Posted on May 16th, 2021
By Nikhil Inamdar and Aparna Alluri Courtesy BBC News
It took 31-year-old Sneha Marathe half a day to book an appointment online for a Covid vaccine.
“It was a game of ‘fastest finger first’,” she says. “The slots filled up in three seconds.” But the hospital cancelled her slot at the last minute: they had no vaccines. Ms Marathe went back to try for another appointment.
All 18-44 year-olds in India have to register on the government’s CoWin platform to get vaccinated. With demand for jabs far outstripping supply, tech-savvy Indians are even writing code to corner elusive appointments.
May 6, 2021
For years, India has made and exported more vaccines than any other country. Yet its vaccination drive against Covid-19, which began in early January, is stumbling and faltering.
To this observation, the most obvious response is that India’s population is huge and scattered that reaching 1.39 billion people is a complicated, time-consuming task. True enough, though the government’s mode of vaccine delivery its maze of crashing apps, differential pricing, unclear messaging, and patchy record-keeping is still cause for worry. But the real problem is the alarming shortage of vaccines. This week, India opened up vaccinations to over-18s, but most states didn’t have enough stock to offer shots. Adar Poonawalla, the CEO of the Serum Institute of India (SII), the world’s biggest vaccine manufacturer, has warned that the supply crunch will continue for another three months.