Bhubaneswar: As many as 2 lakh more doses of Covishield vaccine will reach Odisha today. The State currently has a stock of 3.1 lakh shots of the vaccine which will last for two to three days, informed Health & Family Welfare Director Bijay Panigrahi on Sunday.
“After the vaccines reach the State, it will be distributed to several districts. The immunization drive will be normalised across all the session sites from tomorrow,” said Panigrahi.
Around 56,000 doses were administered to people in 427 vaccination centres in the State on Saturday.
Today, inoculation drive is underway in these 427 centres while the State has stopped vaccination in around 1,000 centres due to unavailability of doses. Similarly, the inoculation drive has been completely halted in eight districts of the State.
The State had received over 2.5 lakh doses of Covishield vaccine on April 10.
Amid the struggle over short supply of vaccine to the State, Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik had urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi to make Covid-19 vaccines available in the open market in a letter on Saturday.
Patnaik also requested Modi to ensure adequate supply of Covid-19 vaccines to the states so the vaccination drive can be scaled up. He also said that India has huge vaccine-manufacturing potential and the Centre and state governments should support units to ramp up production of vaccines.
Maintaining that Odisha has the capacity to administer more than 3 lakh doses of the vaccine every day while the people are willing to get vaccinated, the intermittent supply is creating a problem.
(Edited By Rashmi Ranjan Mohanty)