The COVID-19 pandemic has so far accounted for reported 5.5M deaths worldwide, with 8.7% of these coming from India. The pandemic exacerbated the weakness of the Indian healthcare system. As of January 20, 2022, India is the second worst affected country with 38.2M reported cases and 487K deaths. According to epidemiologists, vaccines are an essential tool to prevent the spread of the pandemic. India's vaccination drive began on January 16, 2021 with governmental policies being introduced to prioritize different populations of the society. Through the course of the vaccination drive, multiple new policies were also introduced to ensure that vaccines are readily available and vaccination coverage is increased. However, at the same time, some of the government policies introduced led to unintended inequities in the populations being targeted. In this report, we enumerate and analyze the inequities that existed in India's vaccination policy drive, and also compute the effect of the new policies that were introduced. We analyze these potential inequities not only qualitatively but also quantitatively by leveraging the data that was made available through the government portals. Specifically, (a) we discover inequities that might exist in the policies, (b) we quantify the effect of new policies introduced to increase vaccination coverage, and (c) we also point the data discrepancies that exist across different data sources.
翻译:2022年1月20日至2022年1月20日,印度是受影响第二大的国家,报告病例为38.2M,死亡487K。根据流行病学家,疫苗是防止该流行病蔓延的基本工具。印度的疫苗接种运动始于2021年1月16日,通过政府政策优先关注社会不同人口,从2021年1月16日开始,印度的疫苗接种运动开始推行了政府政策,通过疫苗接种运动,还实行了多项新政策,以确保疫苗随时可得,疫苗接种覆盖面扩大。但与此同时,一些政府政策导致目标人群出现意想不到的不平等。我们在报告中罗列和分析印度疫苗接种政策运动中存在的不公平现象,并了解新政策的效果。我们通过利用政府门户网站提供的数据,不仅从质量上而且从数量上分析了这些潜在的不公平现象。具体地说,(a)我们发现政策中可能存在的不公平现象,(b)我们量化了新政策的影响,并量化了新政策在疫苗覆盖范围方面出现的差异。(c)我们用的数据还显示,(c)我们用不同数据来增加免疫覆盖面。