Is Covid-19 mass vaccination warranted?
"During the pandemic, India missed “the bus of sanity” even though it originated in the country!"
Author: Dr Amitav Banerjee, MD, Clinical Epidemiologist. Prof & ex-Head, Community Medicine, Dr DY Patil Medical College, Pune
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Conflict of interest: The author has no conflict of interest.
"There are several crowning achievements of Indian scientists over the ages; Covid-19 vaccine development and rollout is most emphatically not among them."
Author: Bhaskaran Raman, Professor, Department of CSE, IIT Bombay
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Conflict of interest: The author has no conflict of interest.
Author: (External link)
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"Focused protection by vaccination, of elderly and young with co-morbidities on the advice of their personal physician, rather than across the broad mass vaccination would be a more prudent and cost-benefit approach."
Author: Dr Amitav Banerjee, MD, Clinical Epidemiologist. Prof & Head, Community Medicine, Dr DY Patil Medical College, Pune
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Conflict of interest: The author has no conflict of interest.
"Here’s a million-dollar question: How do they explain the lowest rates in most African countries that also have the lowest rates of vaccination?"
Author: Dr Amitav Banerjee, MD, Clinical Epidemiologist. Prof & Head, Community Medicine, Dr DY Patil Medical College, Pune
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Conflict of interest: The author has no conflict of interest.
"While there is no cause for panic, reports of otherwise healthy people suddenly collapsing and dying do need to be investigated to determine if there is any correlation with vaccines or something else"
Author: Dr Amitav Banerjee, MD, Clinical Epidemiologist. Prof & Head, Community Medicine, Dr DY Patil Medical College, Pune,
Bhaskaran Raman, Professor, Department of CSE, IIT Bombay
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Conflict of interest: The author has no conflict of interest.
"Did the mass vaccination rolled out in unholy haste in most countries reduce the incidence of cases and deaths from Covid-19 at the population level? The experiences of most countries are not very encouraging"
Author: Dr Amitav Banerjee, MD, Clinical Epidemiologist. Prof & Head, Community Medicine, Dr DY Patil Medical College, Pune, India.
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Conflict of interest: The author has no conflict of interest.
"The Covid-19 pandemic triggered by the novel coronavirus, in its third year now, has some common themes running throughout its course. The foremost of these has been the uncertainty about almost all aspects of the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2."
Author: Dr Amitav Banerjee, MD, Clinical Epidemiologist. Prof & Head, Community Medicine, Dr DY Patil Medical College, Pune, India.
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Conflict of interest: The author has no conflict of interest.
"In the present environment of high-pressure promotion of their products by the pharmaceutical industry, skills in appraising the evidence in published and promotional literature assume greater importance than ever."
Author: Dr Amitav Banerjee, MD, Clinical Epidemiologist. Prof & Head, Community Medicine, Dr DY Patil Medical College, Pune, India.
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Conflict of interest: The author has no conflict of interest.
"Why has coronavirus vaccination status become an elephant in the room in such cases?"
Author: Dr Amitav Banerjee, MD, Clinical Epidemiologist. Prof & Head, Community Medicine, Dr DY Patil Medical College, Pune, India.
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Conflict of interest: The author has no conflict of interest.
"Deaths reported by MOHFW are likely to represent gross underestimate of the real scenario in India."
Author: Priti Nandkishor Tiwari, Arvind Singh Kushwaha, Department of Community Medicine, AIIMS Nagpur, India
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Conflict of interest: "Source of Support: None, Conflict of Interest: None"
"Like many others the world over who rushed to get vaccinated against Covid- 19, most Malaysians too feel familiarity is no contempt when it comes to Covid- 19 vaccines and face masks."
Author: Jay Ihsan, Malaysia
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Conflict of interest: (statement pending)
"To predict whether we will have a disastrous fourth wave, let us go back to fundamentals of transmission dynamics of communicable diseases which any epidemiologist who has worked at the ground level will know…"
Author: Dr Amitav Banerjee, MD, Clinical Epidemiologist. Prof & Head, Community Medicine, Dr DY Patil Medical College, Pune, India.
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Conflict of interest: The author has no conflict of interest.
"Urgent need for impassionate look at the data involving heart-attacks along various dimensions: Covid status, vaccination status, age, gender"
Author: Bhaskaran Raman, Professor, Department of CSE, IIT Bombay
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Conflict of interest: The author has no conflict of interest.
"much of the critical parameters are based on assumptions which are known in the literature to be wrong"
"the current jab impact model using the transmission model has grossly overestimated the number of lives saved by the jab rollout"
"scientific evidence to substantiate a jab as life-saving should always be a rigorous randomized control trial"
Author: Bhaskaran Raman, Professor, Department of CSE, IIT Bombay
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Conflict of interest: The author has no conflict of interest.
Author: Dr Amitav Banerjee, MD, Clinical Epidemiologist. Prof & Head, Community Medicine, Dr DY Patil Medical College, Pune, India.
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Conflict of interest: The author has no conflict of interest.
"While quacks harm the individual, public health quackery can potentially damage the population"
Author: Dr Amitav Banerjee, MD, Clinical Epidemiologist. Prof & Head, Community Medicine, Dr DY Patil Medical College, Pune, India.
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Conflict of interest: The author has no conflict of interest.
"Vaccination has been on the forefront as a preventive measure against covid infection. How is this prevention, far from reality?"
Author: Dr Gayatri Panditrao, BHMS, PGDEMS, Homoeopathic Physician, Pune, India.
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Conflict of interest: The author has no conflict of interest.
"So vaccines appear to be neither “necessary” nor “sufficient” to end the pandemic. But used judiciously it can still be a trusted companion for elderly and people with co-morbidities."
Author: Dr Amitav Banerjee, MD, Clinical Epidemiologist. Prof & Head, Community Medicine, Dr DY Patil Medical College, Pune, India.
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Conflict of interest: The author has no conflict of interest.
"Instead of focused protection of the non-immune, mass vaccination campaigns are being rolled out even in populations where over 80% have acquired natural immunity. The superiority of naturally acquired immunity (13 to 27 times more robust than vaccine induced immunity) was known since ages and confirmed in the pandemic as well."
Author: Dr Amitav Banerjee, MD, Clinical Epidemiologist. Prof & Head, Community Medicine, Dr DY Patil Medical College, Pune, India.
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Conflict of interest: The author has no conflict of interest.
"if we give the shot to all 7.9 billion people, then we will not have a ‘control group’ – the set of people in a comparative vaccine impact study who are tactically not given the shot or given only a placebo"
Author: Dr Amitav Banerjee, MD, Clinical Epidemiologist. Prof & Head, Community Medicine, Dr DY Patil Medical College, Pune, India.
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Conflict of interest: The author has no conflict of interest.
Author: Dr Amitav Banerjee, MD, Clinical Epidemiologist. Prof & Head, Community Medicine, Dr DY Patil Medical College, Pune, India.
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Conflict of interest: The author has no conflict of interest.
Author: Dr Amitav Banerjee, MD, Clinical Epidemiologist. Prof & Head, Community Medicine, Dr DY Patil Medical College, Pune, India.
Disclaimer: link
Conflict of interest: The author has no conflict of interest.
Author: Dr Amitav Banerjee, MD, Clinical Epidemiologist. Prof & Head, Community Medicine, Dr DY Patil Medical College, Pune, India.
Disclaimer: link
Conflict of interest: The author has no conflict of interest.
"Halfway into the year 2021, there was a sobering realization that the impact of the mass vaccination at the population level was modest if any."
Author: Dr Amitav Banerjee, MD, Clinical Epidemiologist. Prof & Head, Community Medicine, Dr DY Patil Medical College, Pune, India.
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Conflict of interest: The author has no conflict of interest.
"The ambitious launch of COVID vaccination by India at the juncture of a declining pandemic needs to be discussed in relation to its timing, economic implications, and ramifications on public health. This article aims to analyze this vaccination strategy."
Author: Dr Arvind Singh Kushwaha (Department of Community Medicine, AIIMS, Nagpur), Sitikantha Banerjee
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Conflict of interest: "Source of Support: None, Conflict of Interest: None"
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