Jon CohenReporting for this story was supported by the Pulitzer Center.MUMBAI, VELLORE, AND NEW DELHI, INDIA—On a Sunday morning in early April, as Mumbai was in a daze from the first weeks of a surge of COVID-19 and had instituted nighttime curfews, Baliram Boomkar asked his neighbors in the city’s Kaula Bandar slum whether they wanted a vaccine to protect them or had received one.
Some said they had but only because their employers required it. One man said he’d get vaccinated if his company gave him time off to recover from side effects. “COVID is nothing,” he said. “People are only spreading rumors.