National Vaccination Day 2021: Where does India stand on COVID-19 vaccination?

National Vaccination Day 2021: When it comes to coronavirus, governments around the world are working to get their population vaccinated against the highly infectious disease. While several countries have launched vaccination drive, the largest one started on January 16 in India. The vaccination drive is currently in the second phase in which people over the age of 60 years or those above 45 years with comorbidities are being inoculated. According to data released by the Union Health Ministry, the country is nearing 3 crore cumulative vaccination doses.

The ministry said that a total of 2,97,38,409 vaccine doses have been administered through 5,10,400 sessions till Sunday.

While 73,47,895 healthcare and 11,35,573 frontline workers have been vaccinated or given the first dose, there are 42,95,201 healthcare and 73,32,641 frontline workers have been fully vaccinated or have received the second dose. Also, the data provided by the ministry shows that 81,87,007 senior citizens and around 14,40,092 beneficiaries aged more than 45 years with specific co-morbidities have received the first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine.

Though the numbers look huge, reports suggest that with this pace, India will take many years to fully vaccinate at least 70 per cent of the population. While there is no clear figure for herd immunity, health experts believe that this figure is required to attain herd immunity that will break the chain of coronavirus transmission.

In India, the drug regulator has approved two vaccines so far – Covishield, which is being developed by Serum Institute of Indian (SII), and AstraZeneca with Oxford University and Covaxin, being manufactured by Bharat Biotech. However, people have not being given the option to choose between them and they are randomly being administered any of these vaccines.

Government officials, however, clarified that they are making sure that a person gets inoculated with the same vaccine as the second dose which he or she received as the first dose. While these vaccines will be administered absolutely free in state-run hospitals, eligible people will have to pay Rs 250 per dose at private hospitals.

Let’s have a look how many peopel have been fuly vaccinated against COVID-19 in other countries:

United States – 36,929,777
England – 1,076,426
European Union – 14,774,787
France – 2,205,468
Germany – 2749786
Bahrain – 2,12,117
Belgium – 3,78,932
Brazil – 2,849,230
Canada – 5,93,331
Denmark – 2,43,527
Greece – 4,06,070
Indonesia – 1,454,836
Ireland  – 160,729
Israel – 4,128,807
Italy – 1,968,796
Mexico – 609,874
Norway – 246,961
Poland  – 1,595,520
Portugal  – 334,195
Spain  – 1,583,244
Switzerland  –  368,454
United Kingdom – 1,532,754

(All figures are from ‘Our World in Data’ and of those who have got both the doses of COVID-19 vaccines.)