Union Health Secy advises States, UTs to increase COVID-19 vaccine coverage percentage

Union Health Secretary Rajesh Bhushan on Thursday advised states and union territories to increase the percentage coverage of COVID-19 vaccine beneficiaries and optimize sessions per day.

According to a statement, the Health Secretary, while reviewing the status of vaccination with Health Secretaries and National Health Mission MDs through video conference, pointed out that the COVID-19 vaccine is available in sufficient quantity and technical glitches on the CoWIN app have now been resolved.

"While some States and UTs have more than 50 per cent coverage, they were all advised to improve the percentage coverage of vaccinated beneficiaries as there are many States and UTs that need to improve their performance on this parameter," the statement said.

States/UTs have also been advised to ensure that regular review meetings of the State, District and Block Task Force were held to assess the emerging challenges and promptly address ground issues.

"There is a huge scope for improvement in the number of average vaccinations per session," Bhushan said and asked states and UTs to analyze the daily variation in the number of average vaccination and take the necessary steps to increase them.

States/UTs were also asked to orgze multiple simultaneous vaccination sessions per day in the health facility to boost the number of vaccinations per day.

The Health Secretary also elaborating on the global landmarks crossed by India and underlined that India is the fastest country to reach not only the one million target but also two million and three million marks in COVID19 vaccination.

He further pointed out that a provisional digital vaccination certificate after the first dose and final certificate after completing the second dose is required to be issued, and necessary steps should be taken to ensure that vaccination certificates are before beneficiaries exit the session.

( With inputs from ANI )