COVID vaccine drive not delayed; free inoculation for priority groups: AIIMS Director

AIIMS Director Dr Randeep Guleria said that there will be no delay in the immunization process as the government is aggressively working on the Covid-19 mass vaccination program. Priority groups have been identified and the vaccine will be free for the healthcare & frontline workers as well as the elderly, he added.

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According to Dr Guleria, the mechanism and the twin aims of the vaccination drive is to decrease the mortality as we do not want more people to die because of COVID-19 and to break the chain of transmission in which we will aim having a sufficient number of people vaccinated, therefore the cases will come down automatically.

"With these aims, we have to see how many people we have to vaccinate. We want to vaccinate our higher population--those having co-morbidity and the elderly because they have a higher chance of having a severe Covid-19 infection. We know that there are people who have got the infection and already have the immunity and if we give the vaccine to them then another significant number of people get immunity, In that way, we may have reached so-called 'herd immunity' and we may not need to vaccinate larger number of the entire population because we broke the chain of transmission," he added.

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Dr Guleria stated that once the virus is not able to spread and gradually dies down, the number of cases will become very few. It will depend upon how the virus behaves in the next year, and if we find the number of cases becomes very few and it is like ordinary influenza cases that we see every year, we may not have to vaccinate the entire population.

"By the latter half of 2021, we will have more than one vaccine which will be available and it will allow us to vaccinate large part of the population and thereby protect them in a much better way," he added.

A member of the National task force on Covid-19 management, Dr Guleria said that the government is working to develop a very good mechanism for the mass vaccination drive, in order to maintain the cold chain, having temperature monitors at the cold storage sites where the vaccine will be stored, training staff, making sure that enough syringes are available for vaccinating people.

"The digital platform Covid Vaccine Intelligence Network (Co-WIN) is being used to monitor everything so that it is done properly. Since the government is rolling this out, they will make sure that the data using Aadhaar cards and other identities will be used to give the vaccine to the person who needs to be vaccinated as per the data available to the government. The chances of misuse are very limited," he said.

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Dr Guleria claimed that as of now, for the priority groups which are health care workers, frontline workers and the higher risk groups (elderly), vaccines will be provided by the government and there is no charge for this. It will be given to everyone, even in the government or the private sector as far as the priority is concerned.

The AIIMS director informed that the government has created a group to look at the Covid-19 vaccination drive. The group has done detailed discussion and based on that the priority groups have already been set-up. The work on who should be vaccinated has been done. Their data is being uploaded on the government website.

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Vaccination drive not delayed in India, AIIMS Director contends 

"I don't think we are delaying the vaccination process, we are making sure that we have a safe and effective vaccine that can be rolled out for the entire country. The most important thing for us is that the vaccine should satisfy the regulators and it is safe and effective for our population. Therefore we cannot say that we just start giving vaccination because it has been approved in some other countries, where it is tried on very different populations. There can be ethnic differences from one group to another, therefore we should not rush into doing something when we are not sure that it is safe. So, once the data is good enough, we should roll it out on a big scale", he explained.

Dr Guleria also assured that AIIMS has a large number of healthcare workers and they are qualified for vaccination.

(With ANI inputs)