India has given 83.39 Crore COVID-19 vaccine doses to its eligible population as of September 23, 2021.
Over 71 lakh doses have been given in the last 24 hours, and of these, 39 lakh are first doses, and 32.3 lakh are second doses.
The people can get Covishield, Covaxin, and Sputnik V vaccines, although the Covishield is mostly being administered.
UK and Covishield
The UK, after a brief refusal to recognize Covishield in its travel guidelines, has made amends and will now accept it as an approved vaccine. However, the BBC reports that people leaving to the UK may still have to self-isolate.
India is on the UK’s Amber list of travel, while 18 countries are placed on the green list. If people from the green list get ‘fully vaccinated,’ they do not have to self-isolate after arriving in the UK.
While the Indian authorities objected to the ‘discriminatory rules,’ several netizens have pointed out that Covishield and the UK-approved Astra Zeneca are the same, and the UK also receives doses from India.
Covishield is approved by the World Health Organization.
Ghana, which received 50,000 doses of the vaccine from India, was fiercely critical of the UK travel guidelines.
Speaking at the United Nations Headquarters in New York, President of Ghana Nana Akufa-Addo said that non-recognition of the Covishield was intriguing, and such steps must not be tools for immigration control. Such a move would be retrogressive, he said.
India’s Rajya Sabha Member Jairam Ramesh termed the episode bizarre and hinted at racism.
However, Indian media houses NDTV and Times of India reported British officials as having said the problem lay not in the vaccine itself but the certification process in the country.
Johnson and Johnson’s Janssen and Moderna, while approved for emergency use, are yet to be made available in India.