Mumbai civic body to restart vaccination drive from Tuesday

After a two-day halt following the launch on Saturday, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) will on Tuesday restart its Covid-19 vaccination drive for 130,000 healthcare workers, under the first part of the programme.

A total of 1,926 healthcare workers were vaccinated across the city on Saturday. However, the drive was suspended owing to technical glitches in CoWIN, the mobile application used for registration of vaccine beneficiaries across the country. While the civic body claimed the application is now functional and they are undertaking tests by sending text messages to vaccine beneficiaries, it plans to conduct the vaccination drive only four days a week — Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday. The drive will be gradually increased to five days a week, said civic officials.

Dr Sheela Jagtap, immunisation officer of the BMC, said, “The aim is to vaccinate 4,000 health workers daily, and gradually increase the capacity. We conducted tests throughout Monday, by sending text messages to the vaccine beneficiaries. In case, the text messages do not get delivered, we will call them individually. For now, the vaccination will happen on four days a week —Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.”

According to BMC officials, until Saturday, they were calling individuals and asking them to come to the respective centres for vaccination, but later they were asked to stop the process, and conduct it only via CoWIN application. However, now they have got the go-ahead to restart the process by calling beneficiaries, in case the application does not function.

While the BMC has sent text messages to vaccine beneficiaries via the CoWIN app, in addition to this all the 24 Covid war rooms will be provided with the list of beneficiaries to inform them individually about the place and time of inoculation by calling them.

A total of 1,926 health workers were vaccinated on Saturday, according to BMC, and 200 staffers, including 80 vaccinators, were involved in the process.

Meanwhile, the BMC has maintained that no adverse effect or major side effect has been reported among healthcare workers who got vaccinated on Saturday. However, a few workers complained of fever, chills, body ache on Sunday — a day after getting the vaccine shot. By Monday, all these workers said they were feeling better.

A senior doctor, who took the vaccine and did not wish to be named, said, “On Sunday, for the entire day, I felt a little weak with some body ache. Hence, I took a normal pain killer after which I felt better on Monday.”