RANCHI: Jharkhand government finally came up with vaccine wastage data of 2.68% on Friday, almost a fortnight after the state government had rebutted the Centre’s claim of high wastage figures in Jharkhand.
Although the chief minister had immediately tweeted to claim that vaccine wastage in Jharkhand was under 4.65%, the health department failed to come up with data to support the CM’s claim.
Even on Friday there was no district-wise data available with the state health department to back their claim of 2.68% wastage data.
Talking to TOI, the officer on special duty to state health department, Siddhartha Tripathi, said: “A total of 57,15,600 doses have been received by state health department; of which 47,32,426 doses have been administered to beneficiaries and a total of 1,53,494 doses have gone waste, which amounts to around 2.68% of the total doses.” The Centre had said that Jharkhand was one of the states with higher wastage percentage.
On May 26, the Union government in its report had accused the state of wasting 37.3% doses which was immediately countered by chief minister Hemant Soren and state health minister Banna Gupta.
However, when the state health department was asked to present the data, they couldn’t do it citing effect of cyclone Yaas.
Although the state is yet to produce district-wise wastage figures, TOI accessed a report prepared by the districts in which Koderma and Gumla have shown negative wastage of 33.1 % and 19%.
Total vaccine doses allotted to Koderma till June 9 was 1,15,300 units out of which 33,710 doses are left unutilised but instead of administering 81,590 the district has jabbed 1,08,611 persons indicating that 33.1% additional people got the shots in comparison to doses utilized.
Similarly in Gumla, as against 1,78,300 doses allocated till June 9, as many as 55,120 doses are left.
But instead of inoculating 1,23,180 persons, as many as 1,47,026 persons have received the jab.
On being asked about this, Tripathi said: “It was due to the mistake of data entry operators who were punching the data at the ground level.
We, too, were surprised with those figures but after we got it checked it was found that the entries were wrong.
In our meeting with the Union health ministry on Thursday, we had requested them to allow us to make the necessary changes in the portal.
Once we were provided the access to correct the wrong entries we collected the cumulative figures first and now sharing them with the media.
We are correcting all such mistakes and once it is finalised we will share it again.”