Health Min Odisha Seeks Permission From Center To Vaccinate +2 Students

Bhubaneswar: The Health Minister of Odisha, Naba Kishore Das has written to Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan seeking permission for vaccination of +2 students in the state.

“While India is currently witnessing a decreasing trend in new Covid positive cases. many countries across the world have faced multiple waves. Therefore, we need to be prepared for a possible third wove of infection. Most experts advise that vaccination is the main weapon to protect our people from subsequent waves of the pandemic and we need to scale up vaccination at the earliest.” said the letter.

“States may be given the flexibility to design and decide on distribution of vaccines taking local factors into consideration (for eg. in many hilly terrains, internet connectivity is poor and we can’t make online registration mandatory in those districts; State would like to do priority vaccination for plus 2 students and their families and so on),” wrote the minister in the letter.

“We appreciate the steps token by the Union Government in liberalising the vaccination policy and providing support to Vaccine manufacturers to ramp up production. From the beginning, Odisha has been one of the most active States in vaccinating its people.” the minister added in the letter.

“We have meticulously planned our vaccination program and are among the States with lowest vaccine wastage. We have so far vaccinated 61,06,415 people with at least one dose” he added.

He also wrote about the current vaccine crisis in the State and said, ” we immediately placed an order of 220 Lakh doses of Covishield with Serum Institute of India 10111 and 10.34 Lakh doses of Covoxin with Bhorat Biotech. However, so far they have only supplied 5,78,480 doses of Covishield and 1,65,490 doses of Covoxin respectively. This is quite inadequate in view of the huge demand for vaccines across the State.”

“Vaccination has been a game changer in most countries in saving both lives and the economy. It is important that we complete Vaccination on a war-footing before the onset of possible third wave. In view of the urgency of the issue we look forward to early action in this regard and assure our continued cooperation to defeat Covid-19”, he concluded.