COVID-19 vaccination drive | Uttar Pradesh vs Maharashtra vaccine race heats up

A healthcare worker gives a dose of Covishield, a COVID-19 vaccine manufactured by Serum Institute of India, to a woman at a hospital in India (Representative image: Reuters)

India’s COVID-19 vaccination story is also a quiet race between two big states, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh.

The former has lead the total vaccination numbers for over four months since the exercise began. But Uttar Pradesh has sprung a surprise in the last 12 days, scoring more jabs daily than Maharashtra, and fueling a modest recovery in country-wide vaccinations with around 45 lakh jabs given in last two days.

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Sample this: Maharashtra has given a total of 2.13 crore jabs so far, the highest for any state in the country and led in daily jabs too since January while scoring a high of 5.4 lakh doses on April 26. But since May 14, Uttar Pradesh has scored more daily jabs than Maharashtra to become the state doing the highest daily vaccinations in the country, with total jabs standing at 1.7 crore, as per official data on the CoWIN platform.

While Uttar Pradesh administered 2.8 lakh jabs on May 24 and about 2.7 lakh jabs on May 25, Maharashtra did 2.5 lakh and nearly 1.95 lakh vaccinations on those two days, respectively. But comparing the jabs administered per million population, UP is last in India at 73,500. Maharashtra is at 1.7 lakh.

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“The major reason is that Maharashtra is not getting adequate vaccines. The vaccines in the pipeline come in piece-meal way. We are focusing on the 45+ age group and it is a fact that our urban centers like Mumbai and Pune have done vaccination on war-footing,” Shiv Sena’s Rajya Sabha member from Maharashtra, Priyanka Chaturvedi told News18.

In Uttar Pradesh, Additional Chief Secretary (Information) Navneet Sehgal told News18 that UP’s vaccination numbers are further expected to increase as the state is opening up vaccination for 18-44 age group in all districts, against 23 districts presently. “We are vaccinating the highest number of people now daily. We have adequate number of vaccines,” Sehgal said.

Maharashtra trails UP in a big way in the 18-44 category in which vaccinations opened from May 1, with UP having delivered 13.61 lakh jabs in this category while Maharashtra has only vaccinated 7.47 lakh people.

Chaturvedi said UP had lately got a much larger share of vaccines in the allocations. “We have invited global tenders for the 18-44 group but Pfizer and Moderna have an issue with the indemnity clause,” Chaturvedi said.

She said there was also a disparity in the price on which vaccine is offered to states and private hospitals by the manufacturers and the call was handed over to them to fix this. “Hence the state government is suffering as the manufacturers want to supply to private hospitals first,” Chaturvedi added.

Sehgal said UP’s vaccination numbers are going up as the state is working hard on removing rural hesitancy for the jabs and removing misgivings among the villagers. “We have surveillance committees in 97,000 villages who are running a campaign both on testing and vaccination. We have also started a public campaign ‘Mera Gaon, Corona Mukt Gaon’ under which money allocations as prize money will be given to villages becoming free of corona, to be used for development projects in the village. This campaign involved vaccination too,” Sehgal said, adding that 68 percent of the villages in UP had no active COVID-19 case.

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