Private hospitals in Mumbai flooded with queries for Covid-19 vaccine booster shot

A beneficiary gets vaccinated at Nair Hospital. File pic

As private hospitals across the city have been getting requests for booster doses of the COVID-19 vaccine, the state task force discussed it at a meeting held on Tuesday and reached at the unanimous decision of postponing it keeping in mind vaccine equality. Dr Kedar Toraskar, member of the state task force, said, "We need to think about vaccine equality. We can't allow booster doses when only 10 per cent of the population is vaccinated."

He said America has started giving booster shots because more than 75 per cent of its population was vaccinated. Dr Toraskar, who is also a critical care specialist at Wockhardt hospital, said considering public health it was too early to go ahead with a booster dose plan in India.

"Even in the US they are giving booster doses to immunocompromised people and healthcare workers. From a public health perspective as well, more people getting vaccinated will be much more beneficial than a small percentage of people getting booster doses," he explained.

Dr Anant Bhan, Global Health and Bioethics researcher said, "The science regarding the need of booster dose and for whom is evolving. As of now, the focus needs to be on enhancing the coverage of primary doses across the population, while studying to understand which section of the population might require boosters and at what time." Meanwhile, city hospitals said that the booster dose requests were mainly coming from healthcare workers, who had taken their vaccines in January-February.

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"With the fear of the third wave, they are afraid of whether they will be able to face the infection again," said another state task force member. Approximately 83,000 healthcare workers and 64,000 frontline workers took their second shot before March end and they will complete six months from then by September end.

The task force also discussed ways of increasing vaccine coverage in the state. "We all know that vaccination is crucial in the fight against COVID-19 and the aim is to get most of the population vaccinated. While talking about how to increase vaccine availability, we also discussed the intradermal (ID) vaccines, which is currently in the trial phase. The ID will be 1/10th of the doses of the current intramuscular (IM) vaccines and a single shot will have higher coverage," said Dr Toraskar.