COVID-19 vaccination drive: How states plan to immunise those with hesitations

States are planning to roll out awareness campaigns and are reaching out to religious groups and minority institutions to encourage hesitating healthcare workers to get vaccinated against COVID-19.

Moneycontrol News

January 21, 2021 / 10:14 AM IST

Representative image: AP

The Union Health Ministry has advised states to run awareness programmes to ensure that healthcare workers take the COVID-19 vaccine, The Economic Times reported. This came amid low immunisation figures in several states.

Based on this advice, state governments came up with different strategies to tackle people’s hesitation towards getting inoculated. The strategies include appeals from state health ministers and administrative staff that the COVID-19 vaccines are safe, the news report suggested. Some states have also identified ‘COVID warriors’ who will be vaccinated to help dispel fears.

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“We have identified our top doctors and every day some well-known doctors would take the vaccine to give a message to our healthcare workers that these vaccines are safe,” Bihar health minister Mangal Pandey told the newspaper.

In Gujarat, all district collectors have also been asked to reach out to religious groups and minority institutions.

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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