CHENNAI: At least 5.36 lakh doses of Oxford vaccine for Covid-19 – Covishield, manufactured by Pune’s Serum Institute -- will arrive at Chennai airport on Tuesday morning in 45 crates. Another batch of 20,000 doses of Covaxin by Bharat Biotech, will arrive later.
The Centre has allotted a total of 5,56,500 doses of Covaxin and Covisheild for Tamil Nadu, health secretary
J Radhakrishnan said. The Centre has announced that the first round of inoculation using these two vaccines approved for emergency use in the country will begin on January 16.
Public health authorities will receive the vaccine and dispatch them directly to the state warehouse from where it will be sent to the ten regional warehouses and then distributed to districts and the vaccination centres. “We have the route plan, transport and cold chain ready for this,” Radhakrishnan said.
The state has more than 2,000 centres ready for vaccination. The vaccines will be offered to doctors, nurses, paramedics, sanitary workers at hospitals and other healthcare providers on a voluntary basis. The state will give two doses of the vaccine in a gap of 28 days. After healthcare providers, it will be offered to frontline health workers. “The centre has assured us that both vaccines are efficient and safe to use,” he said.
Earlier, health minister C Vijaya Baskar had told reporters that the state will administer the vaccine to 1.6 crore people across the state in the first phase. In the first phase, healthcare providers, frontline workers and vulnerable populations will be covered.
The state has the capacity to store 2.5 crore vaccines in its cold storage units and has trained more than 21,000 health workers. Each centre will vaccinate not more than 100 people a day to avoid crowding.