Vaccination drive: India’s one million shots in 6 days is world’s fastest rollout

NEW DELHI: The six days that it took India to administer more than one million doses of vaccines against Covid-19 makes it the fastest rollout of a million vaccine shots against the pandemic among countries that have placed their inoculation data in the public domain.
A week into India’s vaccination drive, which began on January 16, nearly 1.3 million (12.7 lakh) shots have been administered, the health ministry said.By Thursday night, 10.4 lakh vaccines had been given, the government stated.
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Prior to this, the fastest known rollout of Covid-19 vaccines took place in the US, which achieved a million doses in 10 days of launching the vaccination drive on December 14 last year. The UK, where inoculations began on December 8, had vaccinated around 130,000 people in the first week and had reached close to a million doses only by December 26.
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The rollout details in China, where 15 million doses had reportedly been administered by January 20, are not publicly available. The head of Chinese government-owned Sinopharm Group, which has developed a Covid vaccine that is being widely used, was quoted by Nature journal as saying China had achieved one million vaccinations in November itself.

Globally, nearly 57m vaccine shots had been given till Thursday, with the US leading the way with 17.5m doses, followed by China (15m), the UK (5.4m), Israel (3.3m), UAE (2.3m), Germany (1.4m), Italy (1.3m), Turkey (1.1m) and Spain (1.1m). India was in 10th place till Thursday night, the latest period based on which comparisons can be made.

However, while India's rollout has been the swiftest so far despite a late start, it has a longer distance to travel than other countries, with the exception of China, because of its bigger population. The first million doses translate to just 0.08 shots per 100 people in the country.

On this score, Israel is far ahead of other nations, having given vaccine shots to 38 out of every 100 citizens even though the country’s vaccine programme has become controversial as it reportedly leaves out Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The UAE has the next best numbers so far, 22.7 shots per 100 people, followed by Bahrain (8.5), UK (8) and US (5.3).