Keypoints:
- Air India may be used to transport vaccines across the country in the first phase.
- Air India could be the sole airline to transport vaccines during the first phase of inoculation, targeting frontline workers.
- The flight is the first of many in the coming months as India readies to vaccinate hundreds of millions.
Thursday marked an important milestone for India as the first vaccine doses arrived from the Serum Institute of India’s (SII) facility in Pune to New Delhi. The vaccines flew on Air India flight AI 850, which departed Pune at 18:40 local time.
With the vaccination drive less than a week away, Air India could get the contract to fly the vaccine during the first inoculation phase. The first phase will see 20 million frontline workers receiving the shot across the country, requiring 40 million doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine.
“All details on vaccine transportation are being worked out but Air India is likely to be used to ferry vaccines in the first phase,” said an anonymous government source.
Several such shipments will reach other major cities in the country over the next 72 hours, as the government prepares to roll-out the vaccine to around 30 crore people.Sources, however, said that there is no information on the quantity of vaccine being ferried in the first flight.
On Tuesday, India announced that it would be ready to administer the coronavirus vaccine by January 13.
On Sunday, the Drug Controller General of India had announced approvals to Oxford-AstraZeneca’s Covishield manufactured by Serum Institute of India and Bharat Biotech’s Covaxin – against coronavirus infection – for restricted emergency use.
The government had also announced that one crore healthcare workers, along with two crore frontline staff, will get the vaccine for free.
However, there is a fear that the next wave of infections may rise with many cases of people infected from a virus strain that started in the UK, which is reporting highest-ever cases of about 60,000 infections per day.
The COVID Vaccine Intelligence Network or Co-WIN app will be used to manage the vaccination drive. Everything will be fed to the database in real-time. After vaccination, each person will be kept under observation to check any adverse events.
