In the long list of lies peddled regarding the Covid-19 pandemic to target the Modi govt, a new one has been added, that the govt is not allowing corporate vaccination. On Friday, actor-singer Siddharth tweeted that “corporate vaccination drives are being disallowed by the Government”.
In a tweet, he asked whether the corporates in India should be allowed to mass vaccinate their employees, and asked that big corporates should be made responsible and use their abilities to achieve faster vaccination.
However, the claim made by the actor is completely wrong, and currently there is no ban on corporate vaccination programs, as he is claiming. In fact, several corporate houses are already vaccinating their employees and their family members against Covid-19.
At present, the corporate houses have tied up with various hospitals to run the vaccination programs in their premises. As several corporate houses also run hospitals, they are using their own hospitals to run the vaccination programs.
Yesterday, Reliance Industries had announced that they will vaccinate its all present and retired employees free of cost under the largest corporate vaccination program in the country. The company will vaccinate over 1.3 million employees, associates, partners and their family members in 880 cities across the country.
India’s largest IT company TCS is also going to vaccinate its employees and their family members through direct partnership with suppliers. HCL has said they will vaccinate their 350,000 employees by June 30, with around 25% employees already vaccinated. PSU organisations like BHEL, State Bank of India, Punjab National Bank, Bank of Baroda, NTPC etc have already started running corporate vaccination programs.
Contrary to claim that Govt of India has not allowed corporate vaccination, the govt has actually issued detailed guidelines for running vaccination programs at workplaces, both public and private sector. The govt had issued the guidelines in the beginning of April, and vaccination at workplaces had started on 11th April. Initially, it was allowed only for employees, but last week the union health ministry had clarified that their family members also can be vaccinated.
Even though it has been allowed for almost two months, corporate vaccination had not got much momentum due to lack of enough vaccines. But now that vaccine availability has started to increase, the number of corporates starting vaccination has also started to increase.
Recently, states like Telangana, Odisha etc have also issued guidelines for vaccinations at workplaces.
When several Twitter users informed Siddharth that he is wrong and corporate vaccination is not banned by the govt, he claimed that he has talked ‘personally’ to several companies regarding the matter. According to him, those companies told him that they are waiting for vaccine allotment by quota. However, he refused to take back his earlier tweet that corporate vaccination is banned by govt, and didn’t apologise for spreading false information.
