More controversy,state may return 15 lakh doses

This is not the first time that such a huge quantity of the vaccine vials have been wasted. In the past three years,over 30 lakh doses of vaccine have met similar fate after similar controversies broke out.

“It is unfortunate that like previous years,this time also too one million doses would be lost. This will be a monetary loss as well as loss for all those children who could have been vaccinated,” said Pritu Dhalaria,Director of Immunisation at PATH,a voluntary organisation assisting the Centre in JE vaccination drives.

Sources in the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare said that a high-level meeting will be held on Thursday to discuss the matter.

The fresh stock of JE vaccine is expected to arrive only towards June-end or early July,which the experts claim will be of hardly any use. The reason: the encephalitis season begins with the onset of monsoon and this time,the state is expected to receive rainfall by this weekend.

The Centre too finds its hands tied. Around 18 districts in the North-East and Andhra Pradesh have imminent requirement of a vaccination drive as no such campaign has been launched in this part of the country so far.

Since March,when the Centre and the state government agreed to launch the special immunisation campaign,it has become a bone of contention between the two.

The last time JE vaccination drive took place in eastern UP was in 2006. After that,the newborns were supposed to be vaccinated every year under the routine immunisation programme. However,the Centre recommended a special campaign in eastern UP,saying that routine immunisation in UP was not being implemented properly and that many children were not being vaccinated.

At first,the state government was not ready to accept the Centre’s argument but after several communications from the Centre,the state agreed to conduct the special vaccination drive. At the same time,the state told the Centre not to send any vaccine if it was in the second or third stage of exposure,as it would become unusable by the time it reached the field. In its reply,the Centre said there is nothing called second,third or fourth stage of exposure,and the vaccine is either “usable” or “unusable”. The UP government then agreed to use the stock sent to it by the Centre.

The latest controversy began just days before May 31 — the first date of launching the special immunisation campaign — when the state government alleged that a large part of the vaccine stock sent by the Centre was unusable and needed to be checked before launching the campaign. Consequently,the drive was postponed to June 14 and officials of vaccine vial monitor (VVM) manufacturing firm,Lisa Line,were called to Gorakhpur to conduct a random check. In its report,Lisa Line officials said that a large part of the tested sample was usable,but a final decision will have to taken during the drive by checking the VVMs.

But the state government objected to the findings saying the officials had not checked the entire stock of vaccine. It also claimed that about half the stock was unusable.

“Since large part of the vaccine is not usable,we had to call off the campaign. We have recalled the stock from Gorakhpur,” said S P Ram,Director of Communicable Diseases in the UP government.

Experts,however,beg to differ.

“No one forced the state to use the unusable vaccine,but the stock which is usable could have been at least use-d during the drive,” said Dhalaria. Since January,over 300 encephalitis cases were recorded and 59 deaths reported in eastern UP. Last year,the state reported over 3,000 cases and around 550 encephalitis deaths.