‘No cause for fear... Happy to be in first few to get vaccinated’

Dr Sudhir Bhandari, principal and controller, SMS Medical College and Hospital, who played a pivotal role in the effective management of the Covid-19 disease in the city, received the first dose of the vaccine on Saturday along with three colleagues, doctors Ish Munjal, Tarun Patni and GL Sharma.

Bhandari, who is a member of the state advisory board for Covid-19, said, “I am happy that I am among the first few persons selected to get vaccinated. It is a proud moment that our country has developed a vaccine to deal with the pandemic. There is no cause for fear.”

He added that a vaccine usually took more than 10 years to develop starting from initial research and testing to approval for general use.

“With the Covid-19 vaccines, there have been exponential advances in scientific understanding from the initial genetic code released globally to numerous laboratories developing potential vaccines in only 10 months and more importantly, there has been the sharing of information,” he said.

Experts agree that efforts to tackle the Sars-CoV-2 virus, which causes the coronavirus disease, capitalise on decades of advances made globally in the study of the coronavirus as well as on immunisation technologies.

Saturday saw the launch of one of the world’s biggest Covid vaccination programmes as 300 million recipients will receive the jab in the first phase.

The official schedule aimed to innoculate 300,000 people across 3,351 centres around the country. At least 191,181 people were vaccinated around the country today.

Eminent persons, doctors, nurses and frontline workers including sanitation and anganwadi workers were among the first to take the jab of either of the two vaccines approved in India: Covaxin, developed by Bharat Biotech Ltd and Covishield, developed by Oxford-Astra Zeneca and manufactured by Serum Institute of India in Pune.

Rajasthan has seen over 314,600 cases of the virus since the outbreak.