Private hospitals must be roped in for immunisation drive, says Shiv Sena MP

Shiv Sena Member of the Parliament (MP) Priyanka Chaturvedi, in a letter to Union Health Minister Dr Harsh Vardhan, urged to rope in private hospitals in the immunisation drive, consider opening more mobile vaccination centers and plug the issues faced on the CoWIN application.

She has also appealed to de-regularise the sale of vaccines and cap the cost of the same to ensure that there is no high cost for the citizens to bear or fear hoarding. Chaturvedi’s letter coincided with the 1,01,88,007 COVID-19 vaccine doses administered across India. “It would be unfair to the country that we do not use our own strength and leverage all our available resources to help the society rid itself of the virus,” said Chaturvedi. She emphasised the need for the availability and accessibility of the vaccines, especially when India is once again seeing an increase in COVID-19 cases and various strains of the virus have also been detected.

She said, as per the Health Ministr y data, COVID-19 vaccine supplies are underutilised. “In fact, the data of vaccine supplies shows that only 31.45% of Covishield and 11.75% Covaxin have been administered to frontline workers. If this is the case, shouldn’t we reconsider our policy of regulating the availability of vaccines?” she asked.