Sri Lanka must act quickly. While the first cases of Covid-19 attributable to the highly contagious Delta variant were detected in early June, the country has embarked on a race against time to quickly obtain a sufficient number of vaccines and thus make up for the delay caused by stopping exports from India.
“I have personally spoken to heads of state from countries like China and India. I also made requests in writing ”, declared Gotabaya Rajapaksa on June 25, during a river speech addressed to the nation and intended to reassure. The Sri Lankan president hopes to be able to immunize 13 million of the country’s 21.9 million people by the end of September, more than half of the population.
Currently, 13.5% of Sri Lankans have received a dose, but only 5.7% of them are fully immune. “To achieve the government’s goal, we would need to be able to immunize 100,000 people every day, which is doable. But everything will depend on the availability of vaccines ”, underlines Chandima Jeewandara, director of the allergy, immunity and cell biology unit at the University of Sri Jayawardenepura.
Indian exports halted
Thanks to a donation from India, the Sri Lankan vaccination campaign was able to begin on January 29, before derailing a few months later, due to lack of doses. As part of its vaccine diplomacy operation called “Maitri vaccine” (“Friendship vaccines” in Hindi), the South Asian giant had offered Sri Lanka 500,000 doses of Covishield, the AstraZeneca vaccine manufactured by the Serum Institute of India. Neighbors of India, such as Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bangladesh, were the first to benefit from these “friendship vaccines”. One way for New Delhi to counter the influence of China, which is developing numerous infrastructure projects in the region.
Initially, Sri Lanka had placed all its hopes on the AstraZeneca vaccine. Authorities had obtained 500,000 additional doses of Covishield in February under a trade agreement, and another 264,000 the following month through the international Covax mechanism. But after, nothing more: in the grip of a terrible second wave of Covid-19, India stopped its exports of vaccines from April, endangering the Sri Lankan as well as Bangladeshi immunization campaigns or Nepali. Bangladesh, which had entered into a trade agreement with the Serum Institute of India for the purchase of 30 million doses of Covishield, received only 7 million. As for Nepal, it has so far received only half of the 2 million doses ordered.
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