Govt begins sending first doses to states

PUNE/NEW DELHI: Supplies of the vaccine against the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) began being dispatched from the Serum Institute of India’s (SII) manufacturing facility in Pune early Tuesday morning, with the first lot arriving in Delhi by a special flight hours later, days before the country begins a vaccination drive to inoculate 30 million health care and frontline workers.

Three trucks left carrying the vaccines packed in 477 boxes left the SII facility at around 4.55 am, from where it was sent to the Lohegaon airport to be further transported to the nine different cities in nine passenger and freight flights, officials said.

The SII is producing Covishield, the Oxford Universityastrazeneca vaccine against Covid-19, that has shown to be up to 90% effective against the viral disease.

Spicejet flight SG8937 brought the very first consignment of vaccines to Delhi. It departed the Pune airport at 8.05am and landed at the Indira Gandhi International Airport at 10.15am. Union aviation minister Hardeep Singh Puri said Air India, Spicejet, Goair and Indigo operated nine flights from Pune with 5,650,000 doses to Delhi, Chennai, Kolkata, Guwahati, Shillong, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad, Vijayawada, Bhubaneswar, Patna, Bengaluru, Lucknow

NEW DELHI: The Centre said 5.47 million Covid-19 vaccine doses have been received at designated national and state-level stores till Tuesday afternoon, and all the shots -11 million from the Serum Institute of India’s Covishield and 5.5 million indigenously developed Covaxin from Bharat Biotech -- will be received by January 14. Around 3.85 million Covaxin doses will be priced at ₹295 each, even as Bharat Biotech is providing 1.65 million doses for free.→p4

A police official performs prayers in front of a truck carrying the first consignment of Covishield, the Covid-19 vaccine, before it leaves the Serum Institute of India facility in Pune on Tuesday.