Less than 10,000 Covid booster shots given on Day 1 of rollout of precaution dose for all adults | India News
People above 18 years who took the second dose at least nine months ago are eligible to get a third dose of the same jab in private hospitals. Most hospitals plan to start the booster plan from Monday.
With the rollout of the boosters, SII and Bharat Biotech have reduced vaccine prices to Rs 225 per dose. As most private hospitals have an inventory of vaccine doses that were procured when the shots were costlier, both Bharat Biotech and SII have requested hospitals to provide their respective jabs at the revised lower price and the companies will compensate the price differential for the existing stocks with supply of additional doses.
Private vaccination centres can charge up to Rs 150 per dose as service fee, over and above the cost of the jab. Earlier, Covishield was priced at Rs 600 per dose, whereas Covaxin was priced Rs 1,200 a dose.
On Saturday, Bharat Biotech had also announced that the price differential with any existing stocks of Covaxin in private hospitals shall be compensated in the form of additional doses.
Although 850 private centres in the country were shown to be administering Covid vaccine shots in the CoWin dashboard on Sunday, it was not clear how many of these were giving booster doses to adults on Day One of the rollout.
Some hospital executives said they were sceptical about the initial response from people for a paid booster programme. Besides, Sunday was not considered a favourable day as footfalls are usually low on weekends and this time it was also coinciding with Ram Navami. Most private hospitals were also short-staffed due to the holiday, executives said.
The official update on the number of ‘precaution doses’ administered among 18-59 years population was not available till the time of going to press.
