The Health Ministry on Saturday issued a release titled “Busting myths on vaccination” in which it tackled claims that the CoWIN portal for booking a vaccination was creating a digital divide in India.
“There have been some unfounded media reports of the CoWIN platform creating a digital divide and allowing unscrupulous elements to hack the system to benefit a few sections of the population. The lack of basic comprehension about the complexity of a vaccination exercise has led to the false labelling of citizens not finding slots on the platform to problems of the platform itself,” the ministry said.
Dr R.S. Sharma, Chairman, Empowered Group on Technology and Data Management, was quoted in the release to “debunk misconceptions” that the vaccine booking system was at fault for registered users being unable to get slots.
“Examining the issue of unavailability of vaccination slots, the noise started surfacing after registrations for 18 to 44 years age group were opened up on April 28. One would be amazed to learn how steeply skewed the demand-supply for vaccines has been in this age bracket,” Dr Sharma said.
“The ratio of registrations to doses administered stands at 6.5: 1, which was an alarming 11:1 a week before. Overall, with over 244 million registrations and over 167 million receiving at least one dose(as per data on 7 pm 29th May 2021), the shortfall explains the current proceedings, which will naturally catch up as time passes and there is a larger supply of vaccines,” he said.
The ministry said nearly one in every eight Indians had been vaccinated, with nearly 55 per cent of the 211.8 million doses administered to date being through walk-ins. “The brilliance of CoWIN lies in its ability to allow changes on the fly for the proportion of slots made available between online registration and offline walk-in,” he added.
Addressing reports of tools being made to allow users to get notified when a slot is available, Dr Sharma hailed the “innovation”.
“When we hear about coders like Berty Thomas (mentioned in one of the misinformed articles) creating alert systems to assist their communities find available open slots, that is the cause of technology being furthered. Considering the skewed demand-supply, such innovations ensure vaccination centres don’t get overcrowded and that citizens only leave their homes on availability of vaccination slots. Such innovations don’t create a divide, as they are publicly available and democratised through applications such as Paytm or Telegram,” he said.
Dr Sharma’s comments come after Union Minister Prakash Javadekar claimed every Indian would be vaccinated by December, in response to a comment by Congress leader Rahul Gandhi who had said only three per cent of India's 130 crore population had received both doses of a vaccine.
Earlier, the Centre said the indigenously developed Covaxin takes approximately four months to manufacture per batch.