Mumbai : Maharashtra minister Aaditya Thackeray said on Monday the state has set a record of administering vaccines to 800,000 people in a day against the coronavirus disease (Covid-19), adding it can conduct 1.5 million inoculations within a span of 24 hours. “Our effort is to make the vaccines available to the people as soon as possible,” Thackeray, the tourism and environment minister, was quoted as saying by news agency ANI.His comments come as several districts in Maharashtra continue to grapple with a shortage of Covid-19 vaccine doses to inoculate people at the earliest. Authorities have till now administered vaccines to 44,672,654 people across the state of which 33,440,863 have received the first dose and the remaining 11,231,791 have been fully vaccinated.

Maharashtra was the first state in India to administer both doses of the vaccine to more than 10 million people. However, the shortage of vaccines has led to the suspension of inoculation drives in recent months, including July.

Last week, state health minister Rajesh Tope reiterated the demand for more vaccines by saying a majority of the Covid-19 cases are from Maharashtra and the death rate due to the viral disease is also high. “ We want to immunize the people as soon as possible. In this way, the effect of the third wave in the state would be less,” Tope said on July 28.

Maharashtra has recorded 6,310,194 Covid-19 cases, 132,948 people have succumbed to the disease and 6,094,896 have recovered till now.

Meanwhile, as the government is planning to ease the ongoing lockdown like restrictions in 25 districts where the Covid-19 growth rate and the positivity rate is lesser than the state average, state minister Aaditya Thackeray said on Saturday that Maharashtra has to start preparing for the third wave of the pandemic as soon as the relaxations are introduced. “When the third wave will hit us depends on us; as soon as we start opening things, we need to start preparing for the third wave,” he told HT.