The district with the lowest vaccination rate in India is a poor, neglected corner of Assam

Dr Saiful Islam is a dejected man. “My head has just stopped working,” he told this reporter over the phone on Saturday evening. “I just don’t know what to do anymore.”

Islam has reasons to be despondent. He heads the directorate of health services in South Salmara-Mankachar, the district with the dubious record of the lowest Covid-19 vaccination coverage in India.

As of June 3, the Western Assam district bordering Bangladesh has administered only 3.2 doses per hundred people, shows an analysis of official vaccination data on the CoWin portal by Scroll.in. This amounts to barely one-fifth of the national average of 15.72 doses.

District officials say the abysmal numbers are a result of vaccine hesitancy fuelled by misinformation. The district immunisation officer, Dr Sirajul Islam, said: “There is this video of a foreign virologist doing the rounds where he is apparently saying that people who take the vaccine will die within two years.”

In May, a WhatsApp message had surfaced across the country where Luc Montagnier, a Nobel prize-winning French virologist, was quoted to have said that. While Montagnier is known to share an anti-vaccination stance, he did not say what was attributed to him in the viral message, several fact-checking organisations had clarified at the time….

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