Aiming to vaccinate all eligible beneficiaries of Delhi within three months, the Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal on Sunday urged Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan to direct Serum Institute and Bharat Biotech to increase their monthly supplies of Covid-19 vaccines to the national capital to 60 lakh doses per month during May to July.

This would help Delhi vaccinate all 92 lakh people in the age group of 18 to 45 years within three months. Delhi had launched vaccination for 18 to 45 years segment on May 3 and so far administered around 2.99 lakh doses.

Stating that the national capital in all requires about 2.5 crore doses (including 69 lakh doses from government channel for above 45 years age group) for next three months, Kejriwal said in a letter to Harsh Vardhan that Delhi was neither able to receive supplies as per its requirement nor even get firm delivery schedules from vaccine makers.

“As the third Covid wave is also anticipated soon, we want to complete vaccination of all people in Delhi within three months,” Kejriwal said in the letter.

Kejriwal noted that vaccinating all of the people in Delhi would need 3 crore doses and the city so far received roughly 50 lakh doses. Therefore, Delhi needs about 2.5 crore additional doses.

Allow States to develop apps

Kejriwal highlighted that the current CoWIN App is faced with lot of glitches, which is leading to most people spending valuable time for getting registered or for booking vaccine appointments. Also, a large number of people are not tech savvy to be able to register themselves. “As we plan to expand vaccination for the 18 to 45 age group, such glitches should not be allowed to deprive people of vaccination. Hence, I request you to allow States to develop their separate apps or develop mechanisms other than apps to manage vaccinations in their States,” Kejriwal said.

Convergence of sincere efforts of GOI, States and private sector is a sincere to ensure faster vaccination. But such convergence is getting constrained by the continued glitches in the CoWIN App, he added.

Uniform price

Kejriwal said that an uniform price should be fixed for the vaccines for supplies made to governments (whether Central or State), and to private hospitals. The inherent fallacy and danger in the current differential pricing mechanism is that there is an obvious incentive for private manufacturers to prioritise supplies to private hospitals over supplies being made to governments since under the current mechanism they will earn more from the latter.

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