New Delhi: Thousands of healthcare and sanitary workers at the frontline of India's COVID-19 battle got their first jabs on Saturday as Prime Minister Narendra Modi rolled out the world's largest vaccination drive against the pandemic, showing the light at the end of a 10-month tunnel that upended millions of lives.
More than one crore cases and 1.5 lakh fatalities later, India took its first steps out of the pandemic with shots of the Covishield and Covaxin vaccines being administered at medical centres across the country to a collective sigh of relief that this could finally be the beginning of the end of the COVID-19 trauma.
Over 1.90 lakh beneficiaries were inoculated with COVID-19 jabs at 3,352 session sites across the country on Saturday and no case of post-inoculation hospitalisation has been reported so far, the government said on the first day of India's massive vaccination drive against the virus.
Sanitation worker Manish Kumar became the first recipient of the vaccination drive at Delhi's All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), the Health ministry said.
"I had good sleep last night, came here (hospital) in the morning and talked to the other staff who were to get the shot," the 34-year-old who got a shot of the indigenously developed Covaxin said.
Injecting confidence in the people, several high profile persons, including AIIMS director Randeep Guleria, NITI Aayog member V K Paul, who is also head of an empowered group on medical equipment and management plan to tackle the Coronavirus outbreak, Serum Institute of India's Adar Poonawallah and West Bengal minister Nirmal Maji, also received their first shot of the two-dose vaccine.
The Prime Minister on Saturday reassured the country that emergency use authorisation was given to two made in India vaccines only after scientists were convinced of their safety and effectiveness, and urged people to beware of propaganda and rumours.
Addressing the nation ahead of the launch, Modi said these vaccines will ensure a "decisive victory" for the country over the pandemic, but asked countrymen to continue wearing masks and maintain social distancing even after receiving the jabs.
Emphasising the enormity of the vaccination drive, which he launched through a remote control amid chanting of Sanskrit shloka that meant 'let everybody be happy, let everybody be healthy', Modi said never before in history, has this type of a large-scale vaccination campaign been undertaken.
In the second phase, the number of those vaccinated has to be taken to 30 crore, Modi said, pointing out that only two countries other than India have a population in excess of 30 crore — the US and China.
The Prime Minister said that those who are elderly, are suffering from serious illness, will get vaccinated in the second stage.
Striking an emotional chord, Modi spoke of the disruption the pandemic had caused to people's lives, isolating victims of the Coronavirus and denying the dead traditional last rites.
In a choked voice, he also referred to sacrifices made by healthcare and frontline workers, hundreds of whom lost their lives to the viral infection.
"Our vaccination programme is driven by humanitarian concerns, those exposed to maximum risk will get priority," the Prime Minister said.
However, the Covid vaccination mega drive suffered some setbacks on Day I due to glitches in the Covid Vaccine Intelligence Network (CoWIN) application, developed by the Union government to monitor and track the inoculation process.
In West Bengal, health workers had trouble uploading beneficiary data, as the app had reportedly slowed down.
In Thane district of Maharashtra, the vaccination was suspended temporarily as the connection to the CoWin website snapped. In fact, a day before i.e. on January 15, the state health department found the app was working properly. As a result, the messages were not going out to the registered beneficiaries.
In Nilgiris in Tamil Nadu, health officials said the CoWin app was working slow as several vaccine receivers didn't get post-vaccination acknowledgement on their cell phones even after an hour due to trouble with the CoWin app. Due to the slow response from servers, the health officials had to manually input data on Excel sheets and fill all the columns manually, which delayed the vaccination process further.
In Gujarat, 161 centres were marked for the inoculation drive with nearly 16,000 health workers being on the recipients' list for the first day. However, the drive faced some glitches.
Even in Karnataka, several centres reported problems with CoWin due to server crash.