Tamil Nadu plans to vaccinate 15mn against Covid in October mega drive: Govt

Tamil Nadu has so far conducted three mega-vaccinations camps on Sundays and a total of 14.2 million people were given Covid vaccines in September

Chennai: Tamil Nadu has set a target to inoculate 15 million people in October through mega vaccination camps, state health minister M Subramanian announced on Friday. “We have come to a situation where people are coming forward to be vaccinated,” Subramnian told reporters.

In the mega vaccination camp held on September 12, Tamil Nadu surpassed its target of 2 million and achieved vaccination of 2.89 million people against Covid.

Tamil Nadu has so far conducted three mega-vaccinations camps on Sundays and a total of 14.2 million people were vaccinated in September. This is the highest since the vaccination drive began on January 16 across the country. In the mega vaccination camp held for 12 hours on September 12, the state surpassed its target of 2 million and achieved vaccination of 2.89 million people. The second camp on September 19 saw over 1.64 million people being vaccinated. This led to exhaustion of the vaccine stock in the state with nothing left for the next day on Monday. In the third drive held on September 26, over 2.49 million people were vaccinated .

The state is now gearing up for a fourth camp to be held this Sunday. Tamil Nadu presently has more than 2.89 million vaccine doses in hand, the minister said. “We will utilise these doses during the fourth camp on Sunday. Like previous weeks, there will be 20,000 camps for the driver which will go on from 7am to 7pm,” he said.

“So far, only in September maximum vaccinations have reached people where we covered more than 1.4 crore through the three Mega Vaccination Camps in the history of our vaccination”, the minister said. “Because of this we have received more than 37-lakh vaccines from the union government. So for October, 1.23 crore of vaccines are expected from the union government and we hope we can vaccinate more than we did in September by vaccinating 1.50 crore people,” About 800,000 doses were received on Friday evening. He said that the aim is to vaccinate at least 70% of the population as prescribed by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and insisted by chief minister M K Stalin.

Tamil Nadu officials have been using the achievements of these camps to seek more vaccines from the Centre. “We have proven that we have the capacity to vaccinate 50-lakh people per week if we get ample vaccines,” the health secretary had said earlier. On September 20, Stalin wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi seeking allot 5 million vaccine doses every week to ensure that the entire eligible population can be covered by October.

The Directorate of Public Health and Preventive Medicine also directed its officials on Friday via a circular to attend gram sabha meetings on Saturday across the state and create awareness among people, including on the importance of vaccination.

Initially, there was widespread hesitancy in Tamil Nadu for taking the Covid-19 vaccines due to fear of side effects, among other factors. The perception began to change only during May and June when the second wave of Covid-19 had peaked and the state was under duress much like other regions due to shortage in medical oxygen. But vaccination numbers were still low but this time officials said that it was due to shortage in supply. But July onwards, there has been a steady supply of vaccines from the union government.