Doctors and patients in New Delhi and financial hub Mumbai said it was taking between three and eight days to find slots for the highly accurate RT-PCR tests and get their results.

The government presently levies 10 percent customs or import duty plus a 16.5 percent I-GST and social welfare surcharge on vaccines coming from overseas. These taxes would make the imported vaccines costlier than the ones made by Serum Institute of India (SII) and Bharat Biotech.

Furthermore, owing to the complexity, and urgency of the situation it is challenging to supply it independently to each corporate entity.We would urge all corporate and private individuals to access the vaccines through the state facilitated machinery and private health systems,” it said in a statement.

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The current production capacity of indigenously developed Covaxin vaccine will be doubled by May-June 2021 and then increased nearly 6-7 fold by July-August 2021 i.e increasing the production from 10 million vaccine doses in April, 2021 to 60-70 million vaccine dose per month in July-August,” said the ministry of science and technology in a statement on Monday.