School ID cards of children will be accepted for vaccination: CoWIN's RS Sharma

CoWIN, India's COVID-19 vaccine delivery tech platform, will accept the school IDs of children eligible for vaccination starting January 3, 2022, top executive RS Sharma said, adding that the system will be able to configure changes easily if the government decides to mix vaccines for a proposed booster dose.

"Anybody who is born in 2007 or before will be able to get vaccines. Children aged between 15-18 do not have voter ID cards and many of them may not have Aadhaar too, so we are now allowing school certificates and ID cards. There are currently 9 eligible documents to register on CoWIN, we will add school ID cards to this," Sharma said in an interview.

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RS Sharma is the CEO of the National Authority and chairperson of the empowered committee for CoWIN. He is also the former chief of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), the semi-government body tasked with rolling out the national identity project, Aadhaar.

CoWIN's move to add school ID cards as an identity document comes days after Prime Minister Modi unveiled significant additions to India's vaccination plan amidst the Omicron variant scare. PM Modi said that healthcare, frontline workers and senior citizens aged above 60 with comorbidities will be eligible to receive a third precautionary dose of vaccine from January 10th, 2022. He also said children aged 15-18 will be eligible to receive a jab starting January 3, 2022.

By some estimates, there are three crore healthcare workers, three crore frontline workers, and six-seven crore children who will be eligible in this leg of India's vaccination drive. The gap between the second and the third dose will be at least nine months.

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"A medical certificate for senior citizens with comorbidities will be required. The new vaccination certificate after the third dose will be generated real time with a QR code, and will be verifiable. This will have details of all three doses of vaccination and the brands used. We will also be sending out SMS-es to healthcare, frontline workers and senior citizens who will be eligible for vaccination. We will have no challenges related to supply of vaccines," Sharma said.

While it is still unclear if the Government will go for mixing of vaccines, wherein it may recommend a different vaccine for the third dose compared to the previous two, CoWIN is prepared to handle this scenario.

"I am not sure about that, whether the third dose will have to be different. But it should be very easy to configure in our system. The policy data file and the APIs are separate. We will be able to configure our system accordingly. Our partners have to make similar configurations," Sharma said.

Vaccination has gathered pace in India in recent months, with the country crossing the one billion or 100 crore milestone in October. While 90 percent of India's 900 million adult population have received at least one dose of vaccine, over 60 percent are fully vaccinated, with two doses of vaccine.

The new vaccination certificate will be verifiable.

- Sharma

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"Ninety percent (for the first dose) is not a small number. Many countries haven't achieved these numbers. The speed of vaccination has not reduced and we continue to vaccinate a huge number of people every day. The 60 percent will soon reach 90 percent but I don't have a timeline," he said.