Striding towards another vaccination milestone, Uttar Pradesh on Thursday achieved the landmark of administering over 50 lakh doses of Covid vaccine to children in the age category of 12-14.

“This is another milestone as the state continues to conduct one of the most successful vaccination campaigns in the country since the rollout of the mass immunisation drive,” a government spokesman said here on Thursday.

He said strengthening its fight against the COVID-19, the Uttar Pradesh government was providing vaccine cover to all children between 12 to 17 years of age in a time-bound manner. He said so far, over 2,24,75,498 doses of the vaccine had been administered to children in the age group of 15-17 and over 50,02,069 to children in the age group of 12-14 in the state.

As per data from CoWIN portal updated till 1:00 pm on Thursday, at least 31.30 crore out of the total 188 crore doses administered in the country are from UP.

Committed to providing additional protection cover to the priority group, Uttar Pradesh started administering booster shots (precaution dose) to the frontline and healthcare workers as well as senior citizens from January 10. Over 27.45 lakh ‘precaution doses’ have been administered in the state so far.

UP is followed by Maharashtra with 16.44 crore doses of Covid vaccine administered so far. In terms of percentage, about 84 per cent of the adult population is fully vaccinated and over 100 per cent has received one dose of the Covid vaccine.

In the age category of 15-17, around 95 per cent of the children have received at least one dose of the vaccine. Over 52.27 per cent of the children in the age group of 12-14 have received the first dose of the vaccine.

To speed up the vaccination drive for children in the state, Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath has asked the officials concerned to ensure adequate availability of vaccine doses in Uttar Pradesh.