As vaccination pace slows, central govt, states squabble over supply

NEW DELHI: The pace of daily vaccinations across India has again started slowing, and has now dropped to levels last seen before June 21, when the country started the latest phase of its inoculation drive in which the Centre provides shots free of cost to all states.

The slowdown comes at a time when the states and the Centre are locked in a war of words over supply of doses.

At least six states, Maharashtra, Delhi, West Bengal, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu and Odisha, have said in recent days that they are facing severe scarcity of doses, and some have said they’ve been forced to close down vaccination centres.

Union health minister Mansukh Mandaviya on Wednesday hit back at the states, and alleged that “misinformed” statements were being put out to “create panic” among people regarding vaccine supply. He added in a series of tweets that states knew “well in advance” the time and volume of doses they were scheduled to get, so any supply shortage was the result of “mismanagement” at the state level.

As the new vaccine policy kicked off on June 21, India’s vaccination rate soared to its highest ever. On the first day of the new drive, more than 8.6 million doses were administered – the highest daily vaccinations to date. This remained high the first week or so of the new phase with the average inoculation pace touching a peak of 6.4 million jabs a day for the week ending June 26, according to HT’s Covid-19 dashboard.

Since then, however, this has been consistently dropping. In the last seven days of June, an average of 4.8 million doses were administered every day across the country, while this dropped to 4.2 million jabs a day in the first week of July.

On average, 3.4 million doses were administered every day across India in the past seven days – marking a drop of 46% from the peak vaccination rate. The last time India’s vaccination drive was at this pace was before the June 21 shake-up.

To be sure, this trend where there’s a rapid rise in numbers that isn’t sustained over a longer period is not new. At the start of April, when the vaccine eligibility was extended to all residents over the age of 45, a similar jump was witnessed where the daily rate jumped from 1.7 million doses a day in the last week of March to 4.2 million for the week ending April 12 (a rise of 140%). However, by May, this rate had again dropped to under 2 million doses a day.

The issue, experts say, is of production and supply. India’s vaccine drive has been hobbled by the inability of Bharat Biotech, whose vaccine was approved in January (along with Serum Institute’s Covishield) to increase production to expected levels. Supplies are anticipated to increase starting August, although it will take some doing for the country to fully vaccinate all adults by the end of December as the government has repeatedly said it wants to.

“It is clear that we are still struggling to produce adequate number of doses to meet our target of vaccinating all adults by December this year. As we hear, Bharat Biotech is still producing around 20-25 million doses a month, and Sputnik has not opened up for everyone yet. Zydus’s vaccine candidate is in the pipeline but the company has not begun producing it yet, and there are still regulatory clearances to be granted. All this will obviously have an impact,” said an health expert.