Sena MP writes to Health Minister seeking price cap on vaccines

New Feb 19 Shiv Sena MP Priyanka Chaturvedi has written a letter to the Health Minister to consider roping in private hospitals in the immunisation drive and opening up more mobile vaccination centres.

In the letter Chaturvedi wrote, "I would request you to kindly consider de-regularising the sale of vaccine and capping the cost of the same to ensure that there is no heavy cost for the citizens to bear or the fear of hoarding."

" It would be unfair to the country that we do not use our own strength and leverage all our available resources to help the society rid itself of the virus," she added.

In her letter she said that the country is once again seeing an increase in Covid-19 cases and the various strains of the virus have also been detected.

"As per the Health Ministry data, Covid-19 vaccine supplies are under-utilised. In fact, the data of vaccine supplies shows that only 31.45 per cent of Covishield and 11.75 per cent Covaxin have been administered to frontline workers," she said

India reported 13,193 new cases in the last 24 hours on Friday and the overall tally mounted to 1,09,63,394, health officials said.

The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare said that there were 97 more Covid fatalities, taking the overall toll to 1,56,111.

In the past one month, the country has been recording less than 15,000 new infections daily with the toll not going over the 200-mark.

However, in the past few days the coronavirus cases in various parts of the country suddenly showed a spike.

On Thursday, the count of new cases was 12,881, on February 17 it was 11,610, on February 16 the number was 9,121 and on February 15, 11,649 cases.

Earlier, health ministry officials said that the average daily new infections for the last 15 days were oscillating between 9,000 to 12,000 while the deaths were between 78 to 120.

( With inputs from IANS )