The Calcutta Municipal Corporation had asked the state’s health department for “a buffer stock of one lakh Covid vaccine doses”.
Firhad Hakim, the chairperson of corporation’s board of administrators, said on Saturday that this could help plan the CMC’s vaccination programme better and reduce chaos outside the vaccination centres.
But the health department has never had a large enough stock itself to be able to provide the CMC the protection of any buffer stock, he added.
Hakim’s statement on Saturday comes at a time when 152 Covid vaccination centres of the CMC had stopped vaccination from Friday owing to unavailability of Covishield vaccines. Forty other centres are administering Covaxin.
Long queues of people outside CMC’s vaccination centres have been a common sight across the city.
“I had asked the health secretary to give us (the CMC) a buffer stock of one lakh doses. But even he does not have that much stock of vaccine with the health department that he can give the CMC a buffer stock,” Hakim said.
“We do not know the night before as to how many doses we can administer the next day. As a result, we are having problems in distributing the coupons to recipients.... We are having difficulty in managing the vaccination programme.”
Officials managing Covid vaccination centres of the CMC said people standing in queues to take jabs could be informed early as to how many doses would be administered if the information was available with the officials in advance.
At present, people get to know how many doses would be administered after standing in a queue for four-five hours. It is then that some of them realise doses would get exhausted before their turn came.
“People are harassed as they have to wait in the queue without any knowledge whether they will get the vaccine or not. We could have displayed the number of doses to be administered the next day in a notice board if we ourselves had the clarity,” said one CMC doctor who is in charge of vaccination in a part of Calcutta.
Hakim added that the CMC would require more vaccine doses as its centres did not vaccinate only Calcuttans but many from the neighbouring districts as well because their home districts did not have enough vaccination centres compared to Calcutta.
A CMC official said they had found that between 25 per cent and 30 per cent of those who had taken the jabs from CMC’s centres were not residents of Calcutta.
“The CMC will not turn away anyone who is not a resident of the city as it is bound to vaccinate anyone from the country,” said the official.