NEW DELHI: Even as some states are saying shortage of vaccine is causing disruptions in the inoculation drive against Covid-19, the
Centre maintained that the problem was not as much of supply but needed better planning by states.
India administered over 40 lakh vaccine doses on Monday and continues to remain at the top globally in terms of daily doses given with an average 41.6 lakh shots per day.
“In any state, the case might be that in one district, more consumption is taking place while in another, there is less consumption. Our request to state governments is to ascertain where the doses can be re-appropriated,” health secretary Rajesh
Bhushan said.
While the government is currently procuring two vaccines — Covaxin and Covishield — for the national Covid-19 immunisation programme, it is also in talks with Russia’s sovereign development fund RDIF, Dr Reddy’s Laboratories (which will import and distribute Sputnik V initially in India) and five other local pharma firms, which will manufacture Sputnik V that was approved for restricted use in emergency situation on Monday.
According to the
health ministry, the Centre has supplied around 13.1 crore doses of the two vaccines to states and UTs till 11am on Tuesday. Of this, over 11.4 crore doses have been consumed (including wastage) and around 1.6 crore are unutilised with different states and UTs. In addition, there are over two crore doses of the two vaccines in the supply pipeline, which will be delivered to states and UTs in a staggered manner till April-end.
“This clearly shows that the problem is of lack of planning, not of shortage of vaccine doses. We have made available vaccine doses to states from time to time and to bigger states we give supply of four days and on fourth and fifth day we replenish the supply. For smaller states, because of logistics and other issues, we supply seven-eight days’ vaccine doses and on seventh or eighth day their supply is replenished,” Bhushan said.
The Centre also raised concerns over rapidly rising Covid-19 cases as well as deaths and asked states to increase testing and tracking. In almost all high burden states, the pace of testing is not proportionate to the rate of growth in positive cases, impacting the positivity rate. In many states, the share of
RT-PCR is also significantly less.
Maharashtra,
Uttar Pradesh, Delhi, Haryana and Gujarat are among the states with high caseload of Covid-19 and showing a surge. However, officials said the a serious situation was emerging countrywide.