Kolkata: Queue broken to make up shortfall

KOLKATA: With only 19 of the 100 beneficiaries confirming their presence — and only two turning up in the first hour of the vaccination drive — at the Bidhannagar Municipal Corporation-run primary health centre (PHC) in Duttabad on Saturday, a desperate civic body let three of its board of administration (BOA) members and six civic body drivers get Covishield jabs instead.These nine were enlisted for vaccination in the second phase, scheduled on Monday.
Fifty-four people, including 20 doctors and nurses, were vaccinated at this PHC on Saturday. The rest were civic health workers. Denying allegations of any queue-jumping, Bidhannagar BOA chairperson Krishna Chakraborty said everything was done according to the rules of the health department.

The BOA members who stepped in to take the shot were Pranay Roy, Sudhir Saha and Rajesh Chirimar. “We did not deprive those on the list. We just filled up the space since many did not turn up,” Saha said.
According to sources, none of the enlisted beneficiaries at this PHC received any SMS from the Co-WIN application till Friday evening. Sources said the civic body, too, did not receive any list of beneficiaries from the state health department for Day 1 till late on Friday. They were later told that the servers had been down and no e-mail on the beneficiary list would be sent. They were asked to go ahead with the list the civic body had submitted and call the beneficiaries for confirmation over phone. “We called up all our frontline health workers and doctors, but many were reluctant,” the source said. The state later informed that members of the BOA and hospital management panel could also take the shots on Saturday.
“We were apprehensive whether even 20 people would turn up for the vaccine. The BOA members and other workers were called in since we were running out of time,” said a civic official. North 24 Parganas CMOH Tapas Roy confirmed that the civic authorities did not get the first list of 100 people as the Covid server was down. “They had the total list with them and called in beneficiaries from that,” he said.
“Our names were not on the first list. Only two persons had come in the first hour so we consulted with the health department officials and we were permitted to get vaccinated. It was a spontaneous decision,” said Roy, who was earlier the civic body’s MMIC (health).
Chirimar, said, “When I asked the health department officials if I could take the vaccine, they said yes.”