The Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, launched the pan India rollout of COVID-19 vaccination drive via video conferencing on 16th January 2021.  This is the world’s largest vaccination programme covering the entire length and breadth of the country. 

The Prime Minister put the unprecedented scale of the vaccination drive in perspective by informing that, in the first round itself, 3 crore people, which is more than population of at least 100 countries of the world, are being vaccinated. He said that this needs to be taken up to 30 crores in the second round when elderly and people with serious co-morbidities will be vaccinated.

On the first day, a total of 3,352 sessions were held wherein 1,91,181 beneficiaries were vaccinated as per the provisional reports. Additional 3,429 beneficiaries were vaccinated in Defence institutions. As many as 16,755 personnel were actively involved in organizing the immunization session sites. 

The second day of the massive countrywide COVID-19 vaccination programme was also conducted successfully. A total of 553 sessions were held in six States. 17,072 beneficiaries were vaccinated on Day2, as per the provisional reports.

Two types of COVID-19 vaccines have been supplied for the vaccination drive:

• Covishield vaccine (made by Serum Institute of India Ltd) has been supplied to all States/UTs.
• Covaxin vaccine (made by Bharat Biotech International Ltd) has been supplied to 12 States.

Dr. Harsh Vardhan, Union Minister of Health and Family Welfare chose to be with doctors, nurses and other healthcare and frontline workers at AIIMS, New Delhi on this momentous day when the Prime Minister launched the world’s largest COVID-19 vaccination drive.

“3006 session sites across all States and UTs held the exercise simultaneously today with around 100 beneficiaries vaccinated at each of the sites. With a population of 138 crore and a history of Universal Immunization Program which involves targeted vaccination against twelve vaccine preventable diseases, India stands at the cusp of recording history and shows the way to peers across the globe. After Smallpox and Polio, it is the turn of COVID. All the remote, hard to reach areas, urban slums, tribal belts are all covered in today’s exercise”, he said.