New Delhi: Ahead of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s virtual meeting with chief ministers Monday, Cabinet Secretary Rajiv Gauba will hold a meeting Saturday with the chief secretaries of all states and union territories to discuss the plan for rollout of Covid-19 vaccines.
Government sources said the administration has completed price negotiation for the vaccines, but the purchase order is yet to be formally issued.
“The purchase order is yet to be issued, but we have finalised the price and the vaccine should start arriving at government medical store depots across India very soon. We also have a very concrete plan for the rollout and that is why the cabinet secretary and the prime minister are separately meeting states,” said a senior government official involved in the planning of the vaccination programme.
“We are hoping that on the first day itself across several thousand sites in the country, a few lakh people would be inoculated. We are talking about vaccinating a country of 137 crore not 6 crore like the United Kingdom. Across the world so far, just 1 crore 75 lakh people have been vaccinated so far. When our rollout happens, those numbers will change dramatically,” he added.
On Friday, in the second countrywide dry run, a mock exercise was carried out in over 550 districts to test the feasibility of carrying out vaccination in several 1,000 centres across the country and to test whether the CoWIN system and the protocol for reporting and redressal of adverse events following immunisation are foolproof.
The results, according to health ministry officials, have been satisfactory and the dry run happened without any major glitches.
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Three states did not do the dry run
The dry run, which was originally supposed to happen in 736 districts of the country, did not happen in Arunachal Pradesh, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh.
“All these three states had carried out an exercise of this nature only recently so it did not make sense to make them go through it again,” said a health ministry official.
Sources said that the common query from all states currently is about when the vaccine will reach them, but there is no date as yet that has been shared with them.
Earlier this week, the health ministry had said it would take 10 days from the date of approval of the vaccines to roll out the programme. The vaccines, Covishield and Covaxin, were approved on 3 January and with the prime minister meeting states on 11 January, officials said, 13-14 January are the most likely dates for the vaccine rollout.
“The vaccines have not been shipped out of the respective facilities yet. That would happen any time now and when that happens we will not keep it a secret,” a second official said.
However, health ministry officials declined to comment on what is the final price that has been arrived at for the vaccines.
“But it is not correct to say that we will ship them out only from Pune (manufacturing facility of Serum Institute of India). Both vaccines have emergency approval, we can technically use both for the programme,” the official said.
Also read: Modi govt schedules another Covid vaccine dry run for 8 Jan, this time in all 736 districts