GUWAHATI: Assam's health authorities and those who are eligible for Covid-19 vaccination are currently at the mercy of an erratic supply of vaccines to the state by the central government.
The health department has been forced to scale down its target of three-lakh vaccination , resulting in thousands of people returning home from vaccination centres without getting their stipulated dose. Moreover, there is no certainty when the state will get its next supply.
NHM officials said the supply of vaccines from the Centre was not "erratic", but "non-uniform, which put the brakes on the pace of vaccination. They added that the supply of Covid-19 vaccines dropped after the Enhanced Immunisation Drive had entered into its third day. The drive was started from June 21 with a target of vaccinating three lakh people everyday. Initially the drive was successful as 9.75 lakh people received vaccination shots across 2,425 vaccine centres in the first three days. On Friday, only 1,545 CVCs operated with 1.63 lakh people receiving vaccination. On Wednesday, the total number of vaccinated people were 70,22,282, while over 1.72 lakh were inoculated on Thursday. "We want to vaccinate maximum number of the people in minimum possible time. But the criticalities here is the availability of the vaccine," NHM director Lakshmanan S said. "We are worried that a large number of people have to go back without vaccinations, which is unfortunate" he said.
He added, "We have shown our capacity and are in constant touch with the Union government officials stating that this is how we are inoculating and our per day capacity of vaccination. The Union government knows our capacity and it allocates vaccine as per its availability." He added that after the authorities came to know about the proposed availability of vaccine allocation, they informed the districts and later distributed the vaccines among the districts as per their requirements, capacity and Covid situation. "There was a short supply of only Bharat Biotech's Covaxin which forced the suspension of administering the first dose of Covaxin on June 4, but later the availability of Covishield by the Serum Institute of India also became an issue, he said.
