18-plus group to get the jab from May 14
J’khand has received 2.40 lakh doses of Covishield, Covaxin, said health officials
RANCHI: Jharkhand is all set to roll out the third phase of the Covid-19 mass vaccination drive from May 14 that will cover citizens aged between 18-44 years, officials said on Monday.
The announcement came after the state received 2.40 lakh doses of the two vaccines, Covishield and Covaxin, against its purchase orders placed with the two approved manufacturers-Serum Institute of India and Bharat Biotech, respectively. “Against our purchase orders, we have so far received a total of 2.40 lakh doses of Covishield and Covaxin. We are going to kick start the free inoculation drive for 18-44 age group from May 14,” state health department’s principal secretary Arun Kumar Singh said.
The third phase of the nationwide inoculation drive for the aforementioned age group was earlier scheduled to begin on
May 1. However, it could not be started in Jharkhand, as the Centre disallowed all states from using the existing doses in their stock for inoculating the 18-44 age group.
The Centre, last month, said that the vaccines sent to states earlier were meant for only people above the age of 45 and other priority groups.
It then asked the states to purchase the vaccine doses on their own directly from manufacturers to inoculate the younger age group. Following this, the state health department issued purchase orders (PO) to both companies,
demanding 25 lakh doses from each of them.
According to sources, against the new PO, the state received 134,400 doses of Covaxin and 100,000 doses of Covishield. It was likely to get another consignment of 287,000 doses of Covishield by the end of this week.
However, the number of doses received by the state so far was very less, and if the supply chain is not maintained, the inoculation drive will likely come to a halt.
When asked about any special preparations being made to carry out a smooth vaccination drive for the third phase, the health secretary refused to divulge details.
The 18-44 age group constitutes around 48% of the state’s population. According to an estimate of the health department, the state has around 16 million people in this group, for which it requires 32 million doses of the vaccine.
With only 2.40 lakh doses at its disposal, the department will require to meticulously plan division of vaccines among the 24 districts in order to keep the vaccination drive going. If calculated, each of the 24 districts will likely get an average of 10,000 doses only.
Chief minister Hemant Soren announced to provide free vaccination to all eligible citizens between 18-44 years of age.
Jharkhand till May 9 inoculated 2,731,546 beneficiaries, including health care workers (HCW), frontline workers (FLW) and citizens aged over 45 with the first dose of Covid-19 vaccine. As many as 585,950 of them have also taken the second dose.
This accounts for around 8.30% vaccination coverage against the state’s 32.9 million population.