Supreme Court dismisses petition seeking door-to-door COVID vaccination for all Indians

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court dismissed a plea seeking a direction to the Union government to commence door-to-door COVID-19 vaccination for all Indians. As per the petition filed by the Youth Bar Association of India, the Centre must ensure that the elderly, differently-abled and weaker sections of the society can get vaccinated at their respective places of residence. Maintaining that it cannot pass directions in one stroke for the entire nation, the bench headed by Justice DY Chandrachud said that this petition needs research. 

Justice Chandrachud observed, "The vaccination program is underway and this court is monitoring the progress under the suo moto plea. At this stage, it will be difficult to issue general directions especially with regard to the diversity of conditions and our directions should not impinge upon the administrative powers of the state government including door to door vaccination". While disposing of the plea, he stated that the petitioner can send suggestions to the Ministry of Health.

COVID-19 vaccination in India

Apart from Covishield and Covaxin, the Drugs Controller General of India has approved Sputnik V, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson's Janssen vaccine, and Zydus Cadila's ZyCoV-D. From June 21 onwards, the Centre started procuring 75% of the vaccine stock and distributing it to the states for free. The vaccination drive is gaining pace with more than 180 million jabs being administered in August which is more than all G7 nations put together. As per sources, 40 crore doses of COVID-19 vaccines will be available per month by October. 

This will be possible as a total of 7 vaccines are set to be available by October with Biological E's Corbevax and Gennova's mRNA vaccine likely to get approval soon. The government has already hinted at vaccinating the entire adult population i.e nearly 90 crore people by December itself. In another development, the DCGI approved a study on mixing Covishield and Covaxin. This came after the ICMR observed in a preprint study that a combination of these COVID-19 vaccines elicited better safety and immunogenicity results than two doses of the same vaccine.

In this case, the Christian Medical College, Vellore will conduct the clinical trials on 300 healthy volunteers. The aim of this study will be to ascertain whether two different vaccine doses can be administered to a person instead of the current practice of administering two shots of the same vaccine. A total of 54,19,04,205 persons have been inoculated whereas 16,63,08,325 of them have received the second dose of the vaccine too.