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Complaining of Covid-19 vaccine shortage, Maharashtra heads to PM's meeting with 4 issues
Maharashtra health minister Rajesh Tope accused the Centre of not supplying enough Covid-19 vaccines. Union health minister Harsh Vardhan on Wednesday slammed Tope, accusing the state government of "misgovernance" in tackling the pandemic.
The Maharashtra government has once against raised the issue of shortage of Covid-19 vaccines, saying the replenishment ordered by the Centre is not enough. Ahead of the meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Maharashtra health minister Rajesh Tope said he will raise four key issues.
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"I have just been informed that the Centre increased Covid-19 vaccine doses from seven lakh to 17 lakh. Even this is less because we need 40 lakh vaccine doses a week and 17 lakh doses are not enough," Tope said while in interacting with reporters.
"We will raise these four issues before PM in today's meeting over Covid-19: Remdesivir supply and price control, supply of oxygen from nearby states, vaccine doses and ventilator operational support," he added. The meeting is scheduled to take place at 6.30pm today.
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He earlier accused the Centre of supplying less number of vaccines, adding that the issue has been raised through multiple mediums. On Wednesday too, the Maharashtra health minister blamed the Centre for vaccine shortage.
Reacting to Tope's claims, Union health minister Harsh Vardhan lashed out at the Maharashtra government and accused it of "misgovernance" in tackling Covid-19, saying that it has followed "utterly casual approach" and is putting the residents in danger "by letting people escape institutional quarantine mandate for the sake of their personal vasuli".
In a strongly worded statement on Wednesday, Vardhan asserted that it was nothing but "an attempt to divert attention from Maharashtra government's repeated failures to control the spread of pandemic". He accused the Maharashtra Vikas Aghadi (MVA) government in Maharashtra of focusing its energies on "playing politics and spreading lies to create panic".
India's Covid-19 cases have soared 13-fold in barely two months - it reported a record 126,789 new cases on Thursday, the third day this week when the daily caseload surged to more than 100,000.
More infectious variants of the virus may have played a role in India's surge, some epidemiologists say, with hundreds of cases found of variants first detected in Britain, South Africa and Brazil.
