A year after the pandemic upturned our way of living, the vaccination has finally become more of a reality than just wishful thinking. With priority being placed on approximately three crore health workers and other frontline workers, the first ones to receive the vaccinations will be them. According to the Health Ministry, the vaccination drive will begin on Saturday, 16th of January 2021. Once the initial phase of giving vaccines to frontline workers comes to an end, next on the priority line are those aged above 50 after which come those aged below 50 but have comorbidities. This number in itself comes up to a whopping 27 crore. This news was released after the Prime Minister had participated in a meeting, to assess the state of the pandemic in the country along with assessing how prepared each state and union territory was for the vaccine drive.
PM Modi was then briefed about the centre’s as well as states’ and union territories’ advances in preparing to distribute the vaccine. The official announcement stated that the two vaccines namely Covishield and Covaxin that had proved to be safe and also established immunogenicity were in fact granted Accelerated Approval or Emergency Use Authorization.
The announcement also mentioned the use of Co-Win Vaccine Delivery System, a digital platform set to provide one with real-time information on vaccine stocks, individualized tracking of the beneficiaries of the covid vaccine as well as its storage temperature. A staggering amount of more than 79 lakh beneficiaries have already registered themselves for this program and it will be helping program managers across different levels through automated session allocation. After the vaccine schedule has been successfully completed, a digital certificate declaring the same shall also be generated.
According to Ministry data, vaccinators and vaccine administrators have also been continuously given the required training to execute this vaccination drive. A total of 2,360 participants were trained at the national level while 61,000 program managers, 2 lakh vaccinators, and 3.7 lakh other vaccination team members were also trained in various states, union territories, and districts. According to PM Modi, three phases of dry runs have also been conducted across the country.
It has been decided that the vaccination drive will start following festivals like Lohri, Makar Sankranti, Pongal, Magh Bihu, and more.
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