State on Wednesday received additional 58,590 doses of Covaxin from the Centre to continue the immunisation drive against Covid-19 after an acute shortage of vaccines led to several session sites turning non-operational in the past 48 hours, health officials said.
In order to ensure uninterrupted vaccination across the 24 districts, the State distributed the fresh lot of vaccines to the districts on Wednesday itself and decided to keep the vaccine stores open throughout the night so that vaccination centres can collect the vaccine vials allotted to them, officials said.
As per data shared by the health department, Ranchi received 5400 vaccine doses from the additional vaccines supplied from the Centre for crisis management. East Singhbhum and Dhanbad received 4500 doses each, while 3000 doses were given to West Singhbhum. Hazaribag received at least 5800 doses from the additional lot.
“We have received additional doses of vaccines today and distributed them among the districts as per their requirement,” said Dr. Siddharth Tripathi, the nodal officer for health department’s Information, Education and Communication (IEC) wing. “The additional vaccine doses will help us continue vaccination across the state until we receive fresh stock for the month of July,” he added.
However, several vaccination centres in Ranchi remained non-operational on Wednesday due to the shortage of vaccines. Ranchi civil surgeon Dr. Vinod Kumar said that barring four session sites – Rajendra Institute of Medical Sciences (RIMS), CCL Hospital, Bandobasti Karyalaya and Nepal House – all the remaining session sites did not administer vaccines on the day.
“We have more than 90 session sites in Ranchi and most of them were non-operational today due to the shortage of vaccines. Only about four session sites were open today,” said Dr. Kumar, adding that the session sites will resume vaccination once fresh doses are supplied to the district.
Similarly, several session sites in Bokaro, East Singhbhum, Dhanbad and other districts of Jharkhand either did not administer vaccines at all or vaccinated only a limited number of people, officials said.
Owing to the crisis, the State administered vaccines to only 47,066 residents on Tuesday against 87,639 doses administered on Monday. On an average, vaccines were administered to over 1 lakh beneficiaries every day last week. There are as many as 3377 vaccination centres in Jharkhand.
As per records with the health department, the state has so far received 69,41,260 doses of vaccines and used 68,30,995 of them by Tuesday evening. Jharkhand had 99,220 doses of vaccines left in stock before the vaccination centres opened on Wednesday morning, and more than 50,000 people were administered the jabs on the day. The final figures of vaccines administered on Wednesday were not out by the time this report was filed.