From losing loved ones to volunteering for a vaccine

In September, a close friend of Anil Hebbar died of Covid-19 in India’s western city of Mumbai after being ferried around three hospitals over five days.

Mr Hebbar, who runs a medical equipment firm, had visited his 62-year-old friend, a well-known social worker, in the intensive care unit, hours before his life ended.

The social worker was not the only friend Mr Hebbar lost during the pandemic. Since March, 10 people he knew well have succumbed to the virus in Mumbai, which quickly emerged as a hotspot. The city has reported more than 230,000 cases so far.

“It was all very overwhelming. I felt this had to stop. That’s one reason I decided to volunteer for the Covid-19 vaccine trial,” Mr Hebbar, 56, told me.

Earlier this month, he signed himself up for the clinical trials for a vaccine being developed by pharmaceuticals group AstraZeneca and Oxford University.

The vaccine is made from a virus which is a weakened version of a common cold virus that causes infections in chimpanzees. It has been genetically changed so that it is impossible to grow in humans, according to Dr Tania Thomas of the Oxford Vaccine Group. It is also one of the most promising Covid-19 vaccines among some 180 being tested around the world. None has yet completed clinical trials.

Mr Hebbar is among the more than 20,000 volunteers who have signed up for this trial in the UK, Brazil, South Africa and India. In India, he has joined 1,600 volunteers who are receiving doses at 15 centres across the country. With more than seven million reported infections, India has the second highest caseload worldwide after the US.

The trials will find out whether the vaccine induces good immune responses and whether it causes any unacceptable side effects. Adult participants will be randomised to receive one or two doses of either the vaccine or a licensed vaccine that will be used as a “control” for comparison.

It was not easy for Mr Hebbar to convince his family to join what is essentially an altruistic – and potentially risky – trial.

His wife, a professor of development studies at a leading social sciences school, was not pleased about it, he says. His 11-year-old daughter quizzed him on what a vaccine trial meant. Reports about the brief suspension of trials after two volunteers fell sick in UK stoked the family’s anxieties.

But not Mr Hebbar’s. “I didn’t worry at all. I have faith in science,” he says.

In early October, he called up a hospital in Mumbai which was conducting the second and third phases of the trials. He was told that 55 people had volunteered for the six-month trial, but finding the remaining 45 in a planned 100-volunteer trial at the hospital was “becoming difficult”.

Next morning, he drove to the hospital where doctors took a blood sample and swabs for a Covid-19 test. Trial participants must test negative for SARS-CoV2, the virus that causes Covid-19, be in good health and, in the case of women, not be pregnant. That night the hospital called him to say that he had been cleared for the trial.

Next day, doctors briefed him on the experimental vaccine, got him to sign a consent form and gave him a single shot of a vaccine. They asked him to rest for 30 minutes, prescribed anti-fever pills and paid 500 rupees ($6.81; £5.27) as a fee for participation. Doctors told him that three of the 55 volunteers had a “slight fever”. Then they told him to return in early November to receive a second dose. Mr Hebbar will also have to visit the hospital once every month over the next six months for check-ups, and call them if he “feels anything unusual”.

“It was a very smooth and painless process. I just felt a bit tired, possibly because I had been driving around the city a lot,” Mr Hebbar said.

When India’s sweeping lockdown to stall the spread of the virus began in late March, Mr Hebbar shut his firm, sent his 45 employees home and plunged into relief work. “It was a terrible state of affairs. The lockdown was so badly executed,” he said.

Since then, he says, he has driven 28,000km (17,398 miles) in and around Mumbai, distributing over a million meals and essentials and running shelters for the homeless and stranded workers who lost their jobs.

“I have been on the streets, visiting slums and hospital ICUs, meeting people and distributing food and relief material for the past few months. I have worn a mask. But I don’t have an irrational fear of the virus,” he said.

Mr Hebbar even managed to convince some of his friends to volunteer for the vaccine.

“The pandemic has been a life-changing experience. But I am very optimistic that this vaccine will work. We will beat this virus together,” he says.