Tripura govt stands with vaccination data, to file affidavit in HC

Agartala: Two days after the High Court of Tripura sought clarification in the claim made by the state government on COVID-19 vaccination of eligible age groups as ‘inaccurate’, the National Health Mission director said that the data was corroborated with the Government of India.

Speaking at a press conference, Dr Siddharth Shiv Jaiswal, Mission Director, National Health Mission said the data for the 45 year-above target was 12.36 lakh, which was correct as per the data available at that particular time.

“The data provided to the High Court was based on arithmetic projections. Later, we did ‘brainstorming’ on the target population involving census reports, UIDAI data etc. and settled upon the revised estimated target. This is much more solid data and has been corroborated with the target of the Government of India”, the NHM director said.
However, the official admitted that there was a slight variation in the vaccination figures of the 18 to 44 age group.

“The figure which now stands at 78.43 per cent was slightly over 70 per cent when the news reports came out. The state health department team worked extensively for the high vaccination and the data is available,” Jaiswal added.

Speaking about the vaccination summary, he said that 27,05,506 vaccines have been administered of which 20,58,044 was the first dose and 6,47,462 second dose.

“We have administered the first dose to 78.43 per cent of the total eligible population. Similarly, complete vaccination i.e. both vaccines have been administered to 24.67 per cent of the total eligible population,” Jaiswal added.

Meanwhile, a press release issued by the Press Information Bureau (PIB) said no case of delta plus variant of the coronavirus was reported from sample sequencing in Tripura.
“152 samples were sent from Tripura to NIBMG Kalyani for Whole Genome Sequence (WGS). The random samples were of people who tested RT-PCR positive between April and May 2021…There was no case of Delta Plus reported among an aforementioned lot of sequenced samples”, the PIB statement reads.

The PIB clarification comes two days after the health officials held a press conference and informed that 138 cases of Delta Plus variant were found among 151 COVID samples sent to Kalyani laboratory in West Bengal for testing.