Pune also shut over 100 vaccination centres because of vaccine shortage, Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) MP Supriya Sule tweeted.
Maharashtra continues to be the worst-affected state with the highest number of cases.
Mumbai:
Vaccination was halted in parts of Maharashtra last evening, reportedly because doses were unavailable.
Among districts that stopped giving shots was Satara. According to Vinay Gouda, the Chief Executive Officer of the Satara Zilla Parishad, the authorities ran out of doses.
So far around 2.6 lakh people over the age of 45 in Satara have received at least one dose each.
Panvel also stopped inoculations citing the unavailability of Covid-19 vaccines.
“Vaccination drive temporarily halted in all government and private inoculation centres in Panvel, due to unavailability of #COVID19 vaccines. Centres will be reopened once vaccines are back in stock,” said the Panvel Municipal Corporation in a notice, according to news agency ANI.
Pune also shut over 100 vaccination centres because of vaccine shortage, Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) MP Supriya Sule tweeted last night.
“Pune District vaccinated 55,539 persons in 391 vaccination centres today. Several thousand people went back without being vaccinated because the vaccines stock was exhausted,” tweeted Ms Sule, whose party is a part of Maharashtra’s ruling coalition.
“109 centres remained shut today because they had no stock of vaccines. Our momentum may be lost due to lack of stock, we remain determined to vaccinate every consenting person to save lives, to break the chain of infection and to get our economy back on its feet at the earliest,” she wrote.
“Requesting Hon. Dr Harsh Vardhan ji to kindly help us with the COVID 19 vaccines.”
Requesting Hon. @drharshvardhan
Ji to kindly help us with the COVID 19 Vaccines..3/3— Supriya Sule (@supriya_sule) April 7, 2021
Maharashtra has been reporting the highest number of daily cases in the country. On Wednesday, it logged 59,907 new COVID-19 cases and 322 deaths in 24 hours.
Earlier Wednesday, Maharashtra Health Minister Rajesh Tope had flagged fast-depleting stocks and had said the state would run out of vaccines within three days.
“Stocks of vaccine in the state remain only for three days. We have requested the centre to send more vaccine. This in the state with the highest number of cases every day. In Mumbai also stocks only remain for three days,” Mr Tope had told NDTV on Wednesday.
He said he had told Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan how serious the situation was.
“Today (Wednesday) 14 lakh doses are available, which means there is only three days’ stock. So every week we need 40 lakh doses that is if we vaccinate 5 lakh everyday,” he said.
The minister said he had told Harsh Vardhan: “We don’t have doses in most of our vaccination centres… sending people back… I have been asking you to supply vaccine to us.”
In a separate letter, Shiv Sena MP Priyanka Chaturvedi told Dr Vardhan Maharashtra has only 48 hours of supply left.
But the Union Health Minister emphatically denied any vaccine shortage and hit out at what he called “deplorable attempts by some state governments to distract attention from their failures and spread panic among the people”. The “lackadaisical attitude” of Maharashtra had bogged down the entire country’s efforts to fight the virus, he added
The centre had “no option” but prioritise “so long as supply of vaccines remains limited”, he said.