‘India should begin scaling up syringe supplies for Covid vaccination’

New Delhi, Dec 5 : With the Union government focusing on early availability of coronavirus vaccine, experts on Saturday stressed that India should immediately scale up syringe supplies to deal with the vast number of inoculations required to control the pandemic.
The experts said that as India gets ready for Covid-19 vaccine, the government should be well-equipped with a secured stock of syringes in advance.
According to Rajiv Nath, Managing Director of Hindustan Syringes & Medical Devices Ltd, the estimated demand in India would be around 900 million pieces of different kinds of syringes for just one shot of the vaccine, considering 60-70 per cent of the country gets vaccinated.
“The number would amplify to 1.8 billion if the vaccine India chooses needs two shots,” Nath told IANS.
The experts have also focused on the role of auto-disabled syringes in the Covid-19 vaccine immunisation programme “The focus has shifted to single-use disposable consumables from reuse consumables and especially a change has been seen in higher deployment of auto-disabled syringes even for curative injections,” Nath said.