Mamata hits out at Centre's Covid vaccination policy, calls it hollow, evasion of responsibility

A day after the central government announced the liberalised and accelerated phase 3 strategy of COVID-19 vaccination policy to be flagged off from May 1, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Tuesday wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi calling the new policy a "regrettable show of evasion of responsibility by the Centre" at the time of crisis.

"I am informed that the central government has announced the much-delayed universal vaccine policy on April 19, 2021, which appears to be hollow without substance and a regrettable show of evasion of responsibility by the central government at the time of crisis.

The announcement does not address major issues like ensuring the quality, efficacy, stable flow of supply of required number of vaccines by the manufactures and also the prices at which vaccines are to purchased by the States," wrote Mamata in her letter to Prime Minister.

"It is apprehended that the announced policy might lead to unscrupulous mechsms in the market including pricing of vaccines as it appears to be based on market prices which may put the common people under huge financial burden. More importantly, the supply would become very erratic because the vaccine manufacturers are hardly prepared to scale up their production capacities to the desired levels to meet the nationwide demand.

I would earnestly request you to kindly ensure a fair, transparent and credible vaccination policy addressing the issues outlined above, which would enable the people of the country to get vaccines urgently at affordable prices as per the current scale as applicable," reads the letter.

In order to ramp up the coronavirus vaccination drive in the country, the Government of Indian on Monday announced a "liberalised and accelerated" Phase-III strategy of COVID-19 vaccination from May 1.

Everyone above the age of 18 to be eligible to get the COVID-19 vaccine, said the government.

Meanwhile, India reported 2,59,170 new COVID-19 infections and 1,761 deaths in the last 24 hours, the Union Health Ministry said on Tuesday. This has taken the total number of positive cases in the country to 1,53,21,089.

There are currently 20,31,977 active cases in the country as of Tuesday.As many as 1,54,761 people recovered from the virus. With this, the total number of recoveries reached 1,31,08,582 in India.The death toll has reached 1,80,530 with additional 1,761 fatalities.

( With inputs from ANI )