its relations with Kenya, a geopolitical move that will be a boost for it, vis a vis Chinm  which had established a chokehold over India in the African region before Covid-19 struck.

However, reports emerged last week that the Indian government had recorded 234 hospitalisations and 71 deaths after the administration of the Covishield vaccination.

In an official letter seen by Nation.Africa, Indian health experts demanded an "urgent investigation" into the deaths and serious adverse events following the administration of Covid-19 vaccine.

The group raised concerns over the possibility of blood clots among beneficiaries, post inoculation.

"We believe that due to the possible linkages of vaccination with blood clotting, all these deaths and adverse events should be reviewed together for a possible causal relationship with the vaccine," the experts said.

The Indian government, in response, said that out of the 71 deaths, 38 postmortems indicated there was no direct link to the vaccine.

No vaccine suspension

Dr Akhwale, in a past interview with Nation.Africa, made it clear that his taskforce was not considering suspending the use of AstraZeneca either.

"When a drug is under Emergency Use Authorization (EUA), any suspicion is met by suspension to investigate. Iy is a requirement before market authorisation. There has been no linkage ... [the process] has to be that strict and that is why it takes 14 days before a batch number is suspended," the taskforce chair said at the time.

This, according to him, explains why the message a recipient gets via Chanjo, the government's Covid-19 digital immunisation platform, is a batch number.

"The AstraZeneca vaccine being used in Europe was not made by the Serum Institute of India. If we were sharing batch numbers we would also stop," he said.

Both Kenya and India get their doses from the institute.

Asked whether his task force will now prioritise discussions on the suspension of the vaccine in light of post vaccine deaths recorded in India, the chair said the two countries’ impending collaboration couldn't have come at a better time.

"What is happening in Europe is purely about suspend-return trade wars. You can see it too … it's not about science, "he said.

Warning

On Thursday, European Medicines Agency chief Emer Cooke announced that the vaccine is "safe and effective".

Ms Cooke added that its benefits in protecting recipients from Covid-19 outweigh the risks of side effects, but patient information will carry a warning of the risk of very rare blood clots from now on.

"If it were me, I would be vaccinated tomorrow," she said. "But I would want to know if anything would happen to me after vaccination and what I would do about it."

Sabine Straus, the chair of EMA's Safety Committee (PRAC), said that “overall, the rate of blood-clotting events seen in people who have received the vaccine are "lower than the expected in the overall population".

Ms Cooke, however, declined to comment on whether national regulators around the world had made the right decision in suspending vaccinations pending the review.​

[email protected]