Common People Will Have To Wait Till 2022 For COVID-19 Vaccine Shot: AIIMS Director

New Delhi: Common people will have to wait till 2022 for a shot of the coronavirus vaccine, AIIMS Director Dr Randeep Guleria told CNN-News18 in an exclusive interview.

He is a member of the national task force on the coronavirus management in the country.

Guleria said that a strategy on how to distribute an approved vaccine in different parts of the country has to be worked out. “Maintaining the cold chain, having adequate syringes, adequate needles and being able to deliver it to the remotest part of the country in a seamless manner is the biggest challenge,” he said.

He further said that the second challenge is that more than one vaccine candidate is being studied. “So if we have a vaccine that comes out later and is seen to be more effective than the first one, how do we position it? How do we do a course correction? How to then decide who needs vaccine A and who needs vaccine B? A lot of decisions need to be taken as we go along,” he said.

Randeep Guleria also asserted that the infection “will not vanish” with vaccination. “It will help us deliver herd immunity rapidly. It will help us break the chain of transmission and fewer and fewer people will get infected, but it will not be zero. We will continue to need to follow social-distancing norms and wearing masks,” he added.