COVID-19 vaccines for masses in next few days: Union Health Minister

COVID-19 vaccines will be provided to the people of the country in the next few days, says Union Health Minister Dr Harsh Vardhan.

“In the next few days, in the near future, we should be able to give these vaccines to our countrymen. It will be given to our healthcare professional followed by frontline workers,” he told reporters after visiting the Rajiv Gandhi Government General Hospital in Chennai to review the arrangements for COVID-19 vaccine dry run. “We have ensured that every detail is conveyed to the people from the national level to the grassroots level. Lakhs of healthcare workers trained and the process continues.”

Vardhan said a dry run was conducted in about 125 districts in the country on January 2. He highlighted that its being carried out across the country, except in three states who had it done earlier. “Haryana and Arunachal Pradesh will not be participating in this dry run as they have already conducted them in all their districts.” The minister said that lessons learnt from the earlier exercise will be made use to execute another dry run. He said whatever was lacking earlier has been rectified, and will be tested in Friday’s dry run.

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“All participating districts will identify three types of sessions for the mock drive: district hospital, medical college/private health facility, urban/rural outreach. Following this, beneficiary registration, micro-planning and vaccination will take place. Then, site organizers will have to hold review meetings after the session to gather feedback,” Vardhan said.

The mock drills are being conducted are aimed at familiarizing district and block-level officials with the process of the vaccine roll-out and vaccination. The exercise will also test the operational feasibility of the CoWIN application in a field environment. CoWIN, which is short for COVID Vaccine Intelligence Network, is a digital platform to roll out and scale up the vaccination drive.