Shipping Facilities: The government announced that the vaccination drive in India will commence from January 16 and now it is finalising the shipping facilities and other such needs to ensure supply of vaccines to every state.

This will be the largest vaccination drive in the world against coronavirus where nearly 30 million people will be vaccinated under this campaign. The Union Health Minister is finalising all the arrangements with regards to coronavirus vaccines. This will take into consideration arrangements from manufacturers to storage facilities. 

On Sunday, it was confirmed that the Civil ministry will be collaborating with different stats to take care of all such shipping needs. Apart from vaccinating these 30 million people on priority basis, the government plans to vaccinate 270 million others in six to eight months. 

The additional secretary of the health ministry Manohar Agnani said as he was monitoring the preparations made for shipping the vaccines, “Arrangements are being made for shipping the vaccine supplies after orders are issued in coming days without wasting any time. Expeditious transport of vaccines is being ensured from state vaccine stores to last-mile cold chain points by all states and Union territories.”

To monitor the progress of vaccination drive, a digital platform was launched called CoWIN, which will track the status of the whole process. On the given application, around 8 million health workers were registered till January 9, says a report. 

Agnani also talked about the money approved by the finance ministry saying that it has been distributed according to the beneficiary load in all the states. “The money is being disbursed among states according to the beneficiary load to fund the operational cost of the vaccination for the first 10 million beneficiary vaccinations.” 

The finance ministry had announced that Rs 480 crore has been approved for the operation cost of conducting the vaccination drive. 

Oxford-AstraZeneca’s covishield and Bharat Biotech’s Covaxin are two vaccines that were cleared by the Drug Controller General of India for emergency use. The Covishield is locally manufactured by Serum Institute of India. Covaxin however has been restricted to emergency situations in ‘clinical trial model

The government held a meeting on Sunday through video conferencing where they reviewed the functioning of CoWIN software with all the state representatives.