Looking to boost coverage, the government has adopted a slew of measures to allay fears.
New Delhi:
India’s Covid-19 vaccination drive, which began a week ago on January 16, has covered nearly 14 lakh people already, the Union government has said. The mission of administering the two-dose jab accelerated to over three lakh people per day yesterday, according to the Union Health Ministry’s data.
The average number of vaccinations per day during the past week has been 1,98,656, data collated till yesterday showed. The total has touched 13,90,592. Yesterday alone, the number touched 3,47,058.
On January 16, Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched India’s massive Covid-10 vaccination drive using two products – Covishield and Covaxin. While the former was developed by researchers at Oxford University in collaboration with pharma major AstaZeneca, it is being manufactured in India by Pune-based The Serum Institute of India.
Covaxin, on the other hand, is being produced by Hyderabad-based Bharat Biotech which created the vaccine in collaboration with the Indian Council of Medical Research.
In phase 1 of the inoculation drive, set to be completed by July, one crore health workers followed by 2 crore frontline workers will get the vaccine. In the next one, besides those aged above 50, Prime Minister Modi and all Union and state ministers and lawmakers are likely to get jabbed.
Looking to increase the rate of coverage, the Union government has over the past few days adopted a slew of measures to allay fears and dispel myths, which it says are being peddled for political gain.