India is getting ready to administer COVID-19 vaccine to the pre-registered beneficiaries as of now as per broad guidelines.
For equipping ourselves at service delivery point it is mandatory to know specific product information with regard to how many doses in one vial [single dose / 5 doses / 10 doses per vial]; in what form it is supplied -- liquid form ready for administering or lyophilaized powder requiring a diluent for reconstitution, temperature consideration at delivery point and the like. These are be product specific.
For calculating requirement of cold space; volume of the carton containing vaccine vials [length x breadth x height] and that of diluent if applicable is also important as the national general guideline in India is to keep vaccines and diluents in the cartons irrespective of number of doses / vials a planning unit wants -- practically difficult if the vials required are less than full carton as vaccine / diluent specific dummy cartons are not available: a common “cold problem” - shared with the global stakeholders a couple of years back.
In a similar situation in 2010, Karnataka was supplied with 1,24,200 doses of Panenza vaccine [H1N1] for administering to selected high risk group. Specific protocol and operational guidelines were developed by the author which enabled to achieve 99.17 % vaccine utilization rate, 1.03 % overall AEFI rate and 0.63% rejection rate at the screening site.
Hope on receiving similar protocol and operational guideline from the current programme mangers we may be able to derive similar performance indicators concurrently during the programme implementation.