Covid-19 vaccination sites drop to half in India amid shortage of doses

Number of locations down from 120,000 to 60,000 from April 3 to 7

Mumbai municipality vehicles were en route to the Pune facility of the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer, Serum Institute of India, on Friday afternoon. An official said the cargo they pick up could beat the shortage of doses threatening to scuttle the Covid vaccination process in the country’s financial capital.

“We are expecting as many as 188,000 doses of Covid-19 vaccines. Our vehicles have been sent to Pune to pick them up,” Suresh Kakani, additional municipal commissioner of Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), told Business Standard. Vaccinations in Mumbai will happen on Saturday if the BMC gets these doses, he said.

National-level data on vaccination sites captures the decline in the inoculation drive, not just in Mumbai or Maharashtra but across the country. The data by the Union government’s Covid-19 Vaccine Intelligence Network (Co-Win) dashboard and collated by crowd-sourced data repository covid19india.org  tells a story. According to the data, the total vaccination sites had risen to 120,000 around April 3.

But it’s been on a rapid downhill journey thereon. As of April 7, the number of vaccination sites had dipped to 60,000. While the depository had earlier mentioned a difference between the government’s Co-Win platform figures and numbers that the health ministry releases, the drop may be considered to be broadly indicative of what is happening elsewhere in the country, especially in the backdrop of vaccine shortage concerns raised by many states.

Reports of shutdowns have come in from Odisha, Andhra Pradesh and Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh among others over vaccine shortage.

On Thursday night, Kiran Dighavkar, assistant commissioner of BMC G/North ward, had tweeted a status list of vaccination centres. The list, which went viral, showed 51 vaccination sites including major ones like the Bandra-Kurla Complex (BKC) jumbo centre, Sion Hospital and Seven Hills among others, would be closed on Friday. Dighavkar’s tweet had further warned that due to ‘’limited stock’’, the other centres may also exhaust vaccine doses early and more centres may be declared ‘’out of stock’’ even before the day ended. Twitterati responded with multiple examples of appointment cancellations.

The Maharashtra government runs around 49 centres in the city. Including the private sector, the city has 120 centres which vaccinate close to 40,000-50,000 people daily. Kakani said that by the end of the day, 90 centres had to shut down early as they ran out of doses.

Maharashtra health minister Rajesh Tope had said the state needed 4 million doses every week to achieve vaccination targets even as cases rose to record levels.

The central government has maintained there’s no shortage of vaccines. There were around 90 million doses administered and another 43 million in stock or nearing delivery to states, according to a social media post by minister for health and family welfare Harsh Vardhan.

“Where does the question of shortages arise, we're continuously monitoring...(and)...enhancing supply,” the minister had said earlier this week.

Private vaccination centres shut in Mumbai for 3 days

Vaccination will take place at municipal and government centres in Mumbai on Saturday and Sunday, but private sites will remain shut till April 12. Maharashtra has been facing a shortage of vaccines, resulting in the closure of centres in many parts of the state.

DRL asked to give more data on Sputnik V vaccine

An expert panel of the drug regulator on Friday sought additional data on a comparative analysis of late-stage immunogenicity data from both its Indian studies and an ongoing Russian study from drugmaker Dr Reddy's Laboratories on its Sputnik V Covid-19 vaccine trial.