India has administered over 64 crore Covid jabs in total before August is over. Month-on-month shots being given are slowly but steadily increasing. But with a population of over 90 crores in the 18+ years bracket, India still has the mammoth task of administering over 120 crore jabs, especially if the government wants to achieve its target of fully vaccinating all adult population by December-end.
National Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (NTAGI) chief Dr N K Arora says the target is well within reach, even though as per current calculations it can take up to 11 months.
On Friday, India completed the feat of one crore jabs in a day and has to maintain that rate daily to finish another 120 crore jabs in four months remaining.
Speaking exclusively to CNN-News18, Dr Arora said, “Health System has repeatedly demonstrated that feats of 9 million, 10 million+ doses per day are not a one-off or photo-ops. Giving one crore doses in a day shows the system capacity. On top of that, 70% percent of those doses were given in villages, so it’s not an urban phenomenon alone. We can sustain this pace. As the vaccine availability increases, system can handle as many as 1.25 crore doses a day too.”
“We should be able to vaccinate all adults by Dec-end. SII is increasing production and will provide over 18-20 crore doses a month from September. Bharat Biotech will provide 6-7 crore jabs per month September onwards. Sputnik-V is also getting manufactured in India. We will have sufficient doses to vaccinate 90 crore with 2 doses.”
Apart from this, the government also expects supply of three new vaccines manufactured in India – Zycov-D from October at around one crore doses per month and Gennova by October-end at about five crore doses this year.
“Biological-E is preparing a stockpile too. So even if their emergency-use authorisation might come later, we are expecting that around 20-30 crore doses of Bio-E should be available by November,” added Dr. Arora.
But will having a supply of vaccines alone ensure people take them? In India, over 1.5 crore people missed their second dose deadline recently. Around the world, even developed countries are hitting a wall after about 50% saturation of vaccines. But Dr Arora believes, despite some hesitancy in India, over all the country is more ‘vaccine-eager’ than most.
“We have one of the highest vaccine acceptability anywhere in the world. We have used our last 30 years’ experience, from 1990s, from Polio drive where we faced many uphill tasks. The lessons from those drives were used and from October 2020 itself, there was a clear plan of communication. We have dealt systematically with hesitancy. Initially there was hesitancy in rural areas, now there are queues there for jabs. We have been pro-active towards hesitancy.”
“So our target is always 100% inoculation of all 18+ by December-end. We will not lower our target.”
“Besides, literacy and vaccine hesitancy not directly linked. India doesn’t face the kind of resistance that many western countries do. We don’t have the same challenges. For example, in USA and France before Covid, there was a break-out of measles because people were not getting their children vaccinated. But in India, parents don’t have that issue.”
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