India’s vaccinations slowed down in this period compared to the previous week. If the recent pace continues, India won’t reach 70% vaccine coverage until December 2021, a Mint analysis shows.In the 12th week of vaccinations (3-9 April), 22.6 million Indians got their first dose, the highest so far.
This reduced to 18.6 million in the following week, lending credence to claims that India was falling short of doses. For remote areas in several states, the vaccine drive was put to a halt by stock outages, even as the Centre denied any shortage in vaccine supply.Part of the failure of the ‘tika utsav’ in boosting the pace comes from production constraints.