Coronavirus | 15 crore vaccine doses to be available in August: Paul

India likely to miss vaccination target of 51 cr doses for July

People wait in queue for COVID-19 vaccine at a vaccination center setup at Bopal Village Panchayat office on the outskirts of Ahmedabad on Tuesday, July 27, 2021.

The Centre expects to have 15 crore doses of vaccine available for administration in August, Chairman of the National Empowered Group on Vaccination (NEGVAC) V.K. Paul said on Tuesday.

“We have a visibility of about 15 crore doses,” Dr. Paul said at a press briefing. “We produce and we inject. A part of what we produce goes into testing and the batches are released in a certain way.”

About 25% of the population has got at least one dose and 7% is fully inoculated.

Health Minister Mansukh Mandaviya said last week that 2.5 crore doses of Covaxin would be available in July and 3.5 crore in August. The earlier estimates were that at least six crore doses of Covaxin would be available from July. India’s target was to administer 51 crore doses by July. So far 44 crore doses have been administered.

Based on the supply, it is improbable that the target will be reached in the next four days.

 

The government has said that it plans to inoculate all adults — about 94.4 crore persons — by the year end. For that nearly one crore doses have to be administered a day while India has generally averaged about 0.5 crore for most of this month.

Of the vaccines administered so far, Covaxin comprises about 15%.

Bharat Biotech said in May that it took four months for a batch of Covaxin to be manufactured and readied for supply. Thus, production of batches of Covaxin that were initiated during March this year would be ready for supply only in June, the company had said in a statement. At that point, about 2-2.5 crore doses of Covaxin had reportedly been supplied. That implies that only the batches produced in April would be ready for supply by July.

At Tuesday’s briefing, Joint Secretary, Health Lav Agrawal said that participants who had participated in clinical trials of Covaxin would get certificates only if they hadn’t been administered a placebo and the trial was unblinded. Currently, all those vaccinated get a digital certificate via Cowin but those who had participated in trials had not got such certificates and had complained about the unavailability of the same.