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January 10 onwards India will begin to administer ‘precautionary’ doses to frontline workers and citizens above the age of 60. The declaration came on Christmas when Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a sudden address to the nation, announced the next steps of vaccination for children and booster doses for adults in the wake of the Omicron surge.
However, PM Modi did not term the third dose as the worldwide-acclaimed ‘booster shot’. Instead, he named it ‘precautionary dose’.
What is the ‘precautionary’ dose? Here’s all you need to know
1. According to a report, Dr RS Sharma, CEO of the National Health Authority said that a comorbidity certificate is required by senior citizens to get their precautionary dose.
2. The gap between the second dose of Covid-19 vaccine and the third, “precaution dose”, is likely to be nine to 12 months, official sources said on Sunday.
3. The precautionary dose denotes a third dose of the vaccine for the fully vaccinated, but PM Modi refrained from using the term "booster dose", as it is generally referred to.
4. According to reports, the government is likely to refer to the old list of comorbidity during administering the precautionary dose. The list would be the one that healthcare workers followed when the vaccination drive started in January, early this year.
5. A booster dose certificate will be given to beneficiaries after receiving the precautionary dose.
6. A newspaper report states that the CoWIN platform will automatically reflect who all are eligible for the precautionary doses. The government has compiled data on the number of people who are eligible for the dose from January 10. However, an announcement regarding the same is expected shortly.
7. The precautionary dose is being administered as a matter of “abundant precaution”, as many view India to already have hybrid immunity, reports suggest.
8. The nitty-gritty of the gaps in the vaccines currently being used in India's inoculation programme Covishield and Covaxin is being worked out, and a final decision over this will be taken soon.
9. Further, there will be no mix and match of vaccines and the third dose will be the same as the first and second ones., state some reports..
10. Other newspaper reports state that booster doses are used on a population-wide basis, irrespective of the physical(comorbidity) status of the beneficiary. However in India, due to the lack of population-based data, the third dose will be a measure of abundant caution, protecting vulnerable groups against the virus.
