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More than 250 people have registered for vaccination against COVID-19 and one person has received the precautionary shot in India on June 6, 2025, according to the CoWIN portal.
The country's active caseload is 5,364 as of June 6 morning, showed the COVID-19 dashboard of the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW).
While people are registering to get inoculated amid the growth in COVID-19 infections, it is not clear if the country has a usable stockpile of vaccine doses at its disposal.
The CoWin portal showed that there is only one site in the country conducting vaccination at the moment.
It has been three years since the manufacturing of two most popular vaccine candidates was discontinued in India — Covishield in December 2021 and Covaxin in January 2022. Of the 2.2 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccine administered, some 1.74 billion were Covishield and 363.9 million were Covaxin.
Covishield, that accounted for 80 per cent of the doses, has a shelf life of nine months, according to Adar Poonawala, the chief executive of Serum Institute of India (SII) that manufactures Covishield. Talking at the Developing Countries Vaccine Manufacturers Network in Pune in October 2022, Poonawala had shared that SII had to destroy 100 million doses of Covishield that expired in September 2022.
After vaccination for the infection was rolled out in the beginning of 2021, the central government started providing booster shots to the vulnerable population — health workers and the elderly — by January 2022. But uptake was low and only 227 million doses have been administered till date, according to the CoWIN portal by MOHFW.
In March 2023, Jharkhand's Sadar Hospital in Deogarh district had to destroy 1,95,000 unused doses of expired COVID-19 vaccines. In November 2023, it was reported that Maharashtra had to throw away 1.34 million expired doses COVID-19 vaccines Covishield, Covaxin and Corbevax, amounting to a loss of Rs 26 crore.
In January 2022, some private hospitals in Kerala alerted that more than 260,000 doses of Covishield were about to expire by March 2022 and will be forced to dispose them if the government doesn't buy back.
Karnataka also faced similar requests from private hospitals, while their own stock was also nearing expiry, and had to conduct massive vaccine drive in February 2023 to finish up the available stock and avoid wastage.
There were reports of vaccine vials lying unutilised in West Bengal as well.
With the low uptake, private hospitals across the country have been discouraged to procure COVID-19 vaccines.
Further, apart from some state governments like Delhi, there has been no direction to ensure vaccine availability. There has been no indication for the need of mass vaccination amid the current rise in cases.
Calls to three prominent private hospitals in Delhi for a COVID-19 vaccination appointment revealed that none have doses available at the moment. One of them informed that the vaccine can be administered if the person can source the dose and bring it to the hospital.
A report in The Hindu with inputs from multiple states mentioned that the country has no stocks at present, citing a government official. "Most states, including Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and West Bengal have no stocks or supplies of the vaccine at present either in the government or private sector," read the report. These states have reported the highest increase in infections since mid-May.
The public healthcare facilities in the United States is in a state of confusion regarding COVID-19 vaccination, since Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr announced that the government has removed vaccine recommendation for healthy children and pregnant women. The decision was not on advise of an expert panel of the the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and led to the resignation of Dr Lakshmi Panagiotakopoulos, paediatric infectious disease expert with US CDC and part of a working group that advised the medical community on COVID-19 vaccination.