Shillong, June 2: With SBI Ecowarp report predicting the third wave of COVID-19 pandemic as imminent and vaccination being the key to reducing the deaths, Meghalaya’s Leader of Opposition and senior Congress legislator, Dr. Mukul Sangma has also emphasised on vaccination as the best way to fight against the pandemic.

Stressing that “vaccination is the arsenal to fight against this virus” and the war against the Corona virus is to be won collectively with vaccination being key to it, Dr. Sangma on Wednesday urged both the Centre and State government to provide free of cost ‘universal vaccination’ to all citizens including children to protect Meghalaya from the impending third wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We are urging both the state government and the Union government to aggressively put in place all the measures to complete universal vaccination free of cost (to all citizens),” he told reporters after conducting an inspection of Shillong Civil Hospital here.

As COVID-19 has been notified as a disaster, he said the government must try its best to prevent the third wave and take the responsibility to ensure that infrastructure and facilities are in place to treat the infected ones. According to him, mitigation and prevention are the integral part of approach to deal with any disaster.

“Therefore, vaccination must be there on time. We will still talk to the government and we will still put pressure as may be felt needed to ensure this happens,” the former Chief Minister said.

Explaining the need for universal vaccination, he said if vulnerable groups are around that have not been immunized, the virus have new hosts available which means “the virus will continue to circulate around us and attack us at will”.

“Therefore, if you want to protect your family against the virus of COVID-19 therefore you’ll have to have vaccination,” he underscored.