Ahmedabad: Gujarat on Sunday launched a COVID-19 vaccination drive for frontline workers, covering over 70,000 beneficiaries in a single day, with district collectors, police officials and civic commissioners taking the jabs among others in the initial hours, an official statement said.
As against the target to cover over one lakh beneficiaries for the day, 71,534 frontline workers were vaccinated till 8 pm on Sunday, it said.
During the day, 19 district collectors, 11 district development officers, and 23 superintendents of police, besides several senior officials of the home, revenue, urban development, panchayat, rural housing and rural development departments, were inoculated.
Talking to media after taking the vaccine shot, Ahmedabad Police Commissioner Sanjay Srivastava said everyone needs to get inoculated to win the war against COVID-19.
"I am feeling absolutely fine after getting vaccinated...policemen are highly exposed, so the vaccination will protect them from the infection," he added.
Ahmedabad Collector Sandip Sagale, who was vaccinated at the civil hospital here, said that he and other senior state officials joined the drive "to express appreciation for the work done by the frontline warriors during the coronavirus pandemic".
He also appealed to all frontline workers to get them vaccinated against the viral disease, saying the vaccines are "completely safe and effective".
The Gujarat health department said it will cover around 3.3 lakh frontline workers under the second round of the COVID-19 inoculation drive which kick-started earlier in the day.
Not a single person has experienced any serious side-effects due to the vaccination so far, it claimed.
In a related development, authorities ordered the postmortem of a sanitation worker after he died within hours of getting vaccinated in Vadodara earlier in the day, in order to ascertain the cause of his death.
The department on Saturday said it had covered around 50 per cent or 2,45,930 of the healthcare workers in the state in the first round of the vaccination drive that was launched on January 16th.
A total of 33,193 beneficiaries were vaccinated across 579 centres on Saturday, the health department said.
(PTI)
Also read: Union Health Secy advises States, UTs to increase COVID-19 vaccine coverage percentage
