Priority Jabs for Healthcare Staff: Faking professions to avail benefit

Taking advantage of loopholes in online registration process, some people are faking their identities and registering themselves for the Covid-19 vaccine as healthcare professionals.

The government has recently allowed healthcare workers of public and private hospitals and health ministry staffers to directly register online. 

According to health officials, the Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS) had to relax the conditions of going through the mandatory database system for primary inputs for the eligibility to register online due the unavailability of a complete list of professionals under the category. 

The DGHS's decision means that if anyone aged 18 and above under this category wishes to register online, they can just use their National Identity Card number. 

The Daily Star received a number of allegations against people not belonging to this category registering for vaccination by faking their professional identities.

This correspondent then tried to register online by selecting "Authorized Non-government and Private Health and Family Planning Employee" option. The automated system accepted the registration request.

The reporter however logged out when the system asked him to move on to the final step for registration.

However, for other frontline professionals aged below 40, NID numbers needed be sent through respective organisations to the DGHS to upload in their server.

Prof Dr Mizanur Rahman, director of the Management Information System of the DGHS, said, "In fact, the system will not understand who is a health worker and who is not. In the long run, everyone will register and we have to vaccinate everyone. Now if anybody does this [faking professional identities], we cannot do anything about it."

An official linked to the registration process, willing not to be named, however, said otherwise.

"As the DGHS has no complete list of public and private healthcare staffers in the frontline, the bar was withdrawn recently. Besides, the list we have was not sent to us in a prescribed format that supports the database of surokkha.gov.bd."

During the ongoing vaccination campaign, only frontline workers and people aged 40 and above will be inoculated on a priority basis.

Such conditions will not be applicable at one stage, according to the National Vaccination Plan.

REGISTRATION UPDATE

Meanwhile, the number of registrations was higher yesterday than the day before.

Around three lakh people have registered online in the last 24 hours till 2:30pm yesterday. With this, the total number of registrations rose to around 17 lakh.

Some 1.63 lakh people had registered the day before.

The total number of people vaccinated as of yesterday rose to 9,06,033 with 1,69,353 vaccinations yesterday.

Majority of those who were vaccinated were men, according to DGHS data.

A total of 6.27 lakh were males while 2.8 lakh were females.

The mass inoculation campaign began on February 7.

The government launched the vaccination campaign with 70 lakh doses in hand.

It is expected to get the second instalment of 50 lakh shots from Serum Institute of India later this month.

Another 1.31 lakh doses under the COVAX programme are scheduled to arrive around the same time.