The clearance of the Moderna vaccine for limited emergency use will make it the fourth vaccine against coronavirus that will be available and used in India. The third vaccine to get approval - Russia's Sputnik V - has been soft-launched in different cities across the country as part of a pilot phase.
In Bengaluru, the Manipal Hospital held a vaccination camp for members of the transgender community where doses of Sputnik V were administered.
Divya Darshini, a physiotherapist who works for a community-based organisation, told NDTV, "For my vaccination, I was eagerly waiting for this vaccine - the Sputnik vaccine. The efficacy of this vaccine is more from what I have heard on social media and YouTube. Out of my own interest, I have taken this vaccine."
"There is a segment of the population that prefers to take Sputnik. The efficacy is around 92% and you complete the entire vaccination within 3 weeks' time, which is the least among vaccines available in the market," the hospital's Chief Operating Officer Karthik Rajagopal said.
"Less than four percent of the transgender community has been vaccinated. So when we looked at the stats, we believed that this is one community that probably needs to ramp up vaccinations," he said.
"Irrespective of what vaccine is used, the drive aims to get as many people vaccinated as possible," he added.
"We need as many vaccines as possible to cover a population of 1.3 billion people. No country will ever undertake such an exercise, probably other than China," Dr Satyanarayana Mysore, Head of Pulmonology, Manipal Hospital, told NDTV.
"Over the last six months, our hospital has been engaging with the LGBT community. We have cleared the misconceptions they have had. We have allayed the fears they had. This has been our motive - to be all-inclusive. We urge NGOs, corporate hospitals to join this kind of a campaign to vaccinate them," Dr Satyanarayana Mysore, Head of Pulmonology, Manipal Hospital, told NDTV.
The private sector in Bengaluru has been actively involved in the vaccination campaign.
The eligible population for Covid-19 vaccination in the city is around 99 lakhs - 50 lakh doses have been administered so far.
The city's civic body BBMP said it is targeting almost one lakh vaccines a day in the capital city so that it is better protected by the time the third wave hits.
"The limited pilot soft-launch of the Sputnik V vaccine in India that was initiated by Dr. Reddy's in Hyderabad on May 14 has been successfully scaled up to Vizag, Bengaluru, Mumbai, Kolkata, Delhi, Chennai, Miryalaguda, Vijayawada, Baddi, Kolhapur, Kochi, Raipur, Chandigarh, Pune, Nagpur, Nashik, Coimbatore, Ranchi, Jaipur, Lucknow, and Patna. By the end of this final leg of the pilot phase, we aim to reach 28 cities in total," a statement from Dr Reddy's Laboratory - which is manufacturing the vaccine in India - said.
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