I am astonished that a learned and erudite person like Dr.

Harshvardhan is making statements which are

completely contrary to the data provided by his own Ministry.

I cannot fathom the reasons that have prompted him to do so when he has been absolutely delightful
whenever I had an opportunity to interact with him over official video-conferencing or in informal one to
one phone calls and personal meetings. He has also been appreciative and encouraging of our efforts as
lately as in the video conference on 6th of April,2021.

Yet, since, these allegations have been made; I am forced to respond to these serious and baseless
allegations.

The primary allegation is regarding introducing Vaccine Hesitancy in the state of Chhattisgarh.

The first and primary data to answer this allegation is available on COWIN database (as on 7th April 05:00
pm) which clearly states that Chhattisgarh has achieved 10 percent population coverage in administration
of the first dose of vaccine. This places Chhattisgarh in top position in the country along with Kerala and
Gujarat in terms of first dose vaccination coverage with only small states like Sikkim, Tripura, Lakshadweep
and Ladakh being ahead. If these allegations are not politically driven then, why has the Union Ministers
statement failed to question the worst performing states like UP, Bihar and Assam which have achieved
only 3 percent coverage of the population.

As far as my initial objections regarding COVAXIN were concerned, I still stand by them. My objection had
been that there is an international protocol in place regarding Vaccine trials which provides that there has
to be a three Phase Trial with international peer review and initially, COVAXIN was being administered in
clinical trial mode which was at variance with the international protocol. From the time Clinical Trial Mode
was withdrawn by DCGI, Chhattisgarh has also allowed administration of COVAXIN.

The issue still remains that we are among the highest in Vaccine administration in the country and thus
there is no basis for saying that there is vaccine hesitancy in the state.

The second allegation was regarding extraordinary reliance on Rapid Antigen Tests and some vague
connection to extraordinarily high number of deaths due to it.

Firstly, we are testing more than 40,000 people on a daily basis and our attempt is to find and locate and
provide immediate treatment to all positive patients in our state. On 6 April 2021, the Tests per Million in
th

our neighbouring states is as follows:

Andhra Madhya
Chhattisgarh Maharashtra Jharkhand Odisha Telangana
Pradesh Pradesh
1627 1653 608 703 568 1658 490

The above figure makes it clear that our testing is on a higher side and that we are actually working with
complete data transparency. We have reduced our percentage of Anti-gen tests from 80% in October
2020 down to 59% as on 7th April 2021. We are constantly increasing our RTPCR testing capacity with 4
new labs scheduled to be operational this week and 5 more labs are also being established, something
which we had appraised the Union about during the video conferencing on 6th April 2021.

With-regards to this second allegation with number of deaths in the state I am at a total loss to understand
its connection to anti-gen tests. We totally understand that anti-gen tests are no substitute to RTPCR tests
in terms of sensitivity (though specificity is almost the same for both tests), but Rapid Antigen Tests do
help in early identification which is important to implement the strategy of test, trace and treatment. As
per ICMR protocol every symptomatic Anti-Gen negative case is followed up by RT-PCR test to ensure
that we do not miss a single positive case.

As per ICMR data on testing as on 8th April 2021, there are 8 states which have a higher percentage of
Rapid Antigen Testing compared to Chhattisgarh, with 6 states having more than 70% testing done via
Rapid Antigen Tests. They have somehow failed to draw the attention of the honourable Union Minister
of the Government of India.

In meantime, we have created 2386 oxygenated beds in government sector since start of COVID and in
addition we have also established 21 Oxygen Generation Plants in our Government Hospitals to ensure
that there is no shortage of oxygen, which provides critical life support to serious COVID patients. 3 more
such oxygen generation plants are under construction.

So it would be really helpful if the Union Government instead of being discriminatory, acted in a fair and
impartial manner and actually pulled up the worst performers, rather than single out Chhattisgarh which
is performing reasonably well on the national index.