More priority groups may get Covid-19 vaccine; pace of inoculation remains sluggish

India’s pace of vaccinating 30 crore people with two doses of Covid-19 vaccine remains sluggish even after two months as the second wave of the epidemic picks up speed in most of the populated states.

For the past three days, the number of doses administered is stuck at 23 lakh. Barring once, the number of vaccinations administered never breached 30 lakh in the past week though the number of daily fresh cases rose from 40K to nearly 60K in the same period.

Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan on Friday said the government might create more priority groups for vaccination in the line of healthcare workers and frontline workers. Public health researchers pointed out it was time for the government to involve the private sector and undertake micro-planning to step up the pace of vaccination.

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"The current pace is barely sufficient to prevent the onslaught of the rising cases. We need to have strong micro plans and energetic mobilisation campaigns to step up the vaccination pace,” Giridhar Babu, an epidemiologist at the Public Health Foundation of India told DH.

“Also there is no element of outreach and engagement for the poor and vulnerable in the current programme,” noted T Sundararaman, former executive director at the National Health Systems Resource Centre.

Experts said the current average pace of vaccinating 20 lakh plus population per day had to be enhanced with far greater involvement of the private sector.

The public health system has about 3 lakh trained vaccinators whereas the private health system has 5 lakh more health workers encompassing doctors, nurses and other health staff.

“If all of these are used, and they are all trained and able to give vaccines, then we can reach 7-10 million doses per day very quickly,” Babu said.

Even after two months, just about half of the targeted one crore healthcare workers, the first priority group identified by the government, received two doses of the vaccine.

While more than 80 lakh got the first dose, nearly 52 lakh healthcare workers received both. The progress among the frontline workers is even less.

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Nevertheless, Vardhan said the government planned to create more such groups. “A few days ago, the government announced that from April 1 all citizens aged 45 years and above, whether having any comorbidity or not, will be eligible to get vaccinated. The government is already planning to widen the umbrella of Covid-19 vaccine beneficiaries soon to cover other sections of the population," he said here.

Meanwhile, the Union Health Ministry dispatched high level teams to Chhattisgarh and Chandigarh on Friday to aid the local administrations in their battle against the rising wave.

In the last 24 hours more than 59,000 new cases were reported, of which close to 36,000 are from Maharashtra. As many as 257 people died from Covid-19 and three other states, Punjab, Karnataka and Chhattisgarh reported more than 2,000 new cases in the same period.