West Bengal is facing an acute shortage of Covaxin vaccines so much so that the Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) had to shut down its Covid vaccination centres (CVC) on Thursday. The corporation informed the public that none of the 38 KMC vaccination clinics will administer any Covaxin shots since there is not a single dose is available with the state’s health department. Even though the use of Covaxin doses is much less in the state than that of Covishield, but the supply of the jabs is quite low.
A member of the KMC Board of Administrators (BoA), Atin Ghosh, maintained that since the Covaxin doses were grossly inadequate, it was impossible to keep the clinics that administer only Covaxin doses open. A health department official from KMC said that at present, the civic body cannot even spare five vials for each centre that exclusively administers Covaxin doses. This is the reason that KMC decided to shut down the centres.
At the end of June, the Mamata Banerjee-led government had directed all the districts and state-run hospitals to reserve at least 50% of the available vaccines for the second dose. For this, the state had decided to cut down on administering the first dose of Covid-19 vaccines.
However, looking at the recent situation it seems that the state government does not have any Covaxin dose left even though the private hospitals have a few. In such a situation, those who have received the first dose of Covaxin from a government hospital or a municipal health centre are more perturbed. The state’s health department is also uncertain about when the new batch of Covaxin doses will arrive.
Even though the civic body is hoping to resume the vaccination drive from next week, provided the supply of Covaxin improves, a section of civic body officials feel that even a temporary closure of the clinics and hospitals might inflate the backlog of Covaxin second dose, which currently stands at 40,000 doses.
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