Why Covid vax drive will slow down twice a week

Ghaziabad: Every Wednesday and Saturday, the Covid vaccination drive will take a back seat in Ghaziabad from now and make way for the district to focus on regular immunisation of children aged between 0-5 years.
Health officials said a direction in this regard was recently given by the state government to all districts as a large number of kids failed to get vaccines for life-threatening diseases due to the pandemic.
In Ghaziabad, Covid vaccination will be done only in permanent centres on these two days. The number of Covid centres would be around 30, which is almost half the number on other days, officials said.
Interestingly, the move has come at a time when the district is facing a shortage of vaccines. Even as Ghaziabad has almost stopped cluster activities in various parts of the district wherein the focus was to mobilise the maximum number of people for vaccination.
As a pilot project, the cluster activity was started in six areas of the district on June 21. Apart from online registration, people were being vaccinated through on-site registration.
The district authorities had announced the expansion of the cluster activity and inoculating over 40,000 people per day from July 1, but this could not put into practice.
According to sources, the new instruction is applicable for all districts and they have been directed to slow down the Covid vaccination drive. They added that a district in UP that was doing more vaccination than the target was reprimanded. According to health department sources, a district was given a target of 8,000 vaccinations daily, whereas it was vaccinating 12,000 people.
Meanwhile, the effect of the new order was visible on Wednesday. Covid vaccination was done at only 27 centres wherein 10,618 people were jabbed. Whereas routine immunisation was done at 54 centres and about 2,500 children and around 1,000 pregnant women were vaccinated.
However, chief medical officer Dr NK Gupta said, “Other diseases of children are also quite deadly and they need to be immunised on time. Now, ANM and Asha workers would be equally distributed on these two days for RI and Covid vaccinations. We are getting a regular supply of vaccines”