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Pune: The spike in Covid-19 cases in Maharashtra has spiked a war of words between the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-ruled Central government and the Uddhav Thackeray-led Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) government. On Wednesday Union Minister Prakash Javadekar slammed the MVA government for what he called as “poor administration of vaccines”.
“Maharashtra Government had only used 23 lakh vaccines out of the total 54 lakh vaccines dispatched to the state, till March 12. Only 56% vaccines remained unused. Now, Shiv Sena MP’s ask for more vaccines for the state. First mismanagement of pandemic now poor administration of vaccines,” tweeted Javadekar, who is Union of Environment, Forest and Climate Change.
In a sharp rejoinder to Javadekar’s remarks, state Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) president Jayant Patil, who is also the State Water Resources’ Minister, said that despite vaccines being manufactured by Indian companies, the Centre was more eager to export them to foreign countries including Pakistan without adequately addressing needs at home.
“Despite the fact that the vaccines are manufactured by Indian Pharma firms (Serum Institute and Bharat Biotech), why is it that the Centre has been slow in vaccinating the people of this country who have helped vote the BJP to power? The Centre is sending vaccines abroad, giving it wholesale to countries including Pakistan. I guess one must appreciate the generosity of the Central government. It seems it is all right to them if Indians are bereft of vaccine doses and lag behind in vaccination,” said Patil.
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On Tuesday, Union Health Secretary Rajesh Bhushan had written to the Maharashtra government admonishing the MVA administration for ‘inadequate’ contact-tracing efforts while urging that it must focus on strict and effective containment strategies and plan for a worst-case scenario.
Meanwhile, stating that there was no need to panic or any cause for undue worries, State Health Minister Rajesh Tope said that despite the rise in infections, the number of fatalities in the State had gone down.
“Of the current active cases, only 5% of them are presently occupying oxygen beds in hospitals. Of these, a mere 3.8% are in the ICU. The case fatality rate in the State is declining. The virulence is less in the renewed surge,” said Tope.
Tope said that the government’s emphasis was on ramping up vaccination, and said that he had written to Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan that Maharashtra needed 2.20 crore COVID-19 vaccine doses from the Centre for the ongoing inoculation drive in the state, which translated to 20 lakh doses per week to the State.
“While I respect Javadekar, I have spoken to both Harsh Vardhan and Bhushan and informed them that Maharashtra only has ten days’ vaccine stock left. We told them that as we are vaccinating more people daily, we would need at least 20 lakhs doses per week,” Tope said.
The Maharashtra Health Minister informed that thus far, 33.65 health and frontline workers, and senior citizens above the age of 60 as well as those above 45 with co-morbidities had been inoculated across 180 centres in the State.
“On Tuesday itself, we vaccinated as many as 2.32 lakh people. We propose to increase the daily target even more,” he said.
With Maharashtra reporting an average daily spike of more than 15,000 cases for the past one week, the State’s active case tally has shot to 1.40 lakh. The State contributes to nearly 60% of India’s total active cases with eight of the ten most-afflicted districts in India in terms of active cases being from Maharashtra, including Pune and Nagpur.
