Plea seeks COVID-19 jab certificate without PM Modi's photo; Kerala HC issues notice

In an intriguing development, a plea was filed in the Kerala High Court seeking a COVID-19 vaccination certificate without PM Modi's photo embossed on it. After the petitioner got inoculated from a private hospital, he received a vaccination certificate containing the PM's photo along with his message-'Medicine and strict control. Together India will defeat COVID-19'. Alleging that the national campaign against the novel coronavirus is being converted into a media campaign for the PM, he contended that the present vaccination certificate violates the fundamental rights of a citizen.

Subsequently, a single-judge bench of Justice PB Suresh Kumar directed the Kerala government and the Centre to file their response to the plea within two weeks. During the recently concluded Monsoon session of Parliament, Union MoS Health Bharati Pawar had justified the Centre's decision to have the photo of PM Modi on COVID-19 inoculation certificates. In a written response to the Rajya Sabha, she stated, "The photograph along with the message of the Prime Minister in the vaccination certificates reinforces the message for creating awareness about the importance of following Covid-19 appropriate behaviour even after vaccination, in the larger public interest".

COVID-19 vaccination in India

As per the Health Ministry data on Wednesday, the active cases in India declined to 2,30,971- the lowest in 208 days. The improving novel coronavirus situation has been attributed to the rapid vaccination rate in the last few weeks. From June 21 onwards, the Centre started procuring 75% of the vaccine stock and distributing it to the states for free. Apart from Covishield and Covaxin, the Drugs Controller General of India has approved Sputnik V, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson's Janssen vaccine, and Zydus Cadila's ZyCoV-D.

The government has already hinted at vaccinating the entire adult population i.e nearly 90 crore people by December itself. In another development, the DCGI approved a study on mixing Covishield and Covaxin. This came after the ICMR observed in a preprint study that a combination of these COVID-19 vaccines elicited better safety and immunogenicity results than two doses of the same vaccine.

In this case, the Christian Medical College, Vellore will conduct the clinical trials on 300 healthy volunteers. The aim of this study will be to ascertain whether two different vaccine doses can be administered to a person instead of the current practice of administering two shots of the same vaccine. A total of 68,53,37,489 persons have been inoculated whereas 26,95,70,606 of them have received the second dose of the vaccine too.