India is ready to roll out COVID-19 vaccine for the masses within 10 days of approval, claims Health Ministry

• India’s Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW) claims that it will be ready to roll out the COVID-19 vaccine for the masses starting January after a successful nationwide dry-run of the vaccination exercise — Co-WIN Vaccine Delivery Management System.
• The ministry declared that there were no major issues observed during the dry run and that any minor issues were addressed.
• Since the approval came in on January 3, the vaccine should be on track to the masses starting January 13 or even earlier.

India recently conducted a nationwide dry-run of the COVID-19 immunisation drive and the results show that it will be ready to roll out the vaccine within 10 of Emergency Use Authorisation (EUA) approval coming in.


Since the Serum Institute of India’s (SII) Covishield and Bharat Biotech’s Covaxin COVID-19 vaccines officially got the green stamp from the Drugs Controller General of India (DCGI) on January 3, they should be on track to the masses starting January 13 or even earlier.

According to the Ministry of Health of Family Welfare and Health (MoHFW), there were no major issues during the exercise dubbed Co-WIN Vaccine Delivery Management System. Minor issues were noted, which have since been addressed.

“All states expressed confidence in the operational guidelines and IT platform for large scale programme implementation,” said Rajesh Bhushan, the Secretary of the Health Ministry at the press conference.

As for the new UK strain of COVID-19, the ministry has not observed any ‘untoward clusters’ growing in the country aside from the 58 cases registered so far. In fact, India is the first country in the world to culture the new variant of the virus.

Who will get the vaccine first in India?

India’s Ministry of Health has sent states and union territories (UTs) guidelines on managing the massive challenge for distributing the vaccine across the seventh-largest country in the world with the second-largest population.

The guidelines dictate that no more than 100 people can be present during a session at each site per day. However, the centre noted that the number of people per session could be increased to 200 — if the supporting logistics are present.

“Conduct of the vaccination process [will be] similar to the election process,” said the government’s draft standard operating procedure (SOP) document. People who are above the age of 50 will be identified using the Lok Sabha voter list.

All the beneficiaries will be tracked using the Co-WIN platform.

The number of active cases in India has continuously been declining since September and currently stands at around 2.5 lakh.

India’s positivity rate has been below 3% since December 23, and the average number of recovered cases have exceeded new cases for the past five weeks, according to MoHFW’s data.

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