Politicians lack the will to allocate funds for public healthcare because it is a costly and long-drawn affair and one can only hope that the Covid-19 crisis will teach them why they need an investment in science, Professor Ravindra K Gupta said in conversation with author and senior journalist Kaveree Bamzai in TNIE Expressions, a series of live webcasts with people who matter.
Global collaboration between scientists to work on the vaccine and understanding the virus is reassuring and will take science ahead by quite a few steps, said Gupta who was recently named in Time’s list of the 100 most influential people of 2020.
“The global cooperation has been unprecedented. The efforts behind the vaccine, across the country, have been remarkable. We need to sustain this,” said the Professor of Clinical Microbiology at the Cambridge Institute for Therapeutic Immunology and Infectious Diseases.
“I am certainly one of those who think that we need to get the vaccine right the first time. We are getting better at treating the disease and we can invest a few more months into research. I believe these months are going to be well invested. We have nine odd candidates and we want to choose the best few. It is not necessarily a race to see who makes it first but it is more about the quality — to see whether it is effective in the long run,” said Gupta, who is hailed for having functionally cured the London patient — the second person ever to be cured of HIV with a stem-cell transplant.
Healthcare needs more investment in healthcare, the Indian-origin biologist said, regarding the preparedness of medical facilities during COVID-19, “The UK was prepared for a significant first wave and the healthcare system just about coped with it but at the cost of other procedures and treatment. There was a lot of damage due to the diversion of the resources from critical healthcare like cancer treatment.”
There have been enough discussions about herd immunity setting in, but Gupta said that it would be quite difficult because lockdowns were imposed and the transmission of the disease had been hampered.
Though the COVID-19 mortality rate in India is low, something which the Indian government has been highlighting often, the virologist contended that the data at any point during a pandemic of this scale is not reliable.
“There are people who are not making it to the hospitals. There are people dying at home and these numbers are not being reported. So the data is not reliable at this point,” he said.
“India has a younger population and the disease is correlated to age. So maybe age is a reason. It can also be the theory that tropical countries have more encounters with infectious diseases and thus the immunological memory helps them to cope with the virus.”