India’s 1m shots in 6 days is world’s fastest rollout

The six days that it took India to administer more than one million doses of vaccines against Covid-19 makes it the fastest rollout of a million vaccine shots against the pandemic among countries that have placed their inoculation data in the public domain.

A week into India’s vaccination drive, which began on January 16, nearly 1.3 million (12.7 lakh) shots have been administered, the health ministry said. By Thursday night, 10.4 lakh vaccines had been given, the government stated.

US leading global vaccine drive, has given 17.5m shots

Prior to India administering a million doses in six days, the fastest known rollout of Covid-19 vaccines took place in the US, which achieved a million doses in 10 days of launching the vaccination drive on December 14 last year. The UK, where inoculations began on December 8, had vaccinated around 130,000 people in the first week and had reached close to a million doses only by December 26.

The rollout details in China, where 15 million doses had reportedly been administered by January 20, are not publicly available. The head of Chinese government-owned Sinopharm Group, which has developed a Covid vaccine that is being widely used, was quoted by Nature journal as saying China had achieved one million vaccinations in November itself.

Globally, nearly 57m vaccine shots had been given till Thursday, with the US leading the way with 17.5m doses, followed by China (15m), the UK (5.4m), Israel (3.3m), UAE (2.3m), Germany (1.4m), Italy (1.3m), Turkey (1.1m) and Spain

(1.1m). India was in 10th place till Thursday night, the latest period based on which comparisons can be made.