India’s Covid-19 vaccination drive will roll out next week. The government is aiming to vaccinate 300 million people – a quarter of the cou...
India’s Covid-19 vaccination drive will roll out next week. The government is aiming to vaccinate 300 million people – a quarter of the country’s population – by the end of the summer. The two approved vaccines in India’s arsenal need to be administered in two doses, which means 600 million shots will have to be delivered in the next six months.
That’s more than 20 times the number of pregnant women and children vaccinated as part of India’s universal immunisation program.
Delivering the vaccines at that scale would require a scale of operation “we have not seen anywhere before”, said Prashant Yadav, a health care supply chains expert at Harvard Medical School. “It would require over tens of thousands of vaccination clinics working seven days a week vaccinating from morning to evening in an extremely well-coordinated manner.”
The government has released a detailed blueprint of its plan of action, describing it as “broadly similar to the election process”. Helmed by the National Expert Group on Vaccine Administration for Covid-19, a three-tier administrative architecture has been put in place with committees and task forces at the state, district and block level.
But how exactly will the system work? Scroll.in spoke to health experts, syringe makers, cold storage companies, among others, to understand...