Indore: Mega-vaccination drive pushed back by another 7 days

Indore (Madhya Pradesh): Finally, wisdom has prevailed and the health department has postponed the mega-campaign for administering the free precautionary dose to prevent against Covid-19 to be organised on Ganesh Chaturthi by seven days.

Now, the mega-campaign will be organised on September 7 and officials of the health department are keeping their fingers crossed hoping to get success in inoculating more people on that day.

Free Press, in its Tuesday edition, had raised the issue of organising the mega-campaign on Ganesh Chaturthi as the health department officials blame festivities as the reason for poor vaccination in the city. The department has failed to vaccinate more than 15 per cent of the targeted population with the ‘third dose’ as only 4.08 lakh people have taken the dose so far out of over 28 lakh people in the city.

“The department had already conducted three mega-vaccination drives in the past one month and planned to organise three more such drives in the next month to motivate people in the matter,” health officials said. The department did not get a good response to any of the drives as they could vaccinate only over 25,000 people during the initial drive. According to the CoWIN portal, the number of precautionary doses administered on Tuesday was over 750.

‘Postponement due to the local holiday’

‘The drive has been postponed for a week due to the local holiday at many places because of Ganesh Chaturthi. We believe the vaccination drive will pick up pace again and more people will be inoculated during the mega-campaign on September 7’

—Dr Tarun Gupta, district immunisation officer

Published on: Tuesday, August 30, 2022, 11:00 PM IST