India’s over-dependence on private players for vaccines is promoting irrational use and restricting access that leads to unacceptable fatalities
The death of an eight-year-old girl, Anju, this August after denial of anti-rabies vaccine at Agra’s Sarojini Naidu Medical College (SNMC) is followed by the admission by Health Ministry that fatality rate for rabies in India is 100 per cent. Although the circumstance of Anju’s death is particularly Kafkaesque and macabre — the officer at the Community Health Centre, where she was first taken, refused to allow administration of anti-rabies vaccine because the child had no Aadhaar card — in reality, it only signifies the routine functioning of India’s health bureaucracy. As per the Health Ministry’s own admission, all the 110 reported rabies patients in 2018 died. Buried in the National Health Profile, 2019, casualties such as Anju’s are a statistic on 100 per cent fatality rate for rabies in India.
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