India Expands Coronavirus Vaccination Campaign Amid Crisis

By Staff, Agencies

India expanded its COVID-19 vaccination campaign to all adults on Saturday amid soaring new infections.

Only limited groups were eligible for jabs so far, including medical staff working with COVID-19 patients, those aged over 45 and people with various health conditions.

On Friday, ahead of the planned expansion, several states reported running out of the vaccines, with India using jabs by AstraZeneca/Oxford University and its domestic Covaxin jab.

Relatively high wastage reaching almost 9% in some areas is another issue India is facing as residents are reportedly wary of leaving their houses amid the mounting infections.

So far, around 150 million shots have been administered, equating to 11.5% of the population of 1.3 billion people. Just 25 million have had two doses.

The program expands as India struggles with containing its outbreak, one of the world's most massive, reporting hundreds of thousands of infections each day.

On Saturday, the country added over 400,000 new cases to its tally in the past 24 hours, and registered 3,500 deaths from COVID-19.

The country's official death toll had already surpassed 200,000 and is the fourth-largest globally after the US, Brazil and Mexico.