15 lakh vaccinated in Week 1; Covaxin now in 7 more states

A total of 15,37,190 beneficiaries have been vaccinated through 27,776 vaccination sessions till 6 pm on Saturday, the health ministry said.

With this move, the government is looking at generating a goodwill, but also in instilling “vaccine confidence” among the general public, sources said.

A week after it rolled out the world’s largest immunisation drive against Covid-19, India on Saturday completed administering the first dose of the vaccine to more than 15 lakh beneficiaries in the priority groups of healthcare and frontline workers.

A total of 15,37,190 beneficiaries have been vaccinated through 27,776 vaccination sessions till 6 pm on Saturday, the health ministry said.

India’s crossing the 15-lakh mark in a week after the rollout was launched on January 16 is significantly higher than numbers in the first week across other countries: the US vaccinated 5.56 lakh, 1.37 lakh were inoculated in the UK while Russia vaccinated 52,000.

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As per the official data compiled by the Health Ministry on Saturday morning, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Odisha, Uttar Pradesh, and Telangana reported the highest cumulative vaccinations in the first week of immunisation drive.

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In the first week, a total of 11 beneficiaries have been hospitalized after reporting an adverse event post immunization — 0.0007 per cent of the total vaccinations. Six deaths have been reported in the country, but the health ministry has said that “none of these deaths have been causally linked with Covid-19 vaccination”.

In the second week, the health ministry said that seven new states will also use the Bharat Biotech-ICMR vaccine — Covaxin — that is being administered in a “clinical trial mode” cleared for restricted use on the basis of only safety and immunogenicity data from phase 1 and 2 of the human clinical trials. Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Jharkhand, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Punjab and West Bengal are the new states that will administer Covaxin from next week, the health ministry said.

Currently, only 12 states were using both Covaxin and Serum Institute-manufactured Covishield. “Orientation of all Programme Managers of these 7 States was conducted today by ICMR & Health Ministry covering all aspects of implementation protocols,” said Dr Manohar Agnani, Additional Secretary, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare.

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On Saturday, Agnani said that the Indian government also completed the two-day training of the Immunization Programme Managers of 13 countries — Bahrain, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Brazil, Maldives, Mauritius, Mongolia, Morocco, Myanmar, Nepal, Oman, Seychelles and Sri Lanka — using Indian-manufactured vaccines.

The Health Ministry said that in the last 24 hours, one more death has been reported from Gurgaon, but the post mortem confirms it is not linked to the vaccination. “In the last 24 hours, one person aged 56 years who was a resident of Gurugram, Haryana has died. The Post-mortem confirms that Cardio-pulmonary disease was the reason for her death and it was not related to vaccination,” Agnani said. The health ministry also said that in the last 24 hours, one person, who was vaccinated on January 20, has been hospitalised at Government Hospital, Guntur, Andhra Pradesh.

Kaunain Sheriff M

Kaunain Sheriff M is an award-winning investigative journalist and the National Health Editor at The Indian Express. He is the author of Johnson & Johnson Files: The Indian Secrets of a Global Giant, an investigation into one of the world’s most powerful pharmaceutical companies. With over a decade of experience, Kaunain brings deep expertise in three areas of investigative journalism: law, health, and data. He currently leads The Indian Express newsroom’s in-depth coverage of health. His work has earned some of the most prestigious honours in journalism, including the Ramnath Goenka Award for Excellence in Journalism, the Society of Publishers in Asia (SOPA) Award, and the Mumbai Press Club’s Red Ink Award. Kaunain has also collaborated on major global investigations. He was part of the Implant Files project with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), which exposed malpractices in the medical device industry across the world. He also contributed to an international investigation that uncovered how a Chinese big-data firm was monitoring thousands of prominent Indian individuals and institutions in real time. Over the years, he has reported on several high-profile criminal trials, including the Hashimpura massacre, the 2G spectrum scam, and the coal block allocation case. Within The Indian Express, he has been honoured three times with the Indian Express Excellence Award for his investigations—on the anti-Sikh riots, the Vyapam exam scam, and the abuse of the National Security Act in Uttar Pradesh. ... Read More

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