Vaccination centres run of out of stock, district left with 4,700 doses

Ghaziabad: The announcement of the upcoming four-day event of ‘Tika Utsav’ from April 11 to April 14 has come as a breather for the Covid vaccination centres (CVCs) as the state officials directed that on Saturday, the vaccination will take place only at medical colleges and district hospitals

Ghaziabad: The announcement of the upcoming four-day event of ‘Tika Utsav’ from April 11 to April 14 has come as a breather for the Covid vaccination centres (CVCs) as the state officials directed that on Saturday, the vaccination will take place only at medical colleges and district hospitals. Officials in Ghaziabad said they will operate only two government vaccination centres.

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There are 100 CVCs in the district, including 34 private CVCs. On an average, the district is conducting vaccination of about 8,000 beneficiaries per day in April to meet its target of inoculating 216,000 beneficiaries by the end of the month.

District magistrate Ajay Shankar Pandey said on Friday that there is no shortage of vaccine in the district and added that the district will get 10,000 more doses by Friday night.

However, officials in the know said the district was left with only 1,000 doses of Covishield, which is widely being used for vaccinating beneficiaries, and 3,700 vials of Covaxin.

“There is shortage of vaccine. However, we are expecting that we will get more vaccine doses by Saturday night. As directed, we will inoculate beneficiaries only at MMG Hospital and community health centre at Dasna on Saturday. Only doses of Covaxin will be administered in both the vaccination centres. The 1,000 doses of Covishield are available in small batches at variouss CVCs and not as a whole bunch,” said an officer from the health department, who didn’t want to be quoted.

Officials said that ahead of the ‘Tika Utsav,’ the staff at vaccination centres will take up training for the event. “During the event, we will take up comprehensive vaccination at 6,000 centres and will scale up to 8,000 centres midway during the event,” said Amit Mohan Prasad, UP’s additional chief secretary (health).

Dr Raj Kumar, additional director (health) at Meerut, said vehicles will move to the vaccine depots at Agra and Lucknow to get new stock of the doses.

“The vehicles will get vaccine stocks from Agra for Bulandshahr and Gautam Budh Nagar districts. Likewise, vehicles from Ghaziabad will bring stock of vaccine from Lucknow for Meerut and Ghaziabad district. As of now, we don’t have the approximate number of doses that will be made available,” said Kumar.

Meanwhile, private CVCs continued with their “out-of-stock” run on Friday.

“We have no stock of vaccine at our hospital hence, no vaccination has taken place. We have made the payments but the officials have told us to wait for a couple of days,” said Mohit Tyagi, accounts manager at Ganesh Hospital in Nehru Nagar.

Lalit Goyal, manager operations from St Joseph Hospital at Nandgram, echoed similar views.

“We administered the last vaccine on Saturday. We were to get a stock of 200 doses but got only 100, all of which were administered to the beneficiaries. Though the beneficiaries keep calling us, we cannot assure them about the availability of vaccines as the officials have told us to wait for a few more days,” said Goyal.