Mumbai: No vaccination today, as fresh stock delayed again

A beneficiary gets her anti-Coronavirus vaccine dose at Nair hospital on Thursday. Pic/Suresh Karkera

For the fourth time in a fortnight, the civic body's Covid-19 immunisation drive has been affected due to shortage of vaccine. It has been forced to close all public centres on Friday, twice since vaccination opened for all adult beneficiaries on June 21. Vaccination will resume once the fresh stock arrives, said a civic official.

The city has faced a shortage of the vaccine twice this week. On Tuesday, vaccination centres operated only for the second session due to late arrival of the fresh stock, which lasted only two days. On Thursday, only 16,112 doses were administered across centres, much lower than Wednesday's figure of 58,311. Whereas, private centres have been consistently vaccinating an average of 30,000 beneficiaries daily.

The corporation runs 283 centres across the city with the capacity of vaccinating more than 60,000 people daily. In addition, there are 20 centres run by the state government hospitals with a daily vaccination capacity of 3,000 doses. But the frequent delays in the delivery of the vaccine has slowed down inoculation in the city.

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"Even when the fresh stock arrives, the quantity is very low. Moreover, we never know when the next batch will arrive and how many vials we will get. It becomes difficult to organise vaccination," said a health official from the BMC.

The first time the BMC struggled with the drive was on June 25. Due to the delayed arrival of the vaccine, it could run the centres only from 2 pm to 5 pm. This situation arose again on July 6. However, on July 1, the BMC had to close all the centres due to unavailability of vaccine.

"The state government is thinking about starting vaccination for pregnant women from Monday. But due to unavailability and uncertainty over vaccine stocks, it is difficult for us to organise mass vaccination," said the official.

Meanwhile, public and private centres together vaccinated 45,171 people on Thursday, out of which 27,307 received the first dose.

Out of the 45,171 vaccines, 24,152 were given to people in the 18-44 years age group, 4,312 to senior citizens and 16,217 to those aged between 45 and 59 years.