Covid-19 vaccine-After story

As India and the world await a credible COVID-19 vaccine, let's have a sneak peek at the after story. It's not just about the invention of the vaccines but we also need to focus on its proper distribution among the 1.3 billion Indians. The significant inefficiency, dysfunctioning, and acute shortage of health care delivery systems in the public sector do not match up with the growing needs of the population. Besides, more than 80% of the population still does not have any significant health insurance coverage, and approximately 68% of the Indians have limited or no access to essential medicines.

Addressing the above problems Nandan Nilketani has proposed a massive digital platform on the lines of the Aadhaar model to ensure the administration of the vaccine to 1.3 billion Indians. He said, as we have to reach 1.3 billion people in two years and assuming that it is a dual dose vaccine, that's 2.6 billion vaccinations, or 1.3 billion vaccinations a year. That's more than 100 million vaccinations a month and more than three million a day. He recommended to design a system that can do 10 million vaccinations a day across the length and breadth of the country, but all unified by a common digital backbone so that every person gets the same experience and the same information is recorded. It is bringing the population scale approach that we used in Aadhaar to a new issue(vaccination) which is, in fact much more complicated. He coined out the fact that seeing the existing infrastructure not only the mission could be a huge overload, but it will also end up at a point where a baby is not getting immunized because people responsible for it have been diverted for COVID-19.

He proposed that we build a completely new vaccination channel with 200,000 people who do vaccinations, involving some of the current people following a single method so that everyone can have a similar experience. Digital certification and constant reminders through e-mails would be highly helpful. Further talking about the private sector he said that they should pay for their employee as the government already has to bear a larger group of the population who come under schemes like the Ayushman Bharat scheme. Considering the participation of government, the private sector, and philanthropy it is not going to be that expensive. The technology will cost a few hundred crores at best.