Kolkata Municipal Corporation syringe stock may last only a day

KOLKATA: The Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) has hit a syringe hurdle before it rolls out its usual vaccination schedule this week. The KMC has 27,000 auto-disable syringes which may not last beyond Monday. The civic body needs around 30,000 to 35,000 such syringes daily to run 144 vaccination clinics and 50 mega vaccination centres.
The state government, as an emergency measure, has asked KMC to procure auto-disable syringes from the open market which it will reimburse later. Bengal has sought Centre’s help to get 20 lakh such syringes, the first lot of which is expected this week.
TOI has already reported that Bengal is facing acute shortage of syringes. The number of syringes the state gets is consistent with the number of doses it receives from Centre. Bengal, however, had registered negative wastage, administering more doses than it has received. This has resulted in the use of more syringes than that have been provided, leading to the shortage. Bengal has managed to extract around 16 lakh extra doses of vaccine in the last three months from its stipulated quota by using the extra dose given in a vial to compensate for wastage. As it waits for the Centre to supply it syringes, the state plans to spend Rs 1 crore to procure these syringes from open market to tide over the crisis. KMC, officials said, has already procured 60,000 syringes from the open market in the past few days and is looking for suppliers who can provide it bulk supplies within a short timeframe.
According to state health secretary Narayan Swaroop Nigam, the crisis is temporary. He said the state was expecting the arrival of bulk supply of syringes from the Centre soon. “The nature of such a crisis is temporary and we are expecting to mitigate it soon. But for the time being, we have advised the KMC to go for procurement of syringes from the market to run their vaccination clinics and mega centres. We will pay the civic body for such a procurement in due course,” Nigam told TOI.
However, according to a KMC health department official, the civic body is facing a problem in the syringe procurement as there was inadequate stock in the market. “We have managed to get 60,000 syringes on two separate days after thoroughly searching for such syringes last week. There is no guarantee that we will be able to find such a bulk quantity of syringes next week as there is inadequate stock of automatic disable syringes in the open market,” the civic official said. “We have a stock which will last for a day only. We need to find new supply either from the state or buy syringes from the private market. Otherwise, we will be compelled to suspend our vaccination for the time being,” said a KMC health department official
From Monday onwards, the civic body’s 144 vaccination clinics will administer first and second Covishield and Covaxin doses in two shifts. While the registration counters will open for the recipients of first dose at 10 am, the second dose recipients will be called after 2 pm. The KMC-run mega vaccination centres will also follow the same model.