The Greater Chennai Corporation (GCC) has announced a mega COVID-19 vaccination drive on Thursday, August 26, with 400 camps across the city limits. The idea, according to GCC officials, is to push for more vaccine acceptance in the city which has been seeing a slight dip in the number of vaccinations over the last week. According to officials, per day vaccination numbers had dropped from 36,000 to around 30,000 over the last seven days. “A mega vaccination campaign and enough noise around it will hopefully get the numbers up soon,” he added.
Tamil Nadu also received a fresh supply of vaccines, and with the portion that Chennai received the corporation wants to distribute the doses as quickly as possible. “We received a bulk of vaccines and we want to distribute it as soon as possible. So we decided to conduct the camp as we want to push for more vaccinations,” a senior GCC official in charge of vaccination told TNM. The corporation also wants to increase its capabilities to expand vaccination drives in the future.
“Currently we organise 40-45 camps in the GCC limits every day. We want to increase our scale of vaccination by introducing more camps. So this drive will help us prepare for it in the near future,” he added. The GCC also plans to set up 200 permanent vaccination camps in each ward or division of the local body, in the hopes of motivating more people to visit the camps and get vaccinated.
“Right now, people have to travel longer distances and wait in queues to get vaccinated. But if there is one camp in each division of the corporation, the distance and time reduces and people can access COVID-19 vaccines easily. We hope that this will lead to reducing vaccine hesitancy among people,” the official added.