Fact Checking of Fact Checkers: The Hindu’s fact checking of PM Modi’s facts is factually incorrect

After PM Modi’s fiery address to the nation, where he exposed the lies and propaganda of the opposition and his friendly media, The Hindu was furious and tried to ‘fact-check’ PM Modi’s statement that India has historically lacked access to vaccines against various diseases. With the publication claiming that before the country attained independence, India was self-sufficient in manufacturing vaccines which is nothing but a lie. Such was the silliness of The Hindu’s fact-check that the article contradicted itself on several occasions and appeared to be a hit job on PM Modi. In his address, the Prime Minister said, “If you look at the history of vaccination in India. Be it smallpox vaccine, hepatitis B vaccine or polio, you will see that India will have to wait for decades to buy vaccines from abroad. When vaccination programs in other countries ended, So it would not have even started in our country. Imagine if India had not made its own vaccines, what would have happened to a big country like India? This was also seen as a pot-shot against the previous Congress governments which could not care less about vital vaccines against diseases like polio, with many Congress leaders hesitating against Made in India vaccines especially Covaxin. was spread. Hindus might not have tolerated it as PM. Modi broke the unspoken rule of the Congress that the credit for any achievement should go to Jawaharlal Nehru and the Gandhi family. Hence, The Hindu launched a shoddy fact-check in a desperate attempt to prove PM Modi wrong. Article titled “Fact Checking | History shows that India did not lack access to vaccines as claimed by PM Modi” said be it polio or smallpox, India has never lacked access to vaccines as claimed by PM Modi. A Twitter handle by the name of “Know the Nation” dismissed the publication’s claim as it posted an infographic that includes a timeline of the introduction of major vaccines in India. While the world managed to get its hands on a vaccine against rotavirus in 1998, India was only able to procure vaccines in 2015 after 17 long years. For the vaccine against Japanese encephalitis, the difference was even greater. While the first vaccine against this disease was introduced in 1930, the vaccine arrived in India after 83 years in 2013. Tetanus which has become a part and parcel of the medical infrastructure, was first introduced to the world in 1924, But only came to the country in 1978. Similar delays were observed in vaccines against hepatitis B and polio. The Hindu cited an article by Dr Chandrakant Laharia, which was published in the Indian Journal of Medical Research (IJMR) in 2012, to prove his point. It has its own that, “India, even before independence, was among the few countries to have discovered indigenously manufactured vaccines within almost years, historical records suggest.” The publication cited the vaccination of a three-year-old Indian in 1802. Just four years after English physician Edward Jenner published the results of his experiments on subjects vaccinated with the smallpox virus to prove a smallpox vaccine, India moved at a breathtaking pace and not decades later as PM Modi claimed . Read more: Hindu social media warriors claim second skull: Hinduphobe Tushar Panchal was forced to resign as CM Chouhan’s media advisor, however, The Hindu himself denies that India was unable to achieve complete eradication of smallpox in 1975. was able – a staggering 170 years after the first vaccination of an Indian child in 1802. The article also noted that Europe and North America were only able to eradicate smallpox by 1953. Only India lacked the necessary infrastructure to manufacture Made in India vaccines against deadly diseases, previous governments were extremely slow in vaccinating the population, when vaccines were finally available in India with the vaccination campaign against polio, A proof of this fact. It is worth noting that India took more than 3 decades to eradicate polio. The Hindu agenda-driven fact-check against PM Modi exposed the publication’s bias against the Modi government.