Less than half of India's procured Covid-19 vaccine doses spent so far

India has so far used less than half of the Covid-19 vaccines it procured, necessitating an acceleration in the vaccination programme.

Though more than one million doses were administered for two consecutive days, in total just under 20 million vaccines have been used as against the procurement of 41 million doses.

Read | Over 1.8 crore Covid-19 vaccine doses administered in India

Last month, the Union Health Ministry informed the Lok Sabha that an order of 41 million doses was placed for the two vaccines – Covishield and Covaxin – for the first two groups of healthcare workers and front line workers.

With vaccine hesitancy limiting only about 50% use from these two groups, the same stock is now being used to inoculate the two groups from the general population – the senior citizens and people in the age bracket of 45-59 with comorbidities.

The 41 million doses include the 10 million dose that came from the UN's Covax facility with funding support from Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance – an international support agency.

Experts are unanimous in their opinion that the scale of operation has to be increased if the original target of vaccinating 300 million Indians by August is to be met.

“Meeting the original target of 300 million beneficiaries by August means daily average doses should reach 4 to 5 million as against the 4 lakh doses per day average we have been seeing for more than a month. What is required is a 10-fold increase in daily doses from its current levels,” Rijo John, a public health specialist and a former consultant to the WHO told DH.

Till Friday late evening, more than 19 million people received the vaccine including more than 2.1 million 60 plus population and 3,13,000 people of 45-59 years. In addition nearly 6.9 million health care workers and 6.2 million front line staff received one dose while 3.2 million healthcare workers and more than 1,23,000 frontline staff got both the doses.

“Maintaining morale of the vaccinators over the next several months as well as the fact that India is slipping into its summer will present some special challenges. The target of 300 million vaccinated by August is achievable, but we will have to ramp up the current numbers of daily vaccinations by at least a factor of 5 to 10,” noted Gautam Menon, a professor at Ashoka University, who is keeping track of the pandemic from the beginning.

Meanwhile, nearly 17,000 fresh cases were reported once again on Friday, of which 84% was concentrated in six states. Also 113 Covid-19 deaths were reported in the last 24 hours.