India celebrates 1 billion doses of COVID vaccine with songs and movies | Coronavirus pandemic news

The Minister of Health will release a song and movie at the Mughal Red Fort in New Delhi to commemorate this milestone.

India will receive 1 billion doses of the COVID-19 vaccine early on Thursday, which is an important milestone after the slow start, although the recent decline in vaccination has caused concerns for the government and healthcare providers.

His Ministry of Health stated that Health Minister Manzuk Mandavia will release a song and an audio-visual film at the Mughal-era Red Fort in New Delhi around noon to “celebrate a landmark milestone.”

The country has injected 998.5 million doses of vaccines, of which nearly 90% are AstraZeneca vaccines produced by the Serological Institute of India.

“I call on all unvaccinated Indians to get vaccinated as soon as possible and to contribute to our historic golden vaccination journey,” Mandavia said on Twitter.

The government hopes that all 944 million adults in India will be vaccinated this year. So far, 75% of them have received at least one dose and 31% have received two doses.

To date, India has reported 34.1 million COVID-19 cases and more than 452,000 deaths, most of which were in the second wave of Delta variant infections that swept the country from April to May.

The Ministry of Health said on Tuesday that “despite adequate supplies, there are still a considerable number of people in India who have not received the second dose of the vaccine before the deadline” as the number of new infections has fallen to the lowest level since the beginning of March.

An average of 5 million injections per day this month, one-fifth of the peak in September, although as AstraZeneca’s domestic production of vaccines soared, the state’s vaccine inventory exceeded a record 100 million.

Although the number of infected people is low, officials from the Ministry of Health have been urging people to get vaccinated as soon as possible, especially during the ongoing holiday season, which means family gatherings and large-scale shopping, which increases the risk of a new wave of infections.