As India finds itself caught amidst Covid scare and dearth of vaccines, the government has claimed that the country has overtaken the United States in terms of the number of people who have received the first dose of COVID-19 vaccine.

“As per the data, the number of people who have received at least one dose of vaccine in India is 17.2 crore. We have overtaken the US in terms of the number of people in our country who have received the first dose of vaccine,” said Member Health NITI Aayog Dr VK Paul.

Asserting that country needs more time to achieve high coverage of vaccination, he said: “When the peak is declining and we suddenly get into same behaviour as a society like in January and February, it (the virus) will come back again in a certain way. We have to buy time to ensure that we achieve high coverage of our vaccination.”

Meanwhile, Union Health Ministry’s Joint secretary, Lav Agarwal commented about the drop in the number of active cases, and said, “There has been a continuous decrease in districts reporting more than 100 average daily new cases; 257 districts report more than 100 daily cases.”

On the other hand, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday said that the wastage figures of Covid vaccines continue to be on the higher side and asked authorities to take steps to tackle this issue.

“PM instructed that vaccine wastage numbers are still on the higher side and steps need to be taken to bring them down,” said the statement.