PUNE: The civic bodies would conduct dedicated vaccination drives in slum pockets in September to boost Covid-19 vaccination.
The health department officials of Pune and Pimpri Chinchwad municipal corporations stated that they would dedicate additional teams to cover the eligible residents from the slums as the vaccine supply had improved. A Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) official said the drive was affected a few weeks ago because of the inconsistent vaccine supply.
The district received over 12 lakh Covishield and Covaxin doses in August. The Pune circle health officials stated that the district was likely to get around 20 lakh Covishield and Covaxin doses in September. After the record vaccination of over 2.34 lakh beneficiaries on Tuesday, a total of 39,240 beneficiaries got the jabs on Wednesday.
Ashish Bharati, the PMC’s health department chief, told TOI, “The consistent vaccine supply has given us a chance to cover the susceptible population at the earliest. We shall form dedicated teams to cover the slum areas in the city and ensure that the regular vaccination does not get affected because of the special drives. We are also focusing on speedy vaccination across the wards, where the number of Covid-19 cases are rising. A strategy is being devised.”
A PMC official said the ward-wise vaccination data did not hold much importance because any beneficiary could get vaccine from any vaccination site in the city.
Pimpri Chinchwad municipal commissioner Rajesh Patil told TOI that they were covering the slum population via the vaccine-on-wheels programme and some dedicated sites, but few more additional teams would be deployed to speed up the vaccination.
