From June 21, all citizens above the age of 18 years will get free vaccines
In order to strengthen the Covid-19 vaccination drive, the Centre on Tuesday said that it has decided to increase the supply of two made-in-India vaccines - Covishield and Covaxin.
In his address to the nation, Prime Minister Narendra Modi Monday announced a centralised Covid-19 vaccine policy. He also announced that from June 21, all citizens above the age of 18 years will get free vaccines, and asserted that vaccine supply would be increased significantly in the country in the coming days. “Work on producing an intranasal vaccine for Covid is also happening,” he said.
“The government has placed an order to purchase 25 crores doses of Covishield and 19 crore doses of Covaxin. It has also placed an order to purchase 30 crore doses of Biological E's vaccine, which will be available by September,” Dr VK Paul, Member-Health, Niti Aayog said.
“Vaccines' price to private sectors (hospitals) will be decided by vaccine manufacturers; States will aggregate demand of private sector, which means they will oversee how much network of facilities it has, and how many doses does it require...,” Paul said.
Asserting that there has been a continued and sharp decline in Covid-19 cases across the country, the Centre on Tuesday also said the overall recovery rate has reached 94.3 per cent.
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India has reported 20,822 Covid cases and 252 deaths per million population, which is among the lowest in the world, the Centre said.
Informing about the progress, Lav Agrawal, Joint Secretary, Health Ministry said, “86,498 Covid-19 cases have been reported in last 24 hours with a positivity rate of 4.62 per cent. This is almost 79 per cent decline in cases, since highest reported peak in daily new cases. Last week, a 33 per cent decline was seen in overall reported cases. 322 districts have seen a decline in daily cases in the last one month.”
“Our overall recovery rate stands at 94.3 per cent with 1,82,000 recoveries. Weekly positivity rate in 15 states is less than 5 per cent and 23.62 crore vaccine doses have been given till now,” Agrawal said.
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Shedding light on infections affecting the kids, Dr Randeep Guleria, AIIMS Director, “No data, global or Indian, has had any observations of children being affected more. Even in the 2nd wave kids who were infected had mild illness or co-morbidities. I don't think we will have a serious infection in children in the future.”
