NITI Aayog member (health) Dr VK Paul on Tuesday stressed on the specific purpose of sero surveys, saying that it’s done with the objective to enunciate “how many people have previous experience” of coronavirus. “It isn’t meant to cover granularity at the level of state… This isn’t the way interpretation of data should be done or convey misleading info,” he said at the Union Health Ministry briefing.
Talking about the supply of coronavirus vaccine doses, Paul said the government is expecting to receive about 2 million Covaxin doses by September. “Some delays were seen in the Bengaluru plant of Bharat Biotech. Ankleshwar facility will be giving 6 million,” Paul added.
The government also said the total number of vaccine doses administered in the month of July is more than double of that in May. “Total 47.85 crore doses were administered in the country, including 37.26 crores of first dose and 10.59 crores of second dose. We administered 19.6 lakh doses in May and 43.41 lakh doses in July. The total number of vaccine doses administered in July is more than double of that in May,” the health ministry said at the briefing.
On Moderna vaccines, Paul said talks are ongoing with the American pharma giant. Paul further said that there have been no talks yet on changing the 25 per cent vaccine quota for private hospitals. The government had in June introduced a new policy, allowing private hospitals to buy 25 percent of the vaccines manufactured in the country, with the Centre procuring the remaining 75 percent.
Paul also sounded an alarm, saying that the pandemic is far from over in the country as the R-value, which is the rate of transmission of the coronavirus, is still above 1. The R-value should be 0.6 or below, he added.
Currently, the R value is more than one in eight states, including Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, Tamil Nadu and Kerala.
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