MUMBAI: Around 11 am on Saturday, the ‘smartest’ vaccination drive ever will be simultaneously e-kickstarted by Prime Minister Narendra Modi at Mumbai’s Cooper Hospital and Jalna’s district hospital.
“We aim to vaccinate 28,500 healthcare workers against Covid-19 across the state by Saturday evening,” said state health minister Rajesh Tope. The state has 285 vaccine centres, including six sites where the Bharat Biotech vaccine Covaxin would be administered, and each will vaccinate 100 healthcare workers.
In Mumbai, once the worst hotspot of Covid in the country, the BMC health machinery will aim to vaccinate 4,000 doctors, nurses and paramedical staff through 40 vaccination booths set up in 10 hospitals. By Friday afternoon, Mumbai’s 10 launch day centres had received 4,000 doses of Covishield each. The vaccine vans were escorted by police.
National Health Mission commissioner N Ramaswami said, “Our dry runs have shown that each vaccination takes around 4-4.5 minutes. Depending on the experience of the first few days, we will decide about scaling up.”
A few technical glitches, however, marred the euphoria shown by public health officials. “We haven’t been able to log into the CoWIN software the whole day and hence haven’t been to send system-generated SMS to first-day beneficiaries,” said senior BMC officials. Late in the evening, telephone calls were being made to contact the first-day beneficiaries.
Ramaswami said that most centres had been asked to call up their own employees for the Saturday drive. “We believe there is some glitch which is being sorted out,” he said.
There also was confusion over the number of days that the vaccinate would be available. While state health minister Rajesh Tope told TOI that the first phase of the drive for healthcare workers would entail four days a week of vaccination, senior BMC officials were not clear about it. “We have prepared for Saturday and Sunday, and will continue the vaccination drive on Monday if we get directions from the state,” said a senior civic official.
To iron out the problems, including second thoughts that some healthcare workers have about the vaccine, Ramaswami, and also some of the city's prominent doctors, including head of Covid-19 taskforce Dr Sanjay Oak and another member Dr Shashank Joshi, have been requested to take the vaccine on the first day as a confidence-building measure.
Meanwhile, the BMC focused on preparedness at its vaccination centre at Cooper Hospital in Vile Parle where the prime minister will interact with health workers through video conferencing. And, at the BKC field hospital, chief minister Uddhav Thackeray will visit to monitor the vaccination process and interact with the help staff. Environment minister Aaditya Thackeray, mayor Kishori Pednekar and BMC commissioner I S Chalal will accompany the chief minister.
Additional municipal commissioner Suresh Kakani said, “We are very excited as Covid vaccination is starting in the city and it’s a big day for us. We have been handling Covid cases for months and have managed to control the spread. The vaccination will lead it to a logical end.”
He said, “In our initial vaccination list we included all health workers, even those working in private hospitals, nursing home apart from civic-run hospitals and contractual health workers.”
The BMC got 1.34 lakh doses of Serum Institute-produced Covishield and 1.3 lakh health workers listed with the BMC for vaccination. The BMC has trained 7,000 health staff for conducting the vaccination and they are in the process to train 10,000 more.