The Union Health Ministry today issued clarifications on some unfounded media reports of the CoWIN platform which claim that the vaccine portal is creating a digital divide and allowing unscrupulous elements to hack the system to benefit a few sections of the population. However, the Centre said that these reports are incorrect and not supported by full information on the matter.
It said the lack of basic comprehension about the complexity of a vaccination exercise has led to the false labelling of citizens not finding slots on the platform to problems of the platform itself.
Dr. R.S. Sharma, Chairman, Empowered Group on Technology and Data Management to combat COVID-19 debunked such scare mongering misinformation and set the record straight.
The Centre said some authors criticizing CoWIN Vaccine booking system have not fully comprehended the complexities and scale of India’s vaccination drive. To debunk the misconceptions, the Centres first addressed the larger role that CoWIN has to play besides registration.
It said, "A divide is created when individuals or groups make anecdotal claims or try to fool innocent citizens that running scripts for 2-3 days is the only solution to their problem." "Extorting money in the process for a service that is public and free is even more heinous. We strongly condemn such behaviour of profiteering out of someone’s misery and urge publications to not eulogise such coders and questioning this line of behaviour instead," the Centre told.
The Centre clarified, "third party developers only have access to discovery APIs, and registration is centralised through the CoWIN platform alone. The platform has undergone meticulous security testing." It stated with absolute certainty that no breaches have been found till date. No scripts can bypass the OTP verification and CAPTCHA to automatically register an individual.
It further said, "With a forward-looking approach, CoWIN has been designed to be an interoperable public good that facilitates technological innovations. CoWIN APIs for discovery of vaccination slots have been opened up to third party developers to support wider outreach."
Citing issues surrounding vaccination of 18-44 age group, the ratio of registrations to doses administered stands at 6.5: 1, which was an alarming 11:1 a week before. It said, "Overall, with over 244 million registrations and over 167 million receiving at least one dose(as per data on 7 pm 29th May 2021), the shortfall explains the current proceedings, which will naturally catch up as time passes and there is a larger supply of vaccines."
It said, "the CoWIN platform is not only citizen facing, but also has modules that assist vaccination centres and administrators in the physical operations and management." After the first dose, CoWIN aids citizens to track the schedule of vaccination based on the brand of vaccine by issuing provisional certification. This enables vaccine administrators to keep a check on those who are either jumping their schedule or lack the necessary information around it. Post the second dose, a centralised digital certificate is issued across the country that can be universally authenticated.
