 You're watching NewsClick and I am Anand Dev Chakravarty. You know, when I was in my late 20s, early 30s, that is when KBC was a big thing. Kaun banega karol pati with Amitabh Bachchan. And I used to watch it quite often, religiously. And there was this thing called fastest finger first. If you've ever watched it, you probably know what it is. To get to the hot seat where Amitabh Bachchan would ask you questions and you had a shot to add that one karol prize money. You had to first answer one particular question. And whoever got it in the least amount of time, of course, the right answer, they would be able to get into that hot seat. Now, that segment used to be called fastest finger first. I used to watch it and I say, what's the big deal? Fastest finger first. It's so easy. I could do it much better than all these guys. I should get that one karol rupees. But guess what? It's only now that I realize, thanks to the COVID site and the COVID app that fastest finger first is the most difficult sport in this world. And I'm telling you why, because it is so difficult to get a vaccine appointment on that app or even on Arogya Setu. It comes on. You've been refreshing that page, sitting around for an hour, two hours, seeing where it's going to come up. It comes up. And as soon as you've refreshed, you see those green numbers. Okay, 100 slots. You click on it. And by the time you've typed in the capture code, it's gone. Right? Because so many people are trying to get vaccines right now. And yet we are called vaccine hesitant. Apparently, we're not being vaccinated because we're scared of getting vaccines. Forget about that. I've talked about that earlier as well. The mystery. And some of you probably have tracked this, but those who haven't, the mystery really is that how is it that we're getting vaccinated at such a low pace right now? What is the reason that when you go to the COVID app, you're sitting in Delhi trying to get an appointment. You simply can't get any at all. Why? Well, you think that, okay, we have a huge population and we're short of vaccines, right? The number of people who want to get vaccinated are much higher than our production, vaccine production right now. And we know that, you know, the Punjab government and the Delhi government say that they had approached Pfizer. And Pfizer said, oh, we can't sell it directly to you. We only sell it to the central federal government, the central governments of any country. We can't sell it to you. And we know that the center made no move till now to even try. And once they tried, now we know that Pfizer and Moderna are saying that there's a huge waiting list. We can't really give you anything. Give us your orders. It'll take time. This should have been done much earlier. It wasn't done. So we know there's a vaccine shortage. Now remember that both Serum Institute of India, which produces Covishit, which is the AstraZeneca Oxford vaccine and our homegrown vaccine, which is Covax, Covaxin, made by Bharat Biotech. Both of them had said that by May, we'll be ramping up our production level. So Serum Institute said that if we get a certain amount of money, 300 odd crore rupees from the government, then we'll be able to increase our production to 10 crore, 100 million doses every month. 10 crore doses a month. And Bharat Biotech said that by May, we'll be able to produce about 3 crore doses every month. At the two, how many do you get? You get 13 crore doses. Now divide that by the number of days in May. How many doses should you be getting? Approximately 42 lakh doses every day if that ramp-up has really happened. Because we're now almost at the end of May. So if the ramp-up didn't take place right at the beginning, at least by now, the daily doses available should be about 42 lakh doses per day. Okay, let's say that actually that didn't really happen. It was big talk, it didn't happen and these things can happen. You know, people say we are going to produce more but failed to produce more and they didn't. At least at the beginning of May, we knew that the government of India says that we are producing about 8.5 crore doses every month. Not the 13 crore promised by May, but 8.5 crore every month. Remember, you can say that there are these export obligations so some of it got exported. No, actually nothing has been exported this month. So on an average in the month of May, India should be producing about 27 lakh doses every day. Again, I'm saying the non-ramp-up, not the increased production, but just the old level of existing production, 8.5 crore doses. So 27 lakh doses should be produced every day. And guess how many people are managing to get vaccinated across India? Just 16 lakh every day. In fact, in the last few days, that number has fallen even further. It picked up again, but on some of the days it is dropping to about 13 odd lakhs a day. 27 lakh doses should be available to us. Instead of that, we are actually only being able to vaccinate 16 lakh. Let's say there is a 10% wastage. Let's say some corporates have bought and are hoarding it and they are going to gradually give it to their employees and the families of their employees take out another 10%. Take out 5 lakhs out of that 27 lakhs a day. How much have you left? 22 lakh vaccines should be available in terms of production to us based on the old assessment of what is being produced every month. That is from April, not right now. If I compare it to right now, the gap would be even more dramatic. Right now, we are still not being able to vaccinate the number of people, give the number of doses to people that we produce in India. We are not even being able to do that. This is incompetence of the highest order. This is bewildered incompetence. This is like a deer caught in the headlights. It doesn't know what to do. All governments, the entire system, the entire health system is unable to deliver. The logistics systems are unable to deliver vaccines to people. State governments are saying Telangana, Delhi, etc., that we don't have any vaccines. You have more available than you are currently giving, yet vaccines are not being sent to Delhi and Telangana. Why? Why is this happening? It is sheer mismanagement. Or even our old vaccine production numbers that we have been talking about are overestimates. They are probably overestimates which we didn't know about. So this is another point of poor planning and overstating. Another one where Indians are suffering. We will be able to vaccinate at the current rate, even at the peak rate of average of about 16.2 lakh vaccine doses per day. In May, we will be able to vaccinate about 5 crore odd people. Compare that to the 8.5 crore production level which we were supposed to have by the end of April. 3.5 crore doses are lying around which we are not being able to use on people. And people are playing that fastest finger first and they are forced to sit at home because they are not vaccinated and they are not going to get vaccinated.