No Vaccination In Three COVID Hotspot Odisha Districts

Bhubaneswar: Acute shortage of Covishield vaccines has forced the Odisha government to stop the vaccination drive in three hotspot districts.

Informing the media, Health and Family Welfare Director Bijay Panigrahi on Saturday said that the vaccination drive is underway at 427 session sites with 1073 of 1500 having been closed due to the shortage of Covishield vaccines.

“Vaccination in all session sites in Koraput, Nuapada and Jharsuguda, as well as the urban areas of Sundargarh, Sambalpur, Bargarh, Balangir, Kalahandi, Nabarangpur and Malkangiri, has been stopped due to the non-availability of doses,” he said.

These 10 districts, bordering Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh, have been worst hit the second wave of COVID-19.

The health director further informed the state currently has a stock of 3.6 lakh doses of Covishield and 2.3 lakh doses of Covaxin vaccines and these will be exhausted in two days.

Odisha has so far vaccinated 49,01,977 people and 91,195 among them were inoculated at 781 session sites on Friday.

On the imposition of weekend shutdown and night curfew in the state, Panigrahi said that the ban on the movement of people will help break the infection chain.

Earlier in the day, Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik had written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi,  raising the issue of intermittent supply of the vaccines which was creating a challenge in meeting the demand in the state.

He had earlier sought 25 lakh vaccine doses to increase the daily vaccination target to 3 lakh a day.