Hyderabad: Shortage of vaccine, a bottleneck for special drive

Hyderabad: A special vaccination drive in the State took a slow pace due to shortage of vaccine doses. In view of the Covid third wave, the State government had made the Department of Health officials ready to tackle and curb the virus spread by administering vaccines to all eligible persons in the State. It aimed to vaccinate one crore people by conducting a special drive.

For this the government had initiated a special drive to speed up the vaccination process. At the beginning of the month it has decided to go for a special drive and bring awareness about benefits of getting vaccinated among people.

Announcing a special drive, which started from September 16, the government aimed to vaccinate 1 crore people till the end of this month. To reach the target, it had made all arrangements by deploying 7,319 teams at the ground level and requested the Centre to provide 50 lakh additional doses for the drive.

Officials somehow managed to vaccinate more than 29.42 lakh persons from September 16 to 21. On September 18 the government vaccinated a record 6.36 lakh, on 21, 5.32 lakh, on 17 5.27 lakh.

Officials had taken effective steps to vaccinate all eligible people, but eventually the efforts took a slow pace due to vaccine shortage. On September 22 only 1.75 lakh vaccines were administered, whereas the government aimed to vaccinate 6-7 lakh persons a day.

Reportedly officials claimed that vaccine shortage was the major reason for the slow pace of the process.

If the shortage continues in the coming days, they are doubtful of reaching the target of administering 1 crore vaccines by the month-end. So far 2.45,96,190 persons have been vaccinated, which includes both the first and second doses.