Time to place Bangladesh on a war footing to vaccinate all

Bangladesh is in a precarious position given how Covid-19 has engulfed the entirety of its neighbour, India, causing unimaginable havoc on ordinary people whose helplessness we are witnessing on a daily basis. Dr Farah Husain, head of the Covid ICU unit at the Lok Nayak Hospital in Delhi, a public Covid-designated hospital that has served more than twelve thousand patients, in a CNN interview declared that what is happening in India is "nothing short of an apocalypse". She also mentioned that "every family in India is attacked by Covid". The aggressive double-mutant variant of the virus has been the key culprit in India. It is deadly in terms of virulence and is much more transmissible than others. Its official name is B.1.617, and the "double mutant" is a bit of a misnomer, as it actually carries 13 mutations. More importantly, it contains the E484Q mutation, considered an "escape mutation" because it enables the coronavirus to evade immune protection with monoclonal antibodies, which may decrease the effectiveness of vaccines.