The Health Minister will monitor the dry run in the national capital. (Representational)
New Delhi:
A dry run to check the best way to vaccinate people against COVID-19 and plug loopholes in logistics and training will be held in all the states today. This drive will also test the operational feasibility in the use of CoWIN application in a field environment. Short for Covid Vaccine Intelligence Network, CoWIN is a digital platform to roll out and scale up the vaccination drive. The massive exercise comes a day after a panel of government-appointed experts recommended approval for the Oxford COVID-19 vaccine, manufactured by Serum Institute of India, to the regulator Drugs Control Authority of India. Today’s exercise is the second dry run being conducted in the country – the first was on December 28 and 29 in Assam, Andhra Pradesh, Punjab and Gujarat.
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Some 96,000 vaccinators have been trained for this, the Health Ministry had said. Of these, 2,360 participants have been trained in the National Training of Trainers and over 57,000 with district-level training in 719 districts.
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The process, in which 25 health workers will receive dummy vaccines at each spot, is meant to test the mechanisms and reveal possible gaps in the system ahead of the actual vaccination drive. “An important focus of the dry run will be on management of any possible adverse events following immunization,” the Health Ministry said in a statement.
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Health Minister Harsh Vardhan have asked officials in all states to ensure that the vaccination sites and those in charge follow the checklist and standard operating procedure prepared by the Health Ministry and shared with all the states and Union Territories to guide them in the dry run.
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“Let us attempt to implement it as a real exercise with attention to the minute detail. Proper coordination will go a long way in building mutual understanding so that the upcoming vaccination drive may proceed without any glitch,” the Health Minister said, news agency PTI reported.
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The Health Minister will monitor the dry run in the national capital. The sites are Guru Teg Bahadur Hospital in Shahdara, urban primary health centre in Daryaganj and Venkateshwar Hospital in Dwarka.
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In Lucknow, the dry run will be held at six places. In Pune, it will be held in three healthcare centres, apart from Nagpur, Jalna, and Nandurbar. Chhattisgarh will hold the dry run at seven districts. The day-long drive will be carried out in four districts in Gujarat. Punjab will conduct the dry run in Patiala, and Haryana will carry out the exercise in Panchkula. In Kerala, the dry run will be held in four districts – Thiruvananthapuram, Idukki, Wayanad and Palakkad.
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India is awaiting vaccination for COVID-19 and it will start anytime soon after the regulator DCGI approves a vaccine. The Serum Institute of India (SII) is making the vaccine Covishield developed by Oxford University and pharma major AstraZeneca, while Bharat Biotech has partnered with the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) for its Covaxin.
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On how much would the vaccine cost and who will pay for it, AIIMS Director Dr Randeep Guleria told NDTV, “Currently, the vaccine cost is supported by the government, so this will be something which will be done as part of government initiative as any other vaccine programme, I don’t think it’s going to cost anything.”
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Cheaper and easier to distribute than rival shots, the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine could be a game-changer for global immunisation. Countries with relatively basic health infrastructure have high hopes for a shot that, unlike Pfizer’s, can be stored and transported under normal refrigeration, rather than super-cooled to -70 degree Celsius.
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Britain became the first country this week to authorise the AstraZeneca vaccine, moving ahead of other western countries as it seeks to stem a record surge of infections driven by a highly contagious form of the virus that has also surfaced in India.
