No fresh registrations of healthcare workers for Covid-19 vaccination: Centre to States

The Centre on Saturday directed states and Union Territories (UTs) to stop fresh registrations for Covid-19 vaccination of healthcare workers (HCWs) and frontline workers (FLWs) with immediate effect.

Registration of the healthcare and frontline workers will stop, however, they will continue to get vaccinated against Covid-19.

In the letter accessed by India Today, Union Health Secretary Rajesh Bhushan said that the reason to do so was to prevent "ineligible beneficiaries in this category" from getting their names enlisted and



getting inoculated against Covid-19 in violation of the guidelines.

Bhushan said that registration of persons aged 45 years and above will continue to be permitted on the Co-WIN portal and asked states and UTs to ensure universal vaccination of already registered HCWs and FLWs at the earliest.

While tracking the progress, the timeline for completing vaccination of all HCWs and FLWs with the first dose of COVID-19 vaccine has been extended multiple times and was finally fixed at February 25 for HCWs and March 6 for FLWs, Bhushan said.