A glimpse into the vaccine distribution in India

In the battle against the Covid-19 pandemic, India knew that vaccines would be the most potent weapon. Keeping this as the baseline, India has been providing free vaccines to citizens. The Government-run vaccination program was incepted with providing vaccination doses to healthcare workers and other frontline workers. Gradually, the program was expanded to senior citizens, citizens above 45 years of age, and citizens above 18. The Government of India procured the vaccine doses and provided them free of cost to state governments. Due to a major imbalance in the demand and supply of vaccine doses, many citizens couldn’t opt for the free vaccination program and had to rely on private hospitals to get their vaccinations completed on time. Despite chaotic vaccine distribution in India in the initial phase, it is worth mentioning that India has achieved a milestone of administering more than 1 billion vaccine doses.

Let’s delve deeper into the logistics side of vaccine distribution:

Logistics has a pivotal role to play in achieving this milestone. Both the scale and speed of the distribution deserve appreciation. In order to ensure efficient and timely supplies of vaccines, India made its vaccine supply chain robust by embracing certain digital initiatives. The logistics service providers who were entrusted with this responsibility leveraged their digital capabilities to gain real-time visibility into the vaccine supply chain.

It is crucial to shed light on the export of vaccines by India to foreign countries. International shipping from India wouldn’t have been possible if the logistics sector of the country wouldn’t have been on its toes. The logistics fraternity has worked day in and day out to ensure that the promised volumes of vaccines reach the countries that are in dire need of them. Furthermore, the ideal temperature conditions were maintained while handling the vaccine shipments so that the efficacy of these vaccines is not lost.

It is a matter of pride for us that the healthcare arm of Jeena & Company, Jeena Criticare joined hands with the Serum Institute of India to move their vaccine shipments across the country. We are glad that we could contribute to the process of vaccine distribution in India.

The indigenously developed digital platform CoWIN has been a game-changer in India. Digitization has led to improved connectivity even in the remotest areas of India due to which more doses have been administered in the rural areas as compared to urban areas. While it is expected that the developed nations would take the lead in ensuring equitable distribution of vaccines across the globe, it has not been the case. Instead, India took efforts in ensuring vaccine equality and proved to be a leader in the global canvas. Vaccination has helped in the revival of the Indian economy. If the revival of the global economy is taken into account, there is still a considerable amount of work needed to be done in addressing the global vaccine inequality. It is high time that the global community comes together to end this inequality.