COVID vaccination continues in West Bengal, CoWIN glitches reported

Glitches in the CoWIN portal were reported from several sites, following which health officials chose to manually complete the process of documentation and allocation, a senior official of the Health Department added.

PTI

January 18, 2021 / 12:28 PM IST

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The COVID-19 vaccination drive resumed on Monday at 207 sites across West Bengal with beneficiaries, mostly frontline workers, reaching there as scheduled to receive the doses, a senior official of the Health Department said.

Glitches in the CoWIN portal were reported from several sites, following which health officials chose to manually complete the process of documentation and allocation, he added.

"The vaccination drive began around 9 am. We hope that those who did not come on the first day will turn up today. Most of the people who have received SMSes have already reached the centres. Around 100 beneficiaries will be receiving the Covishield vaccine from each centre today," the official said.

"The CoWIN portal is not functioning. We are facing trouble for session allocation, listing of beneficiaries and sending of SMSes," he said, adding that on Sunday health officials worked round the clock to overcome the limitations.

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COVID-19 Vaccine

Frequently Asked Questions

How does a vaccine work?

A vaccine works by mimicking a natural infection. A vaccine not only induces immune response to protect people from any future COVID-19 infection, but also helps quickly build herd immunity to put an end to the pandemic. Herd immunity occurs when a sufficient percentage of a population becomes immune to a disease, making the spread of disease from person to person unlikely. The good news is that SARS-CoV-2 virus has been fairly stable, which increases the viability of a vaccine.

How many types of vaccines are there?

There are broadly four types of vaccine — one, a vaccine based on the whole virus (this could be either inactivated, or an attenuated [weakened] virus vaccine); two, a non-replicating viral vector vaccine that uses a benign virus as vector that carries the antigen of SARS-CoV; three, nucleic-acid vaccines that have genetic material like DNA and RNA of antigens like spike protein given to a person, helping human cells decode genetic material and produce the vaccine; and four, protein subunit vaccine wherein the recombinant proteins of SARS-COV-2 along with an adjuvant (booster) is given as a vaccine.

What does it take to develop a vaccine of this kind?

Vaccine development is a long, complex process. Unlike drugs that are given to people with a diseased, vaccines are given to healthy people and also vulnerable sections such as children, pregnant women and the elderly. So rigorous tests are compulsory. History says that the fastest time it took to develop a vaccine is five years, but it usually takes double or sometimes triple that time.

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