Overcoming vaccine hesitancy — the key to a successful Covid-19 inoculation drive SECTIONS Share Synopsis A week into its Covid-19 vaccination drive, India needs to overcome its vaccine hesitancy that is hobbling efforts. Agencies The bigger challenge to tackle hesitancy, though, might well be when the vaccine drive is opened to those beyond frontline workers. Related Please do come. There is no queue, it won’t take long,” Akash Kumar Jha says persuasively, as he speaks on the phone to a doctor at New Delhi’s Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital. It’s one of the many calls the hospital’s first officer for vaccination is making on Thursday morning to coax colleagues into coming in and rolling up their sleeves for a shot of Covaxin, one of the two vaccines India has approved to immunise the country against Covid-19. Jha has good reason to be as convincing as possible — it had been five days since India launched its vaccine drive but the numbers at RML Hospital were not encouraging. While 31 healthcare workers —the only category eligible for vaccination now — took the shot on Day 1 and 69 on Day 2, the number shrank to 27 on Day 3, as against the daily target of 100.