Cabinet approves free booster COVID-19 vaccine dose for adults

(Represemtative Image Source: AP)

The union cabinet on July 13 approved free booster doses of COVID-19 vaccines for adults for 75 days starting July 15, the information minister said.

The booster shots of the coronavirus vaccine will be administered free of cost at public healthcare facilities, although, the doses received at private centres will continue to be paid, Anurag Singh Thakur said while speaking to reporters in the national capital.

India, on July 6, reduced the gap between the second dose of the COVID-19 vaccine and the third dose or booster dose to six months for adults from the earlier gap of nine months.

The administration of the precaution dose was already available free of cost to beneficiaries aged 60 years and above, healthcare workers, and frontline workers.

India has been seeing an uptick in active COVID-19 cases over the past several weeks, in line with several other countries that are seeing a spread of new variants of the deadly virus.

India saw a 24 percent increase in daily coronavirus infections with 16,906 new COVID-19 cases being reported in the last 24 hours, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare has informed. With this, the number of active cases went up to 1,32,457. The country’s coronavirus death toll now stands at 5,25,519 with 45 more deaths being reported in the past 24 hours.

This development comes at a time the county's vaccination drive has slowed down several notches, with many beneficiaries shying away from getting booster shots.

As for India’s COVID-19 vaccination drive, which started on January 16, 2021, as many as 1,99,12,79,010 doses of the preventive jab have been administered thus far.

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