Few takers for first jab, Bihar may revise vaccination target

Second dose vaccine seekers (7,14,234) were almost double the first (3,61,987), as 10,76,221 shots were administered to beneficiaries at the mega camp on Monday.

Bihar may have to revise its vaccination target when it got the first indication that there were few takers for the first jab during a mega vaccination camp on October 18.

A health worker gives dose of COVID-19 vaccine to beneficiary at Hotel Pataliputra Ashoka in Patna. (HT PHOTO)

Second dose vaccine seekers (7,14,234) were almost double the first (3,61,987), as 10,76,221 shots were administered to beneficiaries at the mega camp on Monday.

This was the first time that the trend of vaccination at a mega camp had reversed, with beneficiaries for the second dose far outnumbering the first, when 35% of the state’s target population is yet to take their first jab, said an official of the state health department.

It is clearly an indication that either its estimated 73.44 million adult population is inflated, or a sizeable chunk has migrated outside the state. The state health department had initiated a door-to-door survey of households Tuesday to get an exact count of the vaccination target population in Bihar.

The government hopes to collate the survey data by next week, he added.

Interestingly, only 10% vaccines available in the state were used at Monday’s mega camp, as against an average 70%-80% utilisation at mega vaccination camps earlier. The state had administered the country’s highest 33,39,879 doses on September 17 and 30,40,836 doses on October 2, the officer quoted above said.

“The high coverage of second dose as compared to the first, and low utilisation of vaccines at the mega camp are pointers to the fact that there are few takers for the first dose now, despite an estimated 35% adult population being completely unvaccinated,” said the officer.

This, the officer said, pointed to two possibilities.

“Either our adult target population of 73.44 million, derived by estimating the population based on Census 2011, is exaggerated, or there has been heavy outmigration from Bihar. In either case, we will have to revise our vaccination target. However, we want to be doubly sure before we do that,” the officer quoted above said.

State’s nodal officer for vaccination and executive director of the State Health Society, Bihar, Sanjay Kumar Singh, said the department would wait for the findings of the mega survey, before arriving at any decision.

“We are getting a household survey done based on voter list of ongoing panchayat elections in the state, to trace and persuade the eligible adult population take their Covid-19 jab. This will give us a count of the adult people unvaccinated in the state,” said Sanjay Kumar Singh, executive director of the State Health Society, Bihar, and also the state’s nodal officer for vaccination.

“We will leave no stone unturned to reach out to the last unvaccinated adult person to facilitate the jab. We are even sending our vaccinators and vaccination mobilisers to clusters where people are either hesitant or not fully unvaccinated, to convince them to take the shot,” added Singh.

The state has no credible data on migration, making it difficult to estimate the exact number of Bihari migrants across India. There are, however, some estimates which show that nearly 50% of Bihari households are affected by migration.

As per rough estimates, around 40 lakh migrants returned to Bihar in the midst of the national lockdown last year arising out of the pandemic and are expected to have gone back to work outside the state. Of these, 18 lakh benefitted directly as the state government transferred ₹1,000 as humanitarian relief into the bank account of every migrant who returned to the state or was stranded outside last year, said another officer who did not wished to be named.

Bihar had done an audit of its Covid-19 deaths and revised it on June 9, adding 3,951 uncounted deaths since the outbreak of the pandemic in the state in March last year. The cumulative fatalities had then gone up to 9,375. The state’s Covid-19 toll was 9,661 as on Tuesday.

India Thursday achieved a milestone, having administered 1 billion vaccination doses to beneficiaries. Bihar had administered 63.87 million doses, as of Thursday (7pm). The state’s second dose vaccination coverage is 15,655,172 as against 48,216,521 first dose achievement, as per the CoWIN portal. The state has set a target to vaccinate most of its target population by December 31.

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