E-Paper
Covid vaccination pace in India satisfactory, say experts
India, the world’s largest vaccine maker, has crossed several milestones in its campaign to fully inoculate its population.
In the one year that India started its immunization drive against Covid-19, the rate of inoculation has been quite satisfactory as the country has administered 1.57 billionvaccine doses, experts said.
“It is a great achievement that the number of vaccine doses that India has already administered is more than the population of several countries in the world,” said VK Paul, member (health), Niti Aayog. “It has been achieved within a year of having started the national Covid immunisation drive, and that too powered by two made in India vaccines.”
India, the world’s largest vaccine maker, has crossed several milestones in its campaign to fully inoculate its population. For instance, on September 17 last year, close to 2.5 crore vaccine doses were administered across the country, highlighting the single-day vaccine administration capacity of states when there is adequate supply of vaccines.
“It is commendable that Covid immunisation picked up speed from August,” said K Srinath Reddy, founder of the Public Health Foundation of India. “We now need to ensure that all eligible adults and children complete double-dose vaccination, and all those eligible to get the protective doses receive them by the end of February or early March,”
The technological backbone of the Covid vaccine delivery system has been CoWIN, which was created by upgrading an earlier digital platform used for India’s universal immunization program based on an electronic vaccine intelligence network (eVIN).
eVIN was an internet-based digital system to track routine immunization, vaccine stocks, and storage temperature in about 25,000 dedicated cold chain storage points in the country, as well as movement of vaccines.
“CoWIN is one of the robust IT systems that is capable of large-scale implementation of the programme, and has been working successfully,” said RS Sharma, chief executive officer at the National Health Authority, an autonomous body that supervises the functioning of CoWIN.
India’ focus will now be on covering the last mile, and also on providing vaccines to other countries in need, experts said.
“Last mile of the target is always most difficult to achieve, especially when it comes to immunisation, as those that are left could be not coming forward due to vaccine hesitancy,” said Dileep Mavalankar, director, Indian Institute of Public Health, Gandhinagar. “The government will have to aggressively scale up the vaccination drive.”
Under the vaccine maîtri initiative, the government has been providing Covid-19 vaccines to other countries and also supplying vaccine doses to the global COVAX programme under the aegis of the World Health Organization, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), and Gavi.
“India has not only successfully undertaken one of the largest Covid vaccination drives in the world, but has also given Covid vaccines to over 100 countries already, and will continue to help those in need,” said Balram Bhargava, director general of the Indian Council of Medical Research, and secretary at the department of health research.
