With COVID-19 vaccine candidates approving for emergency approval, the Greater Chennai Corporation (GCC) has started the process of identifying personnel who will be receiving the early shots of the vaccine. All frontline health workers including paramedics, nurses, ward boys and technicians will be the first to receive the vaccine in the city.

As per reports, anyone who has set up an establishment under the Clinical Establishments Act is eligible to get themselves registered. The GCC has arranged a special desk at the Ripon Building to facilitate the registration of health workers. The city civic body is expecting around 60,000 to 1 lakh such workers to come forward and register themselves to receive the vaccine. Second in line to receive the vaccine will be conservancy workers and other staff members of the GCC, and then the lower-level employees in the police force who come in contact with the public in their course of everyday work. GCC Commissioner G Prakash said that the civic body already has the database of such workers.

Next in line to receive the vaccination would be elderly persons with co-morbidities, whose data the GCC had collected in the early days of the pandemic during the door to door screening, Prakash added.

Meanwhile, the proposals related to two locally produced vaccines for COVID-19 by Serum Institute of India (SII) and Bharat Biotech have reportedly been kept on hold by the Drug Controller General of India (DCGI) for want of more evidence. The two firms had requested the DCGI approval for Emergency Use Authorisation (EUA) for its vaccines Covishield (SII) and Covaxin (Bharat Biotech). While both the companies needed to submit the results of their phase 3 trials to the DCGI, the drug regulatory body of India had also flagged a case in Chennai in which a volunteer has sued SII for adverse neurological reactions after participating in the vaccine trial.