Kolkata Municipal Corporation needs one lakh doses to tide over vaccine shortfall

KOLKATA: The KMC needs to administer 1 lakh doses within the next seven days to overcome the second dose backlog. The civic body hopes to get an adequate quantity of vaccines to ramp up the inoculation drive.
To achieve the rather stiff target, the KMC health department has asked executive health officers and medical officers of KMC-run Covid vaccination clinics (CVC) to reserve at least 50% of the allocations for the second dose from Tuesday. “This is an urgent measure to clear the second-dose backlog, which is growing by leaps and bounds as we are facing an acute shortage of vaccines for the past several days,” a KMC health department official said.
The KMC brass had to suspend first dose vaccination on Friday and Saturday due to paucity of supply and utilize whatever supply was available from Swasthya Bhawan to inoculate second-dose recipients. “Even then we couldn’t clear 15% of the total backlog. We hope to get an augmented supply from next week and prioritize the second-dose vaccination,” the official said.
The official said the target from Tuesday would be to administer 15,000-20,000 second doses at 195 civic vaccination centres each day. This apart, KMC has decided to administer the second dose from the mega vaccination clinics from next week. According to rules, these centres can only cater to priority groups or super spreaders, including hawkers, vegetable sellers, fish vendors, security guards, domestic helps, teachers, journalists and government officers. However, the civic bosses have decided to relax rules to administer second doses since vaccine allocation for mega centres is higher.
“We hope to expedite the second dose vaccination from the clinics and mega centres. If need be, we will relax rules to accommodate recipients of the second dose. If we can manage a sizeable portion of available vaccines from Swasthya Bhawan for our clinics, we will be able to reach closer to our target,” the official said.