Still recovering, Tharoor bats for free, universal vaccination

The senior Congress leader tweeted a message from his Covid-19 sickbed

After testing positive for Covid-19 on April 21, Congress leader Shashi Tharoor, who was hospitalised and recovered, tweeted a video on Wednesday in which he said that he was still suffering from the complications of a long Covid-19 infection. He said he wondered how the government could possibly meet its target of vaccinating everyone by the end of 2021.

In the video, he says that he supports Congress's call for universal Covid-19 vaccination free of cost within the government's promised deadline.

Union Minister Prakash Javadekar said on May 29 that Covid-19 vaccination will be complete in India by December this year. Javadekar noted that the health ministry had recently given a roadmap about producing 216 crore doses by December and how 108 crore people will be vaccinated, as he rebutted Gandhi's claim that it may take three years to finish the exercise, considered critical to curb the disease.

"It is unacceptable that this government should be demanding that states, private hospitals and others compete in some sort of a market free for all to buy vaccines at different prices, extortionate prices in some cases when the Central government had an arrangement to buy vaccines at affordable prices and give them to the public for free," Tharoor said.

"Let us have a universal and free vaccination policy to save our nation from Covid," he said.

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