AMU Asks Employees, Dependents to Furnish Details of Inoculation Against Coronavirus; Seeks Maximum Vaccine Uptake

The  Aligarh Muslim University Monday asked all its employees to furnish information on whether they and their dependent family members have been inoculated against the Coronavirus.

The letter issued by the Deputy Director of Medical Attendance Scheme (MAS) stated that it was seeking information on how many employees had been vaccinated, names of beneficiaries, their MAS book numbers, employment ID numbers, the age groups they belonged to (18-45 years or 45 and above), number of dependents who had taken the vaccine and the number of dependents who had registered for the vaccine.

“MAS seeks to achieve maximum uptake of the vaccine across all target groups among the beneficiaries,” the letter, which comes in the wake of the high mortality linked to the Covid19 virus at the University’s Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College, states.

The University earlier underlined that the high mortality rate in the second wave was due to non-vaccination, comorbidity, and late admission to the medical college, all of which had led to increasing number of deaths.

The AMU Vice-Chancellor Prof Tariq Mansoor has ordered a 24/7 Help Desk to assist MAS beneficiaries in the Emergency and Trauma Centre, in addition to meeting additional oxygen requirements.

According to reports, so far, at least 18 serving and 21 retired AMU faculty members have died from COVID or COVID-like symptoms. Alarmed by the deaths, AMU had sent some samples for genome sequencing to the Institute of Genomics and Integrated Biology Laboratory, Delhi. However, no new strain of coronavirus was found in the genome sequencing of samples collected from AMU.

The article was originally published in The Leaflet.