India must plan implementation of COVID-19 vaccine when it comes: Ashish Jha tells Rahul Gandhi

India must have a plan for implementing it as it needs 50 to 60 crore vaccines, said Jha.

Ashish Jha and Johan Giesecke spoke to Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on May 27 about tackling the COVID-19 crisis. It was a part of Gandhi’s ongoing series of dialogues with globally-recognised experts in economics, social sciences and healthcare.

Jha is the dean of the Brown University School of Public Health while Giesecke is a member of Strategic and Technical Advisory Group for Infectious Hazards of the World Health Organization.

Asked about when the vaccine for COVID-19 will come, Jha said that there were three vaccines that look promising, including from China, Oxford and the United States.

"I don't know which one will work. It's possible that all of them work, or maybe anyone, but I am very confident that vaccine will come by next year," he said.

If the vaccine comes, India must have a plan for implementing it as it needs 50 to 60 crore vaccines, said Jha.

During the conversation, Jha said that India needed to come up with a strategy to open the economy and create confidence among the people.

He further said that he was not convinced that India could not do more testing for the novel coronavirus than what it was currently doing.

On how COVID-19 would change India, the public health professional said life would never be the same. "Life will not look like the same five years from now like it was five years ago," said Jha.

As Gandhi spoke to Giesecke, asked the Swedish epidemiologist about the best strategy to come out of the coronavirus-enforced lockdown.

"No country thought about the exit strategy while imposing the lockdown. It has to be stepwise. There are many restrictions in India. Ease one restriction and wait for two to three weeks and see the result. It will take months to really ease off all the lockdown but it must ease off one restriction at a time to see what happens," said Giesecke.

The conversation formed the basis of the third episode of Rahul Gandhi's "The COVID Crisis" series.

Previous episodes have featured conversations with the world's renowned economist Raghuram Rajan and Nobel Prize winner Abhijit Banerjee.

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