CHENNAI: Several vaccination centres in Chennai and several other parts of Tamil Nadu were closed on Monday as there was no vaccine stock, health minister Ma Subramanian said.
Of the 1.44 lakh doses of vaccines received, the state had used 1.41 lakh doses, the minister said after inauguration of a special vaccine camp at the Madras high court.
“It is an irony that people in Tamil Nadu, including members from the tribal population, are ready to take the vaccine. But we are not able to give them the vaccine because we don’t have the stock,” he said.
At 8am on Monday, the state had a stock of 2.07 lakh doses. “This would have been over by now,” he said.
Two lakh doses of Covishield are expected to reach Tamil Nadu by 5.30pm on Monday.
Between January and February, the state was vaccinating 10,650 people every day. This rose to around 83,000 in March. In the next two months, between 94,000 and 99,000 people took the vaccine every day.
The average number of vaccinations rose to 1.9 lakh a day. On some days, the state vaccinated up to 4.3 lakh people.
In June, the gave 52.17 lakh doses. The state was allotted nearly 48 lakh doses in June. “The number of vaccinations were higher than the doses received because we used a few doses left over from May stock and nurses used 12 doses from the vial instead of just 10,” said a senior official from the state immunisation wing.
Each vial of the vaccine contains five or ten doses, but the manufacturers always pack additional 1 ml into the vials. “Our nurses have learnt to make use of them too. With this, our wastage also came down,” he said.
Triplicane in Chennai had 90,000 people vaccinated because of Udhayanidhi Stalin MLA’s efforts, he said. “This is the maximum in Chennai,” he said.
