“1,000,000,000 doses administered in India,” UAE-based Gulf News screamed in bold letters on the front page the morning after India achieved the goal of administration of a billion Covid vaccines in the country of ‘nearly 1.4 billion.’
About half of the South Asian nation people have received at least one dose while around 20 per cent are fully immunised according to ‘Our World in Data’, the UAE’s leading daily said in its analysis on Friday morning, a closed holiday for the region with an expat Indian population in the tens of millions.
Languishes in phases
“Many of those shots have come in just the past couple of months, after the rollout languished in the first half of the year amid vaccine shortages and problems with the system for rolling them out.” Khaleej Times, another leading daily from the region, highlighted India achieving a ‘milestone of hope’ and quoted VK Paul, head of its Covid-19 task force as saying that ramping up the second dose is “an…