Less than 75% adults fully jabbed a week before India's Covid vaccination drive anniversary

Less than 75 per cent of adults in India’s 21 states and union territories are fully vaccinated with Nagaland being the worst at 35 per cent followed by Puducherry (40 per cent), Meghalaya (43 per cent), Jharkhand and Punjab (both 45 per cent) and Uttar Pradesh (52 per cent) a week before the first anniversary of one of the world’s biggest adult vaccination campaigns.

Among the southern states, Andhra Pradesh (56 per cent) is the worst, while Telangana (91 per cent) and Karnataka (84 per cent) fare better than Kerala (75 per cent) and Tamil Nadu (64 per cent).

Just about half of the adult population is fully vaccinated in three out of five states that will go to the polls next month. The worst is Punjab where only 45 per cent are fully vaccinated while Uttar Pradesh (52 per cent) and Manipur (51 per cent) are marginally better.

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Uttar Pradesh and Punjab have witnessed a massive jump in the number of Covid-cases in the last three weeks.

Uttar Pradesh recorded 14 cases on December 15 but registered more than 7,500 fresh Covid-19 cases in the last 24 hours. Similarly, the number of fresh cases in Punjab rose from 34 on December 15 to more than 3,500 on January 8. The Covid-19 numbers are also on a rise in Manipur, Goa and Uttarakhand.

"Punjab and Uttar Pradesh currently witness doubling of active cases in every two days. I fear that a lot of such cases would lead to hospitalisation or death,” said health economist Rijo John, a visiting faculty at the Indian Institute of Management, Kochi who is tracking the pandemic over the last two years.

India began its vaccination campaign on January 16, 2021 with healthcare workers and kept on expanding the scheme by including front line workers, senior citizens, people above 45 years with comorbidities, anyone above 18 years and finally the 15-18 years age group.

"The most vulnerable are the marginal population and those living in rural India as well as the elderly. Reaching out to them continues to be the biggest challenge for the government,” T Sundararaman, former Executive Director, National Health Systems Resource Centre in Delhi told DH.

Multiple ministers of the Narendra Modi government last year claimed that India would vaccinate its entire adult population (94.47 crore) by December. This didn’t happen as only 67 per cent adults have received two doses so far.

"In hindsight, it is a reasonably good achievement for a low or middle-income country. But the vaccination could have started earlier to save some of the lives that were lost during the second wave,” said John.

Ten states administered two shots to more than 75 per cent of their population. They are Karnataka, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Telangana, Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Mizoram, Sikkim and Haryana.

Experts said the adverse impact on other public health programmes was one of the consequences of the excessive focus on vaccination. “The government needs to create a parallel system for administering the Covid-19 vaccines rather than disrupting the TB or routine immunisation programmes,” said Sundararaman.

Since December-end, the country is witnessing an exponential surge in Covid-19 cases driven by an Omicron-powered third wave. The number of daily new infections crossed the 1.75 lakh mark in the last 24 hours while hospitalisation numbers have begun to rise again.

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