Centre evading responsibility on vaccines: Mamata Banerjee in letter to PM Modi

Describing the Central authorities’s decision of universal vaccination for COVID-19 as “hollow and without substance” West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Tuesday mentioned the choice was a “regrettable show of evasion of responsibility at a time of crisis”.

“Now when the number of cases in the second wave are spiralling like anything, the Centre has chosen to tactically indulge in empty rhetoric and shy away from its responsibility for making available vaccines to the people of the country,” Ms. Banerjee mentioned in a letter addressed to Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The Chief Minister has additionally cited her letter of February 24, requesting the Centre to allow the State to enable free vaccination for the individuals of West Bengal, including that there was no response from the Centre on the communication.

In the letter, Ms. Banerjee identified that the announcement by the Centre doesn’t handle main points like “ensuring the quality, efficacy, stable flow of supply of required number of vaccines by the manufacturers and also the price at which vaccines are to be purchased by the States”.

She additionally expressed apprehensions that the introduced coverage may lead to unscrupulous mechanism in the market, together with pricing of vaccines because it seems to be based mostly on market costs which can put the frequent individuals beneath large monetary burden.

The Chief Minister highlighted the scarcity of vaccines and referred to as for a “fair, transparent and credible vaccination policy”, which might allow individuals to get vaccines urgently and at reasonably priced costs.

“More importantly, the supply would also become very erratic because the vaccine manufacturers are hardly prepared to scale up their production capacities to the desired levels to meet the nationwide demand. I would like to mention once again that required vaccines are not available in the market and request that steps may immediately be taken to ensure available of vaccines at the earliest,” she mentioned.

West Bengal which is in center of a marathon eight-phase Assembly election, has seen a pointy spike in the variety of COVID instances and deaths. Vaccination and the associated problems with managing the pandemic have turn into an necessary ballot challenge.

Earlier on April 18, Ms Banerjee had written to the Prime Minister on the scarcity of medicines, oxygen cylinders and vaccines. The Chief Minister had 5.4 crore doses of vaccines to vaccinate about 2.7 crore individuals of the State on the earliest.