States mustn’t procure Covid vaccine on their own: Centre

New Delhi, August 12

The Centre today began the process for future Covid-19 vaccine procurement, asking the states not to chart their separate pathways.

The advice came at the first meeting of the National Expert Group on Vaccine Administration. Globally, 24 vaccines are in human trial stage. These include three vaccines under trial in India — Oxford University-Serum Institute’s Covishield; Bharat Biotech-ICMR’s Covaxin and the Zydus Cadila’s ZyCov-D. The last two are indigenous.

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Chaired by VK Paul, Member, Health, NITI Aayog, the task force today discussed conceptualisation and implementation mechanisms to create a digital infrastructure for inventory management and delivery mechanism of the vaccine. The meeting came as India’s Covid count touched 23,29,638 cases with 60,963 new infections in 24 hours and 56,110 record recoveries over the same period. The toll has climbed to 46,091 with 834 new fatalities over a day.

With cumulative national load climbing, AIIMS (New Delhi) Director Randeep Guleria said the cases would rise as testing had been ramped up and there was no cause for panic as long as the death rate was low. He said the cases had neither hit the peak not reached a plateau. “The cumulative disease load should not overwhelm us.” — TNS