10 million jabs a day by July-aug: Centre

NEW DELHI: India will be in a position to vaccinate 10 million people every day by July or August, top officials said on Tuesday, backing statements made by the government’s representative in the Supreme Court that the country will deliver doses to all eligible individuals by the end of the year -- although it wasn’t immediately clear where the doses would come from.

In May, India delivered an average of 1.93 million doses a day and several states ran out of supplies by the fourth week of the month for at least some groups of recipients. Experts say the government’s target will depend on availability of doses, which for June has been pegged at 120 million.

“Shortage is what you feel if you want to vaccinate the country within a month. The total number of vaccinations done in the country is nearly equivalent to the total number done in the United States and our population is four times the population of the US. We have to have some patience. By the mid of year, mid-july or early August, we will have more than enough doses to vaccinate up to a crore (10 million) per day,” said Dr Balram Bhargava, the director general of Indian Council Medical Research (ICMR).

“By December we hope to have the whole country vaccinated,” he said, while asserting that “there is no shortage”. The highest number of doses administered in a single day across the country was a little under 4 million in the second week of April. As on June 1, India has delivered 214.2 million of the 1.9 billion doses it needs to give to 940 million adults eligible for vaccines.