Vaccination only long-term solution for India's worsening Covid crisis: Dr Fauci
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New Delhi: America's top public health expert Dr Anthony Fauci on Sunday called for scaling up the manufacturing of vaccines against the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) in India as he reiterated that the vaccination is the only long-term solution to control the raging pandemic. Speaking to local television in the United States, Fauci said, "The endgame of this all...is going to be to get people vaccinated...India is the largest vaccine-producing country in the world. They've got to get their resources, not only from within but also from without."
Calling for global cooperation, Fauci said, other countries also "need to chip in to be able to get either supply to the Indians to make their own vaccines or to get vaccines donated."
India is struggling with an unprecedented second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic with more than 400,000 cases being registered daily in the past few days. With hospitals swamped with patients, the healthcare system has also reached a breaking point. People are struggling to secure things like oximeters, key medicines as the sudden surge has led to an acute shortage of medical necessities. On Saturday, World Health Organization's chief scientist Soumya Swaminathan warned that a Covid-19 variant spreading in India is more contagious and maybe dodging vaccine protections, contributing to the country's explosive outbreak
US' top epidemiologist, 88-year-old Fauci is one of the leading global voices on coronavirus pandemic. He is currently serving as the director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Speaking further on India's Covid-19 situation, Fauci said big companies should scale up manufacturing of Covid-19 vaccines in a way that India gets "literally hundreds of millions of doses."
