
A woman holds a small bottle labeled with a “Vaccine COVID-19” sticker and a medical syringe in this illustration taken April 10, 2020. Photo: Reuters/Dado Ruvic/Illustration.
New Delhi: Lines in a Union science ministry release, noting that no vaccine against the novel coronavirus could be ready before 2021, have been deleted in the Press Information Bureau’s copy of the release.
The deletion assumes significance in light of the Indian Council of Medical Research’s (ICMR’s) plan to complete clinical trials for a vaccine for the novel coronavirus by August 15 – a deadline that has come under considerable criticism.
The Ministry of Science and Technology release, entitled ‘Indigenous Indian COVID19 vaccines in the global race to end the pandemic’ is authored by science writer T.V. Venkateswaran.
In the original copy of the piece, which reached The Wire Science through the India Science Wire syndication service, Venkateswaran notes (emphasis added): “Now with the nod given by the Drug Controller General of India CDSCO (The Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation) for the conduct of the human trial, it will take anywhere between fifteen to eighteen months before licence are issued for the vaccines.”

Further down, a line follows a note on two Indian vaccines, COVAXIN and ZyCov-D, which are among 11 vaccine candidates that have entered human trials. Venkateswaran adds that there are 140 vaccines currently being developed worldwide.
He then says, “None of these vaccines is unlikely to be ready for mass use before 2021 (sic).” The double-negative is presumably inadvertent.
Both highlighted portions, which attempt to set an achievable deadline for public use of a COVID-19 vaccine, are missing in the PIB’s version of the text in its official website, pib.gov.in.

These omissions come at a significant time. While the science ministry’s release could have been seen as a backtracking of the ICMR’s much-criticised letter to 12 institutions asking them to make sure the clinical trials of COVAXIN, a COVID-19 vaccine developed by Bharat Biotech, end with the vaccine proving to be ready for “public health use” by August 15.
As The Wire Science noted on July 4, this deadline was interpreted as giving Prime Minister Narendra Modi an opportunity to win political points by announcing the vaccine to the nation during his Independence Day speech.
Following backlash, ICMR was keen to stress on July 4 that it intended to do away with “red tape” and not procedure in setting an ambitious and unfeasible deadline.
Also read: India’s Foremost Science Academy Calls ICMR’s August 15 Vaccine Deadline ‘Unfeasible’
“The letter by [ICMR’s director general Balram Bhargava] to investigators of the clinical trial sites was meant to cut unnecessary red tape, without bypassing any necessary process, and speed up recruitment of participants,” ICMR said in its statement.
However, PIB’s deletions correspond to a worrying trend in the flow of information and data from the government to the people during this current health crisis.
In an analysis for The Wire Science, Priyanka Pulla had noted the worrying trends of news articles showing the government in bad light being made to disappear as a reflection of the necessity for the government to control the narrative around the pandemic.
ICMR, as the face of the science that is driving India’s efforts to control the COVID-19 crisis, has been inconsistent in offering data and information, garnering the criticism that it is keener to safeguard the government than provide a true picture of the state of things.
An editorial on this website has thus noted that besides ICMR’s delay in releasing seroprevalance data, it has also been “withholding data, thus denying journalists and experts the ability to check results in the full context in which they are to be understood; distorting or miscommunicating data, as is often the case with the infection fatality rate; removing data, such as by taking down documents containing information about the number of individuals tested by date before April 24; denying others’ claims but with insufficient data, thus adding to the confusion, as with the preprint paper that claimed India’s epidemic would peak in November; and publicising some findings by leaking them to the press.”