Under the leadership of the Rajasthan Chief Minister Shri Ashok Gehlot, the state has performed brilliantly in the last two years to overcome Coronavirus, the biggest pandemic of the century. Our state has been a leader in the country from Coronavirus management to vaccination. Our country has completed one year of the vaccination drive. It was the result of the Chief Minister’s determination and good governance that the state did not see the worst of the calamity amid the horrors of the pandemic. There were times in the second wave, during May, June, and July that the state ran out of its stock of vaccines. At that time, the government managed to get vaccines, using chartered planes twice, without stopping the vaccination drive. Hence, Rajasthan became the first state in the country that was efficient and avoided any hindrance that could occur in the vaccination drive. The Chief Minister even did global tendering to vaccinate the people of the state, thus making Rajasthan the only state to release a budget of Rs 3200 crores. This happened twice in the last year, in August and December when Rajasthan administered more than 1 crore vaccines in just 30 days!
The greatest achievement that Rajasthan has got in the past year is that 100 percent of the people above 60 years of age have taken both doses. To date, 100% of eligible people in the state have received their first dose of Covid vaccination and a lot of people have received the second dose. Precautionary doses have been given to more than 5 lakh, 19 thousand elderly people with comorbidities. Rajasthan was also at the front in getting children of ages 15 to 18 vaccinated in just 17 days, more than 60 percent were given the first dose. Due to the sincere efforts of the Rajasthan Government, today the percentage of Covid vaccination in all sections of the state is more than the national average.
Since the inception of the vaccination drive, Rajasthan has been among the best states in the country in outperforming WHO statistics. The only goal of the government was to maintain the rapid pace of the vaccination drive in this one year. The health department, doctors, nurses, personnel, officers, and the general public also played an important role in this. Additionally, to strengthen the security circle, the government made both the doses of vaccine mandatory for all educational and non-educational staff of all educational and coaching institutes, students above 18 years of age, school bus drivers, auto and cab drivers in the state. Instructions have been given to compulsorily administer both doses of the vaccine by January 31, 2022, to the people connected with every essential service in the state and the public using them.
Given the horrific scenes that were revealed during the first and second waves of Covid, rapid vaccination was done in Rajasthan so that people could be protected from this devastating pandemic. In the last year, this boom has been seen all over Rajasthan. Due to the efforts of the Rajasthan government and the fast pace of vaccination, the situation in Rajasthan has not been too critical with the threat that Covid generally brings, even after the new variant of Omicron arrived. In real terms, it is the Chief Minister of the state, Shri Ashok Gehlot, who has worked hard to bring the citizens of Rajasthan out of danger in the face of a horrendous pandemic like Covid.