Free shots for railway hawkers

KOLKATA: In a special drive, railway hawkers are being inoculated at the Indian Institute of Liver and Digestive Sciences (IILDS) in Sonarpur. Liver Foundation West Bengal (LFWB), under a project called Vaccine Access Initiative, will be vaccinating around 1,000 hawkers with two doses of Covishield free of cost. The drive took off at the Sonarpur facility on Tuesday.
“We decided to inoculate railway hawkers for two reasons.The scientific reason is that they need to get vaccine protection as they are vulnerable to the infection due to their profession. Also, they are in financial distress, rendering them inaccessible to paid vaccine,” said LFWB mentor hepatologist Abhijit Chowdhury.
The vaccine vials for the special drive has been procured with funds from organisations like the Association of India’s Development, Friends of Liver Foundation and Oak Foundation. “We will be inoculating rail hawkers who work in local trains in the South Sealdah section. There are about 1200 hawkers in this section and we found that about 200 have already been vaccinated,” said IILDS secretary Parthasarathi Mukherjee.
While free vaccines are being administered only from government-run CVCs, the inoculation camp at IILDS is the only other non-government CVC from where the jabs are being given free. Around 300 plus recipients have got the jab in the past three days.