Covid-19 vaccination drive: Here’s how frontline healthcare workers will be administered shots

India’s 1st phase Covid-19 vaccination drive is all set to begin in a few weeks with three prominent drugmaker companies rallying for emergency use approval. The high-level expert group is also gearing up with the logistics parts of the dose administration to Indians. According to the latest guidelines, top coronavirus experts of the government have decided that the vaccine will be administrated depending on the likelihood of adverse reaction on the candidate.

Government sources close to the development has informed IE that there will be three separate rooms in each vaccination centre. The first room will be the waiting chamber, the second room is for the actual vaccine administration and in the third room, the vaccinated beneficiaries will be kept under observation for at least 30 minutes to find out if they have developed any adverse effect during that period. The beneficiaries will need to report an adverse health event on the digital platform, CoWin made for vaccine management.

The sources further said that since each session will take 30 minutes from getting the dose to reporting of their health, only 100 shots will be administered in a day. The vaccine sessions and vaccination sites will be managed by CoWin.

According to an earlier IE report, 1 crore frontline Covid warriors will be receiving vaccine shots early next year. CoWin is now in the process of feeding the system with all the data for verification and certification. The data management will be done on two levels. State and centre. Once the centre has certified the data, the states will require special permission to make any amendment. Moreover 2.39 lakh health care workers, many of whom are midwives will be trained for administering the vaccine doses, the data of which will be uploaded by the states on CoWin.

The central agencies have asked the states to ramp up their AEFI (Adverse Event Following Immunisation) network. District Immunisation Officers have been asked to identify a nodal officer for AEFI surveillance. That person will train other doctors for recording vaccination histories on beneficiaries in OPDs, casualty and inpatient admission. Medical officers will also record adverse events after vaccine administration, ‘severe, serious or minor’ in an AEFI register and the nodal officer will review it weekly. Both private and government health centers will be roped in for the first round of vaccination drive on frontline workers.

Meanwhile, both Serum Institute of India and Bharat Biotech have approached the Drug Controller General of India. (DGCI) seeking approval for Covishield and Covaxin respectively. Pfizer that already got a nod in the UK was the first to seek emergency use approval to DGCI for its mRNA candidate.