COVID-19 vaccine: Govt chalking out storage plan

New Delhi, Oct 15: The Centre has commenced the process of identifying government and private facilities to create hubs for storage of COVID-19 vaccine.

The National Expert Group on Vaccine Administration for COVID-19 under which there are subgroups are looking into the various aspects of vaccine development, procurement and distribution. The group is also looking int the cold chain requirements. The vaccine needs to be stored and distributed at a fixed temperature, failing which it becomes ineffective.

Further real time tracking of vaccine movement from procurement to storage to delivery and distribution is being planned using the electronic Vaccine Intelligence Network that is used for the immunisation programme. The cloud based application tracks the realtime stock position and supply route based on the information fed by the ground staff.

It may be recalled that Union Health Minister, Dr. Harsh Vardhan had said that the government was looking to procure and utilise around 400 million doses, which would cover 200 to. 250 million people.

There are around 27,000 vaccine storage centres in India that are connected through the electronic Vaccine Intelligence Network. There are also 50,000 temperature loggers to monitor storage temperatures accurately for at least 40,000 frontline workers to manage logistics.

These developments comes in the wake several experimental vaccines reaching the late stage trials.