BHOPAL: While the country is yet to start vaccinating children below 18 against Covid-19, a 13-year-old in Madhya Pradesh has already been vaccinated on paper. Not as a teenager, but as a 56-year-old man!
This glaring error was detected on June 21, the day the BJP-ruled state claimed to have set a record of 17 lakh-plus doses during the daylong vaccination ‘Maha Abhiyan’ marking the International Yoga Day.
The recipient was Vedant Dangre of Bhopal. “At 7.27 pm on June 21 I got a message on my phone saying that my teenaged son has been vaccinated. I was shocked because the country is yet to start vaccinating those below 18,” Vedant’s father Rajat Dangre told this daily on Tuesday.
There was more surprise in store. “The message read that my son was 56,” said Rajat. He is particularly concerned about his son (who is specially-abled) since he is already being shown vaccinated officially.
“That means he won’t be able to get the benefit of two doses when vaccination for children starts. When I downloaded the certificate from the official link, it showed that the document of my son’s bank account (opened a couple of months ago while applying for disabled person pension) was used in the vaccination certificate,” says Rajat. He has tried to get this addressed at all places, from the ward office of Bhopal Municipal Corporation to health department staff, but this is yet to be corrected.
In another part of Bhopal, Nuzhat Salim, a 46-year-old, too got a message from the government at 10.57 am on June 21 informing her she had been vaccinated. “I’m concerned how I’ll get both doses in future after I’ve already been shown as vaccinated.”
In Satna district, middle-aged educationist Chainendra Pandey, got not one, but four messages in five minutes on June 24, informing him about vaccination of three people whom he didn’t even know. Madhya Pradesh’s medical education minister Vishwas Sarang refused to acknowledge this. “Nothing of the sort has happened,” he maintained.